By Brian Backscheider, Keith Engel, Aleena Farishta, Shambhavi Manglik, Melissa Quirk, Ananth Sampathkumar, Ross Tilchin
New York City is experiencing its worst housing crisis in over half a century –defined by an extreme housing supply shortage, which has led to a near-unprecedented housing vacancy rate of approximately 1.4 %.(1) For the City’s most vulnerable populations, the affordability crisis is even more severe. The vacancy rate for deeply affordable homes is under 1%, and recent research suggests that there is only one affordable unit for every two low-income New Yorkers. On average, rent-burdened New Yorkers below the federal poverty line allocate 72% of their income towards housing costs.(2)
Unlike previous housing crises, New York’s housing supply shortage has impacted middle- and upper-income residents as well. Across the city, 40% of renters are rent-burdened, defined as spending more than 30% of their income on rent. To ease New York’s supply shortage and restore a healthy rental market, researchers estimate that New York City needs to add at least 370,000 new units of housing over the next decade.(3) Unfortunately, the City’s recent efforts to add housing supply have been incremental, and currently, there is no feasible plan to close this gap. To fully address New York’s housing crisis, the City must enact a range of bold reforms – accelerating development timelines, reducing construction costs, and minimizing political and community opposition to development.
While New York City’s housing market has unique complexities, international cities, including Christchurch, Singapore, and Seoul, hold valuable lessons that can inform the City’s efforts to rapidly increase supply.
Rapid Housing Development in Christchurch
In September 2010 and February 2011, two earthquakes with a magnitude of 7.1 and 6.3, respectively, struck Christchurch, New Zealand, causing widespread damage. Altogether, the earthquakes resulted in the loss of 7,000-8,000 homes, and an additional 100,000 homes experienced significant damage.(4) The impact on the housing market was enormous. By 2014, Christchurch experienced a 40% increase in mean rents and a 28% increase in housing prices.(5) To address this sudden affordability crisis, New Zealand’s national government used emergency powers to override local planning processes and dramatically accelerate rezoning in the Christchurch region. In a short period of time, the centralized rezonings accomplished what smaller communities had planned to take place over 30 years. The result: a rapid expansion of the city’s housing supply that has led to Christchurch becoming the most affordable city in New Zealand.
In the aftermath of the earthquakes, New Zealand’s central government created the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), a new government department that centralized the coordination of the recovery and rebuilding. CERA was provided broad powers to “relax, suspend, or extend laws and regulations” to advance earthquake recovery and rebuilding. Through CERA, the central government was able to override local plans to spur redevelopment in a short time period. Christchurch was required to upzone at a citywide scale. The upzoning allowed for a massive amount of additional housing capacity, approximately 30 years worth of previously-permitted development.
The upzoning effort affected nearly all neighborhood types. Farmland surrounding the city was rezoned to permit low and mid-density housing. Single family-zoned areas in the city center were upzoned to permit townhouse developments. Most neighborhood rezonings were modest in nature, but in totality, the results were significant – more than 35,000 new homes were approved in seven years, compared to 26,000 in the seven years before the earthquake. This increase in supply had a direct effect on affordability, with Christchurch maintaining lower house prices and rents than the rest of New Zealand since 2016.(6)
Politically, the rezonings were not particularly contentious. The density increases in neighborhoods were fairly modest, and Christchurch residents were eager to rebuild damaged and destroyed housing stock. In the rest of the country, few raised concerns about the expansion of central government power, as the changes were confined to an area dealing with the aftermath of a natural disaster. New York City could adopt elements of New Zealand’s centralized approach to quickly add supply, such as requiring all City Council districts to create housing supply and set housing supply targets with deadlines, allowing small contiguous areas (ex: city blocks) to opt-out of upzoning to ensure that small pockets of opposition do not stall broader housing development goals, and leveraging infrastructure investments to support the creation of housing.
