Report Envisions 64 New Subway Stations Reshaping Housing and Transit—for Less Than Free Buses

Expanding New York’s subway network, as a new report suggests, may hold untapped promise for easing the city’s housing and affordability crises—if only the politics could keep pace with the rails.

If New York is the city that never sleeps, it is the subway that keeps it awake. Each weekday, roughly 3.6 million riders descend into its labyrinthine tunnels—a figure rivaling the combined populations of Los Angeles and Chicago. For over a century, the city’s fortunes have risen and fallen on iron tracks, the veins through which ambition, resilience, and pragmatism circulate. So when a serious proposal appears to extend this lifeblood by another 41 miles and 64 stations—by some measures, a doubling-down on New York’s original “master plan”—even the most hard-bitten observers ought to pause.

Such a proposal is precisely what “A Better Billion,” a report by Eric Goldwyn and his colleagues at NYU’s Marron Institute, has put forward. The bevy of transit academics and policy wonks behind the study posit that for the price of making New York’s buses free—roughly $1 billion a year—the city could instead embark on a strategic subway expansion encompassing 12 major projects. The catch: this investment would buy not one fleeting policy gesture, but a permanent accretion of urban capacity. Policymakers, the report suggests, risk being distracted by ephemeral solutions while the dull but mighty power of infrastructure remains under-leveraged.

The implications for Gotham are as forbidding as they are enticing. As City Council member Zohran Mamdani has argued, transit and housing affordability are conjoined twins in this metropolis. New Yorkers are not, contrary to populist complaints, fleeing the city because of $2.90 bus fares. They decamp for distant suburbs or sunbelt cities because of rent bills that swallow their paychecks and child care fees that devour the rest. Unleashing new swathes of the city for housing and commerce—unlocking, in short, development—has always required upgrading the subway map.

If theory meets practice, the benefits could be substantial. New rail lines do not merely move people; they redraw maps of opportunity. Transit extensions in Brooklyn and Queens could spur development not at the city’s long-saturated core, but across overlooked peripheries where postwar planning faltered or never arrived. Given that the average subway-served neighbourhood in New York supports seven times as many jobs as car-dependent tracts, the logic is economic as well as social.

Yet the plan arrives in a climate oddly allergic to such long-term thinking. Progressive legislators and mayoral hopefuls alike tout fare reductions as the epitome of justice. But as Goldwyn’s report tartly notes, subway expansion buys repeated, compounding returns: every new station is a future hub for homes, offices, and tax revenue. Over decades, such intangible dividends may far outpace the momentary sugar high of free rides.

Then there is the matter of dollars and cents. By global standards, New York’s subway construction costs remain eye-watering: recent projects such as the Second Avenue extension have clocked in at some $2-3 billion per mile, ten times that of Paris or Madrid. The Marron Institute’s estimates are optimistic—some would say heroic—in envisioning a system-wide build-out for the price of London’s single Elizabeth line. Still, even if actual costs proved twice as high, the opportunity cost of transit inaction arguably remains steeper.

The potential for political grandstanding is not to be overlooked. In an election year, policies promising broad, immediate relief (think “Free Buses for All!”) inevitably crowd out arguments for strategic capital investment. The incremental, technocratic logic—homely to the point of banality—that new subway lines produce new neighbourhoods is easily drowned by populist din. Mayors and governors, it seems, would rather cut ribbons on small-bore “pilot programmes” than broker the hard bargains that subway building requires: rezoning, right-of-way acquisition, patient capital.

Lessons from abroad—and cautionary tales

Other world cities offer cautionary, and sometimes heartening, examples. When Madrid and Seoul set about their own rail expansions in the late 20th century, they combined disciplined engineering with ruthless political consensus. London, after agonising delays and cost inflations, finally delivered the Crossrail (now Elizabeth line) at an all-in price of £18 billion—dear, but transformative. The American approach, weighed down by litigation, union featherbedding, and a generalised distrust of big government, continues to lag.

As ever, the city’s social geography is at stake. Should this expansion come to pass, it promises to reshape patterns of segregation by income and race far more durably than any rent voucher or tax credit. Poorer districts, long bypassed by inadequate service, could be woven into the city’s fabric just as their ancestors were a century ago, when the IRT and BMT sent growth rippling out to Harlem and the Bronx. Whether the present generation can replicate that feat remains the question.

For ordinary New Yorkers, the stakes are not abstract. A bigger subway means a wider catchment for jobs, cheaper commutes, and more plausible hopes for affording a home with a view of something other than a brick wall. For property owners, it presages the usual jolt of gentrification (none too popular, except among the newly enriched). Even the environmental case is robust: every straphanger lured underground is one car fewer belching into chronically polluted air.

There are, to be sure, risks of grandeur run amok. Urbanists are apt to romanticise “master plans”, brushing aside painful lessons from the past—overruns, construction chaos, and, yes, subway projects that never spurred hoped-for habitation. Skepticism is healthy, especially for a city where earnest promises so often founder on the rocks of political inertia and budgetary cannibalism.

Still, the biggest risk may be inaction dressed up as progress: back-slapping over a free bus ticket while the city’s bones creak under weighty demands. New York is, inescapably, a creature of its infrastructure—a city where a billion dollars buys either fare discounting for a few years, or decades of circulatory renewal. No one who cares about affordability, housing, or the city’s broader economic future can reasonably dismiss this trade-off.

The master plan is not a panacea; the sticker shock is real, and the civic pain considerable. But as the city contemplates how to return to a sense of possibility after years of stagnation, these sober rail-borne ambitions seem less like romantic nostalgia and more like a necessary wager. As history has shown, few investments pay as many dividends as iron and concrete laid in tunnels—provided the will to act can keep up with the need. ■