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March 6, 2025 by Jason Barr 1 Comment

Why Has Gotham Been in a “Housing Emergency” for 80 Years? (Part II)

Jason M. Barr March 6, 2025

Note: This post is the second of two on the drivers of Gotham’s historically low vacancy rates. You can read Part I here.

New York’s rental housing vacancy rate is 1.4%—the lowest since 1969. The lack of available housing means that Gotham remains in a “housing emergency”—defined, by law, when the vacancy rate is below 5%.

By this metric, the city has been in a continual emergency since 1943, when rent controls were first enacted. This fact begs the question: Why has the city’s vacancy rate never risen above 5% in over 80 years, and what will it take for New York to free itself from this emergency?

The Theory of Vacancy

Before we analyze New York’s vacancy rates, it’s important to lay out basic concepts. “Vacancy” is defined as the total number of occupiable units minus the total number of units that households occupy. This means that vacancy is determined by the total supply of rental housing relative to the total demand. All else equal, things that raise the number of units will drive up vacancy, while things that increase demand will drive it downward.

Of course, supply and demand are not independent since they are both affected by the price of housing. When prices rise, we expect more supply to be brought online since developers can reap higher returns from new construction. Higher prices will also reduce the demand for units through people living in larger households or by leaving the city altogether (or, implicitly, by not entering).

Over time, when vacancy rates fall below a certain threshold (say 5%), economic forces should create more housing and increase vacancies to a more natural level. We see this phenomenon across the U.S., where average rental vacancy rates have been about 7% since 1956 (across New York State, the average vacancy has been 5.4% since 1986). When vacancies fail to move above 5%, it suggests barriers to new construction.

Housing Supply

The total housing stock is given by the number of new units added to last year’s stock, minus the number of units lost, through demolitions, conversions, or combining units. So, what drives a net growth in the housing stock?

First is the economic climate. When inflation and interest rates are low, more units will be built since housing is cheaper to construct. On the other hand, when construction costs are high—either locally through expensive labor and materials or nationally through supply chain problems or high interest rates—developers are incentivized to provide less housing, all else equal.

The other element is operating costs, which include taxes and maintenance. Again, as these costs rise, it becomes more expensive to provide housing. As a result, current properties are allowed to decline in quality (and some are eventually torn down), warehoused, or switched out of the rental sector, and developers add less new housing because of lower profits.

Rent Regulations and Supply

Additionally, there are building regulations. The more stringent they are, the lower the new housing supply will be because they reduce the return on investment or produce the fear that if market-rate housing is built today, there is no guarantee that the state won’t impose new regulations down the line.

One of these barriers is limits on rent increases. Price caps on units, in and of themselves, reduce vacancy since the lower prices mean building owners are incentivized to provide less housing. At the same time, consumers seek to have more of it–either by staying in apartments that are too big for their current needs and/or by staying in their units longer than they would otherwise so as not to give up their good deal.

The “lost years”—from 1977 to 1991, when cumulative net housing construction was negative—were driven, in part, by the severe limits on landlords’ ability to raise rents while costs, such as property taxes, were rising. Landlords were squeezed on both ends, and the result was abandonment (and rampant arson).

Zoning

But rent regulations are not the only game in town. In 1961, the city was massively downzoned. These regulations disincentivized developers and landlords from producing the units needed to keep prices and vacancies in check. Had looser codes been in place, it’s likely the city would have eventually built itself out of a crisis.

Housing Demand

The number of units demanded by households, independent of the price, is driven by population growth, household size, and income. Large population influxes and increasing incomes due to rapid job growth will increase the number of units (and square footage) people want while falling household sizes will also increase the number of units needed.

For example, in the 1970s, even as the population of New York was falling, the number of households was increasing as people were more likely to live by themselves or in pairs. As a result, the demand for housing remained relatively constant during the decade. Even during the lost years, demand fell but not through the floor since household sizes were also dropping. The low vacancy rates were not being driven by hyper-demand but by demographic shifts (and abandonment). Today, low vacancy rates are being driven by rising incomes, global demand to be in the city, and falling death rates.

Avg. Vacancy Rates Across New York City Zip Codes, 2015-2019. Note: the citywide average during the period was 3.6%. Source: American Community Survey.

A View of Vacancy: A Look at the Data

So, with these economic theories in mind, let’s turn to the data to get clues on the key question: Why has New York’s rental housing vacancy not risen above 5% in 80 Years?

I have assembled two types of data sets to understand the drivers of vacancy rates in New York. The first is annual vacancy rates from 1909 to 2023 and the factors likely to them. The second is a data set with average vacancy rates across zip codes from 2015-2019 and related data that likely drive vacancy across space. (Data sources and results here).

Time Series

Looking at the drivers of vacancy rates over time is good at showing how vacancy is driven by a series of “credits” and “debits”—the respective, economic, demographic, and policy forces that raise or lower vacancy. This analysis demonstrates how the city can use statistical models as guide to adjust the policy levers as vacancies fall. Fluctuations in vacancy are not random. They follow a pattern that can be predicted and, in principle, anticipated.

Of course, economic crises tend to be random, but their impacts are not. In this sense, the City can create an “alert index.” When the economic and demographic forces push the index to a specific value, the government should automatically trigger policies to increase supply, by increasing construction cost subsidies or by relaxing building regulations to get additional housing more rapidly.

The statistical results also provide strong evidence that there are two mechanisms—one direct and the other indirect—by which vacancy is reduced. The direct mechanism are those things that reduce housing availability, while the indirect mechanism is through the forces that affect new construction, which then, in turn, affects vacancy.

The Direct Mechanism

Net housing supply matters. The statistical results show that, all else equal, a rise in supply of 1% (10 net units per 1000) leads to an increase in vacancy rates by 0.65% – 0.75%. This means that if we start with a 3.4% rate, which has been typical in the 21st century, to get to 5% from new construction, we’d need to raise the annual housing additions rate by four times its annual amount, all else equal. In other words, the city must return to producing new housing at rates similar to the non-Great-Depression or War years in the 20^th century.

The rent control years were also bad for vacancy. All else equal, vacancy rates were about five percentage points lower than they would be otherwise. I find a smaller–though still negative–effect of the rent stabilization years (since 1969) on vacancy rates relative to years with no regulations (why this requires further study). When I look at the role of real estate tax rates, I found that as tax rates rise, vacancy falls, suggesting that higher taxes are also causing landlords to reduce the amount of housing they provide.

