When I ran NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, I learned something that no amount of capital can change: the city cannot build its way out of this crisis alone. Even at $1.4 billion a year in housing capital, public dollars do not go far enough, fast enough, or to enough places. Nearly every affordable apartment New Yorkers actually move into is the product of a partnership between the public sector and a private developer willing to take on real risk.
This is the reality of how housing gets built in this city. According to NYU’s Furman Center, land use changes, especially upzonings, help drive new housing production. A third of new units permitted from 2010 to 2023 were in upzoned areas.
The Monitor Point project in Brooklyn, currently being debated by the City Council, is a proposed upzoning under the city’s groundbreaking Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning program (“MIH”) which brings not just housing but open space, educational investment, and quality of life improvements. Because of that, this project deserves the Council’s approval.
Citywide rental vacancy sits at 1.4% — the lowest in more than half a century. Despite the many successful housing plans of past mayors, homelessness in New York roughly doubled over the last decade. The City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, passed by the Council in 2024, is projected to enable about 82,000 new homes over 15 years. While meaningful progress, it is nowhere near enough on its own.
Eighty-two thousand units over 15 years works out to fewer than 5,500 a year in a city of more than 8 million people. We need everything City of Yes contemplates, plus every well-designed individual project that comes through the pipeline through MIH or other incentive programs.
Monitor Point is one of those projects. On a long-underused stretch of industrial waterfront at 40-56 Quay St., currently occupied by an aging MTA facility, it would deliver roughly 1,150 new homes — 460 of them permanently affordable to working families, the majority of which are at 40% to 60% of the area median income (i.e. between $58,320 and $87,480 for a family of three).
A 40% affordability rate is a deeper commitment than most waterfront developments in this city have ever achieved. If built as-of-right — or, as it is currently zoned — the project would deliver zero affordable units. MIH and public review is what makes nearly half of these homes affordable. That trade — a developer willing to build more low income housing in exchange for building a larger project — is the entire point of MIH.
In a housing crisis we should be urgently approving housing developments, but Monitor Point also has more than 51,000 square feet of publicly accessible waterfront, finally connecting Greenpoint and Williamsburg along the shoreline and unlocking the long-promised realization of Box Street Park by relocating the MTA facility currently in the way.
These are the kind of public benefits that only become possible when the project is large enough to support real community investment. That is the bargain at the heart of MIH, and at the heart of nearly every successful waterfront redevelopment of the last generation.
The question facing the Council is not whether this project is perfect — no project ever is — but whether stopping a project that the community wants and needs would make the housing crisis better or worse. The answer is obvious.
New York’s housing crisis was not created in a single administration and will not be solved in one. But the projects we approve in 2026 are the apartments New Yorkers move into in 2031. Monitor Point should be among them.
Carroll was commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development from 2019 to 2021.