How Mixed-Use Housing Impacts NYC Affordability

NEW YORK, NY— A former Crown Heights supermarket has been replaced with a 328-unit residential building with ground-floor retail, including a grocery store, reshaping neighborhood commercial corridors that have struggled with closures and rising costs.

The project, called the Arcadian, includes 99 affordable housing units and retail space meant to replace services lost when the original supermarket closed on Nostrand Avenue.

“We wanted to build a project that respects the deep and historical background of this beautiful neighborhood,” Berke Kalemoglu, development director at Hudson Companies, said.

A Patch analysis of NYC PLUTO building data shows 58,909 mixed-use buildings across 858,602 properties citywide, or 6.86 percent of the total housing stock.

PLUTO, the City’s Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output database, compiles tax, zoning, and building records for every property in New York City and is used to track land use patterns across all five boroughs.

City classifications identify 56,440 buildings as officially mixed-use under land-use codes, while a broader measure that captures residential and commercial uses on the same tax lot raises the total to 58,909.

Buildings constructed after 2010 show a 13.24 percent mixed-use rate.

This rise follows zoning changes that allowed taller residential buildings with ground-floor retail in transit-connected areas.

Special Mixed-Use Districts, waterfront rezonings such as Greenpoint-Williamsburg and Long Island City, and other projects replaced older rules that separated housing from commercial and industrial uses.

Developers often include storefront space because zoning requires it or because it helps offset high construction costs in dense neighborhoods.

Alteration records, city filings that track major changes to existing buildings, show another wave of mixed-use growth.

In the 1980s, 32.65 percent of altered buildings were classified as mixed-use, driven by conversions of older industrial and commercial structures into lofts and live-work housing.

The NYC Industrial Plan, adopted under Local Law 172 of 2023, separates industrial land into areas where manufacturing and freight are protected and areas where housing and commercial uses can mix more freely.

It treats mixed-use development as part of balancing housing growth with the need to preserve jobs tied to industrial land.

Most mixed-use buildings today still come from redevelopment rather than new construction.

Manhattan holds about 33.24 percent, far ahead of Brooklyn at 9.02 percent.

Share Of Mixed-Use Buildings By Borough In NYC

The gap reflects how each borough developed. Manhattan’s older buildings were designed before modern zoning rules, so storefronts, offices and apartments were often built together by default and remain stacked in the same structures today.

Outside Manhattan, mid-20th-century zoning rules separated residential, commercial and industrial uses, leading to large areas of single-use housing or industrial land.

The Bronx accounts for 5.16 percent, Queens 4.15 percent, and Staten Island 1.41 percent.

OpenIgloo co-founder and CEO Allia Mohamed said internal data shows little difference in renter satisfaction between mixed-use and non-mixed-use buildings.

Building age matters more than land use mix, she said.

About 60 percent of tenants in buildings built after 2000 report positive ratings, compared with roughly 50 percent citywide, according to OpenIgloo data.

In buildings built before 1974, approval drops to about 43 percent.

Mohamed said mixed-use space does not consistently change rents in either direction.

“I wouldn’t go as far to make the correlation that if a building has commercial space, it’s going to offset the rents and rents are going to come lower,” she said.

She pointed to a different pressure on storefronts: commercial tenants in New York City do not have the same protections as residential renters.

Without rent caps or renewal safeguards, small businesses can face sharp increases when leases expire, especially in neighborhoods where property values are rising.

In 2018, the Small Business Jobs Survival Act was introduced in the City Council.

It aimed to give small businesses stronger rights in commercial lease renewals and was often described as a form of rent control for storefronts.

A follow-up proposal, Intro 1796-2019, called Commercial Rent Stabilization, took a similar approach, modeling itself on New York’s rent-regulated apartment system.

Neither bill passed.

The City of Yes for Housing Opportunity plan proposes broader zoning changes to increase housing production.

It allows more residential development in commercial corridors, reduces parking requirements, and makes it easier to build housing near transit without lengthy approvals.

The plan also expands mixed-use development by encouraging housing above retail on busy streets, linking new housing supply with neighborhood services.

Mixed-use development combines housing and commercial space in one building or district.

Policy research shows it can lower infrastructure costs by sharing utilities and parking and can place housing closer to jobs and services. It is also widely used in redevelopment projects where cities try to reuse older buildings and increase density.

Critics argue the outcomes depend heavily on local conditions.

Research from the Urban Land Institute finds mixed-use projects are harder to finance because lenders must evaluate residential and commercial components separately.

Other planning studies, including work from UC Berkeley’s Robert Cervero, link higher-density development to rising land values, which can increase rent pressure if affordability protections are not included.

In some cases, ground-floor retail is required by zoning but struggles to find tenants, especially in weaker commercial markets.

Studies from the Urban Land Institute note that storefronts can sit empty or change frequently when demand does not match zoning requirements.

For residents, the debate extends beyond new buildings, Mohamed said.

It touches on what kinds of businesses remain in a neighborhood, how affordable housing is created and how communities change as new development reshapes the streets around them.