Just as important is the duel with economic and population growth. For example, I found that each 1% increase in GDP per capita in a given year reduces housing vacancy by 1.6 percentage points, all else equal. In other words, given New York’s place in the national economy, New York feels the housing pinch when times are flush.

Estimated Rental Vacancy Rates for New York City, 1909-2023. Note that citywide vacancy has not been above 5% since 1940. The blue dots are actual data points. The red line are interpolated values. Sources: here.

The Indirect Effect

Since new construction affects vacancy, what drives new construction? I find that costs matter—when construction costs rise, supply is curtailed. For example, a one-percent increase in building materials inflation reduces the rate of net new units by 1.2 percentage points.

Just as important, the evidence suggests that the 1961 zoning codes have been quite harmful to new supply, reducing the net new housing rate by about 0.7 percentage points (consider that since 2000, the average net new supply rate has been 0.5%). And based on my estimates, the rules indirectly reduced vacancy by about 0.5 percent points lower each year than it would have been if zoning regulations had been more lenient.

Interestingly, I don’t see an effect of rent control and rent stabilization on new construction rates. This is likely partly because new units have traditionally been market-rate units or gained subsidies to offset the loss of income from rent stabilization. In short, the evidence here suggests that rent regulations mostly work to reduce the stock of housing by incentivizing building owners to provide fewer units (or to convert or abandon them).

Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

Taken together, the statistical results demonstrate what might be called the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts method of keeping vacancy low. First, economic growth and falling household size mean vacancy is constantly being pushed downward. Then, when inflation hits, raising construction or operating costs further increases vacancy. But these economic “downward” forces are not being met by an equal reaction on the supply side.

Rent and zoning regulations have worked in roughly equal measure over time to keep the housing supply from responding quickly to economic changes. The rent control years were particularly bad, but today, the main policy effects are coming from relatively higher real estate taxes on apartment buildings and stringent zoning limits across the city.

Estimated Annual Citywide Rent Vacancy Rates vs. Net New Housing Supply Rates (two year lag). The green dots are from the years 1930 to 1940, during the Great Depression (when vacancy was high and new construction low). The blue dots are from the rest of years between 1909 and 2023. Note the strong correlation between vacancy rates and net housing supply over time (i.e., supply matters!). Source: here.

Across Zip Codes

To investigate the question from another angle, I looked at the drivers of average vacancy rates from 2015 to 2019 across New York’s zip codes. This type of analysis is good for examining how zoning and new construction impact vacancy rates, holding demographic factors constant.

The results of this analysis support the conclusions from the time series analysis. Holding population and number of households content, more construction and less stringent zoning raise vacancy rates. But again, both income and population matter. Lower-income districts have lower vacancy rates because there is less construction there and because of lower household turnover.

Interestingly, I did not find a connection between the number of rent-stabilized buildings in a zip code and vacancy rates. This suggests that the drivers of vacancy are more closely linked to income, housing supply, and zoning regulations.

I find that all else equal, a one-point increase in the average allowable floor area ratio in a district yields a 0.7 percentage point increase in vacancy. If this appears low, it is. The reason is because, the data show, that the zoning increases need to be quite generous before they have an impact on vacancy. Based on my findings, the average allowable FAR doesn’t significantly improve vacancy until it hits a FAR of at least five—meaning, a district needs to allow buildings between 6 to 11 floors, on average, to have a meaningful impact on vacancy rates.

Zip Code Vacancy Rates vs. Median Household Income and Avg. Allowable Residential Floor Area Ratio, respectively. Each color is a different borough, but the trend line is for entire city. Note how lower income neighborhoods have lower vacancy and higher FAR districts have higher vacancies. Note State Island is omitted from the graphs. Sources: here.

What are the Solutions?

Let me begin this section with a key point and one that is strongly supported by the data. The New York City housing market is, like any market, affected by the ebbs and flows of supply and demand. Supply matters, but it must be added to the city at a meaningful rate—and in neighborhoods where it is most needed—particularly in lower-income neighborhoods.

If low rental vacancy is the cause of the emergency, then increasing vacancy should be the focus of the solution. The most important thing the government can do is target neighborhood vacancy rates. Looking at the map above, we see the communities most in need are in the “red zones”—particularly northern Manhattan, the South Bronx, and southern Brooklyn and Queens. In these neighborhoods, the government should employ a combined strategy of providing generous construction subsidies, enacting significant upzoning, and potentially involving itself directly in new housing construction.

There should also be an increase in vacancy decontrol. As vacancies rise through targeted new construction, people will be more likely to leave their old units for the new housing, which will free up lots to be redeveloped or incentivize landlords to upgrade these units or cease warehousing them.

Finally, the City needs to create a master plan that improves transportation, parks, and services as neighborhood populations increase. Giving people confidence that densification will not harm residents’ quality of life is key in getting buy-in to making housing more affordable.

It was Supposed to be Temporary

It’s important to recall that in 1943, when rent control was imposed, it was seen as a temporary expedient to help renters harmed by the dislocations from World War II. Price controls were never meant to be a long-term policy, and the on-going housing affordability problem shows the long-term harm they can cause. It’s time that Gotham builds its way out of a “housing emergency.”

You can read Part I of this post series here.

January 22, 2025 by Jason Barr 1 Comment

Why Has Gotham Been in a “Housing Emergency” for 80 Years? (Part I)

Jason M. Barr January 22, 2025

If you google the definition of “emergency,” the search engine provides an answer from the Oxford Languages Dictionary: “a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action.” Merriam-Webster comes in with similar wording: “an unforeseen combination of circumstances or the resulting state that calls for immediate action.”

So clearly an emergency is sudden, unforeseen, and requires immediate corrective action to fix a dangerous situation. And yet paradoxically, for more than three-quarters of a century, New York’s housing market has been in a state of “emergency.”

In March of 2024, once again,

the New York City Council voted to declare that there is an ongoing housing emergency to extend the Rent Stabilization Law from expiring on April 1, 2024, to April 1, 2027. To maintain New York City’s rent stabilization laws pursuant to state law, the Council must determine whether there is an ongoing housing emergency every three years, defined as a vacancy rate of less than 5% of the City’s rental housing stock. Findings from the 2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS) show a citywide rental vacancy rate of 1.41%, the lowest this measurement has been since 1968, and a significant decline from 2021, when the net vacancy rate was 4.54%.

