[HN Gopher] Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
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Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
Author : rascul
Score : 279 points
Date : 2022-07-14 11:45 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Higher interest rates should lower the prices of homes in the
| long run, which should translate into lower rents.
| nickv wrote:
| Actually, that's not true in a strange perverse way. Higher
| interest rates = higher mortgage rates = higher monthly costs
| to own = More people being _stuck_ in the rental market = more
| demand in an already over-heated rental market.
|
| Remember housing prices going down doesn't turn to a lower
| monthly cost (it keeps at pace typically). This is pure wealth
| loss (which is the point so we can cut inflation).
|
| This is already happening in NYC (and this article is the
| outcome of that).
|
| More details:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/11/business/economy/rent-inf...
| tmnvix wrote:
| This is not how it's working out right now in NZ.
|
| Interest rates up. House prices down (-20% in my city).
| Number of available rentals up (almost doubled in some
| markets). Rental prices down (looks like around -10%).
|
| It looks like underutilised housing is being flushed out due
| to high servicing costs. The jig is up.
| nickv wrote:
| Interesting, where are those rentals coming from? Is it
| just an overall drop in demand for any housing?
|
| Intuitively to me, if you make one thing harder to do (buy
| a house), unless people disappear or you suddenly build
| more rentals, they go in the other direction and create
| more strain there (renting).
|
| Where are these people living if they can't buy but are
| renting less? Are both demands are dropping?
| acchow wrote:
| In major cities, renters often have roommates. When they
| exit the rental market to become homeowners, they often
| pick up more debt and higher monthly payments but stop
| having roommates.
| tmnvix wrote:
| I think that it's a case of underutilised properties
| being flushed out.
|
| No one really considers it, but in a booming market you
| might be more likely to have a higher percentage of
| underutilised properties. When the market turns, those
| properties that were making money just by virtue of
| existing now lose money. A second home or a holiday home
| is one example. A house being slowly renovated is
| another. Plain old land-banked properties, etc.
|
| Put it this way. As the property market has boomed, the
| proportion of properties owned by investors has
| increased. Because only investors will underutilise a
| property (homeowners occupy it by definition), the
| proportion of underutilised properties increased. When
| the market turns, capital gains look less certain, and
| holding costs increase, investors try to get out. The
| underutilised properties get flushed out.
| jmartin2683 wrote:
| ...and in return you have the privilege of stumbling over garbage
| on your way to wait inline for an $8 coffee like you're at an
| amusement park or something.
| jessaustin wrote:
| The cause is not mysterious. Residential rental property is the
| newest private equity scam. [0] When the capitalist who has
| inserted himself into your life wants more money, your life
| becomes more expensive. This is called "inflation". Fools and
| charlatans claim the Fed can control this.
|
| [0] https://www.propublica.org/article/when-private-equity-
| becom...
| stomczyk09 wrote:
| It's so upsetting to hear my friend's stories on apartment
| hunting recently. I had someone raise their expectations by 1k in
| their budget where they would barely break even financially, and
| still couldn't find a 2 bedroom apartment in the Williamsburg
| area. I got very lucky getting a "Covid Deal" in the summer of
| 2020, because anyone who moved here/moved around since the fall
| of last year I've heard nothing but chaos :(
| pphysch wrote:
| "Housing is for living, not speculation"
|
| -- good quote from a good leader
| freebee56 wrote:
| These numbers are wildly inflated. the official corporate rental
| sector in NYC s actually very small (most properties are
| condos/coops) owned by small scale landlords. That 5k number is
| the price that a (often foreign) company would pay to keep an
| executive for a temporary assignment in NYC. Then you have the
| students who are burning thier parents money anyways. Anecdotally
| the landlords are looking to recoup their COVID losses and a lot
| of these units are not renting.
| vitno wrote:
| But they aren't. I just did an apartment search after living in
| Manhattan for years and 5k was the number my partner and I
| wanted to be under. It was basically impossible and I'm now
| leaving my neighborhood.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| This is why you need rent control.
|
| 100% of this price hike is going into landlord's pockets, it's
| not a result of inflation.
| asciiresort wrote:
| How has that worked out for San Francisco ?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| How did that work for Berlin? Try moving there today and tell
| me how affordable it is for newcomers.
|
| Rent control is basically subsidizing existing grandfathered
| tenants by fleecing those new wishing to move in, without
| fixing the underlying housing shortage in any way.
|
| The solution is always, always, having (building) more supply
| than the demand, yet nobody seems to get it.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| What if you literally cannot build more supply than the
| demand?
|
| What if there's a feedback loop between building more supply
| and increased (induced) demand?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| I don't think this applies to Berlin yet, it's not an
| island or locked by mountains. You can also build up.
|
| Let's not kid ourselves, real estate prices there are
| insane due to monetary policies, bureaucracy and NIMBYism
| restricting building/supply for a million reasons, and not
| due to the lack of real estate in that area.
| cpascal wrote:
| > The solution is always, always, having (building) more
| supply than the demand, yet nobody seems to get it.
|
| It is easy to hand wave "more building supply", but that's a
| medium to long term solution. What do we do in the short
| term?
|
| Are we supposed to just allow landlords to hike people's rent
| anywhere between 10-40% year-over-year forcing them to be
| displaced?
|
| There needs to be some middle ground.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> It is easy to hand wave "more building supply", but
| that's a medium to long term solution._
|
| YES! It's the long term solution which if it were
| implemented in a timely manner in the past, would have
| saved us today, but even though we are in a mess today,
| it's not being implemented even to this day due to
| bureaucracy, NIMBYism and various political issues which
| beat around the bush, instead of saying it straight: "Build
| more today so we can live easier tomorrow!"
|
| _> What do we do in the short term?_
|
| Also, build more. If you don't build in the short term,
| there will be no long term.
| grapeskin wrote:
| Damn, are rents in Berlin over 5000 euros/5000 dollars? Must
| be nuts.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| What does the 5000$ mark have to do with it? Just because
| rents in Berlin are not as high as downtown Manhattan,
| doesn't mean they're not overpriced for Berlin wages,
| especially since skilled and middle class wages in Berlin
| are nowhere near what they are in Manhattan, so this apples
| to oranges 5000$ mark is meaningless for your snarky
| attempt at an argument.
| acchow wrote:
| Median Household income in Manhattan is $117k. In Berlin,
| it is $59k.
| mcntsh wrote:
| No, but there basically aren't any apartments on the
| market, and the ones left are twice the price they costed a
| few years ago.
| wil421 wrote:
| Rent control doesn't work. Sane zoning laws and higher density
| housing should help.
| Aunche wrote:
| Rent control only helps people who already have a home and want
| to stay there forever. Everyone else loses because there are
| few vacancies. This means less job mobility, more difficulty
| recovering after being evicted, and less development, which
| further exacerbates the rent problem.
|
| > 100% of this price hike is going into landlord's pockets
|
| This is true, and the solution to this is a land-value-tax and
| to use that to offset the city's sales tax, which
| disproportionately impacts the poor. Hell, it would probably be
| enough if the city just assessed property taxes more
| accurately. My TL was bragging about his home being assessed at
| $800k, when it's easily worth $2M.
| settrans wrote:
| Indeed! What we need is a wealth transfer from new residents
| paying _even higher_ market prices to legacy tenants
| grandfathered in to apartments that landlords have no incentive
| to maintain.
| cgdub wrote:
| NYC already has rent control. It's why rents are $5k.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_New_York
| tmnvix wrote:
| "The rent is too damn high!"
|
| A lot of talk of supply side issues, economics 101, etc in these
| threads.
|
| Greetings from New Zealand, where just like so many other
| anglosphere economies we've been playing the low interest
| property speculation game for decades now. We got really, really
| good at it. The last couple of years saw 50% increases in
| property prices. Madness.
|
| A funny thing's been happening in just the last six months
| though. Interest rates have gone up. 2.5% to 6% roughly. In the
| capital the number of homes for sale doubled compared with the
| year before. Prices are down 20% since the November peak.
|
| Here's the interesting thing. While this crash is happening the
| number of rentals available has almost almost doubled and rents
| are going down. This is after tenants experienced the tightest
| rental market in decades just a year ago.
|
| Where did all those new rentals come from?
|
| Hint: there are two sides to supply and demand (no one really
| looks at the demand side too closely but that's where the real
| policy failures are).
| acchow wrote:
| Many cities are experiencing asset price bubbles far beyond the
| rental price increases (driven by central banks). But NYC
| rental prices are actually rising rapidly. It's quite a
| different situation
| rcpt wrote:
| Prior to the NZ Land Tax Abolition Act it was pretty good there
| no?
| tmnvix wrote:
| I put it down to the double whammy of banking deregulation
| and ripping into social housing. From the 90s on property
| speculation has been the name of the game.
|
| It does seem like this year could bring a paradigm shift. We
| might have come to the end of the road with lowering interest
| rates and the social housing system appears to have totally
| fallen apart and been overwhelmed at the same time.
|
| A decent property market correction will be good for everyone
| in the long run, but it's going to be difficult for a lot of
| people. It'll be interesting to see how middle New Zealand
| handles it when the crisis is at their door and not just 'out
| there' for more unfortunate people to worry about.
| throwthroyaboat wrote:
| NZ doesn't do 30 year fixed mortgages like the USA does, so I
| presume this effects things a lot when interest rates go up?
| The bipartisan "medium density residential standard"
| legislation gave me a lot of hope for the future of NZs housing
| market, despite all the grumbling from some of my older
| relatives. Remains to be seen whether building supplies can
| keep up. Would be nice to have a land/capital gains tax though.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I can see why this is happening. For a certain kind of person,
| New York City is the most desirable place in the world to live.
| With work from home becoming possible, all the people across the
| country with the desire and money to do so will want to move to
| NYC, where they might have been in Omaha or Cleveland or Dallas
| for work.
| throw93232 wrote:
| I visited Manhattan once, what I noticed was how run down metro
| (underground) was. I would compare it with Kiev metro around
| 2016, and that country was already at war. I have no idea how
| city hall can get away with doing so little!
| csomar wrote:
| Be careful. It seems from the comments here that NYC transit is
| one of the attraction factors.
| cghendrix wrote:
| Both can be true.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Haha. No one loves it. Everyone wishes it was better. But no
| one wants delays or more crowded trains for 1-? years while it
| gets fixed/updated.
| jononomo wrote:
| I decided about four years ago that it just doesn't make sense to
| live in NYC if you're not making $200k/year consistently. Also, I
| was surprised at how many people without an original thought in
| their head earn $200k/year in NYC --- the city rewards a sort of
| dull ambition. Do you want to hang out with people who are
| intelligent and ambitious yet somehow fail to be interesting? If
| so, then NYC is for you!
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Hey now, we can't all be entrepreneurs working on the cutting
| edge stuff. Lots and lots of boring work needs to be done, and
| that's why you pay bankers, lawyers, consultants, etc. hefty
| sums.
|
| You don't _need_ to be original to do that kind of work, but it
| still needs to be done.
| disantlor wrote:
| i'd say there is a pretty big difference between Manhattan and
| the other boroughs in this regard though it's still too
| expensive. i've found reason to go to Manhattan only a couple
| times in the past few years.
| diehunde wrote:
| How much is the take-home pay if you make $200k a year? About
| 12K a month? A rent of 5k would take away almost half of that.
| A $4K rent would be at the limit of the 1/3 recommendation but
| not sure what you can find these days for a $4K rent. It's
| doable, but I don't think it's sustainable if you want to save
| money or live comfortably
| bradlys wrote:
| Closer to $10k. There are calculators online to figure this
| out btw.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Very few people at that income level are renting a 4k/month
| appt - they probably have a partner. Or if they are, it's
| like a 1-2 yr thing.
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| The median individual income in NYC is $34k. In Manhattan, it's
| $52k. Making 200k puts you in the top 5% of earners in New York
| City.
| [deleted]
| kristjansson wrote:
| Regardless of how true it is, this statistic feels
| impossible.
| bobbylcraig wrote:
| That actually blows my mind when I think about the lifestyles
| I see walking around the West Village every day.
| hmillison wrote:
| a lot of people living those lifestyles are living off of
| credit cards or their trust fund
| n0us wrote:
| The West Village is also one of the wealthiest
| neighborhoods in the wealthiest borough of NYC
| juve1996 wrote:
| The top 5% in NYC is still close to a half-million people.
| [deleted]
| TomGullen wrote:
| One piece of the puzzle I'm struggling with in all of this is why
| if housing is so expensive and rents so high are more houses not
| being built? Surely the incentive is there, what's going wrong?
| bradlys wrote:
| NIMBYism. The incentive is definitely there but the issue is
| that existing landowners don't want any more buildings. After
| all - more supply while keeping demand fixed hurts their
| profitability.
|
| You need eminent domain from the government to fix this. At
| this point - it's complete class warfare and landowners are
| fucking over many generations.
| notRobot wrote:
| My understanding is that houses are being built, but they're
| not affordable. This Last Week Tonight segment from a few weeks
| ago covers this topic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4qmDnYli2E&t=676s
| juve1996 wrote:
| The amount of homes being built in areas where people want them
| built aren't enough to offset demand. In areas where denser
| housing is required (coastal cities), zoning and NIMBYism
| prevents it.
| anovikov wrote:
| Is this an average for newly signed rent, or for the average one
| already paid now? If former, it looks incredibly low. I mean,
| this is what you pay for an above-average (but not posh) place in
| East Europe capitals, and for pretty much average ones in old
| European cities like Paris or Munich.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| What is an average place that costs $5k a month in Paris? That
| sounds like way too much.
| jpdpeters wrote:
| That sounds waaay too expensive. GDP per capita is 39K USD
| and 18% of the population lives in Paris. How would that
| work?
| anovikov wrote:
| "Paris" is only the small place within the old walls. It's
| population is under 2M, most of them owners, with ownership
| lasting since before WWI, who could never afford to buy (or
| rent) now. Rest are suburbs and don't have Paris on it's
| address. And sure, rents there are a lot lot cheaper.
| ctvo wrote:
| You continue to reply to defend your position that 5k
| euros is below average rent per month for Eastern
| European capitals in their most attractive locations. Do
| you actually have data?
|
| It's such an extraordinary claim people are using Paris
| (not an Eastern European capital) as a counter example,
| but let's not move the goal post.
| throwawayben wrote:
| Per month?
| anovikov wrote:
| Obviously. But because price change is so small over so many
| years, i am inclined to think it's average of existing
| contracts, not of newly signed ones, and vast majority are
| regulated rentals signed 30-50 years ago, that are super low
| maybe 1000-2000 per month, and drive down the average.
| moonchrome wrote:
| What ? Your numbers sound 2x above what I'm seeing casually
| browsing ads. Or you have super inflated expectations of
| what's "above average but not posh" - like penthouses with
| views and things.
| vultour wrote:
| One of his comments from 2016 says he spends all of his
| 100k/year living in Vilnius. I don't know what kind of
| mansion he is living in but this guy is clearly
| completely detached from reality. Most people in eastern
| Europe barely break 2k a month, in many countries less
| than half that. No chance average rent is anywhere close
| to 5k.
| rguillebert wrote:
| This is monthly rent, not yearly...
| rpadovani wrote:
| What are you talking about? 5k in Munich, you can rent a 200mq
| apartment in Maxvorstadt
| laszlojamf wrote:
| It's $5k a month, i.e. the same as five thousand euros a month.
| In rent. Now, I haven't rented in Paris, but in Munich, that
| would be a castle.
| asciiresort wrote:
| For a 1-2 bedroom apartment ?
|
| Those prices would mean a software engineer in Europe would not
| even have money for rent after paying taxes, much less anything
| else.
| shankr wrote:
| > Those prices would mea a software engineer in Europe would
| not even have money for rent after paying taxes, much less
| anything else.
