What Could Actually Stop Gentrification?

New York City’s rampantly swelling developments greet you with an unshakable cold shoulder. The glass artifices that glimmer in the skylines of destinations like Williamsburg, Bushwick, and increasingly Bed-Stuy — to say nothing of Harlem, the South Bronx and Astoria — seem to have never intended on being more than 3D renderings used to secure financing. Familiar stores line the blocks of these commercial enclaves but even they seem different, as though they’re all part of a quaintly developed plan that saw inhabitants as an afterthought. The actual people in these neighborhoods are just there for now.

This is quite literally true in Williamsburg where, according to Inside Airbnb, the same 460 “entire apartments” are listed on the sharing app at a regular cadence, effectively vaporized from the neighborhood’s true housing stock. If you spend an extended period of time in the region, which is now the model for rapid development around the world, you’ll find French, Italian and Spanish families whimsied by how cheap American goods (even Brooklyn goods) are in Euros. The logic of these developments — that no matter how expensive you make a home in a desirable location, someone will find a way to live in it — has been bolstered by the tech industry in more ways than just Airbnb. Soon, Williamsburg will be the home of a new WeLive location, a co-living spinoff of WeWork, the sixteen billion dollar co-working start up that describes itself as a “physical social network.”

The tech world’s doggedly optimistic view of capitalism doesn’t take into account the deep dread that accompanies New York City’s housing market. Over the past several years, an unstoppable barrage of new developments have rendered entire swaths of the city unrecognizable, and there aren’t any real signs of the trend slowing.

Mayor Bill De Blasio’s Affordable Housing Plan, which the mayor himself called “a watershed moment when we turned the tide to keep our city a place for everyone,” will likely have a minimal effect on these conditions. Under the plan, 20 to 30 percent of new developments in areas like East New York will be required to rent for below market rate. This is a perfectly good idea but still begs the question of what happens when the people already living in a community get priced out by new, “market rate” buildings.

Miguel Robles-Durán is an assistant professor at The New School’s Parson School of Design as well as a founder of Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), a non-profit cooperative dedicated to researching new, sustainable forms of urban design.

“For us, I think New York has been one of the most difficult places to work,” he tells me over coffee in the East Village. “I think that a lot of the issues that plague New York come from the fact that it is one of the capitals of the world. For a long time for people with money, investing in New York was a very logical thing to do from a business perspective.”

The expansion of money often attributed to the ostensible prosperity of the 90’s, Durán points out, has been a key driver of New York’s housing crisis. “More money exists today than even thirty years ago,” he tells me. “This is essentially imaginary money, so of course, the most logical place for everyone to stash this cash is in physical property.”

Durán’s work focuses specifically on ways to fundamentally rethink housing in a fashion that services people who’ve lived in communities for generations. In his view, residents should be able to accrue “tenure” to a place for living there, even renting, for decades.

“The notion of a house as an investment is not a cultural scenario. It was designed as part of policy that made specific tax benefits for homeownership.” He says.

He tells me that one of his organization’s “obsessions” has been challenging the notion of private property. In Duran’s view, other forms of property like collectivized housing and co-ops have systematically disappeared over the past 20 years. “There are a lot of other possibilities for acquiring and having tenure to land that aren’t simply owning or renting,” he says.

There are countries like Germany, for example, where 80% of the housing stock is rented and only 20% is owned. According to economist Jim Kemeny, “the role of public policy [in Germany],was to follow a third way that involved striking a sensitive balance between ‘letting the market rip’ in an uncontrolled manner and strangling it off by heavy-handed intervention.”

Similarly, Durán looked to find a solution that was a radical step forward but also feasible in an American context. “We were looking at models that would be viable here, in a climate where simply “giving” people housing isn’t politically possible.” He said, “so we thought to create a scenario in which the city is a seed partner for co-operatives around the city.”

Currently, the city of New York spends millions in tax-subsidies for luxury developers. CohStra’s plan was simple: stop giving those tax breaks to developers and instead loan it to co-operatives inside the communities. Unlike the tax breaks given to developers, these loans would be paid back. With interest.

Cohabitation Strategies’ proposal lived as part of Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, a 14 month long project commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. According to Duran, the project even received attention from De Blasio’s camp who, at the time, were in deep negotiations with City Council over the mayor’s Affordable Housing Plan.

It might have behooved De Blasio to take a closer look. Part of the project’s research involved a much deeper analysis of the city’s current housing situation.

“Our investigations find that the housing crisis in New York is much much worse than is being reported.” Duran tells me, “one of the reasons is that all of the statistics you see don’t take into account people living in much more dreadful situations.”

“We found in expensive parts of Brooklyn like Park Slope, people living three families per house in order to send their kids to school in the area.” Duran continued, “at all levels of class-division in this city, this happens”

The proposed initiative aims to provide permanent affordable housing for low income households through a “hybrid tenure” framework. This housing model would be planned, financed, developed, managed, and owned collectively by a public or a nonprofit entity, a cooperative housing corporation, and community stakeholders and residents. With their proposal, this collective would accept a low interest loan from the city to develop housing on HDFCs which, by the nature of their statutes, they wouldn’t be allowed to make a profit from.

HDFCs are much cheaper than market rate and there are currently hundreds of vacant HDFCs in ‘good areas’ of New York because no developers want to buy plots of land with such strict regulations.

“Give communities that capacity to develop, control and distribute their own housing. A radically different view of what housing means.” Durán tells me.

When wondering why plans like this haven’t been explored as much as they perhaps sound like they should, its easy to brush off “idealistic” notions like Durán’s as too expensive or not viable long term but the professor has another idea.

“I was doing a project where I would tour the new developments coming from the Lower East Side to TriBeCa. I would read descriptions of the units and the prices,” He tells me.

“When we made it to TriBeCa people got very angry, so I made up a story that we were doing a survey because the city decided to build affordable housing. You should have seen their faces, some of them even made phone calls to whoever they could to make sure this fictional affordable housing plan stop.”