The Paradox

But if we take a step back, we can see that it’s impossible that there is an “emergency” both as New York defines it and as Webster and Oxford define it. Something cannot be an emergency if it’s predictable, ongoing, and with which people have lived for a very long time.

And yet since the early 1940s, when the language was introduced because of a true housing emergency caused by World War II, New York has never bothered to change the wording. It retains the usage both because of the inertia of the status quo and because the word gives leaders something to perpetually “fight” against—though clearly, they are not succeeding.

Yes, housing affordability is a problem—a huge ongoing problem—but the way its defined does nothing to solve it. If anything, defining the housing affordability problem as an “emergency” only serves to make affordability worse. It provides a convenient distraction to focus on the problem’s symptoms rather than its causes.

The Fire Extinguisher

To make an analogy, imagine a house with faulty wiring so that whenever a person turns on the lights, it produces sparks and ignites the wall. By having a fire extinguisher handy, one only needs to spray the dangerous spot when the switch is flipped. It’s thus easier to shout “emergency” and whip out the fire extinguisher—that is, to continually rely on rent regulations—than it is to address the fundamental problem—New York is not building enough housing, particularly in the middle-income areas.

The New York City Skyline. Photo by Jason Barr.

The Long Life of an Emergency

The history of rent regulations in New York can only be described by one word: labyrinthine. What began as a wartime expedient metastasized into a complex regulatory web, that evolved depending on the crisis du jour. In some years, rent regulations were particularly stringent; in other years, they would be relaxed a bit, only to have the exemptions rescinded when a new crisis arose. When housing costs spiked—usually because of economy-wide inflation—tenants would demand government intervention to protect them against rising costs.

Because the effects of inflation are sudden and noticeable and the benefits of new housing supply take years to materialize, officials realized that applying an addictive “pain killer” (or fire extinguisher) now was more politically saleable than the patience that generating new supply requires. Appeasing renters has been necessary because they comprise two out of three households. And yet, no matter how the rules changed, or how crises came and went, one thing stayed the same: rental vacancy has never risen above five percent since World War II.

1943 to 1968

New York’s decades-long history of rent regulations began in November 1943, when all rental units in New York had their rents frozen at their March 1943 levels as part of the U.S. Emergency Price Act of 1942. These controls were enacted because of the housing shortage and price spikes brought on by the war. Every effort was being used to fight Fascism, and normal, peacetime housing construction had to wait.

After the war, even as Federal rent rules expired, New York continued to implement rent controls for all units built before 1947, though new units were to be exempted. As housing expert Michael Stegman wrote in 1982:

The extension of rent control in New York City was intended to be a temporary measure justified by the continuing housing shortages related to emergency wartime conditions. Increases in supply through the normal workings of the market were expected to ease price pressures and allow the elimination of controls. “For this reason, a vacancy rate of 5 percent was established in the legislation as the criterion for the restoration of a normal supply-demand relationship in the housing market. Anything short of a 5 percent vacancy rate would be prima facie evidence of a continued ‘housing shortage.’”^[1]

Yet, “temporary” rent controls continued for decades, though the rules on rent increases were tweaked over time. Typically, landlords could raise rents if a unit was vacated. At other times, landlords were allowed a one-time, across-the-board increase. Or raises could be implemented through negotiation with a tenant, usually based on an upgrade to the apartment. Tenants could also request reductions if they felt the landlord was not maintaining the unit. But in all cases, tenants in good standing had the right to remain in their apartments and could not be evicted. Units could even be passed from parents to children, essentially making rental apartments “co-owned” by landlord and tenant.

By 1965, 63% of Gotham’s rental stock was rent-controlled, 6% was in public housing, and another 5% were Single Room Occupancy (SRO) housing. Thus, only a quarter of the housing stock was unregulated.

1969 to the Present

1969 was a watershed year with the introduction of rent stabilization. All units completed between 1947 and 1969 were to be “stabilized,” and vacated rent-controlled units would also be stabilized. The rent stabilization program was an admission that rent control was a failure. It was clear by the late 1960s that the inability of landlords to raise rents according to their costs was causing the housing stock to decay. Now, all units in the program would have their rents increased by a fixed percentage each year set by the Rent Guidelines Board.

As a Rand Institute report wrote back in 1971:

The rental housing market in New York City is in a state of crisis. Vacancies are acutely scarce, construction is at its lowest level in many years, rents in the previously uncontrolled sector rose so rapidly in 1969 that a new form of control was imposed, and large numbers of recently habitable buildings have been reduced to shambles or withdrawn entirely from the market. Tenants are deeply dissatisfied either with the quantity of service provided by their landlords or with the rents demanded, or both. Landlords are equally dissatisfied with the yields of their property, the behavior of their tenants, the burdens of public regulation, and the illiquidity of their investments.

To help grease the housing market, the state passed a law in 1971 that decontrolled all apartments that were vacated as of June 1970 (with new construction exempt as well). However, in 1974, the law was changed once again: all units completed after 1969 were to be stabilized, and furthermore, newly constructed buildings would be stabilized if they received 421(a) tax abatements.

1997 to Today

Then, in 1997, the state allowed the decontrol of the more expensive units, and hearty rent increases for vacant units. But these rules was reversed in 2019, when the City and State doubled down on more stringent rent regulations. Since then, vacancy decontrol and decontrol of high-end units have been abolished. And now only a tiny fraction of the cost of major capital improvements can be passed on to tenants. The effect of these regulations has been to encourage the decay of lower-income apartment buildings. Today, over half of the housing stock is either in rent control (1%), rent stabilization (41%), or public housing (7.5%)—over a million units.

Most importantly, if the rent regulations law were designed to help the lowest income families, they were not doing their job. In 1975, for example, the majority of residents in the lowest income brackets were paying more than 40% of their income on rent. Today, the vacancy for those in the lowest rental brackets is 0.4% (basically zero). For renter households earning less than $70,000, more than half are paying 55% or more of their income on rent.

A Very Brief History of NYC Vacancy

There is nothing inherent in housing markets that requires rental vacancy rates to be systemically less than 5%. The long-run average vacancy rate for rental housing in the U.S. since 1956 is 7.3%. During this time, the lowest U.S. vacancy rate was 5%, and there’s no evidence that U.S. vacancy rates are declining. New York State’s average vacancy since 1986 has been 5.4%. In the 1910s and 1920s, Gotham’s vacancy rate was typically above 5%. Furthermore, New York City’s market-rate buildings frequently have vacancy rates above 5%.