|
| Very much the story of lot of South European engineers. I
| used to pay 800 euros as rent when I was earning 1200
| euros/month fresh out of university in Madrid.
| Varqu wrote:
| You probably are talking about yearly amount, not monthly.
|
| In Warsaw you would get top tier places with private pool and
| cleaning service for no more than 2500 USD per month.
| endless1234 wrote:
| What? $5k a month is absolutely not something you pay for an
| above average place in east European capitals, nor in old
| European cities. Check e.g.
| https://www.expats.cz/praguerealestate/apartments/for-rent for
| a pretty expensive central european capital - around 20k CZK
| for studios, or 800 euros/usd. There are only 16 out of 1042
| properties at over 120k CZK (~5k eur/usd), and they're huge
| (around 200m^2 and central).
| II2II wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > If those numbers seem low -- after all there are headlines
| about 40% rent increases -- it's because the CPI measure
| includes renewal rents, the price you pay when you renew your
| lease.
| anovikov wrote:
| So right, just as i have expected. And vast majority of these
| renewed leases are regulated ones, being renewed from the
| Carter era if not before.
| samsonradu wrote:
| Maybe we have different definitions of posh, but 5k gets you
| very far in East Europe capitals. That's a lot of money that
| can get you 6+ bedroom villas in downtown Bucharest.
| deanmoriarty wrote:
| I really wish you took the time, after what appears to be a
| rather inflammatory comment, to reply to the folks who are very
| specifically questioning your argument.
| Victerius wrote:
| Averages are skewed. Still.
|
| To meet the requirement of many landlords to earn in excess of 3x
| rent, one would have to earn 15k a month after tax, or 180k a
| year after tax. To earn 180k after tax in NY, you need to earn
| 300k pre tax.
|
| Your Income Taxes Breakdown Tax / Marginal Tax Rate / Effective
| Tax Rate / 2021 Taxes* /
|
| Federal 35.00% / 25.05% / $75,152
|
| FICA / 2.35% / 4.70% / $14,104
|
| State / 6.85% / 6.12% / $18,356
|
| Local./ 3.88% / 3.73% / $11,193
|
| Total Income Taxes / 39.60% / $118,804
|
| Income After Taxes: $181,196
|
| Retirement Contributions: $0
|
| Take-Home Pay: $181,196
|
| In investment banking, only VPs, SVPs, and directors start
| earning salaries of that magnitude:
| https://mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banker-salary/
|
| The average annual household income in Manhattan is $143,680,
| while the median household income sits at $117,926 per year.
| Residents aged 25 to 44 earn $144,670, while those between 45 and
| 64 years old have a median wage of $126,981. In contrast, people
| younger than 25 and those older than 65 earn less, at $57,813 and
| $47,547, respectively:
| https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Manhattan-Dem...
| rpadovani wrote:
| > Income After Taxes: $181,196
|
| What? I thought that in U.S. taxes would be so much lower than
| in EU!
|
| In Bavaria, Germany, the income after taxes on EUR300,000 euros
| is EUR168.131,35 in the highest contribution bracket, and
| EUR178.251,07 in the lowest!
| runako wrote:
| This is a common misconception also held by many Americans!
| The total tax burden paid by many Americans is very
| comparable to other industrialized nations.
|
| (Yes, NYC has a higher burden than most places, but the
| cities where many Americans live tend to have higher tax
| burdens in general, regardless of the politics of the
| leadership.)
|
| The major difference is that instead of comprehensive social
| services, our taxes buy us the world's most expensive
| military.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| In Germany you hit the higher tax brackets much quicker. I
| just input the numbers into a calculator and at 150k in NYC
| you pay 34.5 and in Bayern 43.4% taxes.
| sempron64 wrote:
| This is a little excessive, you are not taking into account the
| standard deduction, and taxing the entire income at the highest
| bracket.
|
| Edit: I take that back, I see you used an effective tax rate
| including the standard deduction for a single filer instead of
| the marginal rate. This would be slightly better if you're
| married filing jointly or have other deductions.
| sokoloff wrote:
| These ratios are generally applied against gross (pre-tax)
| income.
| Victerius wrote:
| That's the point? That's what I did using a calculator:
| https://smartasset.com/taxes/new-york-tax-calculator
| sokoloff wrote:
| No. The ratio is pre-tax, not post-tax.
|
| > To meet the requirement of many landlords to earn in
| excess of 3x rent, one would have to earn 15k a month after
| tax, or 180k a year after tax. To earn 180k after tax in
| NY, you need to earn 300k pre tax.
|
| The ratio is on pre-tax income. To pay $60K/yr in rent, you
| need 3x that in pre-tax income, or $180K/yr pre-tax. To
| earn $180K/yr pre-tax, you have to earn $180K/yr pre-tax,
| no calculator needed.
| Victerius wrote:
| Ah yes. My mistake.
| [deleted]
| moonchrome wrote:
| >To meet the requirement of many landlords to earn in excess of
| 3x rent, one would have to earn 15k a month after tax, or 180k
| a year after tax. To earn 180k after tax in NY, you need to
| earn 300k pre tax.
|
| But that's household income not individual ?
| jraby3 wrote:
| Those are mostly corporate landlords in large buildings. Many
| smaller landlords don't have such stringent requirements.
|
| Source: rented and invested in NYC apartments for more than 20
| years.
| [deleted]
| ctvo wrote:
| NYC uses much lax requirements:
|
| Your yearly gross income (before any taxes, in aggregate,
| including other sources) must be greater than 40x the rent
| price. The example of 5k would require a gross income of 200k
| or higher, making it much easier to qualify for than what
| you're assuming. Is it a good idea to spend 5k on rent when you
| earn 200k is a different question.
| throwawayiionqz wrote:
| Landlords in NYC require pre-tax income of 40 times the monthly
| rent.
|
| For $5k monthly rent you need $200,000 pre-tax income.
| rayiner wrote:
| I wonder how much of contemporary Democratic politics is driven
| by insane rents in NYC and SF. The party has seen an influx of
| core Reagan voters--everyone from Wall Street bankers to Silicon
| Valley engineers (Reagan won Santa Clara County by 17 points in
| 1984). These affluent, highly educated folks have adopted the
| narratives and politics of the working class, juxtaposed against
| a ever-more-narrowly-defined "elite." And it's not the Kennedy-
| esque "noblesse oblige" that's been a historical pattern. These
| folks don't just express concern for the working class, but
| identify with them and are angry about the economic system. And I
| have no idea how to explain that, except they're paying $5,000 a
| month for a cramped little apartment in NYC or SF, and _feel_
| like victims of the economic system rather than the winners.
| shostack wrote:
| This comment nicely attempts to paint high earning (not
| necessarily wealthy) upper middle class professionals as the
| scapegoat for an issue they did not create. The reality is, the
| people who are actually wealthy (think deca millionaires on up
| through billionaires) and investment firms and corporations are
| the ones suppressing supply for individual home owners.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...
| rayiner wrote:
| My comment isn't blaming anyone. I didn't say these folks are
| the cause of housing prices going up. I'm just trying to
| understand the psychology of how they're reacting to that
| phenomenon.
|
| My suspicion, though, is that ballooning upper middle class
| salaries, combined with tax rates on the upper middle class
| lower than the Reagan era, really are a key driver of housing
| price inflation.
|
| Investment firms, certainly, are a red herring:
| https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-
| blac... ("However, the idea that institutional investors are
| somehow largely to blame for the current housing market
| catastrophe is wrong and obscures the real problem. Housing
| prices have been skyrocketing due to historically low supply,
| low mortgage rates, and the largest generation in American
| history entering the market looking for starter homes.").
| throwaway23234 wrote:
| It's a really really weird space that didn't really exist in
| 1984. I would say that today's "engineers" below the 80% salary
| threshold for this space are today's "construction workers" and
| heavily democratic voters (There are also of course
| "construction workers" too, of course).
|
| Maybe about 5 years ago I would have said that people making
| 200k are wealthy. Today I would say that they are a lot of
| people that have been duped into a lifestyle where they "think"
| they are wealthy but are not. They spend MOST of their salary
| on non-essential and non-asset building things. So in a sense
| they are people that should be rich, but are not. Instead they
| don't own property (renters) buy lattes, restaurant food (for
| every meal) and the rest of that income is just going to
| payments - the tesla, rv/campers/boats, storage facilities for
| the stuff that doesn't fit in the apartment.
|
| Those people certainly could become winners of the economic
| system if they stopped paying everyone else - but they identify
| with wealthy people making 400k but have absolutely no
| appreciating assets (ok except for their self driving module
| that Elon duped them into - which it turns out isn't actually
| "sellable" to the next owner anyway!).
|
| I don't think these people identify with working class -
| instead they are pushing a narrative for themselves as poor to
| feel less guilty about that large salary and how poorly it's
| being pissed away.
|
| That's the closest I can "explain" that from my personal
| perspective at least.
| boringg wrote:
| Using lattes as an example of burning money in your pocket is
| just laughable and really shows how much you understand how
| the local economics of the bay area. I don't think there are
| many owners of RV/campers/Boat owners who live in SF but spot
| on reference. Throw on hatred of Tesla et voila:
|
| Ok Mr. Old Republican Avocado Toast hating throwaway troll
| account - wish you the best of luck in your distorted world.
| Your worldview is a sad deeply inaccurate take and I hope you
| realize that before its too late.
| bradlys wrote:
| $200k isn't enough to buy anything in SF though. Also - I
| know a lot of people making $200k/yr and they spend
| relatively little.
|
| Honestly - you sound really out of touch and like you know no
| one who makes $200k/yr in SF. Where would you put your boat
| if you even could afford one? Where would you put a camper?
| Do you think people at 200k in sf are renting houses often?
| Houses with space for boats and campers?!
|
| Sounds a lot like someone who likes to bitch about avocado
| toast. I wish people like this didn't even post on HN -
| because it's clear they don't live in SF and don't have a
| clue.
| t_mann wrote:
| Haha, anyone remember last year, when we thought big city
| apartment dwelling was going to go out of fashion?
| champagnepapi wrote:
| RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH!!
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| Anyone who wants to live in NYC at this point is a masochist.
|
| Tax, safety, cost of living, dirtiness, noise... left after 27
| years to the Cascades. Never been better.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| We're all grist for the mill now baby
| [deleted]
| ComputerCat wrote:
| With rent prices like this it's impossible to save money for a
| down payment in the future and then you're trapped in a cycle of
| renting unless you can increase your income, which let's be
| honest, easier said than done!
| slaw wrote:
| > The big picture: This points to a conundrum. The Fed is raising
| rates to cool inflation. But rate hikes are driving higher rents,
| which are fueling inflation.
|
| Why everyone and their dog says Fed is raising rates, when Fed
| just barely raised rates. Year over year inflation is 9.3% and
| Fed interest rate is only 1.5%, while it should be 2% points over
| inflation.
| gpt5 wrote:
| >Year over year inflation is 9.3% and Fed interest rate is only
| 1.5%, while it should be 2% points over inflation.
|
| This ignores the realities of the market. A much lower rate
| than 11.3% (e.g. a 4%) would lead to a deep recession due to a
| shrinking money supply, which in turn would "counteract"
| inflation.
| acchow wrote:
| You don't need to go to 11.3%. As raise rise, inflation falls
| (assuming real rates are non-negative, which we haven't
| achieved yet)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _while it should be 2% points over inflation_
|
| Do you really think we solved central banking in 1992 [1], and
| if only you were one of the central bank chiefs we would be
| fine?
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_rule
| SilasX wrote:
| I don't follow. The link supports the claim that interest
| rates should be above inflation when the latter is above
| target.
| slaw wrote:
| I understood it as rhetorical question.
| SilasX wrote:
| Then it's a poor use of the technique, since the parent
| of that comment never implied otherwise, and doesn't
| provide enough to extract what the argument actually is.
| However much or little we have or haven't "solved central
| banking", the comment I replied to was linking textbook
| knowledge that agreed with its parent. So any substantive
| disagreement there is unclear -- hence my comment.
| jdoliner wrote:
| The implication is that because this rule is from 1992
| (which I guess is considered ancient history), arguing that
| it should be implied here is essentially saying that
| central banking was solved in 1992. It's a bad argument.
| SilasX wrote:
| But it's a bad reply too. It just means the rule is from
| 1992. That gives us no way to gauge whether the rule was
| invalidated in the intervening times.
|
| As I like to say, we launch spacecraft based on models of
| celestial mechanics from the 1680s. Doesn't make them
| wrong or disaster-prone. If you replied to someone that
| "oh you think celestial mechanics was perfected in the
| 1680s?", then a lay reader should be equally confused as
| to why they should doubt the person you replied to.
|
| If you have a reason some rule is invalid, _post it_ ,
| FFS. Don't just say it's from $YEAR. And definitely don't
| rely on ambiguity as a way to look smart and
| unquestionable.
|
| But of course, he's a longtime poster, so I guess he gets
| a free pass.
| eushebdbsh wrote:
| people have taken on all this cheap debt and are just realising
| they have to pay for it
| autaut wrote:
| Do you really think that rents in New York are because of
| cheap debt and not because a tiny island has been captured by
| billions and billions of corporate luxury development, while
| at the same time the supply of appartamenti is choked by
| there being more Airbnb places than places being rented.
|
| Covid has been the greatest transfer of wealth upward in our
| lifetime, but sure it's cheap personal debt.
| eushebdbsh wrote:
| i didn't say personal?
| lumost wrote:
| I'm curious how viable permanent AirBnBs will be once
| interest rates rise. It's easy to make ends meet when the
| house rises at 20% per year, and 2 weekends pays for the
| mortgage. If the same house's mortgage costs 4x and doesn't
| sell for 6 months it's a less attractive deal.
| atlgator wrote:
| To be fair, the people that took on the cheap debt aren't
| necessarily the ones paying for it.
| chii wrote:
| > But rate hikes are driving higher rents, which are fueling
| inflation.
|
| how is higher rents fueling inflation? People paying higher
| rents (but on the same income) will have to forego some
| spending, thus reducing demand for some goods/services. So
| you'd actually expect that higher rents would drive _down_
| inflation!
