Here's the added bonus...if you haven't take a stroll up Kingston Avenue to Eastern Parkway from Crown (where this registration drive is taking place), you're in for a real treat. This is the heart of the orthodox Chabad Lubavitch business district, and full of unique shops and delicious noshes. It feels very old world. And if you're not familiar with Hasidic neighborhoods, this is the one to visit first, IMO. Chabad is a very open sect, much more engaged with the outside world than say the Satmars of Williamsburg. That's not a knock against them...just an observation from a curious goy. There's even a great kosher ice cream and candy joint!
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New buildings don't bring people to the city who wouldn't otherwise come to the city. People are coming (from everywhere, and all classes) whether you like it or not. The city leadership, but prioritizing so much new development, is trying to address this reality. In the absence of significant sources of funds for publicly subsidized large scale development, they're trying to find ways to broaden the benefits of new development by working with private developers. And given the American history of large scale public housing projects, I'm skeptical a publicly financed solution would be necessarily better than the result the public-private partnership model gets us (which is also not ideal, and could be better, but halting it would be worse than improving it).
The population influx is one of the best things about New York and what has made it thrive through its history. When we're faced with an influx of population growth we have to figure out, as a city, how to make room for the newcomers. We can either add new housing by building more densely in as many places as possible, or we can just let the market sort it out with a fixed supply of housing. If we decide we don't want to add a lot of new housing, then we're stuck with the housing supply that we have. The market will sort this out by ensuring rents & housing prices continue to skyrocket, forcing everyone from the middle classes on down into paying more for smaller/worse homes than we'd otherwise get if we added more housing stock (and creating perverse incentives for bad landlords to abuse rent controlled tenants).
Which is not to say building more densely doesn't have downsides. Some of them are very worthy tradeoffs IMO (you might see a tall building peaking out over the trees in the park); the bigger challenge is making sure our infrastructure is up to it, but the upside have many more people and more development is more potential tax revenue which can be used to help finance infrastructure expansion.
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