New York

His Mind Helped Rebuild New York. His Body Is Failing Him.

Published

1 year ago

September 6, 2023

His Mind Helped Rebuild New York. His Body Is Failing Him.

The man pulls the buttoned blue shirt down over his head and waits. His hands, bony, cratered, have lost their strength, so the shirt flutters open at the sleeves and neck. His wife walks into the bedroom. She takes his left hand in hers, and closes the button around his wrist.

“I did succeed in shaving this morning,” says the man.

“Without cutting yourself?” says his wife.

“Without cutting myself.”

The man built so much of this city. Look around. The World Trade Center, rebuilt from a mangled hole in the ground? He led that. The High Line and Hudson Yards? He led those, too. Barclays Center, Citi Field and the new Yankees Stadium? Parks on Governors Island and the Brooklyn waterfront? The East River skyline from Williamsburg to Long Island City? Him, him, him.

Once, and it wasn’t so long ago, Dan Doctoroff had more power to decide what got built in New York City than anyone since Robert Moses. Now he is diagnosed with A.L.S., a neurodegenerative disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s that attacks the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, causing patients to lose control of their voluntary muscles. A.L.S. turns the body into a prison. Only the eyes and brain remain mostly unaffected. Death comes by lung failure and suffocation, usually within three to five years of diagnosis.

Mr. Doctoroff is 65. He was diagnosed almost two years ago.

As a powerful man loses authority over his own body, how does he change? And what remains?

It is winter, 2005,

and Mr. Doctoroff is thinking ahead, to a summer day seven years in the future. He is deputy mayor of New York, charged with rebuilding the city after 9/11. His job is to dream the future, and then to marshal the city’s gargantuan bureaucracy to get those dreams built. His boss, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has even compared Mr. Doctoroff to Mr. Moses: both master builders, both at once respected and resented for their relentlessness and their impatience.

But even Mr. Moses never tried to bring the Olympics to New York.

Mr. Doctoroff visits corporate suites, hotel conference rooms and newspaper editorial boards to give his pitch. In his mind, the 2012 Olympics are already about to start. Ferries cross the East River in a parade. The boats carry athletes to a gleaming Olympic Village, built in Queens atop the ruins of empty warehouses and falling-down piers.

Come, he says. Dream with me.

How many times has Mr. Doctoroff given this spiel? A hundred? As he repeats it, he worries. He feels trapped between his imagined future and the onrushing now. His mind jumps again, to the six emergencies erupting across his desk. He feels pulled in so many directions, it’s hard to be present with people. Do they notice?

He’s right to worry. People notice. A journalist who hears the Olympics pitch describes Mr. Doctoroff as a man whose eyes “gaze past you, out towards the horizon.”

Why this constant drive? Why does he find it so difficult to be present? For years, he doesn’t know. His brother Andy says Mr. Doctoroff should be more introspective, and who knows. Maybe Andy is right. Mr. Doctoroff is aware that he graduated Harvard aimless and lazy. Wound up in New York by following his wife, Alisa, who got a job in town. Bluffed his way into a job on Wall Street. Discovered he enjoys spinning numbers into stories, stories with grand ambitions, like a highly leveraged company with hidden potential, or why New York must host the Olympics.

“You could tell he’s very bright, and very competitive,” recalls Stephen Ross, founder and chairman of the real estate development firm Related Companies, who heard the pitch, dropped his own Olympic bid and joined Mr. Doctoroff’s team.

It is hard work seeing the future, and so Mr. Doctoroff puts everything into the job. But peering into the future makes it hard to see the present — hard to be home with his wife and children, hard to really see them. He leaves his townhouse on the Upper West Side each morning in darkness. He rides his bike down the Hudson River trail. He arrives at City Hall before sunrise, even in summer. He starts dozens of development projects, from the Bronx to Staten Island. He flies around the world, advancing the Olympics bid. He runs on discipline and work and depths of ambition that seem — even to his very successful friends — a little freakish.

His staff, mostly Ivy League types 20 years his junior, try to keep up. They fail.

