The city has been discussing housing production since its inception. This battle isn’t just about density, it’s also about design and culture.
In 1869, the New York Tribune reported on new developments in Manhattan. “Few people who pass by Broadway will notice it…currently under construction…one of the largest and most magnificent hotels on the western continent.”
The following year, the eight-story Grand Central Hotel opened with 630 rooms and three elevators, said to transport guests to the top floor in just 30 seconds. Although called a hotel, the building, like many grand establishments of the time, was also a place for long-term stays, housing single men and even wealthy families who lived there for months or years at a time, along with short-term travelers. It provided residents with hot baths and indoor dining without the need for dedicated servants.
In fact, this hotel lifestyle served as New York’s first experiment in middle- and upper-class communal housing, and was a precursor to the purpose-built apartments that were transforming the city.
It also caused a moral panic. The outrage wasn’t actually about the size of the building. It was about what this new way of life seemed to represent. And, as it turns out, that’s the pattern that has characterized New York’s housing struggles ever since. Resistance to density is rarely related to density itself. At the time, critics worried that this new form of communal living would erode social norms. one New York Tribune reporter In the timeless words, he warned that “hotel life is comfortable and desirable for single men,” but that it would be unwise for men to take their wives there, given the “demoralizing effects” and “powerful temptations.” 1879, new york times She lamented the increasing number of “lazy, fashionable women” who can no longer endure the “monotonous work of housework.”
These were the NIMBYs of the 19th century.
New York’s housing debates have long been framed as conflicts over population density, neighborhood character, and perceived threats of social change. What changes over time is not the structure of the discussion, but the type of building being discussed. This history is important because recent research confirms that opposition to development is often shaped not by density itself, but by the way density is designed and perceived.
Today, New York City is experiencing the following situation: The most severe house price crisis This laid the groundwork for the most ambitious housing reform the city has attempted in decades.
Recently approved zoning reforms in the City of Yes aim to accelerate housing production by legalizing more housing types, relaxing parking requirements, encouraging office conversion, and moderately increasing density in large parts of the city. These changes are now being reinforced by a series of city charter reforms and state-level housing initiatives aimed at further streamlining development, expanding infrastructure capacity, and accelerating housing production.
Together, they represent an important political shift from decades of scarcity-driven planning to more explicitly pro-growth housing policies. State and local leaders increasingly adopted these policies to improve the city’s affordability, economic competitiveness, and ability to sustain middle-class families.
But even if these reforms are politically successful, ambitious housing goals may still be missed if policymakers misunderstand what is actually driving neighborhood-level resistance to development, often referred to as NIMBYism.
Housing debates often reduce opponents to self-serving obstructionists. In fact, it is not just density that people often resist, but forms of development that they perceive as placeless.
The origins of multifamily living date back to ancient Rome. island — An apartment complex that occupies an entire city block and is several stories high. roman architect vitruvius They defended them on the practical basis that the city’s growing population necessitated an “infinite increase in the number of housing units.” Two thousand years later, his logic still applies to cities with little land left to build on.
What was new in 19th-century New York was not the type of buildings but who lived in them. The density was for row houses. Respectability meant home.
live in a tenement house It would have been embarrassing It was the “middle class” of “bookkeepers, artists, editors, clerks, lawyers, copyists, machinists, and people in other trades and professions who desired privacy,” but even these families could not afford a single-family home in Manhattan. The challenge for the architects was to design a building that accommodated middle-class life while distinguishing itself from the negatively perceived tenement house. Calvert Vaux, the architect and landscape designer known for co-designing Central Park, was the first to argue that apartment complexes needed to be rebranded, urging New Yorkers to look to Paris.
Vaux and his associates took inspiration from Paris and incorporated Haussmann models into elegant and stately apartment buildings. The first home was built on East 18th Street in 1869. Richard Morris Hunt’s Stuyvesant Flats is built on a block of mostly single-family row houses, whose facades read as one. as Tribune reassured anxious readers“This is an attempt to introduce into the city a style of house building that is almost universal in Paris. . . . This is completely different from the tenement plan.”
The same architectural type that was considered a moral hazard on the Lower East Side became a symbol of cosmopolitan sophistication, with larger suites, indoor plumbing, mansard roofs, and Parisian pedigree. They called it the “French Flat.” By the time the Dakota opened in 1884, the same category of buildings that had threatened society a decade earlier was being marketed as luxury.
Two recent studies point in the same direction: Opposition to new housing is forming. Not just densitybut also depends on whether the development appears architecturally attractivecontextually pedestrian-friendly, and visually consistent with the surrounding environment. In other words, people are more willing to accept new housing developments if they feel integrated into the area rather than being forced upon them. Respondents were consistently more supportive of development when it reflected local architectural patterns, incorporated pedestrian-friendly design, and appeared integrated into the surrounding urban fabric.
Housing debates often reduce opponents to self-serving obstructionists. In fact, it is not just density that people often resist, but forms of development that they perceive as placeless. Even people who don’t live near new developments tend to object when taken out of context. But in areas where density is already the norm, people are more likely to accept it.
In this sense, architecture and urban design are not secondary to housing politics. They are the central characters. The City Planning Department learned this lesson painfully in its 2003 rezoning of Fourth Street in Brooklyn, when it failed to consider how buildings would meet the street. The result was huge, conventional architecture and unattractive cityscapes. Fourth Avenue became known as the “Canyon of Mediocrity.”
If you look at the redevelopment of Gowanus that is taking shape today, the story is much different. While there are inevitable complaints about the loss of historic brick warehouses, much of this large-scale redevelopment shows that entirely new neighborhoods with large, well-designed buildings along a continuous public promenade (including significant affordable housing) provide a much more convincing model of what large-scale density looks like. If the City of Yes and related reforms are implemented primarily as a mechanism to maximize the number of units without paying equal attention to design quality, political backlash is likely to intensify rather than recede. The challenge facing New York is not just whether we can build more homes quickly, but whether we can build more homes that people can be proud of.
Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine that living in an apartment is itself controversial. Most New Yorkers live there. But the deeper lesson of New York’s housing history is not simply that the city must grow. That is, the success of urban growth depended, in large part, on density being felt as desirable, legible, and integrated into the social and architectural fabric of everyday life.
The first real test was Prospect South Neighborhood Planthe first major rezoning recently announced by the Mamdani government. The proposal has already sparked debate over the character of the neighborhood. in interviewSome residents of the Victorian-era Beverly Square, just off Coney Island Boulevard, support rezoning the commercial corridor but don’t want tall glass towers rising over their leafy oasis. Threading this needle is critical to showing New Yorkers that new housing can be built with care. “Gentle density”.
If policymakers fail to take seriously the underlying causes of NIMBYism, especially the human desire for beauty, harmony, and belonging, no amount of regulatory reform, zoning liberalization, or shifts in political power will automatically create places that endure because they are truly loved.
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