Yes and no. Making an area nicer and more attractive is going to drive up rents in that area because more people will want to live there. If the area is already attractive, then rents of existing units will go up regardless. But if the region as a whole doesn’t add enough units, rental pressure for existing units will be worse. So we need to add more market rate, more income-restricted units, and enforce the city’s rent control ordinance for the older existing stock.

I think the Ironbound in particular is a good example. If we don’t add enough supply close to Penn Station and downtown, people moving to the area will push deeper into the neighborhood looking for housing. It happened to me when we first moved here. We ended up much farther away from Penn than we had planned because there weren’t enough housing units available.