“‘Don’t tell me no. I don’t believe in no,’” Sharon Greenberger, Mr. Doctoroff’s first chief of staff in city government, says of his worldview back then. “Barriers are temporary. And we just keep going.”

At city hall, no project goes smoothly. Each elicits an angry petition, a news conference, a lawsuit from neighbors or a state senator. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver kills Mr. Doctoroff’s plan for a stadium on the west side of Manhattan, and with it the entire Olympics bid. Governor George Pataki and leaders at the Port Authority rebuild the World Trade Center with office towers, overruling Mr. Doctoroff’s push for a mixed-use neighborhood of apartments and restaurants. Apartment towers and a basketball arena rise in Downtown Brooklyn, but local residents and the 2008 recession force developers to abandon Mr. Doctoroff’s larger plan for 17 high-rises, many up to 50 stories tall.

Mr. Doctoroff’s impatience grows. Ms. Greenberger invents the Doctoroff Mood-o-Meter, advising staff whether to approach or hide. Mr. Doctoroff’s tantrums cause Mr. Bloomberg so much joy, the mayor stops working, eats popcorn and watches.

“Dan’s team at City Hall was very familiar with his impatience and demanding style,” Mr. Bloomberg says of those days in an email, “but they would have run through a brick wall for him.”

Opponents accuse Mr. Doctoroff of “unmitigated arrogance,” according to an editorial in The New York Post. So do allies, including Senator Chuck Schumer.

“He was a bulldozer,” Daniel Goldstein, the leader of a group of neighbors fighting Mr. Doctoroff’s plans for Downtown Brooklyn, tells The Village Voice.

“I just think I was a little out of control,” Mr. Doctoroff says. “I was jet-lagged constantly, probably in a bad mood, which is why sometimes I would yell at people. Which I regret.”

Only Mr. Doctoroff’s closest aides know his mother is fighting cancer. Then his father is diagnosed with A.L.S. Every three weeks for eight years, Mr. Doctoroff travels to his hometown near Detroit, first to care for his mother, then for his father. Both parents die. His uncle dies, also from A.L.S. Mr. Doctoroff creates a nonprofit called Target ALS, raises tens of millions of dollars for A.L.S. research.

It is 2017,

and Mr. Doctoroff looks down from his office on the 27th floor of a tower in Hudson Yards, a neighborhood he named. He sees the glass-capped entrance to the 7-train station, New York’s first subway line extension in decades.

He is now the chief executive of Sidewalk Labs, a start-up Mr. Doctoroff founded with Google after running Bloomberg L.P. for six years.

“Just as we hoped, Midtown leapt to the west and West Chelsea burst to the north, creating a new neighborhood in Manhattan’s last frontier,” Mr. Doctoroff writes in his autobiography.

His schedule slows a little. Mr. Doctoroff finds a therapist to figure out how to spend his extra time. He digs into his childhood in Birmingham, Mich. His father, Myles, drove a blue Chevrolet station wagon to work at a no-name law firm. His mother scolded her husband. Why can’t you be more ambitious?

He remembers his mother’s anger, her need for prestige. He watched his father rise to become chief judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals.

“I didn’t want to disappoint my mom,” Mr. Doctoroff says. “That has been the major motivating force in my career. And I didn’t even know it.”

Years later, he and Alisa vacation in Iceland. He walks up a hill and loses his breath — strange, he thinks. Back in New York, in October 2021, a doctor offers a diagnosis: The same disease that killed Mr. Doctoroff’s father and uncle; the same disease he had already raised millions to fight.

Mr. Doctoroff had always tried to predict the future, and sometimes it seemed like he could. But that was just his hopes underpinned by his confidence. Now he can see the future with a measure of certainty, and it is finite and hard: This is how he will die.

He calls Manish Raisinghani, the chief executive of Target ALS. He delivers the news, and an order.

“He said, ‘I want to grow this organization. Don’t think small. Think really big. And let’s move really quickly,’” Mr. Raisinghani recalls. “I’m stunned. But he’s not missing a beat.”

Mr. Doctoroff decides to fund partnerships between scientists, biotech companies and venture capitalists during the earliest stages of research. Hopefully this will encourage drug companies to weather the expensive and risky process of seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

He figures he needs $250 million. A year and a half later, he has only $22 million to go.

