Tap dancing in Brooklyn: A developer weighs in on the city’s housing crisis

By Brian Braiker

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Developers tend to get a bad rap. Tucker Reed gets that. The co-founder and principle of the development firm Totem is this week’s guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” and he joins us to discuss what it’s like to build in the borough.

“Brooklyn is one of humanity’s great experiments,” Reed says. “Where else in the world do you have so many different types of people living together in such general tranquility for so long? It’s really an incredible case-study in how humanity should coexist together.”

But the city—and if you pay rent in Brooklyn, you understand this at a core level—is in the midst of a decades-long housing crisis. The recently released 2020 census results tell the story of a boom: In Brooklyn alone the population swelled by 230,000 or 9.4 percent, over the last decade to a total of 2.7 million residents. These figures were lauded by politicians, from Mayor Bill de Blasio to his likely successor Eric Adams, as indicative of the city’s attractiveness for families and workers.

They’re correct, strictly speaking. But their boosterism is undercut by a bigger issue: a housing crisis. From 2010 to 2020, Brooklyn added just 78,300 housing units as its numbers swelled. And Brooklyn doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Citywide, the average household size is approximately 2.5 people, according to census numbers. Given that the population across the entire city grew 630,000 over the past decade, you can do some quick back-of-the-envelope math and determine that there are 252,000 units of housing needed across all five boroughs.

That’s before taking future growth into consideration, much less even maintaining the current housing stock.

“This is a serious issue,” says Reed. “We have a massive supply constraint as it relates to new housing development and we really as a city need to start taking that seriously, and start to have a real dialog about—if we really want to bring the rents down, if we really want to create a city that is gong to be accessible to new people coming here and the existing population that’s been here—we need a whole new approach to how we think about the development of the supply of housing in New York City.”

As president of the nonprofit Downtown Brooklyn Partnership from 2012 to 2016, Reed has had frontline experience. By all accounts, he took a formerly dysfunctional non-profit business improvement district and made it function. Before that, he did a tour in Iraq with the State Department as chief of staff of the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team, where he helped build schools and roads, set up a fire department and rebuilt the sanitation system. If creating new space for New Yorkers feels like operating in a bureaucracy-tangled war zone, Reed at least has paid a few dues on that front.

“There’s a thousand different ways of thinking about how to be smarter and better at how to do this and just blaming a new building or fighting a rezoning that’s adding a couple hundred units to me is a great waste of our city’s energies,” he says. “We should be asking questions in those processes and shaping them to get better, but this misses the forrest from the trees in terms of where the focus of energy should be.”

All of that and more is discussed in the podcast—here’s a fun fact: A graduate of Wesleyan, Tucker’s freshman dorm neighbor was Lin-Manuel Miranda, whom Reed describes as “extra.” Bonus: Reed tells a story, inherited from the writer Pete Hamill, about Charles Dickens’ famous visit to New York and how it led to the birth of tap-dance.