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _will have to forego some spending, thus reducing demand
| for some goods /services_
|
| Or they will increase costs; which is (1) people (labor)
| demanding higher wages or (2) business increasing the costs
| of good to cover rent costs. Given that rent is already the
| biggest cost and has been growing steadily, it may be the
| case the other spending areas have been dialed to a minimum
| already.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Housing is part of CPI. If rents rise then the CPI will rise
| too, all else being equal.
|
| https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-
| an...
| tmnvix wrote:
| > But rate hikes are driving higher rents, which are fueling
| inflation
|
| Rate hikes appear to be doing the opposite to rents here in NZ
| webspaceadam wrote:
| this is bullshit. big time
| Aunche wrote:
| > But rate hikes are driving higher rents
|
| This doesn't make sense to me. Rate hikes decrease spending
| overall, so why would rent be any different?
| deathanatos wrote:
| Demand for a place to live is much more inelastic.
|
| And rate hikes make it _harder_ to purchase a home, by
| raising the cost of them. That forces out of the home-buying
| market those who _would_ have bought a home at the pre-hike
| rate ... and forces them back into the rental market. Seems
| to me like demand goes up.
|
| (Certainly, it makes it harder for landlords to acquire new
| properties, but I think corporations are going to weather it
| better than people -- i.e., people will be forced out of that
| market before corporations.)
| zormino wrote:
| Also new mortgages and variable rate mortgages get more
| expensive, and landlords need to charge more to cover their
| costs.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| aluminussoma wrote:
| The increased rates make home mortgages unaffordable. This
| pushes housing demand to rents because people need to live
| somewhere. Rental prices increase while home prices decrease
| - bad, bad stagflation.
| 71a54xd wrote:
| This is why I left Manhattan - especially in a new world where
| remote work is the new norm. I miss it, but I don't miss
| literally living in a box or the noise.
|
| Fortunately, I got to live in an insanely nice luxury apt (30%
| under market rent) for a year in 2019 while construction was
| being finished on an adjacent high rise. Even though I had an
| incredible view of the Hudson from the 26th floor on W57th street
| tbh that kind of luxury is overrated in my opinion. Finance
| people are also generally pretty boring and / or degenerate. That
| said - I'll always miss pre-covid New York.
|
| Granted, every single person I know in finance got a huge raise /
| bonus last year so this increase isn't exactly surprising. Looks
| like Louis Rossman was right with his prediction of New York
| becoming a city where "only rich finance and tech workers can
| afford to exist".
| gregors wrote:
| Berlin seems to have some solutions
|
| https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/23-05-2022/why-berlin-voted...
| H8crilA wrote:
| I am only commenting to further demote the already terrible
| upvote/comment ratio.
| rffn wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better to use the median and not the average?
| gcr wrote:
| Another commenter in this thread mentioned the median is $4000
| as of a few months ago.
| rffn wrote:
| Yes. This was posted after I wrote mine. I am a bit surprised
| that the median is so high. I would have expected a bigger
| difference, i.e. a few high value outliers pulling the median
| up further up.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Presumably "per month"? Still cheaper than central London though.
| phphphphp wrote:
| I live in central London and pay a lot of rent, but I disagree,
| I don't think it's possible to compare London rents to New
| York. Certainly, the average rent across the entirety of London
| might average out at similar levels because there's a large
| number of renters and the floor is higher but at the upper
| levels, our rent is cheaper: you can live in almost any
| building in London for PS3k/month, it's almost impossible to
| find an apartment building here where the rental floor is
| >PS3k/month, luxury in London is comparatively cheap.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Not according to this:
|
| https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/find.html?locat...
|
| I guess it depends on your definition of central London.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Not that I want to get into an argument on this (both cities
| are fantastically expensive), but the first property on your
| link when I accessed it (so basically at random) - GBP
| 5590.00 pcm.
| rxdazn wrote:
| the average londoner doesn't pay 5600 GBP a month for their
| flat. same goes for 5k USD ~= 4200.
|
| for a one bedroom if your rent is above 2000 GBP you're
| living in a luxury apartment
| zabzonk wrote:
| The average londoner doesn't live in central London.
| rxdazn wrote:
| even within zone 1, the average definitely isn't 4200 GBP
| [deleted]
| yaseer wrote:
| This would have been true when GBP was strong, but it's now
| trading at 1.18 USD. The glory days of 2.05 USD from 2007 are
| long gone, sadly!
|
| Even in Kensington and Chelsea, average rent of PS2.5K or even
| PS3K GBP is only $3K-$3.5K USD these days.
|
| https://www.homeviews.com/renting/average-rent-in-london-for...
| ianbutler wrote:
| I went to view an apartment in Prospect Park SW recently and the
| line wrapped around the block. When I went to apply I was told
| most people had offered over the asking for rent and how much I'd
| like to offer over the amount. We're blind bidding on rent in NY
| now. I wish this was an isolated incident but most apartments I'm
| looking for the amount of people applying is in the 50s low 100s
| I decided to just stay put and not look for bigger space. I'll
| either try again next year or leave the city.
|
| No rent is really worth 5k/mo at that money you can buy a palace
| an hour or two out of the city.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Whenever I hear about the rental market in NYC I always ask
| myself: why do people want to live there?
|
| In a way it's a rhetorical question but in another way it's
| not. Sure some will move there for a job but I'm sure not
| everyone is there just for work. Why do people put up with all
| that? Is it just the dream of living in NYC.
| hmillison wrote:
| NYC is one of the only cities in the US with quality transit
| and really the main one where it's easy to live car free in
| many areas of the city.
| usrn wrote:
| The metro in DC is pretty underrated and you can live car
| free pretty far out into its suburbs even.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The problem with almost all public transit is that it
| converges on a center and branches out into legs that do
| not connect with each other.
|
| This is the DC map:
|
| https://www.wmata.com/schedules/maps/upload/2019-System-
| Map....
|
| If two friends move to the outer edges of different legs
| of the system, then your travel time and inconvenience
| multiplies a lot.
|
| It is the same reason Manhattan is so popular compared to
| the outer boroughs:
|
| https://new.mta.info/map/5256
|
| People in manhattan can go west, south, east, north
| anytime anyhow with few or no connections. People in the
| outer boroughs have to many times go via Manhattan to get
| where they are going.
|
| Now take a look at a map of a good subway system:
|
| https://www.tokyometro.jp/en/subwaymap/
|
| Paris is another good one:
|
| https://www.ratp.fr/en/plan-metro
|
| You can get from anywhere to almost anywhere without
| having to go to the middle of Tokyo.
|
| The Tube is okay, but still has the problem of the lines
| not connecting once you get out of a certain radius:
|
| https://content.tfl.gov.uk/standard-tube-map.pdf
| iggldiggl wrote:
| The Paris example is somewhat skewed, though, because
| Paris proper is comparatively tiny - just 105 km2 and 2.1
| million inhabitants. Compared to London it's basically
| just Zone 1 and a few bits (definitively less than half)
| of Zone 2.
|
| Having said that, yes, it could still well be (too lazy
| to figure it out properly) that inside this city core the
| Paris Metro is still more dense than the Underground in
| London - but on the other hand beyond that, where the
| vast majority of inhabitants of the _whole_ urban
| agglomeration of Paris live, you have similar problems
| regarding radial travel as elsewhere:
|
| https://www.ratp.fr/plan-de-ligne/img/rer/Plan-RER-et-
| transi...
| usrn wrote:
| That sounds... expensive.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, it requires everyone to live in small houses or
| apartments adjacent to each other without large backyards
| and garages for cars. Hence it working well in Tokyo.
| usrn wrote:
| Tokyo can exist in Japan because of some properties
| intrinsic to Japan which I'll get flagged for pointing
| out. The reason I tried to emphasize "expensive" is
| because those cross links are probably where a lot of the
| crazy property tax in NYC is going.
| dopeboy wrote:
| As someone who spent 21 to 29 there, it simply is the best
| place to live in the US for a particular part of life. Arts,
| food, nightlife - it makes it all worth it.
|
| For me, I started to age out of it which made it less worth
| it. But it's more than a dream or "fomo" - it truly is the
| most enjoyable place to be in the US. I visit nowadays and
| it's just as magical as it used to be.
| [deleted]
| ezequiel-garzon wrote:
| I thought the median had to be significantly lower with those
| ultra luxurious rentals distorting the average, but I was wrong.
| The median is $4000 as of a few months ago:
| https://www.elliman.com/corporate-resources/market-reports
| usrn wrote:
| If the median is higher than the mean that probably means the
| distribution is heavier on the positive side.
|
| Cheap apartments are illegal and the legal ones don't get
| financed/constructed. There's a cutoff much higher than zero
| for housing costs everywhere in the US and I'd imagine it's
| pretty high in NYC.
| IceHegel wrote:
| This is the per apartment rate, so anyone with roommates is
| paying a fraction of the listed rent.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Ah. The age old solution. Having 4 roommates in a two
| bedroom.
| asdff wrote:
| If you go to uni in california you are probably having 4 in
| a bedroom, so graduating to just 2 per bedroom is a big
| upgrade in standard of living. We've normalized tenements
| for the engineering class already for a lot of places.
| xhrpost wrote:
| I was wondering this too, I know plenty of people who live
| alone in Manhattan and don't pay anywhere near $5k. Some
| renewed recently even but I don't know who had stabilization
| and who didn't.
|
| Where did you see the $4k number? This looks like condo and co-
| op numbers mostly?
| acchow wrote:
| 4000 in rent is not significantly lower than 5000?
| [deleted]
| bigyikes wrote:
| I've had this thought floating around in my head for a while, and
| it seems wrong, but I'm not completely sure why. I'm hoping
| someone more knowledgeable might be able to set me straight.
|
| Prices on the coasts -- like 5k rent -- are astronomically high
| compared to prices in, say, the midwest. This shocks many people.
|
| You could easily make the same comparison between the midwest and
| some non-developed nation. The difference is, nobody is shocked
| about how prices are higher in the USA midwest compared to an
| arbitrary less-developed country. Why is that exactly?
|
| I loathe these insane prices, but my question is: could it be
| reasonable to view these high prices as a /good/ thing, as a sign
| of development?
| jerojero wrote:
| Short answer: No.
|
| The problem with these insane prices isn't really that you have
| disparity within the same country, but that a significant
| amount of people in these places cannot afford to live in
| there. You can't have a restaurant because you need to hire
| waiters but you can't pay waiters enough for them to pay the
| rent. So your service industry is disrupted or alternatively:
| people need to commute 1 or 2 hours to get to these jobs.
|
| The reason it is not shocking that people in the midwest pay
| more than people in developed countries is because in the
| midwest _most people_ have a relatively better life than _most
| people_ in those developing countries. Whereas, say, a waiter
| living in San Francisco is not going to live a very different
| life from a waiter living in the Midwest who will, in turn, be
| living a much better life than a waiter in a developing nation.
|
| So I think people are shocked because they realise their
| quality of life is not so different but there is a huge
| disparity in prices. Same country, similar quality of life,
| hugely different prices? This is definitely an anomaly!
| golergka wrote:
| > The problem with these insane prices isn't really that you
| have disparity within the same country, but that a
| significant amount of people in these places cannot afford to
| live in there. You can't have a restaurant because you need
| to hire waiters but you can't pay waiters enough for them to
| pay the rent. So your service industry is disrupted or
| alternatively: people need to commute 1 or 2 hours to get to
| these jobs.
|
| Haven't you described a problem that fixes itself through
| market forces? Restaurant waiters move to other cities,
| restaurants (and millions of other businesses) close, city
| becomes less desirable, rents go down.
| michaelchisari wrote:
| On a long enough timeline, maybe. But societies can't wait
| the 5-10-20-30 years it might take the market to correct
| itself. That's one dimensional thinking. Political and
| social destabilization brought on by market inefficiencies
| can create dangerous situations that are deep and long-
| lasting.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| Only if the housing market is functional and responsive, ie
| high rents are only driven by "desirability" and so demand
| can adjust quickly.
|
| The reality is that trends in the rental market are very
| slow to reverse outside of the collapse of a bubble like in
| 2008. At the moment it is completely dysfunctional since
| nearly every city in the Anglophone world is experiencing
| both a housing shortage and massive speculation in the
| housing market.
|
| Additionally peoples' housing decisions are much less fluid
| than their decisions on to say buy a particular product -
| the entire basis of their financial security is tied up in
| where they live. Just because rent is lower in a less
| desirable city that's no help if they can't find a decent
| job in the less desirable city, or if due to high costs
| where they already live they don't have the liquidity to
| finance a major move.
|
| And that's not even getting into the social cost -
| uprooting yourself from your home can cost you resources
| that can't easily replaced, such as a social safety net in
| the form of family and close friends, potentially providing
| things like free childcare, help in emergencies, rides to
| work if you can't drive/can't afford a car, interest-free
| loans etc etc. Because of all this people will stick with
| unbearable rents until long after they stop being able to
| comfortably afford them.
|
| Housing responds to market forces, but since the supplier
| has a far more captive market than most industries the time
| horizon for changes is very slow. It doesn't really help
| people to claim that the market will sort itself out so
| just put up with this misery for 10-20 years - especially
| when in the past 10 years the market has only become if
| anything more dysfunctional.
| littlecosmic wrote:
| People often want/need to live near their friends and
| family, which makes them irrational from the market's point
| of view. Treating location as fungible gives them cheaper
| housing, but isolation.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Wanting to live near friends and family is rational. It
| all gets fed into the utility function that tells people
| if something is worth paying for or not, and people are
| what the market is composed of.
| mindslight wrote:
| The mere existence of a negative feedback mechanism does
| not imply a "fix". Rather depending on the magnitude,
| momentum, and damping, can result in many different system
| behaviors, including increasing oscillation. Meanwhile the
| current conditions cause actual damage to people's lives,
| even if they may converge in the future. So no, market
| fatalism is not very insightful here.
| cheschire wrote:
| There's probably a lot of reasons building up to this. I
| suspect that a lot of this comes from the constant
| reinforcement of equality as broad concept. The idea that all
| people should have equal opportunities seems to have been
| perverted by some into the idea that all people should be the
| same. Then there's the idea of america as "one nation" instead
| of a massive collection of communities. Throw in the american
| need to spread out, and you start to get this culture that is
| far more homogenous than in the patchwork of cultures of europe
| and africa.
|
| So with that backdrop, it seems the problem is people who think
| they're the same get shocked to find out they're not.
| vehicles2b wrote:
| Can you clarify what you mean by development? As far as the
| apartments themselves, they can range from newly developed, to
| newly renovated, to very old and needing renovations. I figured
| the apartments along the coasts, and in particular the
| Manhattan area are quite old.
|
| I do think that development on a global scale has given people
| the ability to move to places like Manhattan, and so
| development outside, as well as within could create the demand
| for higher rent.
|
| Affordable apartments may not be developing at high enough rate
| to keep up with demand - but in a place like Manhattan, surely
| it is difficult to develop affordable housing.
| iamben wrote:
| One of my favourite time-sucks is watching property/design
| videos on YouTube. I'm constantly amazed at how expensive it
| is for _shitty_ accommodation in New York. London is
| expensive, but the quality is (at least in my experience) far
| better for the money, even at the cheaper end.
| mrwh wrote:
| Well that's a scary thought! It's been quite a while since
| I lived in London, but terrace houses barely converted into
| flats is my overriding memory.
| bglazer wrote:
| I think the best comparison would be to other developed
| countries with strong economic growth
| lordnacho wrote:
| > You could easily make the same comparison between the midwest
| and some non-developed nation. The difference is, nobody is
| shocked about how prices are higher in the USA midwest compared
| to an arbitrary less-developed country. Why is that exactly?
|
| Because there's no freedom of movement, legal or cultural,
| between the midwest and the large coastal US cities.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Typo, of course I meant there IS freedom of movement within
| the US but not across borders.
| [deleted]
| 101008 wrote:
| I think the comparison with other places makes no sense if you
| compare nominal prices. What I think you have to compare is
| (among other things) how much of your salary you spend on rent.
| Yeah, a non-developed nation you may get a 3 room apartment for
| 400 USD - but your salary may be not higher than 1k USD per
| month.
|
| If the average salary in Manhattan would be 300k per year I
| think no one would care. But it is not.
| [deleted]
| asdff wrote:
| Yes and no. They are a sign of development, in that prices are
| high because there are enough people in the market with enough
| money to sustain these prices. Its a bad thing however because
| it means there isn't enough supply to keep prices reasonable
| for the actual real population versus just the top echelon that
| can afford these inflated rates on the shortened supply. The
| sticker shock doesn't matter as much as the relative buying
| power of hourly wages.
| [deleted]
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I think it's the phrase "less developed country." The US
| midwest and the US coast at the same, developed country.
|
| Sure, they're long distance apart, and drastically different,
| but that's not on people's minds.
| sorkin78 wrote:
| dokein wrote:
| It's not clear that the data shows an increase in rent with
| interest rates (https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-
| qimg-4f3dc7c9b86908d1c41fb...)
| bern4444 wrote:
| The primary driver of my view on real estate is that it should
| not be treated as an investment grade security. Attempts to
| leverage real estate as an investment grade security should be
| outlawed by the government.
|
| Owners of rental units should be limited to a maximum number of
| units at any given time. For an individual I would say 5 to 10
| units. For a corporation, I would want it limited to something
| like 50.
|
| The goal being to enforce more competition and avoiding
| consolidation.
