A potential remedy for New York’s housing crisis — and the similar crises in other coastal cities — is on display in this small New Jersey town two miles west of the George Washington Bridge.
Palisades Park is one of the few places in the New York metropolitan area where it is legal to replace a single-family home with something other than another single-family home. Over the last few decades, developers have bulldozed many of the old houses and replaced them with bigger, fancier duplexes.
There have been some growing pains, but many more people are now able to live in Palisades Park. Since 1990, the population has increased by 40 percent. The main street has revived and flourished, becoming a destination for Korean food. And the growth has allowed Palisades Park to reduce its tax rates.
One of the most important causes of the region’s housing crisis is the dearth of construction in communities around New York City, where most residential land is reserved exclusively for single-family homes. It is illegal to build more housing on that land, and so it has become impossible to provide enough.
The homes get larger, and the prices go up, but the number of residents does not increase.
Opponents of allowing more homes in suburban communities have sought to scare voters — so far, quite successfully — by insisting any changes in building rules will end in skyscrapers. Last year, after New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, proposed some minor leniencies to allow a little more housing construction, one Long Island politician said the plan would “turn Nassau County into New York City.”
Palisades Park shows that a little more density can deliver big benefits. A quirk in the town’s zoning code, which dates back to 1939, allows two homes on most residential lots — but no more than two. The reasons for that unusual provision are lost to history, and for a long time it didn’t really matter. But in the 1980s, Korean immigrants began moving to the area, and as demand increased, developers discovered that they could turn a single house into two homes.
The new duplexes are typically both more valuable than the homes they replace. That has allowed Palisades Park to cut property tax rates even as its budget has increased. In the early 2000s, Palisades Park and the adjacent town of Leonia, where it is illegal to build duplexes, both taxed homes at roughly the same rate. Last year, Palisades Park’s property tax rate was less than half of Leonia’s.
Allowing more density does not mean that existing homes are immediately torn down and replaced. It will take a few more decades before the supply of single-family homes in Palisades Park is exhausted. Edward Pinto, a co-director of the housing center at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, has found that a typical annual rate of redevelopment is about 2 percent of the parcels in a given area that are legally available and economically attractive.
Mr. Pinto grew up in Palisades Park, in a single-family home built by his father, and I first heard about the changes in the town from him.
Like many proponents of increased housing construction, Mr. Pinto used to focus on the need to make room for larger apartment buildings. But on a visit to Palisades Park a few years ago, he was struck by how the town had changed. His childhood home had been replaced by a duplex, as had many of the other homes. It caused a shift in his thinking — a recognition of the value of what he calls “light-touch density,” meaning the replacement of single-family homes with a few more units.
One key benefit is that this kind of construction doesn’t require large-scale government coordination or investment.
“You don’t need a renewal plan,” said Mr. Pinto. “You don’t need subsidies. All you need is the right to build duplexes.” He added that if duplexes had been legal across northern New Jersey — not to mention suburban counties in New York and Connecticut — “we would be in a very different situation today.”
Versions of this idea are increasingly popular in other parts of the United States. While the specifics vary, the common theme is allowing the construction of a little more housing in areas previously reserved for single-family homes. California passed a law in 2021 allowing the construction of up to four units on single-family lots, although local governments have found other ways to stymie development. California has been more successful in allowing homeowners to add an apartment to any residential property. More than 80,000 of these “accessory dwelling units” have been permitted since 2016.
The cities of Minneapolis and Charlotte, and the states of Washington, Montana and Maine are among those that eliminated most single-family zoning in recent years. Communities across the country have made it easier to build accessory dwelling units.
In the New York region, however, politicians continue to sit on their hands. Ms. Hochul deserves credit for her blunt diagnosis that the state needs more housing, but she hasn’t made any discernible progress in building a political coalition sufficient to overcome the intransigence of the suburbs.
It is understandable that residents like their communities and fear change. A few years ago, Halyna Lemekh, a professor of sociology at St. Francis College who has lived in Palisades Park for two decades, decided to study her own community, interviewing dozens of residents about its transformation. “Many people expressed their resentment that it became a citylike place with less greenery,” she said. “This wasn’t just a face lift. It’s a very different place from what they knew as children.”
But Ms. Lemekh also found that the current residents of Palisades Park are generally pretty happy to be living there. And the important point is that more people are now able to live there.
New York and New Jersey should end single-family zoning so more people can build the communities they want and need.
And to those wary of change, I’d encourage you to take the opportunity to see what the future could look like. Visit Palisades Park.
