There’s a hidden city in the five boroughs. Though its permanent population is zero, it is growing faster than any other neighborhood.
Early numbers from the Census Bureau’s Housing and Vacancy Survey show the unoccupied city has ballooned by 65,406 apartments since 2014, an astonishing 35% jump in size in the three years since the last survey.
Today, 247,977 units — equivalent to more than 11% of all rental apartments in New York City — sit either empty or scarcely occupied, even as many New Yorkers struggle to find an apartment they can afford.
The Vacant City — let’s call it that, with a tip of the hat to the 1948 movie and old TV series “Naked City” — has tripled in 30 years. A generation ago, there were just 72,051 apartments in the Vacant City. Back in 1987, when rents were cheap by today’s standards at a median $395 a month, the Vacant City made up less than 4% of rental apartments.
Today, the median rent is $1,450, having risen twice as fast as inflation, even while the Vacant City tripled in size.
The numbers just don’t add up the way conventional wisdom said they should.
For years, development officials, the real estate industry and think tanks have told us that artificially low rents are holding the city back. Higher rents, the argument went, would free landlords to make a reasonable amount of money and serve as an incentive to increase the housing supply.
The new Census gleanings finally put the lie to that reasoning.
We have higher prices for sure — but the only part of the city’s residential real estate that has grown is the Vacant City. More apartments are being held off the market than ever.
Some remain vacant for legitimate reasons. Almost 28,000 of those unused units have been rented or sold but not yet occupied, or are awaiting a sale. Almost 80,000 are getting renovated, 9,600 tied up in court, and 12,700 vacant because the owner is ill or elderly or simply can’t be bothered.
But that still leaves more than 100,000 units — 74,945 occupied temporarily or seasonally, and 27,009 held off the market for unexplained reasons.
Oksana Mironova, a housing analyst with the Community Service Society, says that the growth of the Vacant City tends to confirm charges made by the organizing group Picture the Homeless and others that landlords are deliberately holding apartments off the market, perhaps in order to rent them out on services like Airbnb.
Additionally, many of the 75,000 temporary apartments are pied-a-terres, weekend or vacation crash pads for the rich, up from just 9,282 in 1987.
Moses Gates of the Regional Plan Association offers an idea to get these units back on the market: Have the city slap a surcharge on temporary occupancy. “Either the person moves in full time, the person pays the charge, or the person gives it up,” he predicts. Win, win, win.
Such supply-side interventions are worthy. But they will not mend the city’s most significant housing deficit.
Rewind again to 1987. The city, still recovering from decades of arson and abandonment, had 6,241 apartments that were vacant because they were too dilapidated to inhabit — down from nearly 23,000 in 1975. The median asking rent for someone looking for an apartment to move into that year was $450 — just 14% higher than median rent existing tenants paid.
Given the apparent benefits of bringing busted-up apartments back into use, it was possible to argue that encouraging more renovation and construction would be good for the city.
In 2017, the Census Bureau couldn’t even locate enough dilapidated apartments to count — but did find a median asking rent of $1,875, 30% higher than what a typical existing tenant pays. What’s more, the vacancy rate for those expensive units is huge. Almost half the apartments available for rent in New York cost more than $2,000 a month — and the vacancy rate for them is above 7%.
We’ve largely conquered dilapidation and abandonment. Statistically, there are no more slums in New York City. But we’ve achieved this through a supply-side fantasy that created an unaffordable and increasingly vacant city.
More than 63,000 New Yorkers are living in homeless shelters (almost three times more than in 1987), and 30% of city households are shelling out more than half their income in rent. What they and all New Yorkers need is not simply the construction of more housing, but better means to keep rents within reach.
Neuwirth is author of “Shadow Cities” and “Stealth of Nations.”
