KEYS TO THE CITY COALITION

Who gets to stay

Over about a decade, the families on one Brooklyn block left one at a time. This is what we found when we went looking for the numbers behind that, and what we have done since.

Start at the beginning Read the paper
EXHIBIT A

Why housing, why now

Over about a decade, families left one block in Brooklyn, one at a time. They wanted to stay. Their parents lived around the corner and their church was up the street, and rent decided it anyway.

Meanwhile the neighborhood filled back in. New neighbors arrived and built lives here, the way people always have in Brooklyn, mostly for the same reasons the last generation came. What changed is who had a choice. The families leaving were doing arithmetic. The families arriving were picking a place they liked.

One block is an anecdote, so we checked the city's data. The pattern holds citywide and it is worst in the Bronx. Housing decides who gets to stay. That makes it a question about belonging, not only money.

The policy is moving right now. On June 25, 2026 the Rent Guidelines Board froze rents on stabilized apartments, citing its own finding that over half of New York renters are rent burdened. The freeze covers stabilized leases only, which leaves market-rate tenants where they were.

A New York City tenement building photographed by a housing inspector.
Housing inspectors have been photographing this problem since 1902. NYPL, public domain
1.41%
citywide rental vacancy rate, the lowest on record
28.8%
of renters citywide spend at least half their income on rent
37.1%
of Bronx renters do, the highest of any borough
5.3%
decline in Bronx renter income in 2024, the only borough to fall

Vacancy rate: 2023 NYC Housing and Vacancy Survey. Rent burden and income: NYC Rent Guidelines Board, 2026 Income and Affordability Study, using American Community Survey 2024 data.

EXHIBIT B

Where it is worst

The crisis lands unevenly across this city. Tap a borough to see what renters there are actually paying. The figure shown is the share of renter households spending at least half their income on rent, which is what housing researchers call a severe rent burden.

NEW JERSEY WESTCHESTER Bronx 37.1% Queens 28.0% Brooklyn 28.6% Staten Is. 26.3% Manhattan 24.2%
Severely rent burdened 24% to 37%

Simplified map, approximate outlines. Severe rent burden: New York City Rent Guidelines Board, 2026 Income and Affordability Study, published April 2026, drawing on American Community Survey 2024 data. Vacancy rates: 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, the most recent edition of a survey conducted every three years. For neighborhood-level detail, see the NYU Furman Center's CoreData.nyc.

The Bronx
37.1%of renter households spend at least half their income on rent
0.82%net rental vacancy rate

Far and away the worst in the city, and the only borough where renter incomes actually fell in 2024, dropping 5.3 percent after inflation. It also has the tightest rental market in New York and the highest unemployment rate. 61.2 percent of Bronx renters pay at least 30 percent of their income toward rent.

EXHIBIT C

What we do

Research

The city and a few research centers publish reports every year. We read them and write up what stands out. Mostly that means tracking rent burden, vacancy, and eviction filings by borough over time. The data is free and public. Almost nobody reads it.

Explaining it

We write short explainers, one piece of policy at a time, the kind of thing you can read in five minutes and then follow a news story about it. Anyone should be able to follow a debate this consequential.

Coalition-building

Plenty of people are already doing this well. The Met Council on Housing, the oldest tenants union in the city. The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development. Churches United For Fair Housing in Brooklyn. We read what they publish and point people toward them. More students should know they exist.

EXHIBIT D

Who does this work

Founder & President
Matteo DeNicola
Xavier High School, Class of 2027 · Brooklyn

Founded the initiative and authored the underlying research. Responsible for the data work, the writing, and outside correspondence.

Vice President
Oliver Irvine
Xavier High School, Class of 2027 · Brooklyn

Works on projects, outreach, and strategy, and brings an economics and finance lens to how housing decisions get made.

Secretary
Devaan Senanayake-Anand
Xavier High School, Class of 2027 · New York

Keeps the records, maintains the reading list, and runs the posting schedule. Brings an economics and entrepreneurship lens to the work.

EXHIBIT E

The research behind us

PUBLISHED RESEARCH
Keys to the City
Matteo DeNicola
Xavier High School, New York
Posted to SSRN
May 8, 2026

It asks the question most housing debates skip: who is this policy for?

