The City of No

Urban Malaise is a New York State of Mind

Keep your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

When, in August 2020, the owner of the Stand Up NY comedy club, James Altucher, declared that New York City was “dead forever,” few people found it funny. Roiling from a pandemic that had emptied offices, wiped out the hospitality industry, and spurred an exodus to the exurban hinterland, Altucher proclaimed that, this time, the city would not bounce back. While the essay seemed only to confirm the priors of the city’s haters, the response from I-♥️-New-Yorkers, embodied in the quintessential New York persona of Jerry Seinfeld, was: 

Altucher’s essay was polarizing and polemical. New York—The City—represented the literal pinnacle of American urbanism. If it was dead forever, what did that mean for “the city” as such? 

If New York couldn’t make it there, could any city make it anywhere?

I started writing

City of Yes

in part to explore the issues facing our cities since the pandemic, but in part—as a long-time but now-former New Yorker—to answer the question, “Whither New York City?” And I stole the name of this publication from NYC Mayor Eric Adams, inspired by the eponymous reform agenda he has advanced to create more housing and economic opportunity in my erstwhile home.

In an interview on the

Thesis Driven

podcast with

Brad Hargreaves

, long-time developer MaryAnne Gilmartin gets to the core of what Mayor Adams is up against. Explaining why she is more excited to build in Baltimore than the Big Apple, Gilmartin says:

[In] New York, you know, the answer is always “no” out of the gate, and maybe you can squeeze in a “maybe” and possibly get a “yes.”

Building in New York is hard to do, but must it necessarily be so bad? Gilmartin cites a “confluence” of reasons from antagonistic relationships between communities and developers, the loss of important tax deductions, and a “dysfunctional legislature in Albany [and] agencies and departments that are overworked and understaffed.”

As Gilmartin sums it up, “All of this just creates a malaise.”

The malaise seems pervasive: subway ridership remains at roughly 70% pre-pandemic levels, office buildings are less than half full, unemployment is stubbornly stuck above the national average, tourism hasn’t fully recovered, and neither have the hospitality and retail sectors along with it. And the worst number of all: New York lost 5% of its population—half a million people—since the pandemic began.

The City newsroom, which tracks the above numbers, asks, “How’s New York City Doing?” While it’s not “dead forever,” it certainly ain’t great.

It would be easy to blame the pandemic for all this, but—like the rise of remote work—the pandemic only accelerated trends that were already in place. 

Despite losing 500,000 people, the city’s decades-long opposition to building enough housing to meet demand has created an acute housing shortage, with rents hovering around all-time highs and vacancies at 50-year lows. Now New York is struggling to absorb 150,000 migrants—again, after losing 500,000 people—when in 1907 Ellis Island admitted nearly ten times as many people. The influx of migrants has doubled the city’s homeless population, itself a function of the city’s failure to build sufficient housing. Meanwhile, that “dysfunctional legislature in Albany” passed an ostensibly tenant-friendly law that has instead taken perhaps fifty-thousand rent-stabilized apartments off the market, triggered $161 million in foreclosures, and further deprived the city of much-needed property tax revenue. If you were trying to create an urban doom loop, starving a city of housing seems like an effective way to do it. 

New York’s problems with building housing had been getting worse well before the pandemic. According to Gilmartin, “you started seeing more very simple rezoning proposals fail to pass, fail to go through ULURP [the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure],” New York City’s costly and cumbersome process of public review for land use changes. And the city council members piled on, too, deploying “member deference”—an informal gentleman’s agreement in which they are allowed to veto any projects in their district—to kill housing projects.

Everybody, it seems, just wants their chance to say “No.” If New York is in a malaise, it’s because it has said “No” to so much for so long.

Criticizing the mayor’s “City of Yes” proposals, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso said: 

“The ‘City of Yes’ should not be something that we’re applauding as a generational-changing thing,” Reynoso said at a policy breakfast hosted by the NYU Furman Center, while still acknowledging the plan as a positive step. “I think the problem we have is there’s no political will to do this stuff in an expansive way, and that we celebrate things like the ‘City of Yes’ like they’re bigger than they are.”

“Political will and boldness is not something that exists in the city of New York,” he said. [Emphasis added.]

On the one hand, I get the criticism. The “City of Yes” programs represent relatively modest reforms in the grand scheme of things. The mayor has called for a “moonshot” goal of building 500,000 more homes in New York over the next decade, but his plan would only add 100,000 over the next fifteen years—if it makes it through the public review process. So there’s a disconnect between the apparent need and the current proposals.

But Reynoso’s alternative is not to offer a better plan, only a different process.

A potential challenger to Mayor Adams in the 2025 election, Reynoso has instead issued a “Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn,” which he calls a “direct response to our city’s failure to plan…Because in New York City, we zone but we do not plan.” However, his 200-plus-page document doesn’t create any pathways to building the housing New York needs—it just offers another cumbersome, arbitrary set of guidelines for businesses and developers to navigate in place of zoning. 

The “City of Yes” proposal, which has been characterized as a “repudiation of much of the zoning enacted in the City Planning Commission’s 85-year history,” does not win Reynoso’s applause because it is a repudiation of the culture of naysaying that has plagued New York. To which Jerry Seinfeld might respond:

I’ve argued that cities need to take a page from improvisational comedy and cultivate a “Yes, And” approach to solving their problems. For a city to say “Yes” to people “And” to housing “And” to the future is to implicitly say “No” to the so-called “urban doom loop” prophesied to destroy our once-great metropolises.

Mayor Adams’s “City of Yes” pithily captures not only the sense of optimism, openness, and agency needed to solve the real challenges New York faces, but also the conviction that they are both solvable and worth solving. If Borough President Reynoso thinks political will and boldness do not exist in New York, it’s because he is still living in The City of No.

The mayor’s proposals will not by themselves solve New York’s problems, but they represent a welcome and, dare I say, bold rejection of The City of No. It remains to be seen whether New Yorkers and their political leaders have the will to join him in saying “Yes.”

Which gets to the root of the present malaise: New York’s problems are not inherently a fact of nature; they’re largely man-made. The city has demonstrated not only a capacity to weather the worst man and nature have given it, but to bounce back and rebuild better than ever. New Yorkers can kick the urban doom loop malaise if they want to—but they’ll first need a change of mind.