Atlas Urbium

Housing, Zoning, and the Frozen City: Why Building Scarcity is a Spatial Problem, Not Just an Arithmetic One

On a Manhattan street, a four-storey building does quiet economic math: a ground-floor shop generating eight times the per-square-foot rent of three floors of apartments above. For the owner, waiting is rational. For the city, the building is a piece of underused land in a housing emergency. Understanding the difference requires treating zoning, rent regulation, and real-estate markets as one spatial regime, not three separate technical problems.