Vacancy Rates Over Time. The blue line is the annual rental vacancy rates for the U.S. since 1956. The orange line is New York State rental vacancy rates since 1986. The green line is vacancy rates since 1996 for New York City unregulated units. The black dashed line is the benchmark rate of 5%. Sources: U.S. here, NYS: here, NYC: Compiled from various NYC Housing and Vacancy Survey Reports.

Period 1: The Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression

After the First World War, Gotham’s housing vacancy was near zero (see figure below). The war and dislocations caused by inflation, supply chain problems, and lack of credit resulted in the virtual cessation of new construction. But then came the building boom of the Roaring Twenties and by 1927, the vacancy rate was 5.16%, and in 1929 it was 7.7%. The high rates were driven primarily by the vast amounts of new housing built during the period.

But then came the Great Depression. People were out of work and were doubling up. By 1934, vacancy peaked at nearly 15%. It would continue to fall through the decade, and on the eve of World War II, it was a healthy 5.6%.

Period 2: Post-World War II to 1990

By 1945, however, New York City’s vacancy was near zero. The war effort drew people to the city while housing construction ceased. But new construction began to pick up after the war, and vacancies slowly started to move upward. Then came the Korean Conflict (1950-53); inflation rose quickly, housing construction plummeted, and rent controls were tightened. As a result, by 1955, vacancy was back down to almost zero and remained below 1.3% for the rest of the decade.

Then, changes in the zoning rules triggered a building boom. The 1961 zoning codes downzoned the city, and so developers rushed to get shovels in the ground before the new, stricter laws took effect. This produced a relative flood of new units, which caused vacancy to rise to 3.19%, a post-war high, though still not high enough to trigger the end of rent control.

After the construction boomlet, housing construction slowed, and vacancies fell and remained below 2% for the rest of the decade. In the 1970s and 1980s, vacancy remained below 3%, as housing abandonment skyrocketed, and new construction was muted.

Period 3: 1990 to the Present

Then came the New York Renaissance which started in the mid-1990s. While vacancies inched up from the historical 1970s lows—thanks to low inflation and increased construction—they have never reached 5%. They have showed a remarkable stability, hovering between 2.9% and 3.6% in the last thirty years. Even the apparent mass exodus caused by the COVID pandemic only brought vacancy rates to 4.5%. Recently, the renewed growth of New York, combined with the lack of new supply, along with the cessation of new construction tax abatements has brought vacancy down to 1.4%.

New York City Rental Vacancy Rates, 1909-2023. Sources: Data complied from several sources by the author (sources available upon request)..

A History of Housing Supply

So, what has kept vacancy below 5% for 80 years? Ultimately, it boils down to housing supply. In short, since World War II, New York has not been building housing at a fast enough clip. Let’s take a tour of Gotham’s supply since 1920. However, we will not look at the number of units built each year–which is what we typically hear about in reports about New York’s housing market–because it’s an incomplete aspect of the story.

A more accurate measure is the relative net supply—the number of new units minus demolished units as a proportion of the total number of existing housing units. In the figure below, I give two versions of relative supply: the total number of new (gross) units completed per 1,000 housing units and the total number of net units completed per 1,000, where net here is the total new units minus the number of demolished units.^[2]

Net New Housing Construction Rates for New York City, 1920 – 2023. The graph gives the number of new units produced per 1000 units of existing stock (blue line) and net new units (new – demolitions) per 1000 units of existing stock (orange line). Note: the black line is 20 units per 1000, a benchmark for net new construction that moves vacancy above 5%. Sources: Data complied from several sources by author (sources available upon request).

The Takeaways

The graph above provides a few key takeaways.

First, the last time that the number of net new units was above 20 per 1000 (or 2%) was 1931. In short, New York has been unable to build past that number in nearly a century. 20 per 1000 seems to be the “magic number” for getting vacancy above 5%.

Second, although there were two periods where gross construction between 1935 and 1965 hit the 2% threshold, new supply was in a big battle with units being demolished. Some of these lost units were from slum clearance projects (both Title I and public housing), but much of it was because apartment buildings were being abandoned. The demolition of older housing units basically stopped around 2000.^[3]

In short, since World War II, there have only been two real supply booms, the one from around 1948 to 1952 and the second from around 1962 to 1965. But in neither case was the boom above the 20 per 1000 threshold.

Net Negative

Third, net housing construction was negative between 1977 to 1991. Thus, for a decade and a half, new supply was unable to match the number of units demolished, even as the population of New York was growing.

Since the mid-1990s, when New York’s economy and population started to rebound, net construction rates have hovered around 5 per 1000, about half as high as they were in the quarter century following World War II. The construction since 2000 has been positively timid.

While the recently passed City of Yes Housing Opportunity is a good start, it will not be enough. Under perfect conditions, it will raise annual construction rates from 5 per 1000 to 1 per 1000, still much lower than what’s needed to move the vacancy needle.

So, What Drives Supply and Vacancy?

In our review of New York’s housing market, we have seen how vacancy rates have remained below the “emergency” cutoff of 5% and have also seen that net housing supply has been consistently low over the decades. But the questions remain: What drive supply and vacancy increases, and how are the two linked?

In the next post, we will discuss the connection more thoroughly and see how New York can end its housing crisis once and for all.

—

^[1] See Stegman (1982) for the source of the internal quote.

^[2] Data on new units through subdivisions or building conversions or loss of units through combinations or conversions away from housing are not so easy to come by. However, based on my analysis, the gains and losses from these types of changes to housing tend to offset each other, on average.

^[3] A frequent complaint in today’s market is that New York is losing moderately priced housing because of teardowns that are replaced by luxury condos. However, looking at the data within a larger perspective shows that housing teardowns in the 21^st century are at an all-time low. We should be less concerned about teardowns and more concerned about new construction citywide.

October 29, 2024 by Jason Barr 4 Comments

The Housing Twenties: New York’s Biggest Building Boom and Its Lessons for Today

Jason M. Barr October 29, 2024

Let’s travel back a century—to New York during the Roaring Twenties.

On our journey, we will see a very different Gotham–not just flappers, speakeasys, and the new jazz–but more importantly massive housing construction. Arguably, 1921 to 1929 was the greatest housing boom in New York’s history. Units of all kinds—high-rises, garden apartments, and one- and two-family homes—were constructed in neighborhoods far and wide. It was a time of housing plenty.