The questions, stated as social science

As social science, that breaks into three questions. Who carries the rent burden, and how it spreads across boroughs and income levels. Who gets displaced, and what predicts whether a household stays. And what happens to a neighborhood once how long you live somewhere depends on what you earn. All three can be measured.

Why Catholic Social Teaching

Catholic Social Teaching gives you a way to judge the answers. The preferential option for the vulnerable is a plain idea with a formal name: when weighing a decision, give the most weight to the people least able to absorb the outcome. The data says what is happening. That idea says which way is better.

What that looks like applied

Applied to a real position, it looks like this. When public money subsidizes new construction, the question to ask is whether the units are affordable to the households already living there. Housing priced at 80 percent of area median income does little in a district where most renters earn far below that. So fewer deeply affordable units beats more expensive ones, even though the unit count looks worse.

Read the Paper
EXHIBIT F

Catholic organizations

Organization Relationship
St. Anselm, Bay Ridge Matteo's home parish. He has volunteered with Bay Ridge Catholic since September 2024. Founder's parish
Xavier High School, Campus Ministry Where all three of us go to school, and where the framework came from. Our school
Catholic Charities of New York Affordable housing, eviction prevention, and homelessness services across the city, including the Bronx, where the data is worst. On our radar
St. Anselm Church, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
St. Anselm, Bay Ridge. Founded 1922. Add images/parish.jpg

Where the thinking comes from

The Church has argued that shelter is a right since long before we started paying attention, and Catholic agencies are among the largest private housing providers in the country. Catholic Social Teaching treats housing as a basic social good and supplies a test for weighing a policy: give the most weight to the people least able to absorb the outcome.

The four documents this rests on
Gaudium et SpesSecond Vatican Council. Names shelter among the things that must be made available to all.
1965
The Right to a Decent HomeU.S. Catholic Bishops, a pastoral response to the housing crisis. The closest precedent for this work, and almost nobody has heard of it.
1975
Economic Justice for AllU.S. Catholic Bishops, on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. economy.
1986
Homelessness and HousingSubtitled A Human Tragedy, A Moral Challenge.
1988
EXHIBIT G

Scholars we read

Matthew DesmondMaurice P. During Professor of Sociology, Princeton University

Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology, Princeton University · Principal Investigator, Eviction Lab

  • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, 2016)

Why we read himDesmond shows eviction driving people deeper into poverty, which reverses the direction most people assume the causation runs. Read this one first.

Emily V. RosenbaumProfessor Emerita of Sociology, Fordham University

Professor Emerita of Sociology, Fordham University · Urban demography, inequality, immigration, housing policy

  • The Housing Divide: How Generations of Immigrants Fare in New York's Housing Market (NYU Press, 2007), with Samantha Friedman

Why we read herThe closest thing to a direct precursor of our own work. Rosenbaum studies how New York's housing market treats immigrant families across generations, which is the question our research asks from a different angle.

Ingrid Gould EllenPaulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, NYU Wagner

Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, NYU Wagner · Faculty Director, NYU Furman Center

  • Sharing America's Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Harvard University Press, 2000)
  • The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates About Housing, Segregation and Opportunity (Columbia University Press, 2019), co-edited
  • Supply Skepticism Revisited, 35 Housing Policy Debate 96 (2025), with Vicki Been and Katherine O'Regan

Why we read herEllen's work on neighborhood change is where you learn that a housing policy and a school policy are often the same policy. She also runs the Furman Center, which produces most of the data we use.

Where we get our data

Our figures come from primary sources, not secondary coverage. The NYU Furman Center for local New York data, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies for national context, and NYC Housing Preservation and Development, NYCHA, and the City Comptroller's office for official city numbers. When we cannot source a number, we do not use it.

EXHIBIT H

What we are writing

Explainer September 19, 2026 · Latest

Why rent stabilization exists at all

About a million apartments in New York are rent stabilized, which means the amount your landlord can raise the rent each year is set by a board rather than by the market. The Rent Guidelines Board uses that round number; the city's Independent Budget Office counted roughly 928,000 this year. More than half the rental units in the city are regulated in some form, which is unusual. Most American cities have nothing like it.