“They’re going to have a ton of money,” Jeff Rothstein, a former Target ALS board member who directs the Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, says of its current trajectory.

Mr. Doctoroff’s body fades quickly. He wakes one morning to find his abdominal muscles have disappeared in the night. His whole life, people described him as athletic and good-looking. He enjoyed that. Now his belly falls over his belt like a basketball. He jokes that this is the worst part of A.L.S. He lands the joke by setting his eyebrows to show it is not entirely a joke.

The disease attacks his lungs. Breath comes raggedly, turning his powerful voice into a soft, pausing tremolo. Central Park stands across the street from his house. The nearest train station is three blocks away. Both too far, now that he loses breath on a short flight of stairs.

“There is some upside to having A.L.S.,” he says. “I don’t have to walk the dogs.”

Adapt. Optimize. Take a complex situation and make it better. The disease will have his body. It will not claim his optimism. Can’t ride the subway? Buy a Vespa. Can’t walk without losing breath? Buy hiking sticks, use them to squeeze air into the lungs. A black brace over his right calf prevents Mr. Doctoroff’s foot from dropping as he walks. Black pants prevent people from noticing.

“I’m right-handed, but now I eat with my left hand. I’m getting good at it!” he says. “I find, actually, adaptation is fun. There’s got to be a better way. I can do it. I can look at it as a positive thing instead of a negative.”

It is May 7, 2023,

and Mr. Doctoroff sees 600 scientists, investors and drug company executives in a hotel conference room in Boston for the annual meeting of Target ALS. They discuss the first drug ever to reverse symptoms of the disease.

“We’re in a new era for A.L.S. research,” Mr. Doctoroff says.

He no longer tries to see the future. He is here, present, and it’s simple. With A.L.S., there’s no time to worry about time. He flies to Puerto Rico, Knoxville, Detroit and Provence with family or friends from high school. He rides his Vespa to meet his rich friends. He delivers his Target ALS pitch, wins a handshake and a promise for $200,000 or a million. He’s still on the board at Bloomberg Philanthropies and the University of Chicago, still gets dragooned into helping the mayor and the governor plan New York’s future. For a normal person, this is a busy career in full bloom.

For Mr. Doctoroff, it is retirement. His dread is replaced by a calm that surprises him.

“You worked so hard when we were growing up,” Ariel Doctoroff says to her father. “We talked about how you were never around, basically. Except for on Saturdays.”

“That’s not true,” Mr. Doctoroff says.

“I know. It’s not true,” Ariel says. “And you tried extremely hard to be present.”

Now, at last, he is.

“I never enjoyed any achievement or anything we accomplished because I was always on to the next thing,” he says. “I’ve changed dramatically since my diagnosis. It’s funny. I just don’t think about the future much. And that has made me more patient. It has made me, I think, a nicer person.”

His voice grows weaker. His peace grows stronger. His will remains. It is 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday in August. The man places both palms on the windowsill of his home gym. He groans, and allows his knees to drop to the floor. A tangle of ropes and rubber bands hangs from hooks on the nearest wall. A physical trainer, connected by Zoom, instructs Mr. Doctoroff to grab the thinnest, lightest band.

“I can do the heavy one,” Mr. Doctoroff says.

“You sure?” says the trainer.

“Yeah.”

New York

Dining Sheds Changed the N.Y.C. Food Scene. Now Watch Them Disappear.

Published

2 days ago

November 23, 2024

Press Room

Dining Sheds Changed the N.Y.C. Food Scene. Now Watch Them Disappear.

On Halloween, Piccola Cucina Osteria Siciliana in SoHo served one last dinner in the little house that it built on Spring Street during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic.

Lila Barth for The New York Times

The next morning, the owner, Philip Guardione, took everything he could save from the structure: 11 tables, chairs, live palms and ZZ plants, basket-shaped rattan chandeliers, space heaters. The rest — including white window shutters with adjustable louvers meant to give diners the feeling that they had arrived home at the end of the day — was hauled off by a trash-removal company.

