NYC Voters Overwhelmingly Want the City to Create More Affordable Housing and Prefer a Not-For-Profit, Public Approach
By Isa Alomran and Rob Todaro
New York City is the largest city in the U.S. with a population of approximately 8.3 million people — and it's facing a major housing crisis characterized by high demand, short supply, and skyrocketing costs. According to NYC Comptroller Brad Lander’s recent analysis of the city’s fiscal year 2024 budget, rent prices remain higher than pre-pandemic levels and have significantly increased over the past year across the city’s five boroughs. Despite near-universal agreement that something must be done to address the city’s housing shortage and affordability crisis, progress on significantly expanding the city’s affordable housing stock remains stalled.
New Data for Progress polling finds that addressing the housing crisis is a major priority for NYC voters, with two in three voters saying it is “very important” to address the city’s housing crisis.
When asked about potential solutions to the housing crisis across the city, NYC voters want lawmakers to prioritize:
Creating more permanent affordable rental housing (61%)
Creating housing that's affordable across income levels, including unhoused and the lowest-income New Yorkers (58%)
Creating housing that prioritizes affordability over making a profit (48%).
The survey also asked voters their preferred potential housing policies for their own neighborhood or community, and found that voters indicate those same priorities when thinking about their own backyard. Notably, “protecting tenants from displacement” was the third most-selected response for both Black and Latino voters when thinking about their own NYC neighborhoods.
When given a description of a “social housing” solution to the city’s housing crisis — which would include prioritizing permanently affordable housing, giving tenants more agency over housing developments that impact them, and providing housing that's affordable across income levels — 81% of New York City voters support the approach.
A plurality of voters (49%) also report an unfavorable opinion of real estate developers in the city. When thinking about how the city should manage the public land it owns, 72% of New York City voters say the city should prioritize not-for-profit developers who treat housing as a public good rather than a vehicle for profit to ensure that all New Yorkers have a home they can afford. Further, 60% of New York City voters say the city should provide nonprofits, co-ops, and community land trusts with financial incentives to build more housing.
In terms of potential solutions to the city’s housing crisis, Data for Progress finds that voters most strongly prefer creating affordable, not-for-profit rental housing that is available to all New Yorkers. Taken together, these findings indicate that New York City voters are dissatisfied with the status-quo, for-profit approach to housing and support alternative approaches like prioritizing social housing and treating housing as a public good rather than a vehicle for profit.
Isa Alomran is a polling analyst at Data for Progress.
Rob Todaro (@robtodaro) is the Communications Director at Data for Progress.