The reason is a law with a number in it. New York State treats a rental vacancy rate below 5 percent as a housing emergency, and as long as the city is under that line, stabilization continues. That is why the Housing and Vacancy Survey matters so much. It is the official count, it runs about every three years, and the 2023 edition found a vacancy rate of 1.41 percent, the lowest on record. As far as I can tell from the published results, the city has never come close to 5 percent.

So the emergency is permanent in practice, and the law has been in place since 1969. People argue constantly about whether it works. What is harder to argue is that it protects a specific group. The city's own survey found stabilized tenants earn considerably less than market-rate tenants. For a lot of them the alternative to a stabilized apartment is not a market one. It is leaving.

By Matteo DeNicola
Earlier posts · tap to read
Data check What the rent freeze covers, and what it leaves out August 28, 2026

On June 25 the Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze rents on stabilized apartments. It applies to lease renewals starting October 1, 2026 and running through September 30, 2027.

Worth being precise about the scope. The freeze covers rent-stabilized units, which is roughly a million apartments. It does nothing for market-rate tenants, who make up a large share of the city's renters and who have no cap on increases at all. If you rent market rate, your lease renewal next year is unaffected by this vote.

The board pointed to its own research. Over half of New York renters are rent burdened. Bronx renter incomes fell 5.3 percent after inflation in 2024, the only borough to decline while every other borough gained, with Manhattan up 6.9 percent. Residential evictions rose 9.7 percent in 2025. In buildings containing rent-stabilized units they rose 11.8 percent, against 6.5 percent in buildings without them.

Landlord groups argued the other side, pointing to operating costs and to buildings running negative net operating income. Both sets of numbers come from the same board's studies, which is a useful thing to notice. The disagreement is about weighting, not about facts.

By Matteo DeNicola

Data check Why two rent numbers never agree August 9, 2026

If you look up the median rent in New York you will find two numbers that are nowhere near each other, and the gap is the interesting part.

The Census puts median gross rent citywide around $1,680 as of 2022. StreetEasy, over roughly the same period, reported about $3,300. Neither is wrong. They measure different things.

StreetEasy sees asking rents on the thirty to forty thousand apartments listed publicly at any moment. The Census surveys all 2.2 million occupied rental homes, including the ones nobody is advertising. More than half of the city's rental units are rent stabilized. Those tend to sit below market, they turn over rarely, and they almost never appear in a paid listing.

So one number tells you what a newcomer pays to move in this month. The other tells you what New Yorkers are actually paying to live here. The City Comptroller's office wrote about this gap directly, which is where I found it. Worth knowing which number a headline is using before you argue with it.

Both are true. They describe two different cities occupying the same blocks.

By Matteo DeNicola

Explainer What a community board actually does July 16, 2026

New York has 59 community boards, one per community district. Members are unpaid volunteers appointed by the borough president, up to 50 per board. They meet monthly and they review land use applications in their district.

Here is the part that surprises people. Their vote on a rezoning or a development is advisory. It does not bind anyone. The application continues to the borough president, then the City Planning Commission, then the City Council, and any of those can go a different way.

So why do they matter. Because the board's public hearing is where objections get made loudly enough to slow something down, and because Council members pay attention to what happened in the room. Katherine Levine Einstein and her co-authors documented this in Neighborhood Defenders (Cambridge, 2019): the people who show up at these meetings skew older, whiter, and more likely to be homeowners than the district around them. A process that sounds like democracy working often functions as a veto held by whoever has a free weeknight.

Anyone can speak. You sign up, you get two or three minutes, and you say your piece. The barrier is not permission, it is a Tuesday evening.

By Oliver Irvine

Reading notes Notes on Evicted June 26, 2026

Matthew Desmond's Evicted follows eight families in Milwaukee and the landlords who rent to them. It won a Pulitzer in 2017 and it is the book most people in this field point to first.

The argument that stuck with me is about direction. Most people assume poverty causes eviction, which it obviously does. Desmond shows the arrow running the other way too. Losing your apartment costs you your job, your kids' school, your possessions, and your references, and each of those makes the next apartment harder to get. Eviction produces poverty as much as it results from it.

