NYC's primary problem is having the worst housing production rates of any major US city (aside from a handful that are economically struggling and have low prod

NYC's primary problem is having the worst housing production rates of any major US city (aside from a handful that are economically struggling and have low production from outright lack of demand), and the downstate/LI suburbs being exceptionally bad as well. The rest is basically irrelevant. Every one of those few "billionaire" buildings could be 1-bedroom market rate units at 100% occupancy instead and it wouldn't do anything significant for the overall problem. For one example of how broken NYC policies are: 60% of residential lots aren't zoned for anything over 2 stories. The city needs to have much of it moderately upzoned to get decent (and decently distributed) housing development, not to somehow start building affordable skyscrapers in Midtown. ------ There's a fantastic non-partisan report here that lays out the scale of the failure and various ways to improve the issue very clearly: https://cbcny.org/research/strategies-boost-housing-production-new-york-city-metropolitan-area https://cbcny.org/research/strategies-boost-housing-producti... If you want to just skim, the various charts show it clearly enough without actually reading every paragraph.