One culprit of the housing crisis was overlooked in this mayoral campaign: the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
It doesn’t seem like Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani or many other politicians are even aware of the issue.
I’m not just talking about NIMBY groups trying to get properties designated as landmarks to block housing that would replace them, or pressuring the commission to reject projects that would replace parking lots or deteriorated churches in historic districts.
I’m talking about the everyday struggles between property owners and the landmarks agency — the kind of fights that never make headlines.
A recent social media post from frustrated developer Eli Lever cited an example. After waiting months for the notoriously anal landmarks agency to decide which color mortar it would allow for a brick facade, he tweeted a photo of the three choices facing the commission:
I’d probably go with the middle one. But it doesn’t really matter. The point is, none of these mortar colors is going to destroy the historic look of the building. The highly trained preservationists at the LPC should have been able to pick one in 60 seconds, not 60 days.
The agency thinks it’s protecting historic districts by being painstakingly thorough and exacting, but the opposite is true. Because it is so slow, and makes work two or three times more expensive and time-consuming, property owners often do things without getting LPC approval as required.
“That’s why if you walk around in a historic district, you often notice minor repairs obviously not done to LPC standards,” Lever noted in an email to The Real Deal. The result of the commission’s overzealousness may well be less historic preservation, not more.
But the bigger problem for New Yorkers seeking affordability — like Mamdani — is that by making construction and renovation more expensive, the city ends up with less housing than it would otherwise have. That’s a basic rule of economics.
I asked Lever if it would have been cheaper to just pick a mortar color and proceed without the agency’s blessing, paying a fine as needed. Not an option, he said. For renovations requiring building permits, LPC approval is essential.
“This is where the wait can be a killer, but there isn’t really a choice,” Lever said. “Doing a job without permits opens up a whole host of issues, over and above the LPC violation.”
The people hired by Landmarks to enforce its standards have a lot of expertise about what buildings looked like a century or two ago, or at least the motivation to research and apply 19th-century standards to today’s owners and contractors.
What they appear to lack is any appreciation of how their decisions — and the time it takes to make them — affect the real estate industry and everyday New Yorkers.
Staffers are surely aware that landmarking has its critics. But art history majors with graduate degrees in historic preservation inevitably view applications through the lens of their education, not think-tank reports and the odd online gripe by a developer. “Preservationists really struggle with change,” a former LPC staffer told Brooklyn Magazine.
I’m not saying the city should trash the landmarks system, although there is a case to be made for that. I am saying that when choices involve benefits and costs, both should be considered.
It can’t just be “it costs what it costs” and “we’ll take as long as we need to make a decision.”
I would suggest the City Council apply a builder’s remedy to Landmarks: If the agency doesn’t decide on an application in X number of days, it is automatically approved. I guarantee that timely decisions would immediately become the norm. LPC would lobby for more staff but would ultimately adjust its methods to meet the deadlines.
My second reform would be to stop designating new historic districts. We have enough.
By definition, any buildings left standing long enough become historic. Taken to its logical conclusion, the entire city will eventually be landmarked.
New York is not Pompeii. The city should not be frozen in time.
To see the effects of landmarking on housing development, one need only look at the Soho/Noho rezoning of 2021.
It was supposed to create thousands of units. But developers are avoiding the historic portion of the rezoned area as if it were a toxic waste dump. Building there would mean competing with projects that cost less — an uphill, if not futile, battle.
Some buyers and renters will pay extra to be in a new development built to LPC’s specifications, but perhaps not enough to make a project pencil out. And keep in mind that affordable units, which are required in rezoned areas and in 485x projects, cannot charge a premium.
We are leaving housing on the table — in high-opportunity neighborhoods, no less.
Landmarking was a nice idea, but it has reached the point of diminishing returns. The benefits of more landmarking do not outweigh the drawbacks. The main thing Landmarks is preserving now is the housing shortage.
About 20 percent of Manhattan, which has the city’s densest zoning and the most investment in transit, is now subject to the strict scrutiny of the LPC. Continuing this way would be a historic mistake.
Read more
Howard Hughes’ Seaport project gets green light
The Strand’s building could become an official landmark despite owner’s opposition
LPC rejects landmark status for 65 city properties
