New Yorkers of a certain era who lived in the outer boroughs recall a time when we used to have to venture into Manhattan to get a good meal, or take in a movie at a quality theater.
As Brooklyn, Queens and even the South Bronx (whose dramatic evolution led some to christen it “SoBro”) became more gentrified, they naturally became exponentially more expensive, thus pushing out long-term residents who couldn’t afford it.
But a funny thing happened on the way to urban sprawl: Suddenly, residents like myself also had a plethora of local options for food and entertainment — and we didn’t have to venture into ‘The City’ unless we really needed or wanted to.
Whether it’s called gentrification (an imprecation that really shouldn’t be) or ‘Yes in My Backyard,’ one of the lessons I derived from a lifetime spent in New York City is that large-scale residential construction ― often fraught with the politics of class and race ― is beneficial in the long run to neighborhoods. It’s not cheap, but it does create more options and improves the area’s vitality.
D-FW Real Estate News
It’s one of the reasons why Nicholas Wooten’s cover story on SB840 makes for such a fascinating read. It’s a case study in how even a pro-business, construction-friendly state like Texas isn’t immune to ‘NIMBY’ public pressure campaigns that upend the best-laid development plans.
Although a legal battle against a mixed-use development in Far North Dallas was unsuccessful, the group that spearheaded the campaign blasted the new law as a “sweeping sledgehammer” that doesn’t resolve the area’s lack of affordable housing.
“It’s just a developer’s dream for them to go in and not have to deal with local governments,” Matt Bach told Wooten.
The forces arrayed against endless sprawl and high-end housing have legitimate concerns about affordability — the single biggest, and most persuasive, argument against many large-scale projects.
But using New York City as a lens, bear with me as I simultaneously out myself as a YIMBYist (if that’s even a word?) and hark back to my graduate school capstone project on Big Apple rent control programs — to explain why a booming population in need of affordable housing needs more market-driven supply.
New York City has a time-honored tradition of embracing policies designed to make life easier on the working class, but inevitably worsens quality of life, and makes things more expensive for everyone. Meanwhile, the city’s widely criticized rent control laws create market distortions that don’t resolve the fundamental problem. It’s a dog’s breakfast that pits landlords/developers against renters in an unproductive, endless war of words.
And it’s not just apartments. If you’ve ever wondered why a NYC hotel room is so expensive, witness how the city has simultaneously banned Airbnb and placed stringent restrictions on hotels that create significant hurdles for new entrants into the market.
Jay Martin, the executive vice president of the New York Apartment Association, spends a lot of time on X educating the public about why the solution to sky-high prices is to let developers, well … build more supply.
He and other ‘YIMBY’ proponents argue that New York’s patchwork of rent regulations have come at a substantial cost to those who need it most. Among other things, the status quo deprives landlords — many of whom aren’t major developers, but ‘mom and pop’ investors that rent for supplemental income — of the means to fix their properties.
Bringing it back to the Dallas-Fort Worth, there are lesson here for well-intentioned neighborhood activists who fight for affordability and the preservation of an area’s character.
Protests and lawsuits can be useful, and they are their own form of market regulation that attracts attention, galvanizes the public and concentrates the minds of elected officials. But they can also be counterproductive to accomplishing what a housing crisis needs the most: building more units.
For my adopted hometown, I’ll close with a plea that doubles as a word of advice. D-FW has a hard-earned reputation as a builders’ town, but should avoid making the same mistakes as my former city did. For the sake of alleviating the affordable housing crunch, please — let a thousand new apartment buildings bloom.
If you don’t, you may live to regret it. New York City certainly has, in more ways than one.
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