An Abundance Agenda for New York

New York's laws create scarcity and hardship. Pro-abundance policy is the antidote.

51% of New Yorkers say that our state’s top problem is the cost of living, the cost of housing, or access to health care.¹ I believe that widespread affordable access to life’s essential goods and services is necessary for individuals to thrive and communities to flourish. Housing, food, energy, transportation, safety, medical care, and education are vital. And yet, too often these necessities are unavailable or unaffordable to New Yorkers.

This crisis of affordability is largely a problem of our own making. Well-intentioned but misguided laws induce scarcity and limit the ability to produce essential goods and services in the quantities and at the prices that allow all New Yorkers to live a dignified, joyful, and fulfilling life.

The only cure for scarcity is abundance. To enable great lives for all New Yorkers, we need to pursue policies across all domains that make life’s essentials plentifully available and affordable. I’ve found this theme has surfaced again and again in my writing over the past year on housing, transportation, health, and our democracy.

Achieving abundance won’t solve all of society’s problems – but it can make many things better. Let me explain the ways our self-enforced scarcity hurts us, and how this drag on our prosperity can be fixed.

The consequences of scarcity

Imagine struggling to pay sky-high rent for a cramped apartment, worrying about how you'll afford childcare, or seeing your loved one suffer from air pollution. These are the real-life consequences of scarcity.

Essentials being scarce, or insufficiently available, is problematic for two reasons:

• Scarcity makes life’s essentials expensive. Prices are determined by the interaction of supply and demand: when demand exceeds supply, then prices get pushed up. This requires people to pay a lot of money for scarce items.

• Only a limited number of people can enjoy a scarce resource. Just like in the game of musical chairs, if there are 11 kids running around but only 10 seats, then someone is going to lose out. We allocate most resources based on ability to pay, so scarcity causes particular hardship to people who cannot afford to outbid others.

We see the consequences of scarcity play out across so many areas of life:

• Housing in New York is scarce and expensive. There are many more people who would like to live in New York than there are homes for people to live in. This results in NYC’s housing being among the most expensive in the country. The government tries to compensate by spending billions on subsidized housing, but still half of New York’s renting households pay over 30% of their income on rent.² Homelessness is largely caused by housing scarcity. Scarcity allows property owners to treat tenants poorly, knowing there’ll always be another tenant waiting to take their place.

• New York's energy choices create scarcity. Households and businesses are forced to use polluting energy sources, or pay higher electricity prices to switch to zero-carbon electricity options. Our air quality suffers, and global warming worsens.

• Childcare for young kids is scarce and expensive. New York City has more than double the number of children under five as licensed child care slots. Working parents struggle to afford daycare or nannies in New York, which can cost between $16,000 and $28,000 per year, depending on the child’s age, location, and quality of care.³ This is an enormous burden for parents in a city with a median pre-tax household income of $76,607.⁴

Scarcity creates hardship; abundance creates opportunity. More homes, more energy, more childcare, and more leisure would allow New Yorkers to not just survive, but thrive.

Curing scarcity

To grossly oversimplify, the cure for scarcity is to get rid of laws that constrain production and adopt policies that deliver abundance of the necessities of life. Note that this prescription is unopinionated about whether it ought to be government or private enterprise doing the actual production of goods and services — just that lawmakers should be really, really careful about laws that impose costs or restrictions on producing these essential items.

To be clear, I am not a deregulatory zealot. Many laws that impose costs or restrictions on producing essential goods are net-positive for society. I’m grateful that surgeons are required to wash their hands, even if it makes their prep take a bit longer. I’m pleased that my home’s wiring was performed by a licensed technician, because I don’t want to die in an electrical fire. I support the rule requiring New York’s coal- or wood-fired pizzerias to install expensive air filters, given that restaurant exhaust is a major contributor to the 2,400+ New Yorkers who die prematurely each year from poor air quality.

However, we are subject to many policies that enforce scarcity and drive up the cost of living.

• New York has a mountain of rules that make housing scarce and expensive. These rules constrain the amount of residential floor space allowed on each property and how large buildings can be. The rules essentially forbid the construction of efficient, vertical buildings across almost all of Staten Island, most of Queens, and much of southern Brooklyn.⁵ Even in Manhattan, since 1961 it has generally been forbidden to build residential buildings with floor space greater than 12 times the size of the lots.⁶ Historic preservation rules encase much of Manhattan and inner Brooklyn in a time capsule.⁷ Across much of the city, homes are required to have dedicated off-street parking spaces, even if their residents don’t own a car.⁸ Our property tax system is geared against multifamily buildings in favor of single-family homes.

• Restrictions on electricity generation and transmission inflate costs and hamper the transition to low-pollution energy sources. Federal regulations take an extraordinarily risk-averse approach to nuclear energy that ignores the fact that the status quo of US electricity generation kills many Americans through air pollution. Long-distance electricity transmission, which is necessary to transport electricity to consumers, is often thwarted by a mess of complicated permitting and NIMBYism.