Lila Barth for The New York Times

Once the scrap wood was gone, the site where Piccola Cucina had served wine from Mount Etna and Sicilian classics like bucatini with sardines and fennel reverted to what it had been before the pandemic: a street-parking space, one of almost three million in New York City.

Lila Barth for The New York Times

Four years after in-street dining gave desperate restaurants a way to hang on and New Yorkers a way to hang out, the very last of the Covid-era dining sheds are truly, finally, really disappearing.

The structures varied from simple lean-tos banged together out of a few hundred dollars’ worth of lumber to small, lovingly detailed odes to verdigris Beaux-Arts winter gardens, sleek Streamline Moderne luncheonettes and sunset-pink Old Havana arcades.

They came to have almost as many meanings as architectural styles. To some urbanists, they were a bold experiment in rethinking public space. To others, they were an eyesore. Restaurateurs saw them as an economic lifeline. Opponents saw a land grab.

Dining inside a popular spot, you could believe New York had embraced al fresco culture like Rome and Buenos Aires. Walking past an empty one at night, you might conclude that the city was throwing a permanent picnic for the rats.

It was never meant to last, at least not in the form it took during the depths of the pandemic. The city’s street-and-sidewalk dining program, called Open Restaurants, used an emergency executive order to allow restaurants to sidestep many existing laws and regulations about safety, parking, accessibility and fees.

Once the emergency ended, permanent rules were written after much wrangling between Mayor Eric Adams, the City Council, a herd of bureaucracies and the restaurant business. The guidelines are now far more stringent: Fully enclosed structures aren’t allowed, for instance, and many setups will have to be scaled back to a smaller footprint.

A dining shed that complies with the new rules in use at Dawa’s in Woodside, Queens.

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

There were so many noncompliant shacks still standing that hauling companies and contractors have had a backlog of several weeks. All street sheds, even the ones that meet the new requirements, are supposed to be removed by the end of the day on Nov. 29. According to the Department of Transportation, any structures still standing the next day will be subject to fines of up to $1,000.

The season reopens April 1, creating a storage challenge for restaurants, which are not known for having lots of extra space.

As of Thursday, the Department of Transportation, which oversees the new program, had received 1,412 applications for roadway dining permits next year — a dramatic drop from the 12,000 businesses that applied under Open Restaurants.

Some owners are bitter about giving up roadway seating for the winter, particularly in December, the busiest month. (There are new rules for sidewalk cafes, too, which are allowed year-round.)

Restaurants excel at conjuring whole moods out of next to nothing. The New York Times took a closer look at several restaurants that have already taken down their creative street setups, and a few that have been holding out.

Building for the Long Haul

Balthazar, SoHo, Manhattan

Jonah Rosenberg for The New York Times

The Open Restaurants program was originally scheduled to end after Labor Day in 2020. Few owners wanted to invest in such a short-term proposition, and many of the flimsier structures that were knocked together that summer were abandoned or falling down by the time winter came.

Balthazar took a longer view.

It waited a full year before coming back in March 2021, with three tented cabanas on Spring Street that were built to last. A peaked roof of red fabric matching the restaurant’s awnings was stretched over a sturdy metal frame. A wainscoted ledge next to the tables disguised heavy barriers that have withstood several run-ins with passing trucks. The floors were a water-resistant plywood that was dyed, not painted, so its deep blue wouldn’t be scuffed away.

The goal was not to make it look new. Ian McPheely of the firm Paisley Design worked to give the cabanas the soft, timeworn look that he helped bring to the restaurant’s interior when it was built in 1995. Keith McNally, the owner, obsessed over the lighting, finding antique table lamps and hanging globe lights that matched the ones inside.

“When you step into Balthazar, you feel like you’ve taken a train to Paris, and you needed to have that same sense outside,” said Erin Wendt, the director of operations for the Balthazar Restaurant Group.

When the cabanas were built, indoor dining was limited to 25 percent of capacity. The cabanas had space for about 40 seats and operated seven days a week, morning to night. The added revenue quickly covered their cost, which the chief executive of Balthazar’s restaurant group, Roberta Delice, placed at about $160,000. American Express and Resy picked up around $40,000 of the cost through a pandemic promotion.

