Bonfire of Your Civic Models
Many people own a car // our buildings are very old // most apartments aren't market rate
This is a companion post to “Bonfire of Your Political Models,” in which I wrote:
One of Maximum New York’s principal goals is to help New Yorkers understand how their government works. This is complicated immediately by the fact that many people, not having looked into it at all, are convinced that they already do. This is one of the largest challenges of teaching government.
So what do you do?
Tell stories that challenge common political models. Open cracks to let in curiosity. Let’s look at three common, but easily broken, models—one each from the city, state, and federal levels of government.
That post was about the challenge of governmental misconceptions. This one is related, but it’s about the challenge of wider civic misconceptions.
Many people think they understand physical facts about New York City (how big it is, how many cars there are, how much room there is, etc), but they usually haven’t looked into it! So let’s look into three of them; none are conclusions—they’re correctly anchored starting points for exploration.
Model #1: No one in NYC owns a car
Extremely untrue. We’re close to being a “majority car” city by household! Most households in Staten Island and Queens own at least one car, and Brooklyn and the Bronx are trending toward 50/50 parity.
Model #2: New York is building new buildings all the time, everything old is being torn down
Most of NYC’s buildings are very old, and the vast majority of our building was in the distant past. ~71% of our residential buildings were built before 1951!1
The chart below breaks down all buildings like this:
Built before 1900: 20%
Built between 1900-1920: 27%
Built between 1920-1940: 33%
Built between 1940-1980: 10%
Built after 1980: 11%
Model #3: New York is dominated by market-rate apartment prices
Most apartments for rent in New York City are not market-rate apartments; most apartments have some kind of rent regulation attached to them, or are public housing. (Side note: NYC has quite a few single-family, detached homes. The housing stock really doesn’t look like most people imagine it at all, across many dimensions.)
From Welcome to the FAR Dome: By How Much is Gotham Allowed to Grow?, the “Overbuilt Gotham” section:
“Many residential structures were completed before the 1961 codes, with 71% of the city’s residential buildings built before 1951.
So, if a developer is going to tear down an older structure to build a denser one, the allowable FAR needs to be sufficiently higher than the current one. However, we see a hurdle to new construction once we compare today’s maximum allowable FARs to the actual built FARs.
Currently, 39% of the city’s residential buildings are above their respective allowable FARs, and 63% are above or within 25%. In other words, for nearly two out of every three residential buildings, it is either impossible or uneconomic to tear the building down to increase housing availability.”