The ADRR

The NYC Housing Partnership’s New Homes Program helped NYC reinvent itself during a critical period. Following the 1970s, a decade of declining population, plummeting home values, and accelerated urban decay, the program created over 13,000 homes, primarily in disinvested neighborhoods. The new units helped stabilize neighborhoods and increase the value of surrounding properties. Now, NYC faces a new crisis defined by a dearth of affordable housing and economic challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it does not have the same stock of city-owned, vacant buildings and land that it had decades ago. Accordingly, as tourism and business travel have substantially declined, converting defunct hotels into affordable and/or supportive housing appears to be a new means of increasing residential stock for rent-burdened and unsheltered populations by leveraging currently unoccupied commercial establishments.

To be sure, the New Homes Program and hotel-to-housing conversions initially appear to be unrelated. The former emphasized scattered-site development of new, one- to three-family owner-occupied housing stock on vacant lots while the latter seeks to create large residential developments by repurposing distressed commercial properties. Moreover, while there may be instances in which hotel-to-housing conversions are appropriate policy interventions, they are not a panacea for NYC’s affordable housing crisis and are unlikely to have as substantial of an impact on housing production for a targeted population as the New Homes Program had.  Despite these differences, the programs share significant policy and ideological similarities that policymakers can draw upon regarding the role that housing policy can play in a city’s reinvention during a transitional period.

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