Happy Thursday in New York City, where the term “housing crisis” gets bandied around a lot. But what exactly does that mean?

Yesterday, the Mamdani administration put an exact number on it. According to a draft report from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the city needs to build 700,000 homes in the next 10 years to address its existing shortage and keep pace with projected growth. About 290,000 of those units are needed right now.

Reaching the 700,000-unit target would require the city to build 70,000 new housing units each year. To put that number in context, the city currently has about 3.7 million total housing units and lately has been building an average of 30-40,000 new ones per year.

“It’s ambitious but achievable, though not easily achievable,” Moses Gates, vice president for housing and neighborhood planning at the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit working on urban planning in the tri-state area, told the New York Times.

So how does the city meet this monumental challenge? According to the report, the key is affordable housing in low-density neighborhoods. The city is already required to identify the 12 community districts that have built the fewest affordable homes, making certain projects in those districts eligible for an expedited review process. The Mamdani administration also released a housing plan in May that pledged to build 200,000 new affordable homes over the next decade, with plans to rezone neighborhoods for greater density and subsidize construction costs with city money.

But reaching 700,000 total units will require far more than publicly-subsidized affordable housing. The city will need to spur new housing in nearly every neighborhood in the city — much of it through private developers — in part by allowing greater density and investing in transit improvements, all while finding ways to make projects viable despite high financing costs. Under the new targets, all 59 districts in the city will be assigned non-binding five-year housing production goals.

“To overcome our housing crisis, we need every neighborhood in every borough to do its part,” Housing Commissioner Dina Levy wrote in a statement.

Do your social media accounts feed you content that reflects your core beliefs and guiding principles? Our new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the algorithms supplying your feeds may be prioritizing content that clashes with your values. That’s because the algorithms heavily weigh online posts that you reply to, and social media users tend to more often comment on content they take issue with than content they agree with.

Notably, our study of the X social media platform shows that although the X feed algorithm promotes content to both Democratic and Republican users that contradicts their values, it does so more extensively for Democrats.

Read on to learn more.

The PREMIUM tag indicates articles that come with extra photographs or special coverage. Thinking of a subscription? Try us out with a day pass for just 99 cents. No long-term commitment for a subscription.

Got a tip? Send it in to [email protected].