Reading about the City of Yes in the New York press, you might think every right-thinking citizen supports it. The first line in a recent New York Times story was typical: “Solutions to the housing crisis often face a small but mighty roadblock. Local residents tend to resist more development in their neighborhoods, and they typically have clout.” But when New York’s City Planning Commission held a hearing where citizens could give their thoughts, so many concerned residents turned out that the meeting went on for 15 hours, and they had much more to say than just “no.” Housing organizations, preservation alliances, and community groups said they care deeply about their great city, not that they don’t want change.

If you watch the testimony recording, you will see that New Yorkers love their city. They want affordable housing for all, but many don’t accept the idea that the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity (COYHO), the third part of Mayor Eric Adams’ massive changes to zoning, is the way to get it. They have watched Big Real Estate make New York more expensive while simultaneously changing the city in ways they don’t like. The dissatisfaction ranges from the influence Big Real Estate has on our government to the proliferation of luxury towers around the city at the same time that we have an extreme crisis of affordability. 

Their advocacy recalls the brilliant work of Jane Jacobs and Robert Caro. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs repeatedly emphasized the destruction of the city by experts and special interests, against the wishes and the wisdom of ordinary New Yorkers. In The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Caro documented how Moses rode roughshod over anyone and everyone who opposed his work, which Jacobs called “urban removal.” In the name of progress, Moses tore down thousands of buildings on hundreds of blocks, displacing hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

 New York has changed since then, but what has not changed is the city promoting top-down planning with dubious arguments. Saint Jane, the patron saint of American urbanism, might be called the Queen of the NIMBYs. She and her army of Greenwich Village mothers were the first people (other than the president of the United States) to successfully stop Moses from executing any of his plans, when they prevented him from building a highway across Lower Manhattan. A few years later, shortly after she turned in the manuscript for Death and Life, Jacobs read in the morning paper that New York City had designated her block and 13 others around it for demolition and renewal. In response, she helped organize the Committee to Save the West Village. This led to the creation of a historic preservation district and the construction of affordable housing designed in neighborhood meetings. “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody,” she wrote in Death and Life. But the City of Yes proposes less public process and more decision-making behind closed doors.

We can easily imagine that Jacobs would be with today’s so-called NIMBYs. She told her son James that she opposed giant new projects like Atlantic Yards: “I think she would have tried to organize the neighborhood to stop it,” he says. She objected to the building heights and the out-of-scale contrast with Brownstone Brooklyn and warned about the damaging effect of what she called “cataclysmic money.” She was decades ahead of her time. 

The Real Estate State and the City of Yes

The Real Estate State and the City of Yes epitomize the use of cataclysmic money in planning and development. Governor Kathy Hochul represents their interests: she believes the biggest donors get to build the biggest buildings. Mayor Adams represents the City of Yes, which has thousands of pages of zoning changes that say “yes” to Big Real Estate. The poster children for the New New York are Hudson Yards and Billionaires’ Row, which remind us of Dubai, Mumbai, and Shanghai—but not the New York we love. Hudson Yards, which cost New York taxpayers over $5 billion, is one of the most unpopular places in New York. 

 No one I know believes the Planning Commission will pay much attention to the critical comments expressed at the hearing. New York economist and urban activist Lynn Ellsworth has documented what she calls “the foxes taking over the henhouse”—Big Real Estate seeding the City Planning Commission with Commissioners and staff who support their program. To make matters worse, COYHO proposes moving some current public review to private meetings at the City Planning Commission.

Big Real Estate has captured other city agencies as well. A court case brought by a neighborhood coalition in Lower Manhattan revealed that New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission held secret meetings in which its staff coordinated talking points with developers appearing before the commission.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who appoints community board members in his borough, gave applicants a YIMBY litmus test. The unsurprising result is that some community boards that opposed Big Real Estate’s housing goals last year now support them. Some of the new community board members are paid lobbyists who work for a YIMBY group called Open New York (ONY), a group Levine has endorsed. 

ONY was founded by YIMBYs in the development and real estate investment community and a large number of young white “tech bros.” The City Planning Commission supported ONY member testimony in public hearings, but its public behavior was frequently controversial. At a City Planning hearing to upzone SoHo and NoHo, an ONY activist famously invited an artist in her seventies to “step outside.” Senior citizens worried about losing their artist-certified, rent-regulated lofts were called racists, not only by YIMBYs but by a City Planning official as well.

The following year, a politically connected woman named Jeanmarie Gray came from City Hall to run ONY, which soon received $2.5 million from Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz, who is active in the California YIMBY movement. The group does not accept money from developers, but it has accepted donations from individuals who work in real estate and endorsed politicians who take donations from Big Real Estate. A new nonprofit arm called “Abundant New York” will support politicians advocating “serious” solutions to the housing crisis. 

Whose City?

Governor Hochul, Mayor Adams, and REBNY all say, “Build, baby, build!” ONY and YIMBYs say, “Yes!” The City of Yes for Housing Opportunity will expedite the construction of taller towers and more-expensive apartments, as long as there is a market for those. But it is not a serious solution for low-cost housing, or even middle-income housing, because the market-driven plan does not have many ideas for profitably building those.

As an architect and urban designer, I have been a YIMBY for decades, bringing walkable, sustainable towns and neighborhoods to suburban sprawl around the country. As a New Yorker, historian, and writer, I have studied urban form and the qualities that made the great New York neighborhoods we love. New Yorkers are not asking for Hudson Yards, Atlantic Yards, Billionaires’ Row, and more luxury highrises. They want a beautiful and equitable city, a better city than the City of Yes, with affordable housing for all.

In the words David Harvey, a professor of urban geographer at the City University of New York, “The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, or what aesthetic values we hold.”

Featured image: 55 Hudson Street via Wikimedia Commons.