Ms. Wendt said that after the structures were hauled off on Nov. 1, the restaurant had 72 fewer weekly shifts to offer its employees.

“We’re going to do everything we can not to lay people off, but everybody is going to take a hit,” Ms. Wendt said.

From Eyesores to Gardens

Cebu, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn

Marissa Alper for The New York Times

Michael Esposito estimates that he poured between $75,000 and $100,000 into the two decks he built in front of Cebu Bar & Bistro. Street dining at Cebu began in late 2020 with movable barricades separating diners from the traffic.

Eventually, with his partner and his contractor, he designed one structure that stretched for 65 feet along Third Avenue and a second one, about half as long, on 88th Street. The sheds were wired for lights, space heaters and speakers.

A floral-design company was hired to turn these big black boxes into urban arbors. Cascades of artificial wisteria swayed below the ceiling, supplemented by live palms and ferns.

“We definitely wanted to look our best for everybody,” said Mr. Esposito, the owner. “If you go by one of the sheds that’s falling apart and filthy, it’s not a good representation of what’s going on indoors.”

He said he suspects his efforts to dress up the avenue may have smoothed the way with the local community board, which recently approved Cebu’s plan to come back in April with a street-dining area that meets the city’s new rules.

Mr. Esposito’s proposal has room for 75 seats, about three-quarters of what he used to have. When the old structures were taken down on Nov. 8, much of it went into storage in the hopes that it can be repurposed next year. The roofs had to go, though, and he will not have as many hours to offer his employees, especially over the winter.

“We’re still fortunate to be given the opportunity so I’m not going to complain at all,” he said.

Privacy on a Busy Street

Don Angie, West Village, Manhattan

Jonah Rosenberg for The New York Times

The public-health rationale for outdoor dining was that fresh summer breezes could help slow the spread of the coronavirus. But as the weather turned cold, restaurants faced a new challenge: keeping their customers safe and warm.

Don Angie came up with an innovative solution: two “cabins” with a total of nine private compartments. Designed by GRT Architects, each room had baseboard heating, insulated walls, velvet curtains at the entrance and space for up to six people. Clear plexiglass dividers let customers see other diners without having to share their air.

Scott Tacinelli and Angie Rito, the chefs, taped parallel rows of auto-detailing decals over the partitions to give them vertical pinstripes.

“It took a really long time to get them straight,” Ms. Rito said. “Scott and I took a whole day to put up those lines.”

“It was more than a day,” Mr. Tacinelli said. (The two are married.)

Diners, and celebrities in particular, appreciated the privacy they could get by drawing the curtains. Some cabin regulars have yet to set foot inside the restaurant, the chefs said.

The two cabins cost about $75,000. The larger one was demolished last year, and the remaining one was hauled away on Nov. 12. To make up for some of the business they will lose over the winter, the chefs are thinking of serving lunch on Fridays and staying open an extra half-hour each night, although people aren’t as willing to eat late as they were before the pandemic.

Although they have applied for permits for the new program, they said they aren’t sure yet what their new structures will look like.

Still Standing, For Now

Empire Diner, Chelsea, Manhattan

Lila Barth for The New York Times

As the Nov. 29 deadline approaches, many street structures are still in place around the city.

Empire Diner, the 1946 stainless steel dining car on 10th Avenue, is hoping to keep the slim, monochromatic building it calls the Pavilion right up to the last minute, said Stacy Pisone, one of the owners.

Designed by Caroline Brennan of the firm Silent Volume in 2021, and built at a cost of $150,000, the structure echoes the diner’s streamlined Art Deco contours. Portholes cut into white panels alternate with the vertical plexiglass windows that wrap around three sides of the structure. When a coalition of urban-planning groups that supported street dining gave awards to seven outstanding structures in 2021, the Pavilion was one of the honorees.

Ms. Brennan wanted to give people eating in the Pavilion’s 40 or so seats something to look at, and the Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra was commissioned to paint a wall above the diner. In a nod to West Chelsea’s galleries, the mural features portraits of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Frida Kahlo.

“We call it Art Rushmore,” Ms. Pisone said.

