New York City stands at the epicenter of an affordable housing crisis that has placed poor and elderly people throughout the country at greater risk of homelessness and forced low-income renters to forgo food and medical care to stay in their homes.

Over the last several decades, New York mayors have tried to combat this problem by renovating rundown buildings that otherwise would have been torn down, subsidizing rents and construction costs for affordable housing and giving developers incentives to include affordable units in new buildings. The efforts have created hundreds of thousands of apartments that are affordable to low- and moderate-income families. Even so, the affordable housing gap appears to be growing.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised to build or preserve 200,000 units in the next decade — about 35,000 more than the Bloomberg administration achieved over 12 years. He has proposed steering city pension funds into affordable housing construction, raising taxes on vacant land to spur construction and legalizing tens of thousands of currently illegal basement apartments.

His most aggressive proposal would require developers to set aside units for low- and moderate-income families in major projects. Many cities around the country have various forms of inclusionary zoning laws. While this is a worthy approach, New York courts have been less sympathetic than courts in other states to attempts by local governments to regulate housing creation.