City Journal floats transit-led housing model; MTA officials intrigued; New Yorkers ask whether the subway needs more projects or fewer delays
NEW YORK CITY
A proposal published this month in City Journal argues that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority should solve New York City’s dual crises of housing scarcity and transit underfunding by becoming a real estate developer, acquiring land near subway corridors, building dense housing, using the profits to fund expansion, and essentially doing what Tokyo does — a suggestion that urban planners describe as “elegant,” that Albany observers describe as “it would require seventeen legislative sessions,” and that existing MTA riders describe as “can they fix the L train announcement system first.”
The proposal, titled “How the MTA Can Solve New York’s Housing Crisis,” argues that the private companies that originally built the New York subway in 1904 also speculated in land along their routes, using real estate profits to subsidize the cost of the infrastructure itself. This model worked. Then the city took over the subway. The land speculation stopped. The subway stopped expanding. The housing shortage began. The connection is not coincidental.
The Japan Model: A Brief Explainer for People Who Missed the Tokyo Episode
Tokyo’s transit authorities operate as what the City Journal piece calls “city shaping companies,” developing commercial and residential real estate around stations, using the revenue to fund infrastructure, and treating the transit network and the real estate market as a single integrated system rather than two separate bureaucratic domains that happen to be physically adjacent. The result is a city with the world’s most heavily used transit system, housing construction that outpaces demand, and rents that, while not inexpensive, have not tripled in a decade the way that New York’s have.
Dr. Franklin Wu, Professor of Transit-Oriented Development at the fictional CUNY Graduate Center for Urban Mobility Finance, described the Tokyo model as “simple in principle and deeply complicated in practice in any city where the transit authority is a public agency answerable to the state legislature, three municipal governments, a federal capital program, and approximately forty elected officials who all have opinions about what the subway should prioritize.”
“Japan’s transit authorities make decisions,” Dr. Wu noted. “They make them quickly, implement them, and iterate. The MTA makes decisions after multiple public comment periods, environmental impact studies, engineering reviews, labor negotiations, capital plan approvals, and a period of general despondency when Albany changes its funding formula. The Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 took 40 years from conception to opening. Tokyo built an entire metro line in that time and also developed the real estate around it.”
Second Avenue Subway Phase 2: Progress Update
Governor Hochul recently celebrated the groundbreaking for the major construction stage of Second Avenue Subway Phase 2, which will extend the Q train from 96th Street to 125th Street in East Harlem — approximately a mile and a half of new track that required billions of dollars, years of planning, and a congestion pricing funding mechanism to make financially possible. Phase 2 is expected to open by 2029 or 2030, at which point Phase 3, which would extend the line further to the Bronx, will enter the planning stage it has been entering for approximately thirty years.
The MTA confirmed Phase 2 is proceeding on schedule. “On schedule” in MTA terms means construction is advancing within the current timeline rather than having been rescheduled, which is distinct from “on time” in the sense that the project has been in planning since the 1990s and was formally approved, funded, and begun multiple times before actually beginning. The distinction is real but requires footnotes to appreciate fully.
The 167,000 Units That Could Exist
The City Journal proposal estimates that transit-oriented development projects outlined in a framework called “A Better Billion” would conservatively add 167,000 housing units under current zoning, with state preemption of local zoning potentially adding hundreds of thousands more. These numbers represent an affordable housing stock increase that would materially change the city’s rental market, reduce displacement pressure, and make the outer boroughs accessible to people who currently cannot afford them without a subsidized lease or a second job.
The path from 167,000 theoretical units to 167,000 actual units runs through community board hearings, NIMBY litigation, environmental review, state legislative action, MTA capital planning, and the specific kind of New York political will that requires a crisis sufficient to override the preference of existing homeowners who have realized that scarcity of housing has made their properties very valuable and would prefer this dynamic to continue. These are not small obstacles. They are the obstacles that have produced the current situation, which is also not small.
What Mayor Mamdani Has Said About This
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office in January having run on a platform that included significant transit investment and housing affordability, has expressed general enthusiasm for transit-oriented development without endorsing the specific real-estate-developer-MTA model, which would require state legislation that Governor Hochul would need to support and Albany would need to pass. The Governor and the Mayor are in the same party. Their relationship on transit policy has been cooperative in public and complicated in private, which is the standard configuration of Albany-City Hall relationships regardless of the party composition of each office.
“The next step is fleshing out the proposal and finding alternative revenue streams,” Mamdani said, in a formulation that covers a considerable amount of policy ground without committing to specific mechanisms, which is either the caution of a new mayor who is still learning which levers actually work or the wisdom of an elected official who knows which battles to fight first. Both interpretations are charitable and neither is wrong.
The Governor’s office said it is committed to transit investment, housing production, and the continued operation of congestion pricing. It did not comment on the MTA-as-developer model specifically, which advocates interpreted as neither endorsement nor rejection, meaning the idea is alive, the coalition to pass it does not yet exist, and someone in Albany is drafting a feasibility study that will be released eighteen months from now and discussed extensively for six months before becoming a talking point in the next mayoral race. This is how New York makes decisions. It is slow. It sometimes works.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com