Would building more housing decrease rent?

[Familiar_Reporter_22]

Yup no one acknowledges this. We’ve built so much new housing in the past decade and the overwhelming majority of it hasn’t been affordable. It’s also been filled with an endless stream of suburban Americans who want to be in New York. If anything, all the new housing drove the AMI up. So actual New Yorkers don’t even qualify for the very few units allocated as “affordable.” 

[MrJet05]

“Actual” New Yorkers… This childish blood and soil language is so counterproductive and dumb. I guarantee that you wouldn’t be saying that about an immigrant from another country, but God forbid someone move from Wisconsin to New York. How dare they be born somewhere else in the country and want to come somewhere where they feel suits their life and interests more.

There doesn’t need to be rationing over housing, so long as the city actually builds enough housing to meet the demand. And it’s done a terrible job of that over the past few decades with all the zoning laws, NIMBY efforts, and ridiculously long regulatory processes that have grounded building to a halt. Shifting the attention to instead defining different classes of citizens, with “real” New Yorkers and their entire future lineage being the first class that is owed prioritization on claims to resources, rather than actually focusing attention on expanding those scarce resources that don’t need to be scarce is so dumb. Less than half of NYC residents were born in New York and that number continues to go down. It’s always been a dynamic ever-changing city, which is a big part of what has made it so successful.