Housing Expert Challenges “YIMBY Consensus”: Upzoning, More Housing, and Less Regulation Won’t Solve the Housing Crisis

By Phyllis Eckhaus

Pundits and policymakers agree: New York City’s housing crisis will disappear if we do what they deem obvious — build more housing and cut the regulatory red tape that hampers development.

But this supposedly obvious solution is wrong, said city planner and author Alan Mallach, speaking at a May 12 online forum co-sponsored by Village Preservation, the local historic preservation group, and the City Club, the civic organization devoted to good government and land use policy. Asserting that “the affordability crisis is a crisis of the poor and near-poor,” Mallach contended that the vast majority of people who are paying over half their income in rent in New York City “earn under $40,000 a year in gross income.”

Mallach characterized low wages as a “pernicious” part of New York City’s economic reality, and low income as a housing obstacle impervious to deregulation or increases in housing supply.

There’s a “systemic gap,” he said, “between what it costs to provide a housing unit and what a poor or near-poor person can afford,” noting that according to the rent-guidelines board, a modest Bronx one bedroom in a multifamily unit costs a landlord $1,200 a month in maintenance, operation, fees, and insurance — perhaps $2,000 a month if the landlord seeks to recoup a $100,000 investment in the unit.

No increase in supply or deregulation will spur the sudden availability of apartments within reach for, say, a single mom who earns $20 an hour thirty hours a week, or $30,000 a year. For her, Mallach observed, an affordable apartment, costing 30 percent of her income, would rent at $750 a month — far less than even the break-even point for a typical landlord.

“It is simply impossible to push rents down low enough to the point where they’ll be affordable to people earning $30,000 a year…without essentially forcing the landlords into bankruptcy,” he observed, noting that the only feasible long-term response is public subsidy from the federal government.

Mallach distinguished the rent burden endured by low income New Yorkers to the costs experienced by those who are higher income. “Let’s say you’re a single person and you’re earning $100,000 and you’re paying 50 percent of your income for rent. You’re not going to live a Jeff Bezos life with that…but you can manage quite comfortably.” He contrasted that relative affluence to the single mom with the $30,000 income, left with $15,000 to cover her expenses and those of her kid if she pays half her income in rent. “That’s a totally different reality and I don’t think people acknowledge that reality.”

No Shortfall in NYC Units

Mallach questioned the conventional wisdom that city population keeps vastly outstripping housing supply, noting that between 2010 and 2024, the city added about 340,000 households and about 325,000 housing units, describing the difference as a “rounding error” in the city’s housing market, which encompasses millions of units.

But he did identify a regional shortfall. In other popular urban areas, such as Austin, Texas and Minneapolis, where there’s been a great influx of people and jobs, “housing prices have stayed relatively low…because those areas have huge amounts of suburban housing production acting as a safety valve for city demand. So people are constantly moving to the suburbs….There is virtually no housing production going on in Long Island, Westchester, or Rockland.” The city, Mallach suggested, is “expected to bear the entire regional burden itself.”

He also noted that the perception of a housing crisis is made worse by the lack of turnover of relatively inexpensive apartments. Though “statistics say” the city has many apartments priced at less than $2,000 a month, renters don’t give them up. “There is a problem, but building $4,000 a month units is not going to solve it. Preserving the older buildings won’t solve it, but at least it will keep it from getting worse.”

The Downsides of Up-Zoning

Village Preservation Executive Director Andrew Berman described recent upzoning initiatives as decreasing affordability, although promoted as affordability measures. He observed that none contain explicit requirements for building affordable housing — and that by allowing dramatically increased density, these upzonings instead encourage the demolition of less dense “naturally occurring affordable housing.”

Mallach added that the vastly increased density allowed (tall skinny towers approved and encouraged via a new “floor to area ratio” or FAR) actually creates disincentives for affordable housing, or reasonably priced market-rate housing, by greatly increasing the price of the underlying land.

He also noted that “in a city like New York, in order to build something new you have to take something out” — and that typically, what’s taken out is significantly more affordable than new construction. Mallach gave as an example a hypothetical Bronx building with 50 units renting at $1,500 a month being replaced by a tower with 250 units renting for $3000 to $4000 a month — a big increase in supply, with an apparent decrease in affordability.

Criticizing YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard, or pro-development and anti-regulation) proponents as “deliberately obtuse,” Mallach castigated their single-minded attempt to use zoning as an engine of development. “Housing is not simply a matter of popping down dwelling units. Each time you build a housing development,” he declared, “you are [affecting] a larger complex urban environment….If you don’t use [zoning] as a tool to create a healthy urban environment, you’re misusing it.”

The discussion, “Cracks in the YIMBY Consensus: Why Can’t We Upzone Our Way Out of the Affordability Crisis?” was moderated by Village Preservation Special Projects Director Juan Rivera, and is the first in a planned series of online events questioning the YIMBY assumptions that increased supply and decreased regulation will make city housing affordable. The full presentation is available at Village Preservation’s YouTube channel.

Published in the June 2026 Village View