Neighbors, including some of the local gallerists who often rented out the space for dinners, have suggested a big, celebratory send-off inside the Pavilion before it is torn down. Ms. Pisone, who hasn’t scheduled the demolition yet, doesn’t have the heart for it.

“I can’t even think about doing a party,” she said. “It’s just so sad.”

Ayza, NoMad, Manhattan

Lila Barth for The New York Times

East of Herald Square, Ayza Wine Bar is trying to hang on to its outdoor dining area through the end of the year. Partly, the owners hope to take advantage of the busy holiday season. Mostly, though, they are confused about how the new rules affect them, because the regulations were written for structures, and what Ayza has on East 31st Street isn’t a structure, exactly.

It’s a trolley car.

This struck Ayza’s owners as an ingenious solution during the pandemic. Purchased from a sightseeing-tour company in Boston and refurbished with 20 seats at a total cost of about $25,000, the trolley had large, unobstructed openings that allowed air circulation. Its dimensions were almost exactly what the city allowed. Because it was up on wheels, rain water ran right under it. And because it was more solidly built than the typical wooden shed, it was safer from minor collisions.

“I would feel bad for the person who hits the trolley,” said Zafer Sevimcok, one of the owners.

Mr. Sevimcok said he has applied for permission to operate in the street next year. He isn’t sure whether his application will be approved, though, because the new regulations do not have a trolley option.

In case the city cracks down, he has a backup plan: He will call a mechanic to charge the battery and then drive the trolley away

Restaurant Photography: Lila Barth for The New York Times (Piccola Cucina, Empire Diner and Ayza). Jonah Rosenberg for The New York Times (Balthazar, Don Angie, Oscar Wilde). Marissa Alper for The New York Times (Cebu). Karsten Moran for The New York Times (Dawa’s).

Produced by Eden Weingart and Andrew Hinderaker

New York

Map: 2.3-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Connecticut

Published

4 days ago

November 21, 2024

Press Room

Map: 2.3-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Connecticut

Note: Map shows the area with a shake intensity of 3 or greater, which U.S.G.S. defines as “weak,” though the earthquake may be felt outside the areas shown. The New York Times

A minor, 2.3-magnitude earthquake struck in Connecticut on Wednesday, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The temblor happened at 7:33 p.m. Eastern about 1 mile northwest of Moodus, Conn., data from the agency shows.

As seismologists review available data, they may revise the earthquake’s reported magnitude. Additional information collected about the earthquake may also prompt U.S.G.S. scientists to update the shake-severity map.

Aftershocks in the region

An aftershock is usually a smaller earthquake that follows a larger one in the same general area. Aftershocks are typically minor adjustments along the portion of a fault that slipped at the time of the initial earthquake.

Quakes and aftershocks within 100 miles

Aftershocks can occur days, weeks or even years after the first earthquake. These events can be of equal or larger magnitude to the initial earthquake, and they can continue to affect already damaged locations.

Source: United States Geological Survey | Notes: Shaking categories are based on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale. When aftershock data is available, the corresponding maps and charts include earthquakes within 100 miles and seven days of the initial quake. All times above are Eastern. Shake data is as of Wednesday, Nov. 20 at 7:41 p.m. Eastern. Aftershocks data is as of Wednesday, Nov. 20 at 11:34 p.m. Eastern.

New York

Two Affordable Housing Buildings Were Planned. Only One Went Up. What Happened?

Published

5 days ago

November 19, 2024

Press Room

Two Affordable Housing Buildings Were Planned. Only One Went Up. What Happened?

It is an idea that many point to as a solution for New York City’s worst housing shortage in over 50 years: Build more homes.

More people keep deciding they want to live in the city — and the number of new homes hasn’t kept pace. Residents compete over the limited number of apartments, which pushes rents up to stratospheric levels. Many people then choose to leave instead of pay those prices.

So why is it so hard to build more housing?

The answer involves a tangled set of financial challenges and bitter political fights.

We looked at two developments that provided a unique window into the crisis across the city, and the United States, where there aren’t enough homes people can actually afford.

