From the New York Daily News this morning:

“Here’s a piece of information that sounds like good news, but isn’t really. New York City added 206,000 new housing units since 2010, a time period during which the city’s population grew by 162,000 people. Overall, 2019 census data show, the city had about 3.5 million units of housing and 3.16 million households.”

Which is to say: Gotham doesn’t have a housing shortage; it has a shortage of housing that is affordable. The city’s rental vacancy rate hit a record 6.14% in November 2020, and a 2019 study found more than 25% of the 16,242 new condo units built since 2013 remained unsold.

Yet in the very same city, more than 78,000 people are homeless, many of them families with children priced out of the city’s housing market.”

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The remainder of the editorial is blah blah blah bullshit excuses and myths.  Read at your own peril:

“Nobody denies the dire need for more affordable housing, yet recently, elected officials and residents have grown increasingly resistant to new mixed-income developments with affordable units incorporated. Those critics root their objection in the fact that units aren’t affordable enough for those most in need, or that all new developments should be affordable. Solving those problems are pricey propositions indeed.
Blame for the fix we’re in lies in no small part with the de Blasio administration’s housing policy — which, though nobly trying to up production, concentrated rezoning efforts to yield more affordable housing in a handful of poorer, less white or formerly industrial or commercial neighborhoods.
A new City Planning Department study shows clearly just how unevenly, and unfairly, the burden of building new housing was distributed across the city’s neighborhoods. Wealthy, whiter neighborhoods in parts of the Upper West and East Sides, Greenwich Village and Soho, stunningly, actually showed net losses in total housing units since 2010, the product of residents buying and combining existing apartments while resisting efforts to allow new, affordable housing to be built. Zoning restrictions and landmark designations have allowed those neighborhoods to avoid building more or building taller.
New York won’t get out of this affordable housing crisis unless every neighborhood, even rich ones, pitches in to help solve it.”

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Here’s the Real Story:  Housing being built  in NYC now is not housing meant to be lived in. 25% of all housing built since 2013 has never been sold, let alone inhabited.

The developers make their money from Construction.  The financing comes from all kinds of sources foreign and domestic and the profits are pocketed as the building is constructed.

Housing is the farthest thing from the Real Estate Interests minds.