Turn the empty apartments into public housing, that’s 50 to 100 thousand people housed, convert outrageously large apartments into multiple units, I have no idea how many but I would assume it would be less apartments than the vacancies. So let’s say that’s 200 thousand new houses. Now there’s offices that could theoretically be renovated, theoretically millions of people could live in these, but renovation would be worth more than moving people elsewhere. Plumbing would be a nightmare, fire safety, electricity costs. Just another uneducated guess we get could half a million in there comfortably. Now we could build new housing, there’s not a lot of space in Manhattan that’s immediately available, there’s parking garages that could be torn down and if we really had to we could build on park space, new construction would take years and not be an immediate solution. But if your including the outer boroughs there’s practically limitless space to build, New York could be as dense as Hong Kong. The density would be wasted without a property transport system and since there’s no subway connecting Staten Island to Manhattan a lot of the space Manhattan could use to spread out is not even available because it’s only reachable by car. So yeah, we could fit tens of millions of people into New York, but unless we were to spend a decade to expand the infrastructure a quarter million new people would overload what currently exists. Call it capitalism, call it growing pains, it’s not Kowloon walled city levels of bad but even if we did everything right the scarcity of housing would be impossible to fix by just getting rid of the landlords, although getting rid of the landlords would be awesome.

Amy Hochul putting her big wet mouth around the end of a car’s tailpipe and we can see her joyfully taking all the emissions.