On November 13, the New York City Council will vote on the third and final part of the City of Yes (COY) proposal from Mayor Eric Adams (and Big Real Estate). Called the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity (COYHO), it has 1,386 pages of zoning changes that make it the most controversial and consequential section for the future shape of our streets, buildings, and neighborhoods. Some of the changes will be good, others bad. In this essay—the third in an ongoing series about COYHO (part 1; part 2)—I look at why many of the results most likely to be built by this market-driven plan threaten to make Manhattan a more expensive, less desirable place to live. 

Yes to Bigger Profits for Big Real Estate 

Two of the apartment towers on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row, 15 Central Park West and 220 Central Park South (both designed by my former boss, Robert A.M. Stern), are the most profitable buildings in the history of New York City. Not surprisingly, Big Real Estate wants to make it easier to build more super-profitable, supertall luxury towers. Until 2024, New York had a 63-year-old statewide 12 FAR (floor area ratio, a measurement comparing the size of a building to the size of the land it’s built on) cap, and developers had to rely on a combination of commercial and residential zoning for the right to build supertalls, limiting the areas where they could build (thus the concentration around West 57th Street). Governor Kathy Hochul, however, eliminated the cap in the most recent state budget. 

COYHO proposes two new residential zones, R11 and R12, which have FAR of 15 and 18. COYHO will also allow towers a thousand feet tall without using R11 or R12. New tools will make it easier to transfer air rights and therefore easier to build supertalls in more places. If COYHO is approved as written, the planner George Janes thinks the next generation of supertalls will be in midtown and downtown, where air transfer rights are unlimited. It remains to be seen what will happen on the Upper East and Upper West sides, which, like Billionaires’ Row, offer valuable views of Central Park, with the added advantage for developers of having popular, and expensive, historic districts. 

The City Planning Commission would like us to believe that a little more affordable housing in every neighborhood is the primary reason Mayor Adams and Big Real Estate want zoning reform. R11 and R12 come with mandatory inclusive housing requirements. But in Manhattan, where land prices, apartment prices, and luxury tower profits are all high, COYHO will mainly give us more apartments at the top of the market. Few luxury housing developers will choose a permanent commitment to rent-stabilized tenants and regulations when they can make more money without those entanglements. 

One of the most reasonable-sounding selling points for COYHO is that we must fight racism by making sure every neighborhood contributes its fair share of equitable housing. However, we know the new housing will be expensive, and there is no reason to think the new apartments will bring racial diversity. The federal Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to try to enforce diversity, in fact. Studies by the Greenwich Village group Village Preservation show that upzonings in New York City typically lead to more expensive apartments and less diverse populations.

Do we need more luxury towers, particularly on the Upper East and Upper West sides? Manhattan has a significant unsold surplus of luxury apartments built in the last two decades, and few urban designers think these areas are where the city should add more people to already-crowded sidewalks, streets, and subway stations. With over 100,000 people per square mile, these neighborhoods are already two of the three or four densest residential areas in the Western world. More than twice as dense as the historic centers of London, Paris, and Rome, they have a density three times higher than the average for New York City as a whole. 

Like all the most popular residential neighborhoods in New York, the Upper East and Upper West sides were built with height limits far lower than is allowed today. Despite what Big Real Estate says in its City of Yes propaganda, residential neighborhoods were not governed by the 1916 zoning, written for commercial districts, but by regulations that limited buildings to 1.5 times the street width or 150 feet, whichever was less. That limited buildings on side streets to 90 feet tall, giving air and light to the apartments, streets, and neighborhoods where people lived.

The height limits were lower than in office and commercial districts, but more than tall enough to produce dense urban neighborhoods while offering a view of the sky. And city planners thought apartment dwellers should also have a good visual connection to the street, both because it felt good and because of the famous principle of “eyes on the street.” The planners also respected the European urban design principle that the most comfortable streets were shaped by buildings 1–1.5 times as tall as the width of the street.

The height limits, in other words, were seen as benefits for the neighborhoods where people lived and played, balancing three things: high density; comfortable apartments with light and air; and streets that felt like good places to be. New Yorkers accept small apartments in return for the city life supplied by a concentration of people and public spaces where they meet. In New York City, most of our public space is in our streets. 

The Price of Views 

The booming economy of the Roaring Twenties brought oversized residential buildings that skirted or simply broke New York’s zoning rules. The most egregious examples were apartment hotels, which were supposed to be in the business districts regulated by the 1916 zoning. These abuses contributed to the creation in 1929 of a new statewide Multiple Dwelling Law that allowed taller buildings on large lots of 30,000 square feet or more. These could have 150-foot towers on 150-foot “podiums” or bases that maintained the street wall. Only five of those exceptions were built before the 1961 zoning resolution: four on Central Park West (the famous twin-tower buildings that reduced bulk above the base) and one on the East River (River House), before Robert Moses built FDR Drive. Residential buildings on smaller lots could have floors higher than the 1.5 x street width limit—if the floors set back sharply, at a 45-degree angle. This led to penthouse apartments with large terraces.

