Almost 400,000 people are without homes in New York City right now, while one of the city’s largest landlords — NYU — sits idly by as its revenue and asset value rise higher than ever. This is all while NYU’s ever-increasing expansion throughout the city continues to contribute to gentrification. NYU owes its neighbors real efforts to, at the very least, mitigate the adverse effects it’s wrought on the cost of living in the city.
Tackling this problem does not require finding radical new methods — NYU could make a lasting impact simply by emulating the strategies of peer universities and its own previous systems of achieving political goals in other areas. For example, earlier this year, Columbia University unveiled 12 new affordable housing units for the Hamilton Heights community at large. NYU owns almost ten billion dollars in real estate holdings, and somehow, it has yet to contribute to a single unit of affordable public housing.
NYU’s Government Affairs boasts securing government funding for projects such as the Digital Games Hub and Tandon business incubators, but has failed to work with the government to concretely address the homelessness issue. NYU itself pioneers research identifying the necessity of government and academia to come together in addressing the housing crisis nationally, namely increasing the amount of affordable housing available. Large and profitable landowners like NYU are necessary partners in the creation of new affordable housing, but NYU seems content to wait on the sidelines instead of trying to implement the types of solutions that it recommends…