Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn are very densely populated, but there's a lot more to the city than that. Huge swaths of the New York metropolitan area are tw

Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn are very densely populated, but there's a lot more to the city than that. Huge swaths of the New York metropolitan area are two-storey houses, and what I suggest is upgrading these to five or six storey brownstone-style housing. Yes, infrastructure does need to be built, but by putting more people in less space, you increase the ability of the city to pay for infrastructure. After all, cities that are losing population (de-densifying) generally do not find it any easier to pay for their existing infrastructure. And if people want New York to stay just the way it is physically, then they're going to have to stop complaining about the prices. Increased supply or increased prices, that's the trade-off. Yes, changing zoning is difficult, and the way Bloomberg went about it only made it worse. Because the up-zoning (permitting more development) was limited to a very few neighbourhoods, it meant that the new development was concentrated there, with noticeable effects. If he'd up-zoned a wider area, that development could have been more spread-out and less disruptive. As it is, though, he actually down-zoned large areas of the city, often those low-rise neighbourhoods which could have handled more density. Just as in San Francisco, increased housing supply will in large part need to happen in the inner and outer suburbs. New York is building housing, but not that much: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nyc-housing.png?w=600&h=371 https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nyc-hou... . Just because there's a few big noticeable towers going up does not mean that there's a large amount of housing being built. Also, just because supply isn't keeping up, doesn't mean it does nothing at all. By building more housing, the increase in price is less than it otherwise would be.