Both developments — 962 Pacific Street in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, and 145 West 108th Street on the Upper West Side in Manhattan — might have appeared similar. Both were more than eight stories, with plans for dozens of units of affordable housing. And each had a viable chance of being built.

But only one was.

Here’s how their fates diverged, from the zoning to the money and the politics.

The Neighborhood

The lack of housing options across the region makes high-demand areas particularly expensive.

Homes are built in Westchester County and the Long Island suburbs, for example, at some of the slowest rates in the country. In New York City, only 1.4 percent of apartments were available to rent in 2023, according to a key city survey.

And median rent in the city has risen significantly over the past few decades.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

That leaves neighborhoods like the Upper West Side and Crown Heights sought after by people of all income levels. Both neighborhoods have good access to parks, subways and job centers in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

The pressures are immense, even as each neighborhood has added some new housing to try to match the demand, though at different rates.

Crown Heights has become one of the most striking emblems of gentrification in the city, with new residents, who tend to be white and wealthy, pushing out people who can no longer afford to live there. Low-rise rowhouses line many streets, just blocks from Prospect Park. But there are also shiny new high-rises.

There were more than 50,000 housing units in the Crown Heights area, according to a 2022 U.S. Census Bureau estimate, a roughly 13 percent jump over the past decade.

The Upper West Side has long been one of the city’s more exclusive enclaves with many brownstone homes. Next to Central Park and Riverside Park, with easy access to downtown, the neighborhood is home to many of the city’s affluent residents.

There were 129,000 housing units on the Upper West Side according to the 2022 Census Bureau data, an increase of roughly 5 percent over the same time period.

The Lot

There isn’t as much empty land left in New York City compared with places like Phoenix or Atlanta, which can expand outward. City developers have to look hard to find properties with potential, and then they have to acquire the money to buy them.

The empty lot in May 2021.

Google Street View

Between the two proposals, the Crown Heights site seemed to be more promising at first glance. Until 2018, it was just vacant land that local businesses sometimes used as a parking lot. The developer, Nadine Oelsner, already owned it, removing a potential roadblock that can often tie up projects or make them financially unworkable.

One of three aging parking garages in September 2015.

Google Street View

On the Upper West Side, though, the site was already occupied by three aging parking garages with a shelter and a playground in between. The garages would need to be demolished if the developer, a nonprofit known as the West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing that operated the shelter, succeeded in its plan to build apartments on either side of the playground.

The new development, which was floated to the community in 2015, would also include a renovated and expanded shelter. And the nonprofit did not own the garages or the land — the city did.

One thing working in the group’s favor, though, was that the city had wanted to build housing on the site since at least the mid-2000s, according to planning documents.

Source: West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing

The Zoning

But something invisible can matter more than a plot’s physical characteristics: zoning.

That governs how every piece of land in New York City can be used. Zoning determines, for example, whether homes or warehouses are allowed in a particular area, how much parking is needed and how tall a building can be.

It also aims to prevent growth in haphazard ways, with schools next to factories next to office buildings.

The city’s modern zoning code does not leave much room for growth, which means that a bigger building often requires a zoning change. One 2020 study by the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission found that only about one residentially zoned plot in five would allow for that kind of additional housing. A zoning change triggers a lengthy, unpredictable bureaucratic process.

The site Ms. Oelsner owned was zoned for industrial, not residential use, a throwback to a time when that part of Brooklyn was dominated by businesses supported by the nearby railroad line.

Community leaders were frustrated by one-off changes to individual lots — there had been at least five zoning changes within a two-block radius of Ms. Oelsner’s site in recent years. To counter the trend, the community decided to come up with a bigger rezoning plan for the area. Ms. Oelsner saw an opportunity for her lot in that idea.

But she would need a zoning change, too.

Sources: OpenStreetMap, New York City Department of City Planning

The site on the Upper West Side had a slight edge: It was zoned for residential use.

As the project began to move forward, the city also sought a slight zoning change to allow for a bigger structure with more homes.

Sources: OpenStreetMap, New York City Department of City Planning

The Proposal

U.S. housing is mostly built and run by the private sector. If developers and owners can’t cover their costs with income from rents and sales — and make a profit — they most likely won’t build.

