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“The New York region’s most critical challenges, from economic inequality to the housing affordability crisis, all converge in the subterranean chaos of Penn Station.”
What does something as particular as the number of escalators at Penn Station have to do with exorbitant rents in Brooklyn, astronomical property taxes in New Jersey, or the cost of groceries in Queens? What does it have to do with the spread of chain stores and empty storefronts replacing neighborhood institutions, families being priced out of their homes, or the region’s painfully obvious malaise?
It seems like a strange question, but the answer is: everything. The New York region’s most critical challenges, from economic inequality to the housing affordability crisis, all converge in the subterranean chaos of Penn Station.
It is the dysfunctional heart of our circulatory system—a place where Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road, and New Jersey Transit collide not in a coordinated symphony of movement, but in a grinding, inefficient mess. To be swept into its currents during rush hour is to experience a metropolitan region at its breaking point, choked by its own success and seemingly out of space.
This daily ordeal is more than just a commuter’s headache; it’s the most visible symptom of a profound structural failure. A region’s ability to grow, create jobs, and house its people affordably—its very scalability—is not defined by an ever-taller skyline, but by the relationship between transit expansion and land use. That necessary symbiosis, however, is being ignored due to a failure of public imagination.
Today, too many people and businesses want a piece of New York, but there’s not enough of it to go around. This isn’t a simple supply-and-demand equation; it is the direct result of clinging to an obsolete regional model.
So what does this mean for Penn Station? It means the station is both the problem and the solution.
The New York City region, for all its immense scale, is fundamentally monocentric. In the 21st century, this is a crippling limitation. To successfully absorb growth, other global cities have become polycentric, developing multiple cores for business and culture. This, in turn, has activated new residential neighborhoods in areas previously cut off from convenient transit and metropolitan life.
New York, however, maintains only one true center: Manhattan, with Midtown as its undisputed Central Business District. Why? Because Midtown is the only place that offers access to the entire regional labor market. The premium that companies pay for a New York address is for the ability to hire from a talent pool of 21 million people, drawing from every neighborhood and suburb across three states.
This unparalleled access is possible only because Midtown is the singular point where virtually every transit network converges. That makes it the region’s greatest asset, and its greatest vulnerability. Midtown is finite. It cannot expand, and new construction is only feasible at astronomical rents that fuel the region’s inflationary cycle.
What makes an apartment in the city or a house in the suburbs desirable? Access. Proximity to the region’s economic engine is paramount. With only one core, we are squandering the scalability that other global cities have already embraced.
This is not an unsolvable problem. Our global competitors, London and Paris, faced similar crises of hyper-concentrated historic cores straining under the weight of their own growth. Their solution was not to accept these limits but to embark on systemic transformation by investing in high-capacity, through-running rail networks.
Both Paris and London are still painfully expensive cities, where generational residents compete with economic and demographic pressures. But unlike New York, these cities have critically utilized their surrounding regions with integrative transit and land use expansions. Thanks to things as technical as through-running, adaptation of a polycentric model, and the metroisation of their commuter railroads, these cities have expanded not just their raw housing supply, but vast areas that are connected to their value propositions.
As a result, residents in Paris and London have the option to live in countless neighborhoods that a generation ago were nowhere as desirable or convenient. This has leveraged abandoned lots, parking lots, and certain obsolete industrial zones as places where housing can be built. And the immediate and long term result is that rents have stabilized, and while both Paris and London remain stubbornly expensive, they are not seemingly stuck in an inflationary cycle like the New York region.
Paris pioneered this model with its RER (Réseau Express Régional), which unified disparate suburban commuter lines by tunneling them through the city center. This allowed for a high-frequency, regional metro system that dramatically increased accessibility across the metropolis. Paris could now preserve its historic core while concentrating growth, housing, and new business districts like La Défense in well-connected suburban nodes.
London also pursued this strategy, first with the Thameslink Programme and more recently with the Elizabeth Line. By connecting commuter rail from the east and west through a massive new central tunnel, the Elizabeth Line has drastically cut commute times, making distant towns like Reading and Abbey Wood newly viable and spurring significant housing development.