Toward the end of the 20th century, developers discovered they could charge a 30% premium for apartments that towered above their neighbors. The chair of the City Planning Commission at the time, Joe Rose, said, “Views have become so prized that we unleashed an intense desire for building height without regard for neighborhood character or scale. Each new building tries to achieve better views by being taller than the last. The consequence has been a powerful inducement to break away vertically as far as possible from the neighborhood pack. While there is nothing wrong with nice views, it is not necessary to have a city shaped by a desperate grab for them.”

Rose proposed new zoning that emphasized neighborhood character and limited the height of residential towers. A third-generation New York developer, Rose spent the first few years of his time in office selling the plan to the development community. When he finally put his proposal on Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s desk, however, a phone call from Big Real Estate within half an hour killed the plan. Twenty-five years later, we have Big Real Estate’s counterproposal in the City of Yes, which we can already see in special permit buildings all around us. Hudson Yards and Billionaires’ Row are the poster children for the City of Yes in Manhattan. 

Rose called the 1961 zoning resolution an ideological statement of Modern planning that did “violence to our urban fabric.” He saw historic districts as New Yorkers’ response. The first historic district was Brooklyn Heights, which came four years after the 1961 zoning. Today, there are over 160 historic districts. Parasitically, Big Real Estate wants to profit from the value the historic districts have created by building alien invaders towering over their buildings and streets. COYHO will make it easier to do that. It is a full-frontal assault on the historic districts, which Big Real Estate says restrain development. Less than 4% of New York is landmarked, however, and that number includes large, unbuilt areas like Central Park and Prospect Park. COYHO enables profiting from the value created by the districts while degrading the character.

Walking around the city, we experience the difference between the old streets shaped by height limits and the new streets like Billionaires’ Row (West 57th Street) or Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Flatbush is now a wide auto sewer bordered by towers that awkwardly frame the space, creating a non-place. The towers look out over Brownstone Brooklyn, which is forced to look back at the towers.

Whose City? Our City

New York Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said the following at a COYHO hearing: “All across the city I ask,‘How many people think housing and homelessness are the No. 1 or No. 2 issue?’ Everybody raises their hand. ‘How many people think the answer is housing at a price point people can afford?’ Everybody raises their hand. ‘And how many people would like to live next to a taller building?’ And no one raises their hand.”

And yet Mayor Adams and the New York City Planning Commission want to enable bigger, taller, more expensive towers, because that is what Big Real Estate wants. Many of the apartments in the towers, we know, will sell to the global rich from other cities and countries. They won’t pay local income tax, and many of the buildings have 30-year tax abatements from the city.

Billionaires’ Row shows that towers can be too rich and too thin. More than forty years ago, Paul Goldberger, then the architecture critic of the New York Times, wrote the following about midtown Manhattan, where supertalls will surely rise if the City Council approves COYHO in its current iteration: 

“There is such a thing as being too crowded, and midtown Manhattan has become just that — a place in which enormous buildings block out not just sun and sky, but one another; a place in which traffic moves not just slowly, but almost not at all; a place in which walking is not necessarily more practical than riding, because the sidewalks are as jammed as the streets.”

New Yorkers love the residential neighborhoods that combine large, 12-story apartment houses, lower apartment buildings on the side streets, and rowhouses (many converted to apartment houses). My own anecdotal survey confirms what Williams found: New Yorkers don’t like living high above the city, so most of the buyers or tenants in tall towers aren’t from New York. They arrive in the city with a new job and a short time to find an apartment, and the quickest and easiest way to find one is to hire a broker, regardless of whether you want to rent or buy. And the easiest apartments to find are in the many new towers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island City. New York living—how exciting! But many come to feel isolated from the city when it’s far below.

“Imagine thinking New Yorkers don’t like towers,” YIMBYs say. But while New Yorkers love the Empire State Building, we’ve never wanted to live in it. Down on the street, there’s no question that the lower buildings make more livable residential streets and neighborhoods. Imagine thinking that New Yorkers are NIMBYs because they love the city they live in. They don’t want to lose that city to a real estate “product” made for foreign investors.

Let’s stop selling the city we love to the highest bidder and make affordable housing for the 80% of New Yorkers priced out of New York. We have the right to demand a city for all.

Featured image via Flickr.