|
| A terrible practice owners of rental units use is to keep
| available units off market in hopes of getting a better price in
| the short term future (typically 3-12 months). This practice
| should be made illegal. If you own rental units, you should be
| forced to list them when vacant.
|
| Foreign ownership should also be seriously curtailed. Taxes
| should be extreme for units that aren't used except for 2 weeks a
| year. NYC should be for New Yorkers, Americans, immigrants, and
| people who choose to come to this city and create their life
| here, not for those who fly in on a private jet to stay 3 of the
| year. They can stay in a hotel.
|
| I also don't believe owners of rental units should be able to own
| them indefinitely. Owners of rental units should be forced to
| sell to after they have recouped their investment and I'd say 3
| times their investment cost. This creates enough upside (300%
| return) to incentivize purchasing of units to rent which thus
| incentivizes building.
|
| After that point, the owner should be compelled to offer to
| renters the ability to buy their apartment or sell to another
| owner. Similar to how the velocity of money helps encourage
| economic activitiy, this is creating a velocity of housing.
|
| I have no problem with individuals looking to create a passive
| income stream, and this should be allowed but up to a point.
| Similarly we need a system that will incentivize development of
| new buildings and construction, so there has to be enough upside
| opportunity down the stack from the owner to the builder to the
| banks financing it all. But it should be limited and real estate
| should not be treated as an investment grade security.
| esoterica wrote:
| You are confused about the economic dynamics behind high rents.
| There are already tens (hundreds?) of thousands of landlords
| around New York City and no single landlord controls more than
| a tiny fraction of the housing stock or has even the tiniest
| bit of price setting power. The problem isn't cartels keeping
| prices artificially high, it's immense demand running up
| against zero new supply.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| NYC apartment vacancy is at 4% compared to 6% nationally. The
| "vacant apartments and foreign owners are cashing rents to go
| up meme" is a straight up conspiracy theory.
|
| We need to build more units. It's really that simple. Any
| regulation that leads to less units should be heavily
| reconsidered. Limiting the number of units someone can own
| would be horrible for increasing supply.
| godelmachine wrote:
| Toronto is just a puddle jump away and rents are hoevering at
| 2k-3k CAD/ month.
|
| Hope this inflation doesn't reach Toronto.
| analyst74 wrote:
| Toronto builds ~3x new units per capita every year compared to
| NY, let's hope they don't slow down.
| godelmachine wrote:
| Yep, new projects are fast upcoming in GTA's as well and
| newcomer immigrants prefer buying their own homes within 5
| years of arrival.
|
| In Toronto they lease their basements too which is not seen
| much in NYC.
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| ourmandave wrote:
| The headline made the Friends theme song pop in my head.
|
| But their huge apartment would have been over $5K back in 1994.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| This is average apartment rent. In the mid-2000s, that was our
| rent for a five bedroom house in Sugar Hill.
| wil421 wrote:
| You could rent a 5,600 sq foot house with a 3 car garage and a
| full basement in a top 10 high school area for $5k down the
| street from me in Metro Atlanta.
| rendang wrote:
| Funny seeing this! In 2010 I lived with a group in a five
| bedroom house in Sugar Hill on St Nicholas Pl for about $6000
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Housing and land is a non-transable good, and therefore there
| should be heavy state intervention on it, preferably by doing the
| same as Vienna, which is holding >40% of the renting stock and
| charging according to income, and renting to a representative
| distribution of tenants so to prevent guettos.
|
| Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the
| rest of the economy, and property owners provide almost no value,
| but to provide access to housing for people who has no capital
| for it, which is service that could be perfectly provided by a
| state entity.
|
| The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing people
| with different monetary and social capital into different
| building and areas, hurting social mobility, which could be
| improved by the setup described above. Many attempts at public
| housing failed because they just tried to provide housing for
| low-income people in separated and/or undesirable areas, with a
| predictable outcome.
|
| CMV
| [deleted]
| rcpt wrote:
| Vienna was only able to pull that off after a devasting war
| left nearly everyone poor. It's not clear that the US could
| seize 40% of rentals in Manhattan without starting a
| revolution.
|
| To your other points yes. Land Value Tax now! There's simply no
| good reason for why we're all taxed so heavily on our labor
| while land speculators get away for pennies.
| bleuchase wrote:
| > Housing and land is a non-transable good, and therefore there
| should be heavy state intervention on it
|
| That's a bold claim. What led you to believe that's the case?
| And what is a "non-transable good"?
| feet wrote:
| I think it might help to find out the definitions of terms
| before assuming the statement is wrong
| macksd wrote:
| Can you help me with the definition, then? I can't find
| that word in any of my dictionaries and search engines are
| suggesting I mean "non-transferable" which is not a
| property of land in NYC.
|
| Unless there's a definition, saying that this property
| calls for heavy state intervention is indeed a bold claim.
| feet wrote:
| I never stated that they were correct or made any comment
| on the substance of the original post. I criticized the
| criticism as being poorly formed
|
| Asking the original poster for clarification of terms
| would be the move before assuming something
| abduhl wrote:
| Non transable is not a term that anyone uses and therefore
| is not one that has a definition outside of this thread.
| Which is why GP asked what it is, smart ass.
| feet wrote:
| And the person I'm replying to, in the order of their
| statements and questions, first assumes that it is a bold
| claim and _after that_ decides they don 't understand the
| statement they're replying to. It's backwards
| abduhl wrote:
| It's not backwards. Calling housing and land an X and
| saying that this means it should have heavy state
| intervention IS a bold claim regardless of what X is
| because it's calling for heavy state intervention.
|
| Compare: "Abortion is a non-transable good and therefore
| there should be heavy state intervention in it." "Video
| games are non-transable goods and so there should be
| heavy state intervention in it." "Cryptography is a non-
| transable good and therefore should heavily be regulated
| by the government."
|
| All of these are BOLD claims regardless of what non-
| transable means, and it's appropriate to ask what non-
| transable means in order to understand why the bold claim
| stands.
| feet wrote:
| I think you missed the point I was making
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Sorry, but this is a non-transable comment, and I only
| reply to transable comments.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I like your style, you made me laugh.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Must be fun spending the whole day looking for
| technicalities to address.
| feet wrote:
| No, I just understand how to make valid criticisms. First
| step before you can criticize is to understand what
| you're criticizing
| abduhl wrote:
| Apparently not because you didn't even understand what
| the GP was calling a bold claim (it wasn't land being
| nontransable).
| feet wrote:
| Really? You must have missed that the exact sentence that
| they quoted was based around the term that they didn't
| understand
| dntrkv wrote:
| Kinda hard to look up when someone misspells the word.
| [deleted]
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Hmm, im on mobile now but I believe it's called non-tradeable
| goods in english.
|
| Basically you cant move supply around.
| nickles wrote:
| > should be heavy state intervention on it, preferably by doing
| the same as Vienna, which is holding >40% of the renting stock
| and charging according to income
|
| This is great policy if you want to make housing unaffordable.
| When supply is less than demand, prices go up. Those price
| increases incentivize builders to increase the housing stock
| (which subsequently lowers prices). Capping prices prevents the
| price mechanism from working, leaving a shortage of housing.
|
| > Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts
| the rest of the economy
|
| I'm happy (perhaps not quite the right word...) to pay rent. I
| don't want to own property. It's a large, illiquid investment
| with high transaction fees, carry costs, and concentration
| risk. My landlord takes all the risk of owning the property
| (prices don't always go up after all).
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Why would housing become unaffordable if the state
| intervenes? The purpose is precisely to control
| affordability. Prices are controlled for social housing, and
| flexing supply allows you to influence the free market
| prices.
|
| Supply is always less than demand in dense cities/countries,
| leaving it for the 'invisible hand' only ensures that the
| whole market is unaffordable and/or gentrified. Like what we
| are seeing in this news piece.
|
| I don't know exactly how it works here in the Netherlands,
| but as far as I understand the government leases land to the
| constructors at its own pace, with strict quotas on social
| housing, to let vs to buy ratio, and free-market properties.
| It isn't perfect (massive bubble on the free market right
| now) but seems to work well enough.
| nickles wrote:
| > Supply is always less than demand in dense
| cities/countries, leaving it for the 'invisible hand' only
| ensures that the whole market is unaffordable and/or
| gentrified
|
| Is that the case in Detroit? I'd wager there's
| substantially more supply than demand.
|
| > It isn't perfect (massive bubble right now) but seems to
| work well enough.
|
| If there's a massive bubble then it seems like that system
| didn't control prices.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > If there's a massive bubble then it seems like that
| system didn't control prices.
|
| The bubble mostly affects new home buyers, which are the
| ones who need the least protection.
|
| Rent is inflation-adjusted and can't be raised at will,
| so there is a very long delay between market prices
| increasing and most tenants actually bearing the cost.
| Everyone living in social housing still has a home, and
| won't be evicted so that another person can come in to
| pay 2x the rent. Seems pretty good to me.
|
| I don't know much about Detroit but it seems to
| demonstrate that the simple supply-demand model does not
| reflect reality. Prices should have dropped
| significantly, but instead it followed the same curve as
| the rest of the USA, with those $500 properties being a
| localized phenomenon.
| nickles wrote:
| > The bubble mostly affects new home buyers, which are
| the ones who need the least protection.
|
| So now you (or more generally the government) get to
| decide who is more deserving of appropriately priced
| housing? Why do new home buyers need less protection?
|
| > Rent is inflation-adjusted and can't be raised at will,
| so there is a very long delay between market prices
| increasing and most tenants actually bearing the cost.
|
| This is precisely the problem with this policy. When
| price doesn't feed through to the market, the market
| can't adjust. People simultaneously argue that the free
| market doesn't work while endorsing policies that prevent
| the market from working.
|
| > it seems to demonstrate that the simple supply-demand
| model does not reflect reality
|
| The population dropped from its peak by 1.2mm people.
| Prices subsequently fell so much that it was _possible to
| buy houses for $500_. That's exactly what the supply
| /demand model would predict.
| Ryder123 wrote:
| Those $500 homes are not inhabitable. As someone who was
| in Detroit less than 24 hours ago, I can tell you I was
| surprised at how expensive the housing was. Not that it
| was close to Bay Area prices, but I was expecting to see
| places I liked for 300-400k. The reality is more like
| 600k for less than 2,000 square feet.
| nickles wrote:
| > The reality is more like 600k for less than 2,000
| square feet.
|
| "In June 2022, Detroit home prices were up 32.3% compared
| to last year, selling for a median price of $99K. On
| average, homes in Detroit sell after 27 days on the
| market compared to 23 days last year. There were 463
| homes sold in June this year, down from 512 last year."
|
| [0] https://www.redfin.com/city/5665/MI/Detroit/housing-
| market
| jdhn wrote:
| You absolutely can get houses for 300-400K in Detroit.
| Where exactly were you looking at? Houses that you're
| describing are definitely possible in hot areas like
| Downtown and Downtown adjacent areas like Corktown,
| Indian Woods, and Midtown.
| Ryder123 wrote:
| I was looking in those areas.
|
| Agreed that you can find $300k houses (and cheaper). I
| was just surprised that the nicer areas were still pricy.
| I mean Indian Village, and the neighborhoods you
| mentioned, have some nice homes, but those neighborhoods
| feel like an oasis surrounded by areas that are dealing
| with very tough economic situations.
|
| Again, I was just surprised at the price for places I
| liked. If I wanted to take a chance on a neighborhood
| that might turn around in the next few years I could find
| some deals (although a lot of those homes need a lot of
| work).
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >It isn't perfect (massive bubble on the free market right
| now) but seems to work well enough.
|
| No it doesn't. We have massive wait lists for social
| housing, and being middle class arguably leaves you in a
| worse state due to social housing eligibility only applying
| to very low incomes, and anyone with an office job close to
| the city will easily earn too much for social housing, but
| not enough for private norms. Meanwhile those with social
| housing are incentivized to stay as the costs are far lower
| than private, and the repercussions are lacking.
|
| The problem has been obvious for decades, yet the
| government felt zero incentive to do anything when it was
| possible. To top it off, there's a general reluctance to
| build due to emission limits. And our government is
| actively bending over to the farmers making things even
| worse.
|
| The Netherlands is the perfect example of what _not_ to do
| when trying to intervene.
| cataphract wrote:
| This is what I remember when I lived in Utrecht a decade
| ago. It would only work for a subset of people. People
| who would get on the list for public housing once they
| moved there for college. And in some cases delay getting
| married so that their combined income wouldn't go over
| the threshold...
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Utrecht is probably the worst offender of all. Huge
| demand, but most notably huge demand from people willing
| to work for low wages. I've noticed employers in Utrecht
| being extreme cheapskates despite the way higher CoL
| compared to even its immediate surroundings, and being a
| hub city in the heart of the country, far more pushing
| for hybrid.
|
| I don't expect it to change either. Too many students
| still under the impression earning 2.5k-3.5k gross out of
| college is "great", despite that exact salary putting
| them in the uncanny valley of renting (no social housing,
| not enough too entice landlords). Unless you left your
| student time with a partner to share, which has become
| increasingly more rare.
| golergka wrote:
| > Why would housing become unaffordable if the state
| intervenes? The purpose is precisely to control
| affordability.
|
| Because intended purpose differs from actual outcome, and
| such regulation almost always creates different
| consequences.
|
| Best intentions pave the road to hell.
|
| > Prices are controlled for social housing, and flexing
| supply allows you to influence the free market prices.
|
| When you control prices, you destroy investment in supply.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Is housing unaffordable in Vienna? If so, your mechanism
| might explain it. If housing is not unaffordable in Vienna,
| your explanation seems likely to be missing something.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Housing is becoming unnafordable in Vienna again... because
| they didn't keep up with their program and now public offer
| is way behind of what should be.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Unless of course your builders wise up and work together to
| produce the bare minimum of housing stock required in order
| to keep prices rising, as they don't want to flood with stock
| and reduce demand.
| madsbuch wrote:
| > Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the
| housing stock
|
| Ahh yes, walking around in NY seeing building projects to
| increase the supply of housing in the 4th dimension where
| land is plentiful and the rivers are clean /s
| macNchz wrote:
| There was just a pretty huge rezoning (with much NIMBY
| protest) of the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, close to
| Manhattan, which is currently mostly composed of empty lots
| and single-story warehouses/light manufacturing around the
| corner from desirable neighborhoods of $4m brownstones. Now
| developers will be allowed to build residential buildings
| up to 30 stories there. I live nearby and walking around in
| just the last few months the number of new projects
| starting has been kind of extraordinary.
| https://www.curbed.com/2021/11/brooklyn-gowanus-rezoning-
| dev...
|
| Similar story currently underway from Manhattan's Lower
| East Side a few years ago:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_Crossing
|
| Even if it's already densely built, there is plenty of
| space that can be better used.
| nickles wrote:
| > Ahh yes, walking around in NY seeing building projects to
| increase the supply of housing in the 4th dimension where
| land is plentiful and the rivers are clean /s
|
| Have you tried obtaining building permits in NYC? My
| understanding is that it's not easy. If you don't allow
| builders to construct new housing then you won't get new
| housing, regardless of price level.
| oezi wrote:
| Free market advocates always find the next culprit why
| the market can't deliver.
|
| I can only speak of Berlin where land prices and
| construction prices have increased by demand so much,
| that new construction is coming in at 4x than 10 years
| ago (from 2k per sqm to 8k). I don't see how the market
| is really solving anything here.
| nickles wrote:
| > Free market advocates always find the next culprit why
| the market can't deliver.
|
| I advocate for the free market because it's been the most
| reliable way of elevating humans from subsistence levels
| of consumption and improving their quality of life. It's
| been the driving force in elevating billions of people
| from poverty over recent decades. I'd wager that most
| people, free market advocates or otherwise, would
| consider that a good thing.
