How NY’s Housing Policy Led to Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill

Many New Yorkers are aghast at the Medicaid and SNAP cuts in the Big, Beautiful Bill. But some of those same people helped make the bill possible by opposing development, costing the city population and therefore congressional seats.

Without their narrow majority in the House of Representatives, Republicans would never have been able to pass a bill that cuts billions of dollars in New York’s safety-net funding.

New York state in the 1940s had 45 congressional districts, 41 in the 1960s and 39 in the 1970s. Today it has 26, because other states have gained population relative to New York.

Many causes of the population shifts that eroded the state’s power in Washington were beyond the city’s and state’s control, but others were self-inflicted.

You might say, “It’s not New York City’s fault. It’s Upstate New York that has been losing people!”

Indeed, it has.

Buffalo had 580,000 residents in 1950 but just 278,000 in 2020. Other industrial upstate cities such as Utica and Rochester also bled population as manufacturing jobs were lost to automation, overseas factories and nonunion shops in the South. Without these jobs, the cold, dreary upstate winters are not worth enduring for many people.

New York City was also once a manufacturing town, with that sector accounting for 1 million jobs in the 1940s. Today about 57,000 remain. But the city became a center of finance, advertising, media, culture, tourism and technology. Other than during the pandemic, its population has risen every year since 2005.

But not enough.

The city and state governments did not allow enough development to capture the ever-increasing demand to live in New York City. This produced an expensive, low-vacancy housing market.

As a result, the city missed the opportunity to make up for upstate’s population loss and other states’ gains.

New York restricted population growth in numerous ways, including:

A citywide rezoning in 1961
A ban on single-room occupancy
Rent stabilization
Limits on floor area ratio
Parking mandates for development
Contextual rezonings (70 by the Bloomberg administration)
An obscure metric called dwelling unit factor
Failure to legalize basement apartments and accessory dwelling units

If not for these actions and others, the city could easily have 1.5 million more people — and two more seats in the House.

Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 6 to 1 ratio in the city, so Democrats would likely have won those seats. They might still be short of the 218 needed for a majority in the lower chamber, where the GOP holds 220 seats, but with margins so thin, every seat matters.

For some reason, proponents of more housing in the city rarely mention the political ramifications of opposing development. It’s even more obvious in California, a blue state where demand for housing vastly outstrips supply.

State lawmakers in California are trying to undo its anti-housing policies, and New York has made progress too. Last year, Albany raised the floor-area ratio in key neighborhoods and the New York City Council scaled back parking mandates, tweaked the dwelling unit factor, allowed some ADUs, and fixed outdated provisions from the 1961 rezoning.

The Council has also upzoned Long Island City, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, East New York, Inwood, Gowanus, Soho and Noho, Atlantic Avenue and parts of the Bronx. More are pending for Long Island City (again), Midtown South and Jamaica.

Critics of New York say people leave because of crime, taxes, child-care expenses and school quality, and some do. But the tight housing market plays the largest role. It not only sends folks packing but keeps others from moving in, including immigrants who could lower the cost of child care.

So if you’re protesting the federal cuts, think about where New York would be if the city had taken advantage of its strengths instead of pulling up the drawbridge.