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KieranSingh2001SecondEssay 3 - 19 Apr 2024 - Main.KieranSingh2001
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The Problem | |
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< | In the early months of 1L, my friend Gabe and I decided to live together. Our leases, in subsidized, yet still incredibly expensive, Columbia housing, were to expire at the end of May. We wanted to start looking far earlier, but units would only list about a month before the lease was to start. Given that, we only started looking in earnest at the end of April. | | | | |
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< | The Current NYC Housing Landscape | >
> | As someone who has never faced housing scarcity, it's hard to put my finger on why it ignites a passion in me more intense than nearly any other political issue. Perhaps it comes from seeing my neighbors, in my well-to-do neighborhood of Minneapolis, my hometown, preach high ideals of racial and economic justice in one breath, then lobby for zoning policies that keep their neighborhoods rich and white in the next. Maybe it comes from seeing economic progressives, my ideological compatriots, advocate for those same exclusionary zoning policies based on a well-meaning resistance to housing developers. The housing issue is marred in hipocrisy and misinformation, which is incredibly upsetting given how stable housing is a prerequisite to security and freedom.
Housing costs and scarcity are at their most severe in NYC, and living here has crystallized my impulse to use my legal career to fight for everyone's right to housing. But for every tenant I can represent as a lawyer, there are a hundred other people with no representation in subpar, or prohibitively expensive, living conditions. Thus, as much as I want to focus my pro-bono efforts on securing housing for as many people as possible, the question remains: is it possible, on a macro-level, to make housing affordable for everyone in New York? Even the oft-derided "transplants?" Is it possible as a practicing lawyer? Or only in politics? | | | | |
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> | The Current NYC Housing Landscape
In 2023, the median rent in Manhattan reached $4,200. In Brooklyn, it was $3,500. Multiply those numbers by twelve and one can more clearly see the problem. On average, it costs fifty thousand dollars just for housing in Manhattan. Moreover, the population of manhattan has declined significantly in the last one hundred years, and, while I would not assume causation here, I would wager that there are far more people that want to live in Manhattan than can. | | | Zoning Laws | |
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> | Manhattan zoning laws are not | | | Rent Stabilization | |
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> | Currently, around a million units in NYC are rent stabilized, meaning that landlords can only increase rent by a certain percentage each year, and that the landlord cannot refuse to renew the tenant's lease. More expansive policies were adopted in [x] when | | | Proposed changes to NYC Housing Law | | | The Path to Housing Abundance | |
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> | Rezoning
In Minneapolis, the city council passed comprehensive zoning reform, which, while controversial (especially to those neighbors I mentioned earlier), achieved some genuine change in the abundance and pricing of housing in the city. The plan allowed for | | | | |
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< | Subsection B | >
> | Rent stabilization | | | | |
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> | Expanding access to rent-stabilized apartments is the second prong of expanding housing affordability, but scarcity problems remain, even if they aren't reflected in the price. It is notoriously | | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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