These are not just infrastructure projects, but strategic interventions designed to distribute opportunity and fundamentally address housing affordability. How is applying this to New York City dependent on Penn Station? Because Penn Station already is physically, but not operationally, a through-running station that, if unlocked as such, could free New York City and the region from the current monocentric congested reality.
Currently at Penn, as an operationally terminating station, trains must slowly enter, unload, and painstakingly reverse out. This model fundamentally caps capacity, acting as a dam that restricts the flow of the entire regional transit network. It also prevents other locations along the region’s portion of the Northeast Corridor, like Newark or western Queens, from receiving trains from all the regional networks.
Obviously coordination between the transit agencies would be required to begin through-running, but there’s also a real physical bottleneck at Penn Station that prevents it from bearing the same fruits as the RER, Thameslink, or the Elizabeth Line.
when they are empty. (Sam Turvey)
The constraint that dictates the station’s low capacity is surprisingly mundane: its platforms are dangerously narrow and they cannot physically accommodate the number of escalators and stairs required to rapidly move thousands of passengers.
This leads to excessively long “dwell times”—the period a train must sit idle at the platform while passengers slowly file off and on. These long dwell times are the absolute limiting factor for the entire system. They create a hard ceiling on Penn Station’s ability to operate as a through station. If this problem was somehow solved, we could lay the foundation to a scalable polycentric region.
So that’s how the escalators at Penn Station limit the ability of the region to absorb the demographic and economic forces that are straining it. The symptoms of this we all know now too well. It’s at this confluence between problem and solution, concentrated at Penn Station, where a transformative transit plan becomes the most powerful land use and housing plan imaginable.
As RethinkNYC Chairperson Sam Turvey detailed in City Limits almost two years ago, by re-engineering Penn Station as a high-capacity, through-running hub—as envisioned in ReThinkNYC’s Regional Unified Network (RUN)—we don’t just get less crowded escalators. We engineer a “leapfrog” that fundamentally expands the entire region’s capacity, following the proven model of our global peers. And this is largely done with the existing infrastructure of the Northeast Corridor, and the already initiated Gateway Plan’s two new tunnels underneath the Hudson River.
The word “leapfrog” is actually very important. There are several plans in the region being circulated to increase the amount of housing units. Most prominent is the Eric Adams administration’s “City of Yes.” Taken together, these proposals would, if implemented aggressively, add roughly 200,000 units.
But all these housing plans fall short. They are a magnitude off from what is really needed. A leapfrog is required, where a plan doesn’t just tweak zoning for marginal gains (not to mention eroding historic preservation). It also has to be regional, not just constrained in any one municipality or state. And it cannot just focus on housing in a vacuum. It must be supported by transit.
While a plan like RUN may not seem to be about housing at first glance, it is fundamentally a strategy for survival. It insists that the goal of spending billions on infrastructure cannot be merely shaving a few minutes off a commute; it must be to alleviate the crushing demand placed on the entire region.
The cost of inaction is dire, and it is measured in human terms: in the families forced to leave, the small businesses that can no longer afford rent, and the young people who see no future here. To suggest that a through-running solution can wait until 2080 (as mentioned last year by the railroad agencies) is to accept defeat. It is to condemn two more generations to a region that is actively hostile to their aspirations.
This is not just a policy failure; it is a moral failure. The choice before us is clear: we can continue to apply small fixes to a fundamentally broken model, or we can make the bold, strategic investment in our infrastructure that unlocks a more equitable, affordable, and sustainable future for all. Penn Station is the key, and the time to turn it is now.
Cezar Nicolescu is a board member at ReThinkNYC and the senior urban designer at ReThink Studio. He holds a MS in architecture and urban design from Columbia University.
Jim Venturi is the vice chairperson of the board of ReThinkNYC, the founder of ReThink Studio and the key thought-leader behind the RUN proposal.
