City planners foresaw New York’s potential to grow into a “monster city” of 55 million people fifty years ago. The city implemented a significant revision to its zoning regulations in 1961 to prevent this outcome, capping the size of buildings and the number of inhabitants they could hold. Now, an affordability issue is being stoked by a long-standing housing shortage, which is in part caused by those earlier restrictions. The fact that there is a housing scarcity in the biggest city in America may seem illogical. New apartment complexes, condominiums, and enormous skyscrapers are being stacked together by cranes and construction workers who appear to be working nonstop. However, the issues are a result of a widespread issue and are made worse by New York City’s fame. There is a housing shortage in this area because more individuals desire to live here than the city can provide. In 2019, the New York metropolitan area would require more than 340,000 new dwellings, according to a May report by the Washington-based policy and research organization Up For Growth. In most of the last ten years, the city has issued fewer building permits per resident than Boston, Austin, and San Francisco, according to a report by the Citizens Budget Commission, a non-profit research organization. Additionally, the construction of new homes is not keeping up with the expansion of new jobs. There are many obstacles in the way of growing housing supply to satisfy demand, including:

·     zoning regulations that restrict building size and allow many neighborhoods to effectively block new growth.

·      The price of construction, in particular the price of funding and promoting affordable housing.

·      The failure of local and state officials to reach consensus on effective fixes.

This study essentially focuses on whether there is enough community housing in New York city. It helps to demarcate the current situation of real estate market in New York in relation to the average earning capacity in the different neighborhoods. The map is created using ArcGIS.

https://prattsavi.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=4ef0db99b36e471b854030d75c7023aa For the base file neighborhood data set is picked from open data portal for NYC. This gives the demarcation of all the neighborhoods. After downloading the shapefile, going into content in ArcGIS, then add item, chose the zip file that was just downloaded. As soon as we click on open file in map viewer, we see the neighborhood boundaries of New York city. To run the analysis, we open the map in map viewer classic. As we click on analysis it uses demographic data and aggregates the dataset to apply to a neighborhood polygon. Then clicking on data enrichment, we go to enrich layer. For the first field we look at income, since affordability is in question so understanding the household median income is useful. For the second field we look onto households which means how many properties are rented and how many are owned. This gives a clear idea about what the real estate situation looks like in this neighborhood. Third variable is population after selecting that we hit run analysis. We see two layers overlapping each other, one for the original neighborhood and the other for the analysis which contains neighborhood information and demographics. Go into new map layer and add another layer. We chose ArcGIS online as our base data set. We need to find database that gives the data on housing affordability and add that as a layer. The geography of this data set is for the entire USA, that needs to be filtered out and make that only for New York city. We open the map again in map viewer classic and click on analysis. Then we go to manage data and select the overlay layers. We join the real estate layer to demographic neighborhood layer meanwhile maintaining the same geography. First layer would be demographic layer and the overlay layer as real estate layer. This so created layer is named as affordability layer. This layer now has all the information. Changing the visualization, we go to styles and add fields. Then we select median household income. With the same layer we can map another field that is average price that a property would cost in that area. We select the style as relationship and change the colours. It is clear in the visualization that household income and property pricing have a correlation. It shows where there is high income and high property value neighborhoods in NYC. The brown in the visualization means that these neighborhoods are made up of high household incomes earners and high property prices and beige means low household incomes earners and property prices. The future scope of this study could be to study if these are appropriately situated according to the income of the people.