Accelerating Housing Production through Prefabrication & Pre-approval Processes in Singapore
In the decades following World War II, Singapore grew rapidly and haphazardly, leading to significant overcrowding. Upon its independence in 1965, Singapore needed to find ways to obtain land for urban redevelopment at a massive scale. The Land Acquisition Act (LAA) of 1967(7) gave the Singaporean government broad powers to solve the land scarcity problem by acquiring private land for public purposes. In the decades since the act went into effect, the government used the powers of the LAA aggressively, and by 1985, more than 75% of the country’s land was controlled by the Singapore Land Authority. Today, 80% of Singapore’s resident population lives in public housing. Singapore’s primary public housing developer, the Housing and Development Board (HDB), has spent decades refining how it designs and builds housing in order to deliver projects more efficiently. A major component of its strategy has been the incorporation of prefabricated building techniques.
Singapore’s HDB began focusing on prefabrication in the 1980s, particularly the use of precast concrete construction. Instead of pouring and curing concrete for walls, floors, and facades on site, major building components were produced in factories, transported to the site, and assembled there. This reduced reliance on labor-intensive site work, accelerated project timelines, and reduced unexpected delays. This approach: Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA)(8) designs buildings as manufactured components.
The production of precast concrete systems evolved to include prefabricated bathroom units, mechanical, electrical and plumbing modules, and eventually, complete rooms.³ DfMA led to shorter construction timelines and less noise, pollution, and resident disruption. The quality of construction also improved due to factory supervision. The success of the DfMA led the City to create Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC), which extends the prefabrication logic to entire three-dimensional modules. In PPVC, modules are manufactured off-site — complete with interior finishes, fixtures, and fittings, and transported and stacked on-site.(9) Singapore took a comprehensive approach to developing its PPVC process, including involving contractors during the design phase, management and coordination of site specific constraints, long-term planning with homeowners to provide them with the necessary information for future renovations and repairs and streamlining of the approval process. The adoption of PPVC led to further construction productivity, reduced on-site labor needs, improved site safety, and even less disruption to neighboring residents during construction.
During COVID-19, prefab doubled as resilience infrastructure. Quick Build Dormitories (QBDs) were modular, temporary structures to improve health conditions and reduce residential crowding on compressed timelines, providing temporary, safe housing for migrant workers during the pandemic.(10)
Singapore provides valuable lessons for addressing New York City’s housing shortage. New York City could make prefabrication a prerequisite for publicly-procured projects, direct housing agencies to create a multi-year pipeline of Design for Manufacturing and Assembly-based projects. DCP’s rezonings and future land use planning could incorporate zoning components to allow and incentivize efficient development practices. Taken as a whole, city-led support for prefabricated construction techniques could alleviate NYC’s housing crisis by producing housing at scale and within a shortened time period. This would also have the added benefit of increasing hiring in the construction sector and associated training industries, reducing homelessness, and positively contributing to New York City’s GDP.
Limiting Speculative Demand in Seoul
Housing prices in Seoul have seen a sharp increase in recent years – surging by more than 50% between 2017 and 2022. The number of households is increasing faster than available units, and even as overall population growth has slowed or declined, inward migration and a rise in single-person households have contributed to a lack of available supply.
Amid this overall shortage, the tight housing market has been further strained by a rise in speculative demand. One illustration of this has been an uptick in property purchased by foreign nationals. The number of foreign-owned homes reached an all-time high of more than 104,065 in June of 2025 – with purchases concentrated in Seoul, according to the Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. The trend has been fueled in part by the recent decline of the Korean won against foreign currencies like the Chinese yuan and U.S. dollar.
In response to this, the Korean government has enacted a raft of rules that seek to crack down on speculative purchases and cool demand in an overheated market. Policymakers have imposed regulations on both foreign buyers and domestic ones, as they concurrentlywork to expand housing production. New York’s real estate market similarly draws significant interest from foreign buyers and investors, and elements of Seoul’s approach could be a useful emergency measure when paired with policies to increase supply.