On the other hand, today is a time of housing scarcity, with the housing vacancy rate at a mere 1.4% and with rents constantly rising.

The vital lesson from the Roaring Twenties is that supply matters. When new construction is robust and housing abundant, many benefits follow. First, rents fall. Second, there are more choices, so residents can find the housing size and location that best fits their needs—and they get more space for each rental dollar. Third, new construction upgrades housing quality, allowing households to live in safer, more user-friendly units.^[1]

On the other hand, when housing is scarce, rents rise, and residents are forced to accept units that don’t match their needs. And they find it difficult to move when their life circumstances change because they have fewer options.

Where’s the Beef? Map of Housing Built in 1920s and since 2010. When compared to housing built during the Roaring Twenties, today’s housing is hard to find. Note the 1920s housing is extant housing, thus under-representing the true construction during the period. Source: NYC PLUTO file, 2024.

Housing Supply Then and Now

Let’s view the number of units completed in two respective 24-year periods, 1920-1943 and 2000-2023 (see the graph below). Several things jump out. First, the Roaring Twenties was roaring indeed. From 1920 to 1929, New York built over 740,000 housing units (when New York’s population was one-third less than today!). On the other hand, from 2000 to 2009—during the great housing “boom” of the early 2000s—New York built less than 200,000 units. (Data sources can be found here.)

In the 1920s, Gotham was building housing faster than its population growth. Today, the city barely builds, and population growth is a trickle. In the 1920s, when immigrants arrived, they found affordable housing and raised their children in the city. Today, housing is a game of musical chairs. People move in, bid up the price of scarce units, and others leave as a result. The only reason that New York’s population has grown in the 21^st century is because of improved health—people are living longer; on the hand, net migration has consistently been negative. That is, year after year, more people leave then arrive.

The second fact that jumps out from the graph is that the period from the Great Depression to America’s entry into World War II (1930 to 1941)—arguably the 12 worst years in American economic history—surpassed housing construction in the best 12 years of the 21^st century (2012 to 2023), with 279,134 units during the first period and 239,910 during the second. In short, New York’s 21^st-century booms can’t compete with 20^th-century depressions.

New Housing Units for Two Respective Periods. The Blue Line is from 1920 to 1943. The Orange Line is from 2000 to 2023. Thus 0 is both 1920 or 2000, respectively. Source: See here.

Vacancy

At the end of 1928, apartment rental vacancy was 7.8%, and nearly half the city’s vacant units were in the lowest-income rentals. Due to subway expansion and brisk housing construction, those with lower incomes could improve their housing situations relatively easily. From 1920 to 1929, Brooklyn alone built 250,000 units—more than all five boroughs from 2000 to 2009.

New York’s current low vacancy rate stems from the slowdown in construction due to the COVID pandemic, high interest rates, the rescinding of 421a tax abatements in 2022, and the renewed growth in the city’s economy. But the truth is that housing vacancy has been unhealthy for many decades. The Rent Stabilization Law defines a “housing emergency” when vacancy is less than 5%. By this definition, the city has continually been in a (self-imposed) housing emergency since World War II and has forgotten what a healthy housing market looks like.

But just as important, nearly all the city’s vacant units are at the high end of the spectrum. Vacancy rates for the lowest-income New Yorkers are way below 1%. With this rate, people have few, if any, opportunities to change or improve their housing.

Vacancy Then and Now. The left graph is housing vacancy vs. rent per room for 1928. The right graph is housing vacancy vs rent for 2023. The y-axes are aligned to show how scarce housing is today. The graph below is a larger version of today’s graph. Sources: Left: State Board Housing Report. Right: NYCHVS.

Vacancy Rates in 2023 vs. Asking Rent. Note that vacancy is above 1% only in the highest rent category. In other words, for low- and middle-income housing there is nearly no vacancy. Source: NYCHVS.

In With the New Out with the Old

As a bonus, new housing improves health and safety and creates a better match between what residents want and what’s available—tenants get new features and layouts that reflect their current needs and tastes. New housing is generally safer as it incorporates the most current building codes and health standards.^[2] As the COVID pandemic has shown, many older buildings, with sealed windows and reliance on air conditioning, were not ideally suited for providing air circulation and outdoor space.

During the 1920s, low-income tenements were abandoned in droves. Officials relished the disappearance of the city’s worst housing. In a report written in 1928 by the New York State Board of Housing—not a group known for its support of tenement landlords—wrote:

Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of the improvement in available dwelling space is the increase in the number of vacancies in the old law tenements and the cheapest apartments generally. The prolonged period of prosperity, combined with the increased physical supply of housing, has made it possible to abandon some of the most unsuitable housing….In this connection, the significant fact is not that the poorer classes of the population now have greater freedom of movement and wider choice—for at best the choice of the lower rental offers very little—but rather that the economic position of at least a portion of the poor has been raised sufficiently to enable them to abandon so large a number of wholly inadequate apartments.

Scarce Housing Policy

On the other hand, today’s “scarce housing policy” causes low-income housing to deteriorate. The problem has been made worse by fiat. In 2019, the De Blasio administration enacted a law limiting landlords’ ability to pass along to tenants the cost of upgrades and improvements. As a result, landlords have been incentivized to worsen the housing stock. Tenants are now squeezed on two ends. They have little choice but to remain in their units because of low vacancy rates, and landlords have little choice but to undermaintain their buildings.

The most recent survey of New York’s housing stock shows a general deterioration in low-income housing in the last few years, which is no doubt tied to both the city’s low vacancy and the 2019 law. As the report states,

The 2023 [NYC Housing Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS)] showed a higher prevalence of most individual housing problems relative to earlier cycles, following the same general pattern as in 2021. This was true for housing types, including rent stabilized units and market rentals. The share of units reporting cracks or holes, broken plaster or peeling paint, and toilet breakdowns remained statistically similar to 2021.

Rents and Affordability

Arguably, the best measure of affordability is rent relative to income. Getting exact apples-to-apples data for the two periods is tricky, but we can generate relatively comparable measures. For the 1920s, I have compiled an index that tracks the average wages of industrial workers in New York to average apartment rents. For rents, I used two indexes. The first was created by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The second is based on newly created data from four economists, Ronan Lyons, Allison Shertzer, Rowena Gray, and David Agorastos.

The BLS data tracks people who have been renting their units for some time. These people are more likely to experience fewer swings in their rent. During the bad years after WWI, rents rose less slowly (in part due to rent control laws and the fact that landlords were often reluctant to dramatically increase rents on longtime tenants). But during the good years, they reduced rents less quickly due to inertia.

