Housing Fantasies: The Hole In de Blasio's 'Big Idea'

What a difference a year makes. In his State of the City speech Wednesday, Mayor de Blasio sounded like a different person from the guy who gave the speech a year ago.

On substance, though, the grand plan the mayor announced pointed up how hard it is for the city to make even the most worthwhile new investments.

The biggest turnaround was this: The mayor started out with the tale of an entrepreneur. Going back a century, he talked about a “young woman” — Anna Briganti, his grandmother — who left an Italian town “rich in natural beauty but scarce in opportunity” to move to a small Manhattan apartment.

Why go from something pretty and nice to something cramped and miserable?

“Profound possibilities,” said de Blasio. Briganti, her sister and mom opened an embroidery company. “I am here because of her,” he said.

It's a story millions of New Yorkers can relate to — life is tough here, but it's worth it.

And it's the first time the mayor has offered a heartfelt story of a private businessperson who made it without (apparently) some special government program.

As for his signature policy — housing — de Blasio this year voiced the fear everyone feels:

The city is a magical place full of opportunity . . . “but you can't tap into the opportunities that New York has to offer if you can't afford to actually live here.”

Yes, we all can't help but notice that a big chunk of our new housing is for billionaires who don't actually live here.

So the mayor offered some specifics on last year's housing plan, which was really just a promise to build 80,000 “affordable” apartments in a decade. But his new specifics aren't very . . . specific.

The biggest question with any mass-scale housing is where to build it. Land is scarce and expensive.

To find some that's plentiful and cheap, the mayor's folks seem to have pulled out a map and looked for a space big enough to build 11,250 new apartments, same as Stuyvesant Town.

Minor inconvenience, though: The space the mayor picked — Sunnyside Yard in Queens — is devoid of housing because you can't build housing on it, not anytime soon, anyway.

First off, it doesn't belong to the city. Some of it belongs to Amtrak, but a good chunk (34 acres) belongs to Gov. Cuomo's MTA.

And the MTA is using it — for trains, but also as part of a major construction project. To dig a massive hole under Manhattan for a new LIRR station, the MTA is trucking tons and tons of dirt out of Manhattan (and trucking materials like marble in) . . . through Sunnyside Yard.

That won't stop for at least another five years — that is, well into a possible second de Blasio term. Even after that, though, the whole point of East Side Access is to provide more train service by 2023 — which means more trains to store at Sunnyside Yard.

Second, even in a decade, the MTA is hardly going to just give the city a valuable piece of property. If Sunnyside Yard is freed, it's for sale — meaning the city would have to pay the MTA a lot for it.

Remember: The MTA is asking the city for hundreds of millions more dollars for its own projects, something the mayor didn't acknowledge Wednesday. But here's the mayor, wanting to take the MTA's property.

Third, even if, eventually, everyone agrees it's a good idea to build a platform over the rail yards to build housing on top, the project will be massively expensive.

We're talking more hundreds of millions, if not billions. That means the apartments on top are not going to be all that cheap, at least not without massive subsidies.

They'll be for couples making low six figures between them — not single parents making far less — and even they may be stretching to “afford” it.

There's nothing wrong with that. But de Blasio brought the whole thing up to imply that he can do something about the fact that more than half of New York households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.

That's a fantasy. Rent — for everyone — will always be high for as long as people want to live here.

That doesn't mean de Blasio is crazy or dumb for wanting to leave the city with more middle-class and working-class housing.

But the fact is that the mayor's one big idea to partly achieve this will probably take two decades, involve space-age engineering logistics and cost billions.

All of which points up why nobody ever said being mayor would be easy.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post

This piece originally appeared in New York Post