This can make it hard to keep rents affordable to potential tenants without big subsidies from the government, such as money a developer receives directly or tax breaks in exchange for making some units affordable for people at specified income levels.

Here are more details of what the two developers planned.

The proposal for the Crown Heights lot was by Ms. Oelsner and her company, HSN Realty, who were private developers working without city support.

Ms. Oelsner also made the case that her family had been part of the community for years, operating a Pontiac dealership.

Most of the apartments she proposed would rent at market rates, meaning the rents could be set as high as the landlord thought tenants could pay. This was similar to other new buildings in the area.

In Ms. Oelsner’s case, a government subsidy would likely come in the form of a decades-long property tax exemption.

In exchange, several apartments would be made “affordable” — in this case, rents would be capped at a certain percentage of gross household income for particular groups.

Under one plan, for example, 38 units would be restricted in this way. Of those, 15 might rent for around $1,165 for a one-bedroom apartment, or $1,398 for a two-bedroom.

Source: West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing

The proposal from the West Side Federation had a much stronger case because of the city’s support. The group wanted to construct a building where all the apartments would rent below market rates and be targeted to some of the city’s poorest residents.

Most units would rent to people who were formerly homeless, often referred from shelters and typically relying on government-funded voucher programs to pay almost all of their rent. The remaining apartments would rent for between $865 and $1,321.

The West Side Federation said it had slowly built trust in the community over decades, in part because of the shelter it already operated on the street and was now expanding, as well as two dozen other area buildings it ran.

Because of that track record, and the need for affordable housing, the city decided to do several things. It essentially gave the developer the land — appraised at about $55 million — for free, a typical government practice in such a scenario.

It also chipped in $9 million to help pay for construction and another $33 million through a federal tax credit program. The West Side Federation would not have to pay property taxes on the development.

The Politics

Both projects met immediate opposition as they began to wade through a bureaucratic city process in which housing proposals often run into challenges from community members and politicians. It’s not unusual for this process to be costly and time-consuming, often taking more than two years.

In fact, this is where Ms. Oelsner’s project in Crown Heights met its end.

In Crown Heights, neighbors wanted more apartments to be available at lower rents and were concerned about parking. Ms. Oelsner worried the bigger rezoning plan of the area would take too long and, if she waited, would run up the costs of her project, which she said she had designed to be consistent with the broader efforts.

In the end, Crystal Hudson, who held the power to approve or reject the development as the local council member, voted against Ms. Oelsner’s proposal last year, effectively killing the project. Ms. Hudson said she would not back individual developments until the bigger neighborhood rezoning was finished.

On the Upper West Side, a vocal resident group had several complaints: that the loss of the parking garages could lead to an uptick in traffic, greenhouse gas emissions and accidents; that the development could disturb students at a nearby middle school; and that it could reduce the amount of sunlight in nearby parks.

The councilman who represented the neighborhood at the time, Mark Levine, initially said he would hold off on supporting the plan until he better understood the effects of more cars on the street.

Eventually, though, the project gave the community enough of what it wanted, the group behind the project said, and government officials came around. The project was split into two phases, keeping one garage running for a few years after the first two were demolished.

The Results

One key to successful development is buy-in from the government and local politicians. The Upper West Side plan had that, despite the opposition it faced, while the Crown Heights project did not.

That’s in part because the Upper West Side lots were owned by the city, which was ready and willing to chip in lots of money to create a deeply needed housing project in the area that would most likely not have been built otherwise. The Crown Heights lot, on the other hand, is privately owned and mostly out of the city’s control — which made the project potentially very lucrative for the owners, even if it added some benefit to the community.

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

The dirt lot in Crown Heights remains a dirt lot. The broader plan Ms. Hudson pushed is underway, set to be completed next year.

Ms. Oelsner, however, has said that she’s not sure whether it still makes financial sense to build her project, so its fate remains uncertain.

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

The Upper West Side building has been open for about two years. It is full and has a long waiting list.

And the amount tenants pay in rent remains low. That’s because the government sends the West Side Federation about $1 million annually to help cover the rent.