|
| To be clear, there are cases where markets fail. In those
| cases, government intervention can actually produce more
| efficient outcomes. Consider the case of basic research.
| Private enterprises would have be foolish to pay for
| glowing worms and shrimp treadmills; there's just no
| clear payoff. _But this seemingly silly research is
| critical to progress_. For example, the research on
| glowing worms (GFP added to C. Elegans) ended up winning
| the Nobel Prize and is crucial for observing biological
| processes in living organisms.
|
| > new construction is coming in at 4x than 10 years
| ago... I don't see how the market is really solving
| anything here.
|
| It sounds like high prices incentivized builders to
| increase construction by 400% over 10 years? That seems
| like the price mechanism is driving an increase in
| housing supply, exactly as one would want when there's a
| shortage of housing.
| noelherrick wrote:
| Industrialization, constitutional democracy, science,
| regulation, and unions have raised standards of living
| for the majority of people. You forget history if you
| don't remember things like the Battle of Blair Mountain
| (first aerial bombardment on US soil) or the Triangle
| Shirtwaist factory, not to mention the incredible death
| and misery inflicted by that first capitalistic country
| Britain. The free market does not feel very free to the
| vast majority of people who have to deal with incredibly
| oppressive companies and plutocrats, and when laws and
| police are geared to oppressing the poor and the jobless.
|
| Do not take me to advocate for centralized planning, but
| we do have to have democratic governmental intervention
| to prevent the free market from chewing us all up and
| spitting us out.
| ponow wrote:
| > The free market does not feel very free to the vast
| majority of people who have to deal with incredibly
| oppressive companies
|
| Yeah, people complain on their iphones, with their
| increased lifespans, and surfeit of food, so that even
| the poor are fat. Cry me a river.
| wyre wrote:
| Dude, have some compassion.
| ponow wrote:
| As someone who once did basic research, I don't buy the
| government-funded basic research argument anymore. If we
| had negligible taxes, the hyper-rich would fund some
| basic research, and there would be some private research
| as well. It would not go away completely. People can
| cooperate without government. Why would anyone fund a
| church tithe voluntarily, since the market wouldn't
| predict such a thing? Yet people freely pay.
|
| More importantly, try arguing that it is morally correct
| that a hard-working laborer ought to fund a Webb
| telescope by non-optional taxes, when he sees no direct
| value in it. Why even 1 penny? Because his betters in a
| grant agency know better what to do with the fruits of
| his labor than he does?
|
| It was disgusting to witness Biden take a victory lap for
| the Webb telescope. It wasn't his money nor engineering
| and scientific effort, that's for certain.
|
| Please, no utilitarian defenses of funding basic research
| by taxes. We need a moral defense. I don't see it at all.
| You can only defend it if you think people are too stupid
| to know their own interests.
| nickles wrote:
| > More importantly, try arguing that it is morally
| correct that a hard-working laborer ought to fund a Webb
| telescope by non-optional taxes, when he sees no direct
| value in it. Why even 1 penny? Because his betters in a
| grant agency know better what to do with the fruits of
| his labor than he does?
|
| There is an optimal level of spending on basic research
| for society, and it's not 0. Was it a bad idea to launch
| unproven satellites into space in the 1970s? Your laborer
| didn't see the immediate benefit, but now that worker has
| GPS, which almost certainly improved the worker's life.
| In fact, the technologies enabled by GPS were
| unimaginable at the onset of the project. Should the
| project have been scrapped entirely?
|
| It's impossible to say whether research will produce
| valuable results a priori. But it's not true that your
| laborer doesn't see benefit. The price we pay to live in
| organized society is taxation. Should that same laborer
| argue that he shouldn't pay taxes for highways built 400
| miles away? Is it _possible_ that this laborer _may not
| know what 's best 100% of the time_?
| ponow wrote:
| It's obvious that in the absence of state funding there
| would be non-state funding. It won't be the same and it
| won't be zero. Why does the committee's judgement take
| precedent?
|
| Also, some poorer people would pay to fund research in
| the absence of gov't funding. They actually already do,
| for disease research.
|
| You can use utilitarian arguments to force people to do
| things that they otherwise would refuse. Isn't that a
| kissing cousin to indentured servitude?
|
| Also, do you knot think I understand the riskiness of
| research? As if I haven't endured a few decades of
| poverty as a result?
| nickles wrote:
| > It's obvious that in the absence of state funding there
| would be non-state funding. It won't be the same and it
| won't be zero.
|
| From an economic perspective, it's likely the level of
| funding would be less than the optimal level of funding.
| If the goal is to maximize public welfare, government
| funding is necessary.
|
| > Why does the committee's judgement take precedent?
|
| Ultimately someone needs to make decisions on resource
| allocation. Is a committee necessarily the best way?
| Maybe, maybe not. I'm not qualified to tell NIH how to
| operate.
|
| > You can use utilitarian arguments to force people to do
| things that they otherwise would refuse
|
| Agreed entirely, it's a very difficult issue to grapple
| with.
| runnerup wrote:
| I'm a HUGE believer in reducing barriers to competition.
| I _agree_ that high prices should lead to entrepreneurial
| increase of supply. However, I think it 's massively,
| massively important to realize the successes of some
| planned economies. I'm not trying to use empty rhetoric
| in the following paragraph, I'm trying to identify the
| "free market"-iness of many of the most impactful "ways
| of elevating humans" in the past 500 years:
|
| The "free market" did not establish the US interstate
| highway system and power grid, or lift 1.4 billion people
| in China out of poverty in a single generation. The free
| market did not establish railroads in the US
| (monopolistic robber-baron markets are not free markets).
| Free markets did not elevate Europeans from 1500-1950
| (colonial slavery). Free markets did not sustain American
| agriculture for one hundred years after slavery was
| abolished (prison labor).
|
| --------
|
| The real point of this is: Maybe it's okay if we have a
| China-style or 1930-1950's USA-style planned economy to
| spark a domestic renaissance via:
|
| - Massive housing initiative, starting with the base
| (bringing more people into trades, greatly expanding
| domestic material supply, and a fierce fight against
| NIMBY-ism). This will have to _first_ cause a glut of
| material and labor, while keeping the excess labor happy
| (paid) and future material supply expanding (subsidies).
| Free market isn 't great at pushing through local
| optimums...but cheaper supply should lead to increased
| utilization eventually!
|
| - All new housing should be luxury. High efficiency, high
| comfort -- these will be what everyone is living in 20
| years from now. It doesn't cost _that_ much more to build
| but it makes a massive difference in QoL. Personally I
| dream of mid-rises and high-rises where people can
| practice tuba /piano/drums without bothering the
| surrounding units, or lift weights, or run a small
| woodshop. Have access to spaces where larger projects can
| be undertaken: DIY car repair, for example. This should
| _greatly_ improve entrepreneurialism.
|
| - Pharmaceutical / healthcare reform
|
| - Intellectual property reform (exponentially growing
| annual fees for patents, etc)
|
| - Import/export/sales tax reform (regulatory compliance
| is incredibly hard and expensive, sales tax is super
| regressive and anti-entrepreneurial because it encourages
| vertical integration to avoid "sales" being taxed, VAT
| would be much more friendly to a true free market for
| niche value-adds to gain foothold).
|
| - Massive education reform (pay teachers enough ($120k+)
| to have a surplus of expert labor migrate in from
| engineering / management / trades / science careers.
|
| - Migrate manufacturing out of China and into disparate
| continents (South America, Africa, greater Asia).
| Domestic manufacturing would obviously be amazing but I
| think USA is too economically fragile to handle the
| increased costs of safety and environmental controls
| which the US people would rightly demand.
|
| People are worried that if the housing market experiences
| a glut that people who saved all their money into their
| home as an investment will lose their retirement.
| However, I believe that as additional high-density units
| are built, the land those homeowners can sell will
| increase greatly in value -- because the house can be
| torn down and a mid-rise or skyscraper can be placed
| there instead, turning it from an unaffordable single-
| family "value" to a very affordable 10-50 family "value".
| That land would be worth way more if a midrise or
| highrise could be built on it.
| dzonga wrote:
| even in a "free" speech country like the USA. you
| would've been arrested for WrongThink / ThoughtCrime for
| putting out thoughts like this if this was 70 years ago.
| treeman79 wrote:
| The free market did not create the highway system, but
| the enormous wealth created by the free market payed for
| it.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| That was a free market where the US was the last
| industrial power producing goods to be consumed by a
| completely destroyed world. If those are the
| circumstances you can provide as evidence the free market
| works as intended you may need something else
| runnerup wrote:
| The free market of WW2 paid for the interstate highway
| system? Every heavy industry was commandeered by the US
| government and strict salary controls were implemented by
| the government. Households had strict quotas for what
| they were allowed to purchase.
|
| Or before that? When the civilian conservation corps
| employed huge amounts of Americans to build Mount
| Rushmore and the Hoover Dam?
|
| The decades immediately leading up to the construction of
| the interstate highway USA was one of the _least_ free
| our market has ever been.
| hpkuarg wrote:
| > the Nobel Prize
|
| Another product of the free market, if you will ;-)
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| There's plenty of land in nyc. There are areas of Manhattan
| that are entirely sub-5 story buildings. There are areas of
| queens that are mostly low density warehouses. Long Island
| City, which is more or less 2 stops on the train out of
| Manhattan, is extremely sparse.
| Victerius wrote:
| Rents are already through the roof. If that hasn't
| incentivized builders to build enough housing to lower rents
| in places people want to live, why not go for the centralized
| solution?
|
| CMV
|
| The "let the free market take care of it; government
| intervention can only make it unaffordable" view is standing
| on extremely shaky legs today.
| nickles wrote:
| > The "let the free market take care of it; government
| intervention can only make it unaffordable" view is
| standing on extremely shaky legs today.
|
| The term "NIMBY" is commonly used to describe people who
| prevent new construction of housing. They typically use
| legal maneuvers (like requiring years of environmental
| review) to do this. By allowing this to continue,
| government intervention supports unaffordable housing.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| >When supply is less than demand, prices go up
|
| Question though... why, exactly does that _have_ to be the
| case? Especially with something like housing where say there
| is mostly a fixed supply at any point and you can 't just
| turn a machine on/off to produce more.
|
| The only reason the prices go up is because of greed
| basically- because people say "hey I can just charge more and
| people will pay more!". And there in lies the bullshit of the
| free market once again. It always benefits the people with
| money, who can afford to pay that amount more "just to get
| what they want".
|
| The last few years in particular have made me so tired of
| hearing about people talk about supply & demand like it is
| some unarguable hard scientific fact. It's not even close to
| that. It just represents how much people like to price gouge
| because "they can"
|
| >Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the
| housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices). Capping
| prices prevents the price mechanism from working, leaving a
| shortage of housing.
|
| And the following part of this is also just more bullshit.
| I'm not saying you are "wrong", but you say it as if that is
| how things _have to work_ and there is no other alternative.
|
| Every word of what you said is based on greed and squeezing
| the most you possibly can from people. Please realize that.
| charliea0 wrote:
| Well demand rising is an abstraction for relative balance
| between buyers and sellers of a good.
|
| Say there's one free apartment in NYC and two marginal
| buyers submit bids: Alice and Bob. If Alice offers
| $1000/month and Bob offers $1200/month, then Bob gets the
| lease. The marginal rent is $1200.
|
| If another apartment is built then Alice leases it and the
| marginal rent is $1000. Similarly, if a new buyer Charlie
| enters the market and bids $1500 then $1500 is the marginal
| rent.
|
| The number of people with apartments depends only on the
| number of apartments built. Which buyers get apartments
| depends on their relative ability to pay. The price depends
| on what the marginal apartment-buyer will pay. That is the
| lowest amount offered that still gets an apartment.
| nickles wrote:
| > Question though... why, exactly does that have to be the
| case? Especially with something like housing where say
| there is mostly a fixed supply at any point and you can't
| just turn a machine on/off to produce more.
|
| Supply/demand is a basic tenet of economics. You can
| visualize the model with supply/demand graphs [0], which
| help make the model more intuitive.
|
| The issue of the fixed supply is known as 'stickiness'.
| Most things in the economy lag policy, and data that we use
| to observe the economy also tends to lag. This is why it's
| really bad to have poorly designed policy; course
| correction is difficult, and people are hurt in the
| meantime.
|
| > Every word of what you said is based on greed and
| squeezing the most you possibly can from people. Please
| realize that.
|
| It could be fun to channel Gordon Gecko, but I disagree
| that this is about greed. I care about well designed
| economic policy because I care about people's well-being.
|
| [0] https://www.edrawmax.com/article/supply-and-demand-
| graph.htm...
| ponow wrote:
| Activity guided by rational self-interest causes rapid
| improvement to the things that people value (_exchange_
| value, not some other value for which people don't trade
| scarce things).
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I largely agree, but if there is a scarce good (where there
| is less of it available than people want -- i.e. supply is
| less than demand) then we have to ration it /somehow/. The
| American way is by bidding up the price, so whoever is
| willing to pay the most money gets it. The Soviet way was
| by queuing, so whoever gets in line first gets it. We could
| also do it by lottery. We can come up with any number of
| schemes and most of them are "fairer" than market pricing,
| but they do all involve the "price" going up in some sense.
| Either you pay more in money, or in time, or in luck, but
| the price has increased because there are more people
| chasing the stuff than there is stuff to chase.
| ponow wrote:
| Very nice description. No free lunch.
| nhooyr wrote:
| There is a machine... Of thousands of workers. If those
| people can't make more money, they have less incentive to
| recruit more and build more housing stock faster...
|
| Such price signals are a basic element of the efficiency of
| the free market.
| karatinversion wrote:
| > Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the
| housing stock
|
| Of course this does not work if building new housing is
| illegal, in which case you might as well have the rent
| control.
| nickles wrote:
| > Of course this does not work if building new housing is
| illegal, in which case you might as well have the rent
| control.
|
| Or make it possible to build new housing. Rent control is a
| subsidy to existing residents to the detriment of people
| who would otherwise move to the area.
| f17 wrote:
| > Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the
| housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices). Capping
| prices prevents the price mechanism from working, leaving a
| shortage of housing.
|
| The issue, empirically, is that (a) we don't see the right
| housing being built, and (b) we don't see quality housing
| being built. We see a lot of high-end luxury units being
| built, but what we need are more 1- and 2-bedroom units
| within 20 minutes (preferably, by affordable public transit)
| of where people work. We also see a lot of large (and
| therefore expensive) but cheaply built McMansions that'll be
| falling down in 20-40 years, so the long-term picture of the
| housing stock is not improved.
|
| What we need is for the government to step in and build
| affordable housing as a floor at a controlled price ("commie
| blocks"). No one will be forced to live in one, of course,
| but they'll be an option; the rich can still buy property on
| the market if they're so inclined.
|
| > My landlord takes all the risk of owning the property
| (prices don't always go up after all).
|
| If you own your house and control your geography (i.e.,
| you'll never be forced to move due to economic inopportunity)
| then you have the truly risk-free position. Renters are at
| much higher risk (log transform, Kelly Criterion) than
| landlords, because real estate costs are such a high
| percentage of their budgets.
|
| The problem, of course, is that owning a house, while it
| gives you a zero beta to the housing market in theory, still
| does have the risks you described. For one thing, other
| people can do things that damage your house's value--both its
| subjective value as a place to live, and its objective market
| price--such as building highways and obstructing sun/view.
| The other issue is that, in today's hypercompetitive world
| where in decent employment every job search is national (and
| possibly international) it's impossible to control your
| geography... you could be laid off and forced to relocate to
| get your next position.