In October of 2025, the Korean government designated 21 of the 25 districts in Seoul as “speculative zones.” Buyers in these zones need government approval to proceed with a purchase and are subject to stricter mortgage rules that require more cash upfront and limit the availability of loans for those who own other property. In an effort to discourage house-flipping by investors, buyers must also live in the property for at least two years.
In August of 2025, the government had separately designated Seoul and other parts of the metropolitan area as “foreigners’ land transaction permit zones.” Foreign individuals, corporations, governments or public institutions must obtain prior approval to purchase property; they must move in within four months following such approval, and they must reside there for at least two years. These designations are temporary – generally slated to apply for about a year, but this period could be extended.
Since both sets of regulations – the expansion of speculative zones to all of Seoul and broadly-applying policies targeted at foreign buyers – are recent, it is difficult to definitively assess their impact on home sales and rents. One nearly-immediate impact is that home purchases by foreigners fell sharply after the August restrictions went into effect, but there’s no clear evidence yet that has translated to lower prices.
Similar regulations were previously applied in specific areas instead of citywide, and this did lead to a significant drop in real estate transactions and some short-term stabilization in prices. Critics, however, pointed to side effects, like prices ballooning just outside the zones while the restrictions were in effect and rising rapidly within the designated area immediately after regulations were lifted. While this sort of regulation may not itself be sufficient to meaningfully unleash supply, it is worth considering as part of a package of tools to help ensure supply-oriented policies have the fullest possible impact on New York City residents. Policies aimed at curbing speculation could also help build the necessary political support for dramatically expanding housing production, as political leaders could communicate convincingly that new housing will be specifically for New Yorkers.
Big Swings for New York City
One big swing that New York City can take to address its current housing crisis is to declare a new “local State of Emergency for housing” (SOE) – layered over the existing 1973 Emergency Tenant Protection Act(11) – based on the extreme shortage of available rental housing units in New York City. Complementary action from the State of New York to declare a State of Disaster Emergency related to public health and safety would enable New York City to waive regulations related to housing production and land assemblage. The SOE would define a time-limited period during which the City would redirect its administrative, financial, and public-private partnership resources and exercise the full extent of its local authority to rapidly accelerate new housing unit production. The City should immediately establish an interagency Coordinating Body with a mandate of temporarily waiving regulations to assemble a suite of tools and reorganizing City agency roles to facilitate rapid production. A Coordinating Body would take the following immediate actions:
Public Track:
- Assemble large parcels of land controlled by the City based on the results of the Land Inventory Fast Track (LIFT) Task Force into disposition packages on which developers can construct large residential buildings. This could include City-owned property identified as underused by City agencies as well as golf courses and proposed casino sites.
- Pre-approve a Rapid-Production Toolkit based on the findings of the Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED) Task Force and temporarily ease certain regulations for construction of new large residential building models that include pre-fabricated components (i.e. OTCR requirements).
- Create a multi-year pipeline of Design for Manufacturing and Assembly-based projects, inclusive of either a limited catalog of pre-approved unit layouts and standardized interior sections (from bathrooms to kitchen pods) or low-rise housing prototypes for standard infill sites.
Private Track:
- Allow as-of-right mid-rise housing citywide, creating an incentive for owners of low-density properties to increase the number of housing units on the land.
- Facilitate rapid re-development of these low-density properties via a time-limited “opt-in, buy-in, stay-in” opportunity for owners to sell to developers that will use the “rapid production toolkit” and receive a comparably sized unit as their primary residence along with a share in the new development.
- Create a dedicated modular approval track to certify module types once and reapply this approval for additional sites, shifting quality control to factories.
Fellows
Brian Backscheider
Keith Engel
Aleena Farishta
Shambhavi Manglik
Melissa Quirk
Ananth Sampathkumar
Ross Tilchin
Sources