On a liberal arts campus with an Irish dance troupe and a contemporary science fiction club, Angelo Mazza recently fell into a singularly niche pastime: reading up on archaic zoning laws.<\/p>\n
It would seem a curious obsession for a college sophomore. But Mr. Mazza, 19, was born and raised in New York, one of the world\u2019s costliest cities. He has watched as a housing crunch in his hometown exploded into a full-blown crisis.<\/p>\n
So with a friend, Mr. Mazza formed a student-led organization last year that breaks down in-the-weeds zoning and policy debates for a youth audience.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re young, but we\u2019re getting older,\u201d said Mr. Mazza, a Fordham University student who lives with his Italian immigrant parents in Queens. \u201cIt sounds weird coming from a young person, but the next generation is going to have to pay attention to housing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Generations of young people have taken up a cause and stood at the vanguard of movements for change.<\/p>\n
College students were pioneers of the Vietnam War protest movement. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds rallied at congressional offices after a gunman\u2019s rampage at a Parkland, Fla., high school. And people in their 20s fought fossil fuel companies, anxious that climate change would derail their lives.<\/p>\n
If every group of young people has its driving cause, this one\u2019s might be boiled down to six words: The rent is too damn high.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the only thing I hear now,\u201d said Samantha Bravo, 21, who was raised in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and worries that housing costs are at a breaking point for young New Yorkers starting their lives. \u201cEvery single day, I think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms. Bravo was only 11 when she started testifying at the city\u2019s Rent Guidelines Board<\/a> hearings, as her family routinely lacked heat and hot water, and clashed with the landlord. \u201cIt\u2019s just so frustrating and disheartening. We\u2019re the culture of the city. We deserve to be here,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Older adults have traditionally been the face of grass-roots housing campaigns and tenant groups. Today, even young people who have never signed their own apartment leases are jumping into the movement in surprising ways.<\/p>\n Teens are coding websites to help neighbors find affordable housing<\/a>. College sophomores are joining picket lines to protest unaffordable off-campus housing. Students at Columbia University and the University of Texas at Austin started their own tenant unions.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no large-scale youth housing campaign akin to the Sunrise Movement, the climate activist group, or March for Our Lives, which summoned students to Washington to rally for gun control legislation.<\/p>\n But the pent-up frustration among the country\u2019s youngest residents appears destined to shape the politics of a generation.<\/p>\n In this spring\u2019s Harvard Youth Poll<\/a>, four in 10 young Americans agreed that housing costs are snowballing into a national emergency. No other issue \u2014 except for inflation \u2014 ranked as an urgent crisis for broad shares of 18-to-29-year-olds.<\/p>\n They were born into, or grew up during, a housing crash, sometimes watching as their families lost homes to foreclosure amid the financial collapse of the 2000s. They spent months stuck inside during the most dire global health crisis in a century, and then witnessed weather disasters force their friends<\/a> into hotels and emergency shelters.<\/p>\n Now, many see a future where they can barely afford a place to sleep.<\/p>\n John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard University\u2019s Institute of Politics, regularly hosts small focus groups across the nation. Without fail, at least one young person shares a harrowing story: They\u2019re homeless, or deeply afraid of becoming homeless.<\/p>\n \u201cI literally don\u2019t remember the last time that didn\u2019t happen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n As many as two-thirds of Gen-Z renters across the nation struggle to afford housing, according to polls and surveys.<\/p>\n And in New York City, young people are often exposed to the housing crisis before they pay a first month\u2019s rent. Some of their middle school classmates might live in homeless shelters. Or they might turn to a parent on a frigid winter night and ask why someone\u2019s sleeping in their subway car.<\/p>\n Emely Rodriguez, who was 16 when she embarked on housing advocacy, watched with frustration as her North Brooklyn neighborhood gentrified \u2014 eventually pushing out many of her high school classmates.<\/p>\n She grew up in Williamsburg sharing a small bedroom with her three sisters in a railroad apartment, and later joined a fledgling youth housing alliance<\/a> that was created by other city teenagers dissatisfied with the status quo.<\/p>\n More recently, she scored big on an apartment, winning the city\u2019s housing lottery. But Ms. Rodriguez, 24, is still championing change: She wants to organize the tenants in her luxury building.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I look at the state of housing, I feel a lot of anger,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n For other young people, the epiphany came in the form of a remarkable statistic: In the 1990s, the median age of first-time home buyers was in the late 20s; last year, it reached 40, an all-time high, according to the National Association of Realtors.<\/p>\n All of that made Farid Sofiyev think: Something has gone deeply awry.<\/p>\n When Mr. Sofiyev, 19, studied abroad in Copenhagen recently, he was amazed by the city\u2019s myriad five- and six-floor apartment buildings, rich with green space and courtyards. It made New York\u2019s restrictive zoning rules all the more glaring.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to start a family, if you want to provide for your kids and not be worried all time, it\u2019s going to get perpetually more difficult,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t see it becoming less difficult unless there\u2019s a collective movement \u2014 especially in New York City.\u201d<\/p>\n So Mr. Mazza, who was exasperated as he watched the median rent on new leases in his Astoria neighborhood balloon to $3,100<\/a>, teamed up with Mr. Sofiyev to start a nonprofit<\/a> whose members have interviewed urban planners and written short articles on the housing crisis.<\/p>\n Mr. Sofiyev has been floored \u201cby how many people are actually interested in this.\u201d<\/p>\n The two friends placed a call-out for passionate students who are eager to pitch in. \u201cIt filled up within a few hours \u2014 and we weren\u2019t offering anything other than to just help out,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n One of them, Nara Kong, 17, was already itching to get involved.<\/p>\n She wondered from an early age why homelessness seemed so pervasive and neglected. \u201cIt\u2019s become something so normalized,\u201d she said. \u201cIt almost feels dystopian.\u201d<\/p>\n She and her friends aren\u2019t yet renters \u2014 they are still living in their childhood bedrooms. But when they envision their grown-up lives, they \u201calways bring up that it will be so much easier\u201d to move out of New York.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re all worried,\u201d said Ms. Kong, who lives in Queens and is a junior at a public high school. \u201cWhat if we can\u2019t live here because of a housing crisis?\u201d<\/p>\n Alain Delaqu\u00e9ri\u00e8re contributed research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a liberal arts campus with an Irish dance troupe and a contemporary science fiction club, Angelo Mazza…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":850385,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[852,5997,5229,294501,16720,266067,46269,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,11228,279276,320356,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,11108,38979],"class_list":["post-850384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-affordable-housing","tag-age","tag-america","tag-chronological","tag-colleges-and-universities","tag-cost-of-living-and-affordability","tag-generation-z","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential","tag-renting-and-leasing-real-estate","tag-teenagers-and-adolescence","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-youth","tag-zoning"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116708054670855415","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/850385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}