|
| So, you're not wrong in general. I think it's a wise
| financial decision for a young person to keep renting one's
| place--as opposed to renting money to buy a place--but I also
| think it's inaccurate to imply that landlords are taking more
| risks than they really are. It really gets on my nerves when
| rich people and employers talk about how they're "taking all
| the risk" and therefore deserve more, when the truth is that
| the poor (involuntarily) take all the risk, because each $100
| means so much more to them.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Yet it isn't working in most european cities. Price increases
| and capital holders always build behind the offer/demand
| curve so they get a better yield from it. Also, rent is
| always high enough to milk as much as possible from modal
| income, as demand is pretty inelastic.
|
| Also, read carefully, I don't want price control directly
| onto the private sector but the adminsitration controlling a
| big chunk of the offer.
| nickles wrote:
| > I don't want price control directly onto the private
| sector but the adminsitration controlling a big chunk of
| the offer.
|
| If the government sets prices for 40% of the market, it's
| price control by definition.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| It doesn't work like that, because not all property nor
| customer is even. A luxury apartment is not competing
| with a 2 bedroom public housing apartment. And there will
| be floating population, there will people moving in,
| there will be people with special needs that public
| housing doesn't cover, etc etc
|
| Maybe such situation would actually push investors to be
| innovative with housing for once. If regulations allow
| that, of course, which is important too.
| foven wrote:
| Yet somehow this doesn't seem to materialize in any
| meaningful way, the price of housing has only been going up
| exponentially and I'm sure builders are doing their best to
| build more but it's not getting any cheaper.
| jahnu wrote:
| Been this way in Vienna for many many decades and still it's
| a very affordable city. So I dunno, I do believe this can go
| wrong if implemented incorrectly and has done in some cities,
| but it hasn't here yet and looks fairly stable for the
| foreseeable too.
| ipaddr wrote:
| How many new units have been added over the last 20 years?
| jahnu wrote:
| Not sure exactly but the population has grown from 1.5
| million in 2001 to 1.9 million in 2021 Some of that
| growth fit into existing stock but since the late 90s
| there has been a lot of new neighbourhoods built. The
| city generally plans ahead, even building public
| transport like metro out before it is completely needed.
|
| E.g. out to this new neighbourhood
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspern
| namdnay wrote:
| I think that's more due to the relative attractiveness of
| the cities. London, NYC, Paris etc have become extremely
| expensive because they're world cities, attracting huge
| amounts of people and jobs. That's not really the case for
| Vienna, or Glasgow, or Riga etc
| jahnu wrote:
| In fact Vienna has had a huge population growth in the
| past 20 years
| rr888 wrote:
| Fewer people than 100 years ago, compare that to Bay
| Area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna#Demographics
| jahnu wrote:
| 100 years ago there were 4 families in the now single
| apartment I live in. There was an extreme housing crisis
| and the current system started then as a direct response
| to that extreme overcrowding.
|
| Bay Area could learn a lot from Vienna. Especially about
| building up.
| Baloo wrote:
| >Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the
| housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices).
|
| This is not reality though. Here in the UK our housing is in
| major crisis because people simply cannot afford the insane
| price increases. Pretty much everyone I know shares their
| living situation, on their own they would not be able to
| afford basic amenities.
|
| The guardian today published an article showing:
|
| >Average monthly rental payments were now 40% higher than
| they were 10 years ago, while typical mortgage payments for
| the same properties were up 13%.
|
| Landlords and property owners are hiking the prices way
| beyond reasonable value, in some parts of the country rent is
| up by over 20% in the last year alone. By your logic there
| should be an incentive for builders to increase the housing
| stock, but private enterprise aren't building anymore homes
| now than they were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.
|
| We do however have a situation where the average mortgage is
| about PS900 per month, whereas the average rent has
| skyrocketed to PS1600 per month (PS1100 outside of London,
| PS2200 in London). Available rental stock is down 25%, with
| demand up 5%. It's great for property speculators, buy-to-let
| landlords and property developers, people are offering above
| asking prices simply to secure a home.
|
| >My landlord takes all the risk of owning the property
| (prices don't always go up after all).
|
| Sure there is risk, but when you charge 30% more than you
| repay for the mortgage, while at the same time property
| prices rise 75% in 10 years, it's safe to say that the cash
| cow is being thoroughly milked for every last drop and as a
| result many people are suffering.
|
| Ultimately there shouldn't be 'risk', this mindset is a big
| problem. Homes are a fundamental, basic human need. Using
| them as an investment method, business model or means to
| hedge against inflation, is causing rampant speculation and
| quite honestly extorting people that have no other choice,
| exploiting vulnerable families that need a home. It should be
| an extremely tightly controlled market, with sufficient
| funding to ensure that quality & affordable housing is
| available for everyone.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| feet wrote:
| Yea, and they're disagreeing. What are you trying to say?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| hedora wrote:
| It takes two parties to increase the price of a housing
| unit. If rents are up 20% that means people are willing to
| pay 20% more.
|
| I don't know about the UK, but here in California, prices
| have skyrocketed, but so has the price of construction.
|
| There are two reasons that has happened:
|
| 1) Shortage of construction workers. The ones that are here
| are either (well paid) first generation immigrants, make
| more than Silicon Valley windfall money because they speak
| fluent English and are competent, or are completely
| incompetent. We don't have enough of the first group, so be
| prepared to pay 2-3x the cost of materials to get anything
| done (with the second group acting as middle men, and the
| third group taking your money, only to have you pay someone
| else to fix it later).
|
| 2) Policies that discourage the building of new rental
| units:
|
| 2a) We have a vacant house on our property. A non-
| structural remodel for it would cost > $50K to get through
| permitting, and we're looking at >> $300 sq/ft for the
| actual remodel. If we did all that, we could either pay a
| special tax on vacation homes owned by individuals in
| unincorporated areas that the townies just passed (to help
| the housing crisis by somehow freeing up housing units in
| town, where the tax does not apply), or we could rent it
| out. If we rented it out to a problem tenant, we could
| literally never get rid of them (unless they decided to not
| pay rent, but even then, it's 5+ years of court battles).
| So the house stays vacant.
|
| 2b) We just built a house. It took almost a year to clear
| permitting, and $100K's of wasted nonsense work. Many
| developable plots in this area are purchased, planning
| bankrupts the new owners, and then they're sold to the next
| saps. According to the neighbors, getting permits to build
| a house around here in under 3 years is unheard of. The
| result? We have a house, but we are way, way, under water
| in terms of money put in vs. current valuation. At the
| lower valuations, the houses around here are not
| "affordable" by any means. However, if you look at what it
| would have cost us to develop this land anywhere else in
| the country, we would have paid way under market value.
|
| Problem (1) could be fixed by encouraging contractors from
| out of the state to fly in to work here. Apparently, the
| state has erected licensing barriers to make this hard. I
| think a lot of money ($1B) is waiting to be taken off the
| table via arbitrage.
|
| Problem (2) is consistently worsened by voters that think
| that capping housing costs, "protecting tenants" and other
| things that further constrict housing supply will somehow
| lower prices.
|
| The easiest way out of this problem is (1) allow out-of-
| state firms to build housing and (2) fast-track all new
| housing permits, including financial liability if the
| planning commission creates unnecessary delays, unnecessary
| work, or approves / passes inspection on substandard work.
|
| They should also replace the state wide mandate to reduce
| commuter miles (which is basically a mandate to increase
| congestion by tearing out roads) with a mandate to reduce
| the total carbon emissions per capita spent on transit
| (which would be a mandate to invest in public transit, bike
| lanes, and in reducing congestion).
|
| None of those things are politically tenable, so I guess
| the millennials will just live in RVs or 4-to-a-bedroom
| until the voting population turns over.
| Baloo wrote:
| There's good and bad regulation. Bureaucracy in the wrong
| place is a pain, but without crucial regulations I feel
| that private capital would be even more ruthless and we'd
| be left with badly built homes, in badly planned
| communities, lacking services and infrastructure, without
| much care for the environmental impact..
|
| It's really hard to see a way out of this for me without
| extreme interference by government..
| nickles wrote:
| > Here in the UK our housing is in major crisis because
| people simply cannot afford the insane price increases.
| Pretty much everyone I know shares their living situation,
| on their own they would not be able to afford basic
| amenities.
|
| The housing in UK is in crisis because there have not been
| enough homes built. My rent has gone up too, but it's not
| because my landlord is greedy. The cost of maintaining the
| building has gone up thanks to inflation
| (plumbers/electricians/superintendent/etc.) all have to be
| paid higher wages. Replacing broken fixtures is more
| expensive. If the landlord has a floating rate mortgage,
| the cost of paying the mortgage went up. For commercial
| apartment rentals, those companies have debt that now needs
| to be rolled over at higher rates.
|
| > By your logic there should be an incentive for builders
| to increase the housing stock, but private enterprise
| aren't building anymore homes now than they were 10, 20,
| 30, 40, 50 years ago.
|
| So is it a problem that they aren't building more or not?
| If we agree that more housing needs to be built, then the
| proper incentives must be in place. And a proper incentive
| may actually be as simple as eliminating a disincentive
| (e.g. 4 years of environmental review prior to the
| project's approval).
|
| > Available rental stock is down 25%, with demand up 5%.
| It's great for property speculators, buy-to-let landlords
| and property developers, people are offering above asking
| prices simply to secure a home.
|
| It's great until it isn't. Interest rates are rising, and
| mortgages in the UK are much shorter term than in the US.
| That means the impact of rate hikes is more immediate on
| housing prices. And if available stock being down is a
| problem (which it is), the obvious solution is to produce
| more. Alternatively, I have a modest proposal [0] that
| would also solve the problem.
|
| > Ultimately there shouldn't be 'risk', this mindset is a
| big problem.
|
| Risk is omnipresent. If I purchase property, I have all
| sorts of risk. My building may burn down. My neighborhood
| may become undesirable to live in. I might not be able to
| take a job in a new location. I tried to pick examples that
| aren't about investment. These are risks that the landlord
| assumes for me.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
| Baloo wrote:
| >The housing in UK is in crisis because there have not
| been enough homes built. >So is it a problem that they
| aren't building more or not? If we agree that more
| housing needs to be built, then the proper incentives
| must be in place. And a proper incentive may actually be
| as simple as eliminating a disincentive (e.g. 4 years of
| environmental review prior to the project's approval).
|
| And this is a part of why it should be administered by
| governments and not just let loose to market forces.
| Homes can't just be built wherever, whenever. It should
| be meticulously planned and integrated with various
| public services. There's no real financial incentive to
| build 100,000 houses in the middle of nowhere, it needs
| to have schools, hospitals, infrastructure etc. A
| property developer would rather squash a bunch of
| apartments or buy some old stock, refit everything and
| charge a premium.
|
| >It's great until it isn't. Interest rates are rising,
| and mortgages in the UK are much shorter term than in the
| US.
|
| They actually suggested recently to offer multi-
| generational mortgages... That's how crazy the market is
| getting.
|
| >These are risks that the landlord assumes for me.
|
| Those are risks your landlord should have insurance for.
| In a world where property isn't such a commodity, those
| risks don't really have the same meaning or value.
|
| We've largely left house building to the 'market forces'
| and it is failing us, that is the reality. What happened
| to the second largest construction firm in the UK? "The
| largest ever trading liquidation in the UK - which began
| in January 2018" - Carillion collapsed with PS7 billion
| in liabilities.
|
| "One of the UK's biggest landlords, owns over 1,000
| properties, tried to ban 'coloured' people from renting
| because of the curry smell" - What happens to people that
| are 'undesirable' to landlords, they need a home too or
| should they simply be destitute or constantly bounced
| around the lowest standard of housing stock available?
|
| Rent caps are probably not effective or radical enough to
| actually solve this crisis. I think if we really want to
| do something, it's going to hurt a lot of peoples 'net
| worth'.
| nickles wrote:
| > And this is a part of why it should be administered by
| governments and not just let loose to market forces...
| There's no real financial incentive to build 100,000
| houses in the middle of nowhere
|
| That's exactly what the Chinese government did, only at a
| larger scale. It hasn't worked out well.
|
| > They actually suggested recently to offer multi-
| generational mortgages... That's how crazy the market is
| getting.
|
| I saw that, it's absolutely wild.
|
| > Those are risks your landlord should have insurance
| for. In a world where property isn't such a commodity,
| those risks don't really have the same meaning or value.
|
| There are risks that can't be insured against. Suppose my
| employer relocates to another region, and I have the
| choice of following or finding a new job. If I own a
| house, I now have to sell it (incurring a 3-6%
| transaction cost and lots of headache). I can only sell
| it if there's a willing buyer, and there's no guarantee
| there will be any.
|
| My rent is covering the building's mortgage, taxes, and
| maintenance, which I would be paying if I owned the
| property. It may be marginally higher than the cost of
| ownership, but I have a strong preference for
| flexibility. That flexibility is worth the liquidity
| premium to me.
|
| > What happens to people that are 'undesirable' to
| landlords
|
| In the US, there's legislation that prohibits
| discrimination across a variety of protected classes
| (race, religion, sex, etc.) Does the UK have similar
| legislation? Putting aside ethics for a moment --
| discrimination is inefficient. It's in everyone's best
| interest to eliminate such behavior, whether through
| market forces or legislation.
| Baloo wrote:
| You should have that flexibility. There should be enough
| housing stock that you can move to another city and not
| have to worry about struggling to find a place, arranging
| visits for them to be cancelled or leased before you can
| even view it. There are parts of the world where
| government rental housing schemes are extremely
| successful, it also typically caters for those that would
| be left with nothing if we didn't intervene with the
| market. Yes there are laws against discrimination, that
| landlord was overruled in high court. That does not stop
| it from happening, in many different forms - there is
| never ending prejudice and difficulty simply getting a
| home for young people, disabled, minority backgrounds,
| immigrants, welfare recipients. The landlords have all
| the power when it comes to deciding who they allow to
| rent, they do not have any obligation to tell you why you
| were refused. Even though the court says it's illegal for
| him not to rent to certain races, what is stopping him?
|
| We live in a world where it is entirely feasible for
| every person to have good quality shelter, clean water,
| food and energy. For the most part, we allow market
| forces to control the access to goods and services.
| Wealth is being concentrated, property along with other
| vital services, are just another asset in the portfolio.
| It's missing humanity. We need homes, healthcare, water,
| food.. I think it's about time we prioritise this vs high
| profit, monetary gain, corporate excess and 'free
| markets' (they're never really free, always tipped in
| favour of the owners of capital).
| ehnto wrote:
| We're all very aware of how the economics should play out,
| but look around you, it's not working that way in a bunch of
| places. That's because houses are being used as investment
| vehicles, with rentals being thoroughly flogged because they
| know people have no choice but to pay. No amount of building
| will help if the value of the property is not intrinsically
| linked to the supply and demand of places to live for people
| who want to live there, but is instead linked or at least
| heavily influenced by what investors with increased buying
| capacity are willing to pay.
| nickles wrote:
| > No amount of building will help if the value of the
| property is not intrinsically linked to the supply and
| demand
|
| Building new houses _is_ intrinsically linked to supply.
| When you build a house, that increases the supply of
| housing. NIMBYs oppose new construction precisely to
| prevent the value of their properties from decreasing.
| ehnto wrote:
| Sorry, of course that's correct. I was trying to
| articulate that the supply and demand, as a whole, is not
| currently a marketplace for people with housing to sell
| to those who want to be housed (in many places). It's a
| marketplace dominated by investors and landlords, and
| people who want to be housed are having to stretch their
| funds as far as they possibly can to keep up with the
| market currently being made by investors and landlords.
| nickles wrote:
| > people who want to be housed are having to stretch
| their funds as far as they possibly can to keep up with
| the market currently being made by investors and
| landlords.
|
| I'm sympathetic to the difficulties people are facing
| right now, and I've seen the stories about housing being
| purchased by investors. The issue is that the data
| doesn't seem to indicate a structural change in ownership
| [0]. Home ownership appears to have peaked at 69.4% in
| 2004 and now sits at 65.4%, the same level as in 1980.
|
| [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
| theropost wrote:
| I agree 100% - on top of all that, the current housing strategy
| reduces the mobility of the workforce, so it becomes more
| difficult to move skilled workers from one region to another.
| On top of that, being generally considered as a persons most
| valuable asset, almost no-one wants "affordable housing" in
| there area, as it would bring down the value of their most
| valuable asset. We need to start considering people as the
| valuable asset, and not the house they live in.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| New York City already has like 150k+ income based public
| housing units.
|
| It's not ideal.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| 150k is nothing for NYC
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That represents like a half million tenants. "Nothing"
| isn't how I would describe it!