He also spends as much time with landlords as with tenants. Several of them are sympathetic, most are running a business, and the book resists making any of them a villain. The problem sits in the structure, not in the people inside it. Harder story to tell, more useful one.

Reading it changed how I read a New York eviction filing statistic. 9.7 percent growth in 2025 is not a measure of housing. It is a measure of how many households got knocked off a ladder they will now have to climb again.

By Devaan Senanayake-Anand

Resource Four free reports worth an afternoon June 1, 2026

Almost everything we cite comes from four documents. All of them are free, all published regularly, and almost nobody reads them.

The Rent Guidelines Board's Income and Affordability Study. Start here. It is the report the board reads before voting on rents for a million stabilized apartments. Rent burden by borough, income trends, eviction counts. Mostly tables, which sounds forbidding and is actually the opposite, because you look things up rather than reading front to back.

The Furman Center's State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods. Gets you past the borough level to all 59 community districts. Brooklyn contains both Brownsville and Brooklyn Heights, so a single Brooklyn number is averaging away the thing you wanted to know.

The New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey. Run about every three years since 1965, which makes it the longest-running housing survey in the country. The 2023 edition found a 1.41 percent rental vacancy rate, the lowest on record. The 2026 survey is in the field now.

Harvard's State of the Nation's Housing. Read it last, to work out which problems are actually about New York and which are happening everywhere. That changes who you should be asking to fix them.

By Oliver Irvine

Explainer Affordable to whom May 14, 2026

When a development is announced as affordable housing, the next question to ask is affordable at what income. The answer is almost always given as a percentage of area median income, written AMI.

AMI is set regionally rather than neighborhood by neighborhood, and the region used for New York City is larger and wealthier than the city itself. So the figure a Bronx project gets measured against sits well above what people in that district actually earn. Housing priced at 80 percent of AMI can be genuinely out of reach for most renters in the neighborhood where it gets built.

This is why unit counts alone tell you very little. A project delivering 200 units at 80 percent AMI and a project delivering 60 units at 30 percent AMI are solving different problems for different people, even though the first looks three times better in a press release.

It is also where our position comes from. The test we think matters is whether the units are affordable to households already living in the district, rather than how many units get built. By that standard, fewer and deeper beats more and shallower, even though it scores worse on the headline number.

By Matteo DeNicola

Explainer What people mean by rent burdened April 21, 2026

You see the phrase everywhere, and it has an exact definition. A household is rent burdened when it spends 30 percent or more of its income on rent. It is severely rent burdened at 50 percent or more. Those two thresholds do most of the work in housing policy arguments, so they are worth knowing before you read anything else.

In New York the numbers are 51.6 percent and 28.8 percent. Over half of renter households here are burdened, and nearly three in ten are severely burdened. That comes from 2024 Census data, published in the Rent Guidelines Board's 2026 affordability study.

The 30 percent line is older than I expected and fairly arbitrary. It comes out of federal housing policy rather than anything about how a household budget actually works. But it has been used consistently for decades, which makes it useful for comparison even where it is a blunt instrument.

The reason the severe threshold matters more: at 50 percent, a household has almost no room left. One car repair or one missed shift and rent is late. That is the line where a tight budget turns into an eviction filing.

By Devaan Senanayake-Anand

EXHIBIT I

Join us

Caring is the whole requirement. Here is how to help.

Housing organizations

If you are already working on this and there is something we could usefully help with, tell us. Research, summaries, turnout at hearings.

Work With Us

Researchers and educators

Point us at work we should be reading, correct something we have gotten wrong, or invite us to a conversation worth having.

Get In Touch

Neighbors and students

Share the research, come to a community board meeting with us, or just tell us what is happening on your block.

Say Hello
Sign up to help
EXHIBIT J

About & contact

Keys to the City Coalition is a student-led initiative based in New York City. The order matters. An interest in how people live came first, then the research, then the paper, and the work keeps going after it. Housing policy is too important to leave entirely to adults, and the best argument is the one with the best evidence behind it.