• Daycare centers for young children are made more scarce and expensive by complex rules and processes. Childcare workers are required to complete a background check, which takes the city on average 36 days to complete.⁹ This makes it difficult for daycare centers to recruit staff, because applicants often find jobs in other industries while their background check is pending — especially given the current low unemployment rate. Daycare centers in New York for children under 24 months old must be located on the ground floor of a building, which constrains the spaces where these businesses can operate.¹⁰

Of course, most of these policies have some legitimate objective behind them. Some people prefer neighborhoods that are primarily single-family detached homes. Requiring off-street parking spaces prevents a neighborhood’s on-street parking from getting overwhelmed. Preserving some historically notable buildings helps educate future generations about the past. Nuclear energy regulation reduces the risk of disaster. Requiring daycare centers for young kids to operate on the ground floor plausibly makes an emergency evacuation faster.

The key is to strike a balance between competing objectives to adopt policies that maximize overall wellbeing. Doing this effectively requires government actors to estimate what the impact of their policies will be, and then judge how to trade-off between these impacts.

Let's examine how this trade-off plays out in practice. Consider, for example, New York’s Facade Safety Inspection Program, which requires all buildings taller than six floors to undergo manual inspection of their facades every five years. These rules were introduced in 1980, following the fatal injury of a pedestrian by a falling piece of masonry. The inspection requirement increases safety by preventing further similar incidents, but also costs buildings tens of thousands of dollars per inspection cycle and covers Manhattan with hundreds of ugly “sidewalk sheds”.¹¹ How can legislators determine the optimal inspection frequency that balances both safety and cost? In theory, more frequent inspections might be even more safe than the current five year cycle. On the other hand, less frequent inspections would reduce costs for buildings and the eyesore on New York’s streets.

One of the hundreds of sidewalk sheds that form part of New York’s Facade Safety Inspection Program

Cost-benefit analysis is one approach to determine which policies will best impact wellbeing. With CBA, the government tries to predict the impact of a policy. You could determine the ideal facade inspection frequency by estimating the value of the policy’s benefits (perhaps by calculating the inspection saving a life multiplied by the “value” of a human life) and weigh this against the policy’s cost (such as the inspection charges for building owners and the negative impact on nearby ground-floor businesses). Different people might legitimately weigh these costs and benefits differently, but at least then we’d all be explicitly talking in the same terms about the trade-off. Without this analysis, legislators draft laws with plausible-sounding parameters (e.g. “buildings taller than six floors”, “inspection every five years”) but without rigorous understanding of these laws’ true impact on housing and safety.

(For what it’s worth, Council Member Keith Powers has proposed some good reforms to make facade inspections less burdensome without compromising public safety. Alas, these bills are stuck in committee and need support from more council members to pass into law.)

Government agencies at all levels are required to assess the impact of new regulations.¹² However, New York's state and city governments seem to do this less rigorously than the federal government, and rarely use formal cost-benefit analysis when drafting and evaluating primary legislation. This lack of analysis limits our ability to choose the policies that maximize well-being. New Yorkers would benefit if our city council and state legislature had expanded staffing to help legislators to estimate the likely impact of their proposals, and then write laws that best maximize the abundance and affordability of life’s necessities.

The bottom line is that I’m pro-abundance. Self-enforced scarcity is at the root of so many of New York’s problems. On Sidewalk Chorus, I try to bring attention to how our laws and systems impact New Yorkers’ wellbeing, and highlight opportunities to make life in this city more dignified, prosperous, and joyful for everyone. The only cure for scarcity is abundance, and it’s within our power to make that abundance a reality.

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1. Poll conducted from February 12th to 14th 2024 by the Siena College Research Institute

2. Spotlight: New York City's Rental Housing Market report by NYC Comptroller Brad Lander (page 10)

3. Investing In Families and Our Future: A policy roadmap to address NYC child care needs now by the 5BORO Institute

4. QuickFacts for New York City by the United States Census Bureau

5. Why housing is so expensive in New York by me on Sidewalk Chorus

6. Dispelling Myths About Floor Area Ratio (FAR) Reform by the Regional Plan Association

7. Why housing is so expensive in New York by me on Sidewalk Chorus

8. Reforms in New York CIty, NY by the Parking Reform Network

9. NYC has a backlog of 140 incomplete background checks of day care workers by Giulia Heyward for Gothamist

10. Leasing Space to Child Care Centers: Frequently Asked Questions for Property Owners by the NYC Department of Health

11. Getting a Grip on the Soaring Cost of Facade Projects in Habitat Magazine

12. See, for example, Cost-Benefit Analysis in Federal Agency Rulemaking by the Congressional Research Service and Section 202-A of New York's State Administrative Procedure Act