On the other hand, the Lyons et al. index comes from asking rents in classified ads from historical newspapers, which reflect the most current market conditions. Spikes are likely to be greater in lean times, when inventory is scarce, and rent drops faster in flush times when housing is abundant.

Rising Rents is Not a Given

When we compare rent indexes to wages, we see that the 1920s was a period of affordability improvement. In 1914, the index values were at 100; by 1928, both indexes were well below that. Viewing the housing scene from today shows the opposite pattern. Tracking median household incomes to median rents shows that they have consistently risen in the 21^st century. Researchers and policymakers consider housing “affordable” when it can be provided at 30% or less of household income. Since 2000, the median rent-to-income ratio has been consistently above 30%. And rents relative income has dramatically risen to above 50% for the lowest-income New Yorkers. The city’s scarce housing is, in effect, impoverishing a large swath of residents.

An Affordability Index. This graph shows an index of rents relative to average wages for industrial workers in New York from 1914 for 1928. As the building boom of the Roaring Twenties got underway, starting in 1922, affordability improved. The spikes after WWI reflect the economic difficulties driven by the war. Sources: See here.

Median Rents Relative o Median Household Income 1965-2023. Note above 30% is considered housing that is relatively unaffordable. Source: NYCHVS.

What’s the Difference?

Of course, the real estate market in the Roaring Twenties was different from today. First was that the zoning codes were relatively lax. Experts in the mid-20^th century estimated that if the city were built out according to the zoning (and tenement housing) codes enacted in 1916, the city would hold somewhere between 55 and 77 million people!

In 1961, the city was strongly downzoned. By my estimate, the zoning codes today allow for a maximum population of about 12 million people, though this likely overstates the case because 60% of residential properties are either above their maximum allowable floor area limit or within 25% of it. These are properties that are illegal or economically unfeasible to densify.

Second, there was no rent control or rent stabilization law as we know them. There was a form of rent limits implemented in 1920 during the “famine” years following World War I, but they did not inhibit new construction when the timing was right. Today, landlords cannot legally evict tenants in rent-stabilized buildings, and who have no incentive (or ability) to move because there nowhere to go.

Third, the amount of land for development was much greater back then. By 1980 or so, most of the large pockets of residential undeveloped land had been filled in. In the Roaring Twenties, large swaths of land were still open for urban development, and developers were buying up these lots to erect large apartment buildings or entire neighborhoods. While Gotham still has a trove of underutilized land, converting it to more housing is difficult and expensive because of the inability to remove tenants from a building, the fragmented nature of lot ownership, and stringent zoning regulations.

Lessons for Today

The key lesson for today, however, is that when a city builds housing faster than its population particularly in the outer areas, prices drop or flatten, quality improves, and residents have more choices. If a city builds large quantities of middle-income housing, it frees up older units for lower-income residents (through filtering), and they get better housing than otherwise.

Unlike the Roaring Twenties, however, the New York faces the need to redevelop and densify in a built-up city. I have written widely on what the New York can do to fix this problem but let me itemize a few key steps.

Transit Oriented Development

First is to encourage transit-oriented development by the subway lines outside of Manhattan. Upzone these areas for mid-rise buildings. 92% of housing near subway stops outside of Manhattan is three stories or less. If each building was redeveloped by adding double the current stories (and units)—that is, from two to four, or three to six, the affordable housing crisis would be over.

Target Vacancy Rates

Second, city government needs to target neighborhood vacancy rates. One strategy is for the City to buy large, under-utilized lots and sell off the ground leases to developers for new middle-income housing. As the vacancy rates go above 5%, tenants will have more flexibility and choices, and developers will be freer to redevelop their properties to contain more housing.

Reduce Construction Costs

Third, the government also needs to reduce regulations that choke off the building of affordable housing; and it must offer construction subsidies to lower the high construction costs, with proportionally higher subsidies for buildings that will rent to those with moderate and lower incomes.

Plan for Growth

Lastly, the City must plan for growth. As neighborhoods add more residents, the government needs to be ready to invest in better transportation—like streetcar service, dedicated bus lanes, and more subway lines—and to add more schools, services, and parks to preserve the quality of life.

City of Yes?

To his credit, Mayor Eric Adams is promoting re-writing the zoning rules to allow for more housing across the city through his City of Yes Housing Opportunity program. However, even if fully passed by the city council, which seems doubtful, the program would only generate about 7,000 additional units per year–hardly enough to make a dent in the problem.

If New York really wants to make housing affordable it needs a new Roaring Twenties for the 21st century–there’s still time to get started!

—

[1] This is not to deny the charm of older buildings, but the key is for a city to find a better balance between preservation and accommodating the needs of the present.

[2] Having said this, building codes often create an undue burden for those constructing low-income housing. If regulations were reasonably pared back, low-income housing would be cheaper to build.

August 5, 2024 by Jason Barr 1 Comment

The Power Author: Robert Caro, Robert Moses, and the “Fall” of New York

Jason M. Barr August 5, 2024

A few weeks ago, I was walking in Central Park on the Upper West Side. As I strolled past some benches near the Diana Ross Playground, I saw a young man, likely in his late twenties, with his face buried in a huge, white-covered book. When I got closer, I noticed he was reading a brand-new copy of Robert Caro’s 1974, 1,300-page biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

It struck me that I was witnessing a quintessentially New York act—to buy the Power Broker and read it in the park. In such an act, we glory in our ability to enjoy ourselves in the vast urban wonderland that is Central Park while reading a book about a man who built more parks in New York than anyone and yet who today is vilified as a power-hungry titan who initiated the fall of Gotham.

The Caro Narrative

It also occurred to me that Robert Caro’s legacy is not just that he provided a chronicle of 20^th-century New York’s most important public figure but has also affected the course of public policy.

Caro’s story is about the abuse of power—how Moses transmogrified into a Kurtz-like figure in The Heart of Darkness. Moses began his career as an ambitious idealist Progressive. His genius and endless drive to create parks and parkways pushed him forward and showed New Yorkers how government can improve people’s lives. Yet, with each success, he became increasingly power-hungry and gamed the system to feed his bottomless appetite.

As Caro writes,

Because of the arrogance that was so basic to his nature…Moses’ susceptibility to the addiction of power was unusually strong….Once Robert Moses had sought power only for the sake of his dreams, only as a means to an end; even then, however, there were signs that he was beginning to seek it for its own sake, as an end in itself. And the avidity with which he sought power—and the lengths to which he went to get it—revealed the depth of his need for it.

