Hi Mikki! Cool post. You really cover a lot of points, and support yourself with the most accredited of sources. You clearly define winners and losers under Bloomberg’s plan, and show how even today under De Blasio, similar patterns persist and not enough changes are being made.
I’d like to temporarily diverge from broader ideas on change and instead discuss some basic economic theory. Let’s start with our axis, we have price on the vertical axis and supply of housing on the horizontal axis. Let’s draw a supply curve sloping downwards from higher up on the price axis, and a demand curve sloping upwards from the origin.
When housing is subsidized, (meaning that the government shifts the natural supply curve) by paying part of people rent, demand will simply increase and more people will want to rent apartments. Even though there is a deadweight loss, meaning that there is societal monetary loss, there are more people living in houses, and there is a change.
By Melissam16 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25533700
However, now picture a realistic supply curve for housing in an area where developers have maxed out capacity based on current zoning laws. It would be completely vertical, meaning that no matter the price, there were always be the same number of houses available. This means, that by subsidizing houses, where the market can’t just move along a sloped supply curve, you don’t even allow for more houses to be built, and more people to move into them. It’s the same number of people, just paying less (with the government paying more).
By allowing for increased density and thus more housing, you allow for greater numbers of people to live, for less cost.
None-the-less, your concerns about which areas were chosen are valid. The plans created winners out of developers, and theoretical monetary gain for society as a whole (with more money for building owners, and cheaper housing for people because of increased demand, yet some people lost: namely those who lived in the neighborhoods before didn’t want change, and who local government was meant to protect.
In the end, I agree with your conclusion: money and power speak. Changes are being made, but in the end politics don’t necessarily help people. Corruption will run rampant, and those will wealth will encourage change for their own benefits.
