Photo: Evan Joseph and Tim Waltman/Evan Joseph Studios, via CORE
Hello. It’s me. Carl the Crane.
I have been looking around, as I usually do, because I am very good at looking and not very useful for anything else.
Recently, I noticed something exciting. A very famous person, Mariah Carey, is selling her apartment here in Tribeca.
She sings very beautifully. Sometimes I imagine the notes float up to me and get caught on my cables for a little while before drifting away. She isn’t here very often, but I like having her around the neighborhood.
Her apartment is also very, very big.
It stretches across three entire floors of a building on Franklin Street. Something like 12,000+ square feet. It has multiple bedrooms (I’ve heard eight), a gym, a movie theater, large living spaces, dressing rooms, terraces and views in every direction. It used to be several apartments, but they were combined into one.
One very large home.
But I have also learned something else. This is not really her main home. She has many beautiful homes in different places across the country. Which makes this one feel less like a home and more like… a very, very grand landing pad. A place to visit. A place to stay sometimes.
Like the world’s most glamorous hotel room.
I tried to imagine it another way. Instead of one home, it could have been many smaller ones. Maybe 20 one-bedroom apartments, each around 600 square feet. Twenty kitchens. Twenty front doors. Twenty places to put your keys at the end of the day.
That made me tilt my head a little (which is difficult for me). Because I am starting to understand something important:
If you care about affordability, it matters what gets built.
A building is not just a building. It is a choice. It can be arranged to hold one very large home, or many smaller ones. And those choices decide what kinds of homes exist in a neighborhood and what kinds do not.
From up here, I see many very large homes. Very tall ones. Very shiny ones. There is a lot of housing at the very top of the market.
But there are not very many smaller homes. Which means the supply of housing that most people could afford is… quite small. And when something is in very short supply, it becomes very hard to find. And very expensive when you do.
Even I know that, and I am just a crane.
So when I look at a space big enough to hold 20 homes becoming one, I think about supply. I think about how many homes exist and how many could have.
And then I look over at the new tower that Vornado wants to build on Greenwich Street. It will be very tall. I have complicated feelings about very tall things. On the one hand, I understand the appeal. On the other hand, they can be very tricky and expensive to build.
Trust me, I have been stuck on top of one for quite a long time. And from here, I can tell you that building higher does not always mean building more homes.
I have also heard that to make room for Vornado’s Tower, existing affordable housing units will be demolished. Homes that already exist. Homes that already work.
And what will replace them? From what I can tell, more very large homes. More space arranged for a few, instead of for many. More mansions in the sky.
I do not understand how that is supposed to help affordability. If you remove homes that people can afford and replace them with homes that only a very small number of people can afford, you do not fix a shortage. You make it worse.
Even a crane can see that.
So, I will keep watching. I will keep counting doors instead of just floors. I will keep noticing how spaces are divided, not just how high they go. And I will keep hoping we remember something very simple: Building more mansions in the sky does not make housing more affordable.
It makes it less.