After World War II, as Caro’s portrait goes, Moses became deeply entrenched in his “Fortress of Solitude” on Randall’s Island as head of the Triborough Bridge Authority. With a wave of his hand, he clear-cut the “slums” that resulted in massive residential displacements; he ramrodded expressways through vibrant working-class neighborhoods; and his highway construction program drove New Yorkers to become automobile junkies while generating rampant white flight and the collapse of the subways.

Caro provides a gripping tale. We all love a Greek tragedy—the king who becomes so blinded by his power and is convinced of his own perfection that he is unable to see the damage he causes.

Robert Moses in 1939 viewing a model for a Battery Bridge (a tunnel was built instead). Source: Wikipedia.

The Caro Effect

Yet, whereas Moses, the man, was in power until the early 1960s, Caro’s portrait of Moses has been “in power” since 1974. He hovers as a living ghost that haunts New York and holds vast influence, perhaps more so than the flesh-and-blood version ever did.

This is not to say that Moses’s career was not problematic. His policies were not race- or class-neutral and often harmed people of color and the poor to benefit the white middle class. As a master bill writer, he crafted legislation that left him untouched by the democratic process to implement his programs as he saw fit. He swatted away community pushback with the epithet, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”

Bogeyman Moses

However, the overly simplistic residual of Caro’s book—the belief that people cling to—is that because Moses was a power-hungry bully after World War II and presumably harmed New York, we shouldn’t build important megaprojects that the city needs today (megaprojects that other cities worldwide are building easily).

Because Moses brooked no community input, the logic seemingly follows, we must allow full-on community input, and, by extension, local veto power that stops the city from addressing its problems head-on. The defining legacy of Caro’s book is that we have become paralyzed by the fear of Moses’s ghost which Caro conjured to life.

The Harm

New York faces 21^st-century crises that need to be addressed directly and strongly. Most notably, the city must become resilient against climate change, dramatically expand its housing stock, and upgrade and produce other services, including mass transit, to improve quality of life and prevent the high cost of living from pushing people out.

Today, Gotham is tiptoeing its way to climate change resilience. It builds out the shoreline here, adds some bluebelts there, and buys out some households over there. But the truth is that a patchwork of programs only offers partial protection against increasingly damaging storms, flooding, and sea level rise.

New York is on the path toward building $52 billion worth of seawalls that will be used sporadically to stop storm surges. Politically, erecting seawalls away from any residential neighborhood is the easy path, but practically, its cost-benefit ratio is questionable. Billions more will be spent against sea level rise and coastal disappearance.

The Housing Affordability Crisis

Just as important is housing affordability. Over half the city’s renters are rent-burdened, paying more than 30% of their income for housing, and one in three low-income households is severely rent-burdened, paying more than 50% of their income for an apartment. There is hardly any rental housing to be found with the current vacancy rate at a mere 1.4%, the lowest in half a century.

To his credit, Mayor Adams’s City of Yes Housing Opportunity will attempt to add more housing in each neighborhood, but it’s unlikely to have a meaningful impact on affordability. He has to tread gingerly to avoid total rejection of his plan.

Additionally, climate change resilience and housing affordability are not independent. Housing will become scarcer and more expensive as more land is removed from use because of rising sea levels or to mitigate flooding.

The Interchanges to and from the Cross Bronx Expressway ca. 1973. Source: Wikipedia.

Moses: A 20^th-Century Centurion

In the decades following the Power Broker’s publication, there have been more nuanced reevaluations of Moses’s career and impacts. The most forceful and comprehensive is the 2007 book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, edited by Hillary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson (which contains a comprehensive list of Moses’s New York City projects). But the revisionists have been drowned out by the howling of the Caro’s spirit.

Lost in the collective memory is that Moses was a product of his time. He rose out of the Progressive Movement, frustrated with machine politics’ failure to eradicate urban ills like overcrowding and lack of fresh air and sunlight. His genius was in figuring out (for good and for bad) how to overcome nimbyism and status quo politics. He had the support of leaders and the people because he delivered the results that they wanted.

Moses existed within the political spectrum of reformers. On the far left were the socialists who sought to abolish private property. Just to their right were those who wanted to master plan the metropolis, deconcentrate it, and create a network of garden cities. Moses pushed back against those that he saw as being too extreme. He decided that a project-by-project strategy was to be preferred to grand schemes. The populace agreed with him, being suspicious of grand plans that would disrupt the culture of laissez-faire New York.^[1]

Slum Clearance

Moses did not invent slum clearance.^[2] It had been the dream of reformers since after the Civil War with the rise of hyperdense slums in Five Points. In the 1890s, Jacob Riis’s expose, How the Other Half Lives, provided more fuel to the slum clearance movement.

One of the earliest examples of slum clearance was that of Mulberry Bend, a dense cluster of tenements in the Lower East Side that was notorious for its poverty, crime, and vice. It was cleared in 1904 and the land was converted into a park (today Columbus Park).

When Moses was in his heyday, slum clearance advocates were in positions of power through the New Deal programs. After World War II, Title I and public housing funds were made available on a level never seen before in human history.^[3] Moses was able to grab the lion’s share for New York. He was largely supported in his endeavor because he was carrying out the work that previous reformers had been unable to accomplish. Moses was their Trojan Horse.

The Automobile

Moses did not invent America’s love of the automobile, and we can’t blame New Yorker’s car addiction on him (and which is certainly no worse as compared to the rest of the country). It’s good that he didn’t get his way in various projects, such as building elevated highways across Greenwich Village and SoHo, and it’s bad that he did not consider neighborhood impacts when helping to build America’s highway system within Gotham’s borders.

But America’s automobile dependence is based on a much larger institutional and cultural framework—subsidies for cheap oil, various Federal Highway Acts (the National Highway Act of 1956 had the Federal Government covering 90% of localities’ highway construction expenses), and the fact that people highly value the personal freedom that comes with cars.

Moses’s radial highway system for New York City was not his invention. As historian Leonard Wallock states:

Far from being novel, [Moses’s] ideas for a circumferential system of roadways were nearly identical to the ones proposed by the Regional Plan Association in 1929, which in turn were based on Edward H. Bennett’s Brooklyn City Plan (1914) and Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909).