Matteo DeNicola, Founder and President

Matteo
DeNicola
Role
Founder and President
School
Xavier High School
New York, NY
Class
2027
Borough
Brooklyn
Studying
Sociology
At Xavier
Entrepreneurship & Investment Society
Senior Retreat program
Published
Keys to the City
SSRN, May 2026
Connect on LinkedIn

Who started this

Matteo DeNicola is a senior at Xavier High School in Manhattan and the founder of Keys to the City Coalition. He grew up in Brooklyn, in a family that has been in the borough for three generations, which is part of why displacement reads as personal to him.

His research paper Keys to the City, published on SSRN, examines New York City's affordable housing shortage through the framework of Catholic Social Teaching, and specifically the preferential option for the vulnerable. It came out of several years of paying attention to one neighborhood and then reading everything the city publishes about it.

At Xavier, Matteo has taken the school's motto seriously. "Men for others" is easy to put on a banner and harder to schedule into a week. He founded the Coalition because he wanted a version of service that meant staying with a problem over time, reading the data as it came out and following where it pointed, rather than showing up for a single afternoon.

He plans to study sociology in college beginning next year. It is the discipline that asks how structures like housing markets shape the lives of the people inside them, which is the question the Coalition exists to press.

Oliver Irvine, Vice President

Oliver
Irvine
Role
Vice President
School
Xavier High School
New York, NY
Class
2027
Borough
Brooklyn
Studying
Business or finance
At Xavier
Varsity Volleyball captain
Student Leadership Council
Also
Assistant coach
Downtown Soccer League
Connect on LinkedIn

Oliver Irvine is a senior at Xavier High School in Manhattan and Vice President of Keys to the City Coalition. Growing up in Brooklyn, he watched how quickly a New York neighborhood can change. His interest in business, finance, and economics led him to look harder at the forces behind that, and at how decisions made by markets and institutions land on the people living inside them.

As Vice President he works alongside the founder to turn research into action, developing the projects, the outreach, and the strategy. He is most interested in reading affordable housing through both an economic and a community lens.

At Xavier he is Captain of the Varsity Volleyball team, President of the Film Club, Vice President of the Photography Club, and Treasurer of the Student Leadership Council, and he is part of the Senior Retreat Leaders Program. Outside school he volunteers as an assistant coach with the Downtown Soccer League, which is where his interest in leadership as service started. He has also taken part in Bank of America's Buy-Side Intern Day and the Fordham Gabelli School of Business Summer Program, and worked as a sales intern at Flushing Meats.

He plans to study business or finance in college. The work here brings that together with Xavier's idea of being men for others: learning how markets function while asking who benefits from them and who gets left behind.

Devaan Senanayake-Anand, Secretary

Devaan
Senanayake-Anand
Role
Secretary
School
Xavier High School
New York, NY
Class
2027
Raised
New York, China, Thailand,
Sri Lanka
Studying
Business and economics
At Xavier
Entrepreneurship & Investment Society
FBLA
Also
MLS Next soccer
UNDP research intern
Connect on LinkedIn

Devaan Senanayake-Anand is a senior at Xavier High School in Manhattan and Secretary of Keys to the City Coalition. He was born in New York and raised across the United States, China, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, moving between very different communities and watching how much the place a person lives shapes their opportunities and whether they feel they belong.

His interests in business, economics, and entrepreneurship led him to look harder at the systems underneath daily life. What draws him to this work is reading affordable housing as a question about the stability of communities rather than only as a question of markets and numbers.

At Xavier he is part of the Entrepreneurship and Investment Society and FBLA, and takes part in the Ignatian retreat programs. Soccer has been the constant outside the classroom, and he now competes at the MLS Next level after playing in several countries. Moving between teams and schools taught him to adapt quickly and find community in unfamiliar places.

In New York he began recovering and repairing usable furniture headed for the trash, and has donated 28 pieces to community members and to Habitat for Humanity ReStore. He also founded a clothing resale business that has generated more than $5,200 in sales, and worked as a research intern with the UNDP's Business and Human Rights Program on corporate accountability in conflict-affected supply chains. What ties it together is a habit of noticing something other people walk past and then doing something about it.

For speaking requests, research questions, or anything else: info@keystothecitynyc.org

Keys to the City Coalition
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