Housing and transit; Same system, different stops - by Tom Scerbo

Growing up in the Bronx gave me a front-row seat as problems developed from treating housing, mobility and community development as separate issues. For a long chapter of the city’s history, transportation came at the expense of housing. The current housing crisis isn’t just a market failure, but a result of that approach.

Today, we have a generational opportunity to flip the script, rewriting how infrastructure is planned and developed.

On transportation and transformation

The current level of investment in transportation is a boon for the city and the region as a whole. My work at WSP in the U.S. gives me a distinctive view into massive development efforts, from the transformation of the Port Authority Midtown Bus Terminal to the extension of the Second Ave Subway to the ways the Interborough Express (IBX) can connect Brooklyn and Queens. But transit without housing is only a partial solution, at best.

We should start treating housing as essential infrastructure, inseparable from the transit systems that power daily life. For NY to be truly future ready, we should rethink development at the intersection of transportation and housing, treating them as a single, integrated investment rather than separate issues or parallel efforts.

What if New York planned housing with the same urgency, discipline and scale as transit?

Creating new real estate

One barrier to housing development is the lack of vacant land relative to other places in the country — and even compared to NYC in the 1990s. After the city saw significant large-scale rezonings decades ago, successive administrations scoured public or semi-public property to pinpoint vacant lots and other places that could be primed for housing. As a result, most obvious publicly-owned development opportunities are gone.

We effectively need to create more land. How? We can start by reframing how we think about land use and transportation assets.

From Atlanta to Seattle, cities across the country are seeing roadways and railways not just as transportation corridors, but as untapped real estate. By building “deck lids” over below-grade highways and railways, we can engineer productive, effective new space, and new value, in the urban core.

For example, Klyde Warren Park in Dallas sits on a cap or deck that was built over eight lanes of below-grade Woodall Rodgers Freeway. The decking has helped generate roughly $2.5 billion in economic impact and catalyze additional nearby development to the tune of nearly $3 billion. The city is expanding the concept with Halperin Park, and other communities are following suit.

Dallas offers compelling recent data, yet New York pioneered the approach when the first trolleys and elevated trains became subways. That approach to development not only enhanced mobility, but helped improve quality of life for people in nearby properties. We need to follow our own example.

Capping the Cross Bronx Expressway could build community and enhance social cohesion while benefiting public health through enhanced air quality and space for thousands of mixed-income homes, parks, and community services. The approach creates a public good. When matched with a dedicated revenue stream such as ground leases or value capture, it also can help cover the cost of long-term operations and maintenance.

In Queens, Sunnyside Yards represents a multi-billion-dollar opportunity to create a city-within-a-city without displacing nearby residents. By decking over rail infrastructure and thoughtfully developing the surrounding area, we can create a sustainable, high-density neighborhood that is well connected to transit, jobs and services.

But we can’t just build a new deck or transportation hub and hope that affordable housing follows. It needs to be part of the plan from the start.

From alignment to accountability

NYC lacks a truly integrated housing and transportation policy; instead of a single framework, housing and transportation operate through parallel systems. They occasionally intersect productively, but unintentionally. Imagine if we linked transportation funding to specific housing metrics and indicators.

If a community is receiving the benefit of a multi-billion-dollar transit investment like the IBX, housing production should not be optional or deferred. It should be a condition of success – defined upfront, enforced through clear governance, and tracked over time.

New York already has a successful model for unlocking transformational projects: focused, independent sole purpose entities, like the ones mobilized for Hudson Yards and Moynihan Station. This approach establishes one accountable “quarterback” that can cut across various parts of government such as the MTA, NYCHA, NYC DOT, the Parks Department and other agencies. It focuses sometimes disparate entities on a shared goal that requires their collective commitment. Dedicated entities can also help coordinate state and federal agencies and mobilize the private sector, nonprofits, citizens’ groups, too.

This approach doesn’t just apply to currently planned projects. It could create a mechanism for maximizing the value of property each entity owns. Since most vacant land has been developed, we need to find opportunities to creatively reimagine existing assets in ways that could help accelerate the creation of affordable residential development backed with multi-modal mobility. We also could extend this planning vision beyond the five boroughs, creating a more coordinated approach to holistic regional development.

The Path Forward

Engineering the future isn’t just about steel and glass; it’s about the policy enablement that allows those materials to serve a social purpose. Our quality of life depends on affordability and proximity, on shifting from infrastructure that divides to unifying approaches to infrastructure that propel us forward.

New Yorkers know there are no easy answers. Yet, the next chapter of growth will require us to create new mechanisms to connect the transportation under our feet with more – and more affordable -- roofs over our heads.

Tom Scerbo, AIA, is the New York Metro regional executive for WSP in the U.S. and serves on the board of the Regional Plan Association, Manhattan, N.Y.