Parts of New York that Will Be Underwater if Sea Levels Rises by Six Feet (a likely projection by 2100). The green areas are those likely to be prone to flooding. Map Source: NOAA.

Moses and “The Fall”

The most influential element of Caro’s book has been its subtitle, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” as if Moses destroyed New York. Yes, Moses did some bad things, and blaming him for Gotham’s post-industrial woes makes for good copy, but it’s just plain wrong.

In fact, after the massive wave of deindustrialization that hit manufacturing cities in the 1960s, New York fared better than most. It lost population from 1970 to 1980 but rebounded after that, and today, the city holds its highest population ever. Detroit and St. Louis, on the other hand, are still losing people. Chicago, Boston, and Newark, for example, have rebounded, but their populations remain far lower than their peak in the 1950s.^[4]

More broadly, while Moses is seen as godlike in his impact on New York, the truth is that there was nothing wholly unique about his building spree. As Wallock writes:

In The Power Broker…Moses is not merely the lawgiver but the creator, for he transcends the role of his Biblical progenitor and usurps the place of God. By making Moses the prime mover responsible for the city’s genesis, [Caro’s] interpretations disregard a crucial fact: from the 1920s through the 1960s, New York’s physical and spatial development was markedly similar to that of other large American cities….The Power Broker fail[s] to explain why other cities, not blessed with a Moses figure, assumed the same physical and spatial configuration as New York.

But Caro was writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s when New York was seemingly coming apart at the seams. To many, including Caro, the “fall” was brought about by Moses’s opening the barn doors. In hindsight, this seems to be a confusion of correlation with causation.

Ironically, in his Introduction, Caro hedges on Moses’s net impact, which is quite rich, given how powerful his book has become. He concludes:

Would New York have been a better place to live if Robert Moses had never built anything? Would it have been a better city if the man who shaped it had never lived? ….

Moses himself, who feels his works will make him immortal, believes he will be justified by history, that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born. Perhaps he is right. It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived.

Time to Move On

It’s time to move on. Let’s put Moses in the past where he belongs. We need to learn the true lessons of Moses and use them as a guide to improve New York’s future, rather than clinging to outdated myths that keep the city nearly paralyzed. The true lessons of Moses are that big projects that will benefit New York can and should be built, but they also need to minimize the negative spillovers and unintended consequences and be done in a way that engenders trust and confidence in the government. Getting community input is vital, but community input should not mean complete veto power.

How to Vanquish Moses’s Ghost

However, once lodged in the public consciousness, myths are hard to kill.^[5] We long for simple explanations for complex phenomena, and when the “truthiness” of the simple explanations is strong, we cling to them. Blaming Moses for the planning mistakes of the 20^th century is easy because he stood in the center of these changes and was seemingly waving his magic wand like Lord Voldemort.

So, how do we remove the Moses Myth from blocking policies needed to keep New York safe, affordable, and viable in the 21^st century? I believe the answer is twofold. One approach must come from the top down and the other from the bottom up.

Trust Building

First is that our leaders need to engender trust. Nimbyism is, in large part, motivated by a failure of confidence that the government will do what’s good for individual residents and that large-scale building projects will do more harm than good. The legacy of Moses and Caro was to remove this trust.

Enabling communities to have strong veto power over large projects forces policymakers to employ half-hearted measures instead. When these measures fail to achieve their purpose, residents blame the government for its inability to solve problems, thereby reinforcing their mistrust.

Leaders need to say, “Yes, people like Moses were heavy-handed and their decisions led to projects that today we feel were poorly implemented, but we must move forward. Some large problems require big solutions, and we can’t tiptoe our way to the future. The cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action and we have learned from the mistakes of the past and will not repeat them. Here are the ways that we have your back….”

Just as importantly, leaders need to create the institutional mechanisms that will bring residents and communities on board. Community input is vital and should be part of the bargaining process. However, all large-scale policies need to lay out the costs, benefits, and the likely negative spillovers, and directly address how these spillovers will be mitigated to reduce the fear of change. (I have spelled out examples here). One mechanism is that a large project also comes with a compensation fund to which people can apply if directly harmed and which is objectively administered by an impartial board.

Rebranding Moses

While leaders work on the issue of trust and compensation, we, the people, need to rebrand Moses and reframe how he is seen in the public eye.^[6] Yes, Moses did many things that, in hindsight, were regretful. But he also did many wonderful things. What’s wrong with a story about a complicated man who was a product of his time?

We need to change the narrative. We need to get the word out that Old Man Moses died in the 20^th century and we refuse to be afraid of the Spooky Ghost Moses. Let’s put him in the history books along with other 20^th-century figures like Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, and Fiorello La Guardia. It’s time to create a future with new leaders who help build New York by incorporating the lessons from the best version of Moses while leaving behind those from his worst side.

—

Notes

[1] When Jane Jacobs emerged on the scene in the early 1960s, her antidote to planning was to eliminate it altogether. Death and Life directly response to the wide-eyed planners who wanted to remake the city from scratch or to build towers in the park. Her “cure” for neighborhoods was to leave them alone (or allow residents to veto any new construction) and permit mixed uses. In terms of city planning, her recipe for utopia was to build more playgrounds and cut long blocks in half to create more sidewalks and street frontages.

[2] Moses did not invent the tower-in-park style of housing either. It was an invention of reformers and visionaries, such as Le Corbusier, starting in the 1920s. The planning consensus during the Great Depression and beyond was that building towers surrounded by green space would cure urban ills.

[3] Arguably federal mortgage programs that created redlining and with which Moses was not involved had a greater effect on cities like New York than Moses’s housing and slum clearance projects.

[4] Ironically, public housing—something in which Moses had a more behind-scenes role in developing—today is a success story in New York. Given the massive affordability problem, NYCHA housing provides a huge benefit for those with low incomes. See Nicholas Dagen Bloom’s book, Public Housing that Worked: New York in the 20^th Century. More broadly, given recent economics research on the impacts of highways (such a Brinkman and Lin, 2024) and slum clearance on cities (such as Collins and Shester, 2013), measuring the net impact of Robert Moses on New York relative to what happened in other cities, would not be too difficult. To my knowledge, no one has specifically measured whether Moses’s projects were a net plus or negative for the city’s economic growth.

[5] Old myths die hard, including the first skyscraper myth, the Manhattan bedrock myth, and the myth of the Skyscraper Curse.

[6] Thanks to Daniel Golliher for his suggestion that it’s time to rebrand Moses.