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| It is nothing. For public housing to make sense it has to
| be a considerable amount of the supply, and be
| universally available, not only for low-income people.
| klyrs wrote:
| [1]> NYCHA has approximately 13,000 employees serving
| about 173,946 families and approximately 392,259
| authorized residents. Based on the 2010 census, NYCHA's
| Public Housing represents 8.2% of the city's rental
| apartments and is home to 4.9% of the city's population.
| NYCHA residents and Section 8 voucher holders combined
| occupy 12.4% of the city's rental apartments.
|
| 1 out of 20 of the city's residents, 1 in 8 if you count
| voucher programs. That's far from nothing, but you're
| right, there's definitely room for improvement if you can
| cut through the red tape of nimbyism and corruption.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Housing_A
| uthorit...
| trident5000 wrote:
| Its about the 70th percentile, above average. But you're
| not living an extravagant life.
| trident5000 wrote:
| 150k is not a low salary even for NYC. You're not mr money
| bags with that though.
| TOMDM wrote:
| > CMV
|
| Rent is high because the demand in large cities majorly out
| strips supply.
|
| All policies that attempt to address housing costs that don't
| increase supply are treating a symptom and not the underlying
| cause.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Increasing the supply alone does not counter the
| gentrification / ghetto effects the parent comment talked
| about, in fact it might amplify them.
|
| A gross oversimplification, but if you somehow make ten
| thousand new apartments available in Manhattan at $1k/month,
| they will eventually fill up with low-income tenants, which
| will make them undesirable. Pressure on all the existing $5K
| properties will remain the same.
| a_c_s wrote:
| Pressure would remain the same just as eating a single
| grape would not abate a person's hunger: NYC has millions
| of existing housing units. To make a significant dent in
| the rent would require building hundreds of thousands of
| new apartments.
| runako wrote:
| Are you suggesting that people paying $5k are doing that
| because of some inherent property of a $5k rental, and that
| they would not prefer to pay the year 2000 rent on the same
| unit, say $3000?
|
| If people paying $5k would prefer to pay $3k for their
| units, why would this logic not also apply to people who
| are currently paying $3k?
|
| If lower rents would make the city become undesirable, why
| did people want to move there in the year 2000, when rents
| were much lower?
| pvarangot wrote:
| > inherent property of a $5k rental,
|
| The inherent property of a 5k rental he's referring to is
| that it costs 5k. Most people paying 5k for a studio just
| _don't want people around their houses_ specially if they
| are poorer than them. Otherwise they would be paying less
| than 3k for a room with a shared kitchen and bathroom or
| renting a bigger place with roommates.
| Aunche wrote:
| $1k/month rent isn't exactly low income material. As a high
| income SWE, I definitely feel like I'm sucking the city dry
| in a way. I'm not making $8 chopped cheeses. I'm not
| building parks. I'm not creating art. I'm just a consumer.
|
| Having said that, what's even worse than me is "low income"
| consumers. A lot of affordable housing, especially HDFC
| apartments, end up in the hands of the children of the
| rich. Not only are they not producing anything of value,
| they're also costing us tax dollars.
| mattzito wrote:
| Why would they fill up with low income tenants? Why would
| that make it undesirable?
| namelessoracle wrote:
| Because low income anywhere (rental area or even just low
| income suburban areas) typically has a population that is
| less able to invest into their area (in time or money),
| and historically has shown that they seek an extractive
| relationship with their environment rather than invest in
| it.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Haha "extractive relationship" come on man. Poor people
| aren't vampires, they _need_ to be resourceful in their
| environment to survive.
| feet wrote:
| Are you joking? Poor people are the exploitative ones?
| That's just entirely false
|
| The entire basis of capitalism in the US is that the work
| of the poor is exploited by those with the capital to
| build factories and businesses which extract labor and
| resources from the poor people
|
| That's why they _can 't_ invest. You have it entirely
| backwards
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Exactly. Most of a poor person's income will be spent
| locally every paycheck. Higher income, more is saved or
| sent offshore etc
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > All policies that attempt to address housing costs that
| don't increase supply are treating a symptom and not the
| underlying cause.
|
| So are the ones that do increase supply, so long as they are
| not doing it in a way which deliberately undercuts the fact
| that there are positive feedback loops at work (and cutting
| those positive feedback loops means reducing quality of life
| and economic opportunity in ways no one wants.)
|
| Among the thing that drives demand for housing is available
| work (demand for labor). Increasing housing supply so more of
| that demand is met increases demand for local services, and
| thereby available work, increasing demand for housing. That's
| not the _only_ positive feedback loop involved, but it 's one
| of them.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Sure that's the capitalist narrative explanation. The actual,
| human, explanation is that landlords see that they can get
| away with charging absurd rates because consumers are willing
| to make dumb decisions to get what they want, so they do it.
|
| I'm sick of these economic abstractions that constantly try
| to explain away our problems, and take away the
| responsibility from the human actors that cause these
| effects. It's not some abstract "supply and demand" that we
| should focus on--it is the landlords and renters and their
| decisions that are to blame. We need to introduce some agency
| and accountability back into our discussions of economics
| otherwise capitalism will continue to be an abstract machine
| in which horribly unethical actions are justified by removing
| human actors and human culpability from the equation. Belief
| in "the market" is not dissimilar to religious belief.
| Furthermore, analyses in capitalist terms often lead us to
| more problems. If the problem is "supply", people will say
| "ok build more homes", but that first of all never seems to
| actually work and secondly has a large number of additional
| negative effects such as increasing overcrowding and climate
| problems.This ridiculous tendency to not actually blame the
| people responsible for these negative conditions is
| ridiculous. It's a large part of the reason we're in this
| mess.
| rglullis wrote:
| There is no system that can work in large scale and depend
| on the good will of all (or the majority of) participants.
|
| If your system only works when everyone cooperates, you
| don't need the system in the first place. Believing that we
| can all live in this utopian ideal is more religious than
| "believing in the market"
| voidhorse wrote:
| I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's quite possible to
| introduce regulations into the existing system that
| _force_ certain actors to behave. I'm not expecting
| anyone to behave without such restrictions, in fact this
| article is precisely the evidence that people will
| exploit others and the system when no such restrictions
| exist.
|
| Many of these landlords are up charging on properties
| that have not been materially improved at all, because,
| as I said, people are making dumb decisions to live where
| they want to, so they can arbitrarily increase the price
| up to the limit of what someone will pay. This is great
| for landlords since they can double their money without
| doing any work.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm really frustrated by these
| incoming renters too. A lot of these people fled and
| abandoned the city like complete cowards when the
| pandemic hit and suddenly they want to return while they
| left the responsibility of keeping the city going on all
| the rest of us that are actual _residents_ that stayed.
| These semi-nomadic people are just as bad as the
| landlords and want to live somewhere only so long as it
| benefits them--they have no allegiance to a community.
| This, in conjunction with land owners behavior creates
| disastrous effects for actual long-term residents who
| invest in the local communities and don't run away the
| second things get hard.
| rglullis wrote:
| >I'm saying it's quite possible to introduce regulations
| into the existing system that force certain actors to
| behave.
|
| Tell me how you want to reinvent taxes and rent control,
| without knowing that you want to reinvent taxes and rent
| control.
|
| > I'm really frustrated by these incoming renters too.
|
| You are passing judgment to all these different groups of
| people, without any shred of fundamental principle to
| justify _why_ they need to act the way _you_ want.
|
| They don't owe anything to you or the city. Stop
| complaining like a spoiled child.
| voidhorse wrote:
| > They don't owe anything to you or the city.
|
| Of course not. And I don't owe them anything either. By
| the same terms of your argument there's no reason I
| should be satisfied with just letting them do what they
| want when it affects me directly since you're stating
| that I should not try to do anything that affects them
| directly. I have my desires, which requires placing
| demands on their behavior since they are ignorant of the
| conditions of other human beings, act entirely selfishly
| and in a vacuum, and ruin things for the rest of us.
|
| The fundamental principle is that people that are short-
| term renters disrupt communities in negative ways by
| having economic effects that harm long-term residents and
| ultimately break the existing community. I'm passing
| judgement on them because I witnessed the mass exodus
| that happened in 2020 and I witnessed all the struggle
| those who stayed had to endure and I witnessed the mass
| return of people that fled to "safer" spaces come back as
| though nothing happened and absolutely screw over
| everyone that stayed.
|
| You must not have ever been subject to gentrification.
| You've got a real empathetic heart. I'm not "complaining"
| I'm trying to speak to the problem and suggest that
| existing solutions clearly are not enough. If anything is
| childish it's your post, which tries to effectively say
| "we tried everything, there's no possible other solution"
| and "in spite of the insane number of problems currently
| evident in our economics capitalism is fine and people
| should be able to manipulate the market without bound".
| Your post has effectively no intellectual content. Being
| upset about something, evoking an opinion, and trying to
| advocate that we need a solution that will not only
| benefit myself but also the thousands of others affected
| by insane rent costs is not "acting like a spoiled
| child", in my opinion. Do I have that solution? No, of
| course not. I'm not qualified. But if we restricted
| commentary on hacker news to professionally qualified
| individuals this thread would have close to 0 comments.
|
| I don't think I'm the child here.
| rglullis wrote:
| > just letting them do what they want when it affects me
| directly
|
| Unless someone straight up breached their contract to
| evict and give "your" apartment to someone else, you were
| not affected "directly" by anything.
|
| > I have my desires, which requires placing demands on
| their behavior
|
| Desires? Is this really the word that you want to use?
| The more you write, the more you are displaying your
| sense of entitlement.
|
| > (your post) which tries to effectively say "we tried
| everything, there's no possible other solution"
|
| There is absolutely no point where I said anything like
| that. Please stop assuming things. If you want to restart
| the conversation around _that_ , by all means let's do
| it. But if you want to argue by baseless statements, I'm
| not your person.
| voidhorse wrote:
| EDIT: Ok, after the parent edit I am convinced you're a
| little bit more reasonable, however, I can tell you've
| already made up your mind and are more interested in
| defending your position (which you haven't actually ever
| elaborated) and making reductive claims about the
| character of your opponents (that they are just
| "complaining" or "entitled") than actually having a
| discussion. You seem to want your interlocutor to follow
| all the polite rules of discussion while abandoning them
| all yourself.
|
| My rent increased significantly for no reason other than
| a shift in market rates. I struggle to see how this does
| not count as being directly effected.
|
| Yes. Desires. People have them. Usually they dictate
| behaviors. It's why people move to New York. It's why
| you're quoting my comments and writing replies--you want
| to show me that you're "smarter" and that my
| dissatisfactions are illegitimate and you think a great
| way to do so is to write targeted quips that take one or
| two lines of text out of context, but unfortunately
| you're not succeeding. It's clear you have no interest in
| actual persuasion or discussion--if you do, I highly
| recommend taking a few writing or debate classes, maybe
| brushing up on what it means to empathize, learn about
| logos/ethos/pathos, read some philosophy, things like
| that.
| rglullis wrote:
| > I can tell you've already made up your mind
|
| When this is your first statement following your
| attempted "apology", how can anyone be interested in
| continuing with the conversation?
|
| > You seem to want your interlocutor to follow all the
| polite rules of discussion while abandoning them all
| yourself.
|
| It's not about "politeness". It's about honesty. I'd
| rather have a honest-but-dry conversation than a
| pleasantly-dishonest one.
|
| > your position (which you haven't actually ever
| elaborated)
|
| My position (if it couldn't even be called that) is that
| NYC is a victim of its own (relative) success compared to
| all the other cities in the US. The best way to get NYC
| to become more affordable would be to rescue other
| cities. There are just too many people with too much
| money chasing not enough houses in urban areas that are
| desirable, so of course the prices will go up in the
| places that are.
|
| Rent control is not going to solve this. It's only going
| to create a privileged class that is going to cling on to
| their old leases. Landlords will have zero incentive to
| invest. Developers will have less incentive to build, and
| then only the existing stock will continue to be around.
|
| It's supply that needs to be fixed. Also, it may seem
| counter-intuitive at first, but to fix cities in North
| America you need to get rid of suburbia.
| ponow wrote:
| Let them charge what they want if it's theirs. Otherwise,
| your demands on what they charge amount to asserting that
| what is theirs isn't really. And, to put responsibility on
| the actor in question, you're asking that the lost
| potential value be stolen from the owner, for the benefit
| of non-owners. Can people own stuff, or not?
| voidhorse wrote:
| If you're renting out basic needs like housing I'd argue
| the terms of ownership should change.
|
| We all have dependencies on one another to get access to
| our basic needs. If your ISP, gas or whatever provider
| decided to suddenly charge you double for no apparent
| upgrades you would not be happy. You might have to option
| to go to another provider. If you didn't, you'd have to
| move somewhere that has cheaper services. Moving is not
| zero cost. It both financially and emotionally affects
| people depending on how tied they are to their
| communities. The problem with rentals is that this is
| happening to long term residents that have no other
| option because the overall market price for the area is
| crazy. People are being removed from their communicates
| because there are no restrictions on landlords that make
| money will producing nothing the vast majority of the
| time. Capitalism is supposed to reward _production_ ,
| _products_. In most cases renting is a parasitic form of
| raising capital that doesn't contribute to any material
| improvements, it just uses existing scarcity of resources
| of basic needs and exploits the fact to make capital
| without producing anything.
| TOMDM wrote:
| I mean sure, if you want to address it from the demand end
| of things that would work if there were a viable solution.
|
| The hard fact is that people want to live in large cities.
| Even if you were to legislate that all landlords had to
| provide housing at cost + 5%, there would still be a demand
| for more housing as people desperately bid to enter those
| areas. Further more, you'd see people never give up those
| rentals because there would be a mile long waiting list for
| every property that is under rent control.
|
| I have a lot of sympathy for people disgusted by the greed
| landlords display, but at the end of the day, the issue
| here is that more people want to live in these places than
| there are homes for them. So the wealthy bid their way in
| and everyone else be damned or destitute in order to
| compete.
|
| If you want radical policy, eminent domain low density
| housing in city limits and build apartment rises on them.
| voidhorse wrote:
| That's fair, but I don't see how it would prevent similar
| effects from eventually spidering out to those city limit
| properties once the demands propagate to those areas.
|
| I think the solution will require a mix of infrastructure
| solutions (building more homes) and regulatory solutions.
| I'm not saying landlords can't make money, but there
| should definitely be greater restrictions around how much
| they can raise rates (which did exist, but which NYC is
| steadily removing) and renters need to be afforded more
| rights and protections too.
| TOMDM wrote:
| I mostly agree.
|
| First off, city limit property is already seeing this
| effect.
|
| Tenant protections in the USA suck. Big Time.
|
| However landlords raising rates are a great signal that
| your infrastructure is failing somewhere. This is useful
| because it means you can look for and address the
| problem.
|
| Some locations are going to be incredibly desireable and
| thus expensive, and that's okay, as long as there are
| options available for everyone else who can't afford
| them.
|
| And as far as regulation solutions, removing mixed zoning
| restrictions would be a massive step forward in allowing
| development of construction that could address some of
| these issues. Being able to live within a minutes walk of
| groceries, restaurants etc. is such a freeing experience
| that is taken from too many due to zoning restrictions.
| Regulatory reform could fix that.
| HPsquared wrote:
| High rent reduces demand and reflects an equilibrium between
| supply and demand. That, and people in Manhattan simply can
| afford to pay more, so are able to bid up the prices higher
| than tenants in other places.
| TOMDM wrote:
| True.
|
| People are asking how you would lower the price though.
|
| If you don't _want_ lower prices, then the NIMBY positions
| make sense, don't build more to meet rising demand, keep
| prices high and poorer people out.
| toto444 wrote:
| My two cents : I believe that if you increase supply and
| allow more affordable housing in a city, it will only
| marginally decrease prices but will mainly attract more
| people to this city.
|
| I think the solution to housing cost is to make smaller
| cities, towns and the countryside more attractive by having
| higher local tax rates in cities. This source of income could
| be used to build better infrastructure in the rest of the
| country.
| dionidium wrote:
| > _I believe that if you increase supply and allow more
| affordable housing in a city, it will only marginally
| decrease prices but will mainly attract more people to this
| city._
|
| I believe that allowing more units will lower prices, but
| what if it didn't? What if all that happened is that a
| whole bunch more people got to live where they want to
| live, productivity increased, and the largest cities got
| more dynamic and interesting? What if that's _all_ that
| happened?
| charliea0 wrote:
| NYC has substantially higher taxes than most of its
| suburbs. It also has a much higher draw due to its dense
| population supporting fancy bars, arts, and other world
| class amenities. The network effects of living close to
| other interesting, cosmopolitan, or just niche social group
| people are also valuable.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Having higher local taxes in major cities would just expand
| the problem. The poor and middle class will get further
| pushed out, and the rich who can afford the tax and prefer
| living in the city will stay, in which case you just get SF
| all over again.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Prices are set at the margin, and demand is largely driven
| by employment.
|
| > by having higher local tax rates in cities
|
| You already pay taxes on par with Denmark if you live in
| NYC and have sufficient income to afford to live there
| without subsidized housing. Tax policy is an insane way to
| prop up little towns. Cities offer a lot of economic and
| environmental benefits, and are generally already
| generating more tax revenue than they receive in benefits.
| voidfunc wrote:
| At some point you run out of people that can move into the
| city... which might make the city huge, but eventually
| supply will outstrip demand.
|
| Also no thanks to wealth redistribution. The rest of the
| country sucks outside the coasts sucks and its mostly
| because they have regressive politics. It's their own damn
| fault nobody wants to live there.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| The policy I mention is precisely that, public housing being
| at least 40% of the supply. If demand increases, you increase
| supply.
| TOMDM wrote:
| Ah, from your original comment, I thought you were
| advocating for seizure + rent control.
|
| If you are instead suggesting some form of eminent domain
| of low density housing, and then building higher density
| housing in its stead, with a target of 40% of housing
| controlled by the state, I'm more inclined to think that
| would work.
|
| To my mind though, I think targeting meeting current demand
| + demand growth (or some margin therein) would be the
| target, rather than what feels to me the arbitrary target
| of 40% (unless you have figures that show that's where
| demand+growth meets.)
| missedthecue wrote:
| So you're telling me that the government should build
| millions of new units in NYC, until they control 40% of the
| market? Am I understanding that correctly?
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| If the private market won't do it, why not?
| jefftk wrote:
| Most of Manhattan is built out to the maximum allowed by
| zoning, but we could raise those limits
| rglullis wrote:
| Because the private market _can 't_ do it. When most
| cities in the US have 80%+ of its land zoned for single-
| family units, developers can not build anything other
| than expensive McMansions.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Don't forget parking minimums, rent control,
| environmental studies in excess of what is needed, and
| the endless town-halls full of people trying to veto
| change. All this just to build an apartment complex. You
| have to retain half the state bar to build anything
| around me and consequences are evident in the rent
| prices.
| Swizec wrote:
| > cities in the US have 80+ of its land zoned for single-
| family units
|
| How is that even a city? Single family zoning is a
| suburban desert at best. Even remote villages have more
| life and vibrancy than that.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| 80% of Seattle is zoned for single family units. It's not
| exactly a suburban desert, but it could be much better.
| Unfortunately, even very limited legislation (HB 1782)
| allowing upzoning to duplexes/quadplexes ("missing
| middle" housing) within walking distance of public
| transit hubs failed earlier this year. NIMBYism abounds.
| kuschku wrote:
| Seize the less developed parts, and build high-density
| affordable housing there. Yes, that's the only action
| that'd have a chance at solving this issue.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Create better and cheaper transport and the problem will
| go away
| treeman79 wrote:
| I think he wants the government to seize housing from
| others.
|
| Which will ensure that absolutely no one develops
| anything in that state again
| martin_a wrote:
| Bullshit.
|
| Vienna hasn't seized those properties, they just invested
| and built them themselves. NYC could to the same.
| seydor wrote:
| Agreed. Housing is as basic a need as food. Either end food
| subsidies and make farmers rich, or deregulate housing
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >and renting to a representative distribution of tenants so to
| prevent guettos
|
| Sounds like a creative way of saying "make sure the poors have
| enough rich people near them that they feel compelled to stay
| in line and keep a low profile."
|
| There are few things that make apartment living worse than
| having neighbors who think your standards of behavior are too
| low and who you have to avoid pissing off.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Many attempts at public housing failed because they just tried
| to provide housing for low-income people in separated and/or
| undesirable areas, with a predictable outcome.
|
| So the taxpayers should pay so the people with low income or no
| income can live iny Manhattan? Why not also provide them with
| expensive cars and exotic vacations?
| greenie_beans wrote:
| so the low-income workers should be required to commute into
| manhattan so they can take care of wealthy people?
| kortilla wrote:
| They don't need to go into Manhattan at all.
| arolihas wrote:
| So then who does the low-income work in Manhattan?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Welcome to Galt's Gulch, where only millionaires can afford
| to live! Every minimum-wage is being filled by someone who's
| constantly exhausted from their four-hour commute from
| Poortown.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > So the taxpayers should pay so the people with low income
| or no income can live iny Manhattan?
|
| Yes. It's a city not a luxury resort. If people are to work
| all kinds of jobs at all levels of income there, then people
| at all income levels should be able to live there as well.
| This mechanism accounts for that.
|
| > Why not also provide them with expensive cars and exotic
| vacations?
|
| Maybe they should idk. Seems completely unrelated though and
| no one is arguing for that here so I don't know why you want
| to or why I should.
| pb7 wrote:
| Manhattan isn't a city, it's the most expensive borough of
| a city. They don't need to live there.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I know what manhattan is and I'm against it becoming a
| luxury development for only the rich, while the people
| who work to service them are bused in from far suburbs at
| tremendous personal cost.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| > If people are to work all kinds of jobs at all levels of
| income there, then people at all income levels should be
| able to live there as well.
|
| Why should taxpayers subsidize employers unwilling to pay a
| living wage?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yes I agree we should force employers to pay living
| wages.
|
| They're definitely closely related issues but I don't
| know that you can completely solve for one in terms of
| the other though.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| IMO the heavy state intervention should be massive capital
| investment into FAST public transportation infrastructure. Make
| areas further away from city centers viable for commuting and
| the problem gets largely addressed.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Ironically, this was what NYC (technically, pre-NYC) did over
| 100 years ago -- there was a thriving network of streetcars
| in Brooklyn[1], which overlap almost exactly with
| neighborhood density. We then tore them up, leaving just the
| subway lines and a bus system that traces the vestiges of the
| old streetcar lines.
|
| Streetcar suburbs[2] not only work, but are _imminently
| sustainable_ compared to other forms of urban /suburban
| extension.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_lines_in
| _Bro...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| > property owners provide almost no value
|
| I think you have no idea how much things break and need fixing.
| I have a friend that owns a few houses that he rents out, and
| it's a part time job just keeping up with fixing things.
| Between them, there's a few thousand items that can and do
| break and need maintenance. He would not be profitable if he
| hired out to fix things. Outside Labour can easily be $100/hour
| and if you need something even a little bit more serious its
| easily $1000/day.
|
| This is the hidden cost of manufacturers making things as
| cheaply as possible, and often out of plastic. Property taxes
| and utility bills and problem with tenants. Navigating
| disputes, noise complaints, missed rent, move outs and move
| ins, signing new lease agreements, landscaping, leaky plumbing,
| damaged flooring, overgrown trees, it's endless. It's a part
| time job.
| rcpt wrote:
| That's property management, not property ownership.
|
| Maintaining and improving structures is work. Nobody
| disagrees with that. Simply owning the thing is not work.
| Churchill said it best:
|
| https://www.landvaluetax.org/history/winston-churchill-
| said-...
| cies wrote:
| Totally agree. It is one of the perfect resources to extort
| people with. Unlike food the price of houses rarely drop to
| zero, and often go up. Like food, it is very essential to
| people.
|
| What you propose is a very socialist solution. I've read
| somewhere that in the USSR paying more than 4% of your income
| to housing was considered criminal (as they calculated that's
| what housing would cost using cost-based-pricing).
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| IDK if it's a very socialist solution, provided that it aims
| to increase disposable income and savings, that will pour
| into consumption, people starting their own businesses, etc.
|
| Think also that the program can avoid deficit by not having
| only low-income tenants, providing more opportunities for
| social mobility and allowing more consumption which means
| more VAT taxes, specially if you're smart enough to provide
| your tenants with supermarkets, bars, etc, which isn't
| difficult if you pack enough people and provide space for
| bussiness in the ground floors.
| nickles wrote:
| > IDK if it's a very socialist solution, provided that it
| aims to increase disposable income and savings
|
| _Socialism is a left-wing political, social, and economic
| philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social
| systems characterised by social ownership of the means of
| production, as opposed to private ownership._ [0]
|
| Government ownership of housing, as opposed to private
| ownership, is unambiguously socialist policy, regardless of
| policy intentions.
|
| > specially if you're smart enough to provide your tenants
| with supermarkets, bars, etc, which isn't difficult if you
| pack enough people and provide space for bussiness in the
| ground floors.
|
| Here's the issue with central planning. How does the
| government know which services residents will find
| desirable? This difficulty is known as the local knowledge
| problem. I don't drink alcohol; why should I be forced to
| pay for a bar I don't use? And more importantly, why is the
| government encouraging an activity that causes the death of
| 140k Americans a year?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| > Here's the issue with central planning. How does the
| government know which services residents will find
| desirable? I don't drink alcohol; why should my taxes pay
| for bars, which contribute to the death of >100k
| Americans a year? This difficulty is known as the local
| information problem.
|
| I didn't say that government runs the bussiness. The
| public hoosuing buildings have space at ground level that
| is rented for businesses.
|
| In many european contries you have supermarkets for the
| neighborhood in those spaces.
|
| This is not public housing, but the lowest income
| neighborhood in my city, serves as example of where
| bussineses can be located. https://www.google.es/maps/pla
| ce/Gadis/@43.3576146,-8.416073...
|
| Another example: https://www.google.es/maps/place/Eroski+
| Center/@43.3754534,-...
| nickles wrote:
| > I didn't say that government runs the bussiness. The
| public hoosuing buildings have space at ground level that
| is rented for businesses.
|
| I misunderstood what you meant as to who would choose
| which services to provide. Completely agree with you
| about mixed zoning, it's really beneficial to have the
| businesses near residents.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| It's also a way to reclaim costs of the program through
| taxes.
|
| The ideal would be to them having everything they need in
| <5min walk.
|
| Also, maybe you can rent to bussiness at a market rate,
| since their clients have more disposable income.
| nickles wrote:
| > I've read somewhere that in the USSR paying more than 4% of
| your income to housing was considered criminal
|
| Fortunately that was the only criminal activity in the
| shining beacon of freedom and prosperity that _was_ the USSR.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| If we're going to dismiss every quality and strategy of a
| country because of its moral crimes then everything about
| the US is worthless through the same path.
|
| I don't think this is a useful way to approach any of these
| problems, and I'm sure neither do you, so why try to score
| cheap points this way.
| nickles wrote:
| > If we're going to dismiss every quality and strategy of
| a country because of its moral crimes
|
| My primary intention wasn't to refer directly to the
| morality of the USSR. Economically speaking, the USSR was
| a disaster, so I'm skeptical that we should implement the
| policies that quite literally destroyed a nation.
|
| But yes, the USSR was a murderous state led by men who
| were happy to kill tens of millions of people for
| personal gain. I find that morally reprehensible.
| Jcowell wrote:
| There's a difference between being skeptical and being
| dismissive. You can be skeptical, but evaluate an idea by
| its merit Maybe it's something that could be a good idea
| under the US economic conditions, maybe not.
| bobthechef wrote:
| huevosabio wrote:
| Housing =/= Land. But our policies which heavily kneecap our
| ability to build more [0] make it such that Housing starts
| behaving like Land.
|
| The solution is to build more, and the success of Vienna does
| not come from public intervention but from the added supply.
| Tokyo is another city with famously cheap housing, and the
| secret is that they make it easy to build.
|
| I personally think that achieving affordable housing prices via
| mainly government intervention is not a sustainable approach.
| You end up consuming both economic and political capital.
|
| A more sustainable approach sets clear, transparent rules that
| specify under what conditions do you get to build by right.
| Then 90% gets satisfied by the market, the remaining 10% can be
| addressed by government investments, if needed.
|
| The only sustainable way to get affordable housing is when the
| market price is affordable.
|
| Land, on the other hand, is another story. There is strong
| economic evidence that many of the observations of Henry George
| [1] are spot on: Land rents tend to take a massive toll in the
| economy, cause inequality and misery, all without requiring
| their owners to provide any added value. The proposed solution,
| again with solid economic fundamentals, is to tax the
| unimproved value of land at 100%. Henry George further argues
| that the proceeds should be equally divided among citizens, a
| citizen dividend if you will.
|
| [0] e.g. it takes 4 years on average to get a new building
| permit in SF, 90% of the city is zoned for single family
| housing, any neighbor etc.
|
| [1] https://www.gameofrent.com/
| sbf501 wrote:
| Too bad there are "investment luxury hi-rises" popping up all
| over the skyline that are largely unpopulated. If that's what
| people want to build to park their billions, we have other
| problems to tend to first.
| dionidium wrote:
| This is a conspiracy-theory-level analysis that isn't
| supported by _any_ available evidence.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Can you supply some evidence that it is a conspiracy
| theory? Because I read this article in The Atlantic:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/america
| n-h...
|
| "But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the
| Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the
| market in the past five years are still unsold, according
| to The New York Times."
|
| Sorry, but I trust the Atlantic over you unless you got
| some facts.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| 4% of apartments in nyc are vacant. You can claim that
| luxury units are more expensive because a block on the
| southern border is made up of half empty units owned by
| billionaires, but the rest of the city does not
| experience that phenomenon at all.
| dionidium wrote:
| Here's the quote from the NY Times article [0] your
| Atlantic article references:
|
| > _Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came
| to market after 2015, or 3,695 of 7,727 apartments,
| remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both
| closed sales and contracts by Nancy Packes Data Services,
| a real estate consultancy and database provider._
|
| So we're talking about 3,695 unsold apartments. There are
| 3.5 million housing units in New York City. So that's
| about a tenth of one percent .
|
| The problem here isn't that the statistic is wrong; it's
| that anybody thinks 7k new units over a 5 year period in
| a metro area of 20 million people is anything more than a
| curiosity.
|
| The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that it offers a
| sensational explanation -- usually some foreign, outside
| force -- for a complex problem, absolves the believer of
| any culpability, and provides an easy, unsympathetic
| target on which to dump all their rage. " _Foreign