As the de Blasio administration's efforts to rezone low-income communities faces pushback amid concerns about gentrification, the debate over how best to increase New York City's affordable housing supply is also surfacing in one of the city's most affluent neighborhoods: SoHo.
City planning and community officials are currently weighing a broad set of rezoning proposals for the two Lower Manhattan manufacturing districts, SoHo and NoHo, which have not undergone a major rezoning since the early 1970s. Many had expected the fight to revolve around issues specific to the area: the push by commercial property owners to expand and legalize retail uses in a part of downtown that has become a major shopping destination, and the longstanding fears of loft artists whose rent-stabilized units have made them targets for eviction.
Although an official city-backed plan is yet to be developed, on the heels of a successful campaign by pro-housing activists, recent public hearings about the potential rezoning have centered on the citywide crisis of affordable housing, and the opportunities that may exist in the manufacturing-zoned neighborhood.
"Someone needs to take the first jump," said Will Thomas, a board member of Open New York, a self-professed YIMBY ("yes in my backyard") group which has mobilized supporters to speak at public meetings. "This is the first rezoning of a wealthy neighborhood."
But resistance to the concept has been sharp, and the battle over affordable housing has exposed a generational divide, where younger New Yorkers perceive older residents as hoarding privilege and preventing them from having the same types of housing opportunities they had.
With its easy access to transit, high-performing schools, and cultural resources, SoHo has long been considered one of the most desirable places to live in the city. But it comes at a price: The median asking monthly rent in the neighborhood is $5,295—60 percent higher than the median in Manhattan, which is $3,315, according to the latest available data from Streeteasy.
The neighborhood is also, as many activists have repeatedly pointed out, overwhelmingly white. According to recent census figures, SoHo is 80 percent white. Asians, the second largest racial group in the area, make up 10 percent of the population. Meanwhile, most of the city's major rezonings under de Blasio have been in low-income, minority neighborhoods, such as East New York, East Harlem, and Inwood, where residents recently successfully fought and overturned the plan. According to city officials, cheaper land costs can finance more affordable units, but the strategy has been criticized for overwhelming poorer neighborhoods with density and driving displacement.
For some, however, the decision over which neighborhoods get rezoned has less to do with cost effectiveness and more to do with a community's relative political clout.
Under a plan unveiled last summer, Open New York has proposed rezoning the area's "edges," outside the historic districts, to allow for greater density that would include affordable housing. Under the city's mandatory inclusionary housing policy, developers building in rezoned areas must set aside up to 30 percent of all units in new market-rate buildings.
The group has identified at least one block bounded by Canal Street, West Broadway, Grand Street, and Thompson Street as a site that could be built with well over 600,000 square feet of housing, yet still fall below the density of the nearby 16-story Holland Plaza Building, which was built in 1929.
"We have an opportunity to do a great deal of good," said Sam Bowman, a 32-year-old West Village resident who teaches linguistics and data science at New York University, on Wednesday night before a packed crowd of roughly 200 people who showed up at a public hearing before the community board.
Bowman was joined by a sizable contingent of young New Yorkers from across the city. Still, they were outnumbered. Boos from the audience of mostly older longtime residents, including artists, rained down on them. Most of the older residents portrayed their proposals as being either misguided or driven by real estate interests.
"I don't know anyone who works or lives here that wants to see bigger buildings," said Robert Murphy, who said he has worked in Soho since the late 1960s. "Are they really interested in affordable housing? I don't think that's really their priority."
Laura Tenenbaum, a resident since the 1970s, pushed back on the notion that the neighborhood consisted entirely of multi-millionaire condo owners. Those people, she insisted, were the outliers. She said her building, for one, had many senior Asians unable to afford to move.
"Are we rich?" she asked. "No, a lot of us are aging in place."
Meanwhile, preservationists say that adhering to the current scale of mid-rise buildings is integral to maintaining the historic character and sense of place of an iconic neighborhood. Andrew Berman, the director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, also criticized the city's policy of affordable housing through upzonings as "ridiculous," saying that most of the time a community gains "many more super luxury units to get a small number of affordable units."
He suggested that the city can add affordable housing in the neighborhood without building more by simply requiring below-market units in existing manufacturing buildings that are converted to residential.
But housing activists want the neighborhood to treat the crisis with a greater sense of urgency. During the hearings, several people argued that the policy to build affordable housing in densely populated, centrally-located area with a strong infrastructure is as much about sustainability and climate change as it is about social justice and economic opportunity.
But Bowman said he found the response from most residents lackluster. "Most people in the public sphere acknowledge that [climate change] is a problem but aren't interested in doing anything personally dramatic," he said.
Were it not for his subsidized housing at NYU, he said he would not be able to afford to live in the neighborhood.
"I'm extremely sympathetic to the goal of preserving the neighborhood as a space for creative/artistic work, and for fighting against the displacement of the people who have spent their lives doing that work," he later added. "But I don't see how that translates into an argument about upzoning. Adding affordable housing and taking pressure off of existing housing seems like it would largely help prevent the displacement of that community, at least if it's done in the relatively careful ways that are showing up in proposals like Open New York's."
The residents opposed to affordable housing, he and others argue, want to have it both ways: live in a vibrant and diverse city but not allow density and access for lower-income New Yorkers. And as a Curbed reporter observed in a tweet, the participants at the hearings on both sides have been mostly white.
On Thursday, Jake Schmidt, an Open New York member, tweeted a video he took of Community Board 2 members talking during an informal executive session after the public hearing.
One of the members sounded conflicted. "I’m very sensitive to the whiteness of us all," she said.
She argued that what makes New York City great is that "every neighborhood contributes something different." SoHo's contribution was its historic character, she said, citing its cast-iron buildings and cobblestone.
"I don't feel we should be responsible for producing as much affordable housing as other neighborhoods," she said.
To which another member chortled, "No kidding, of course not."
At the same time, the initial speaker insisted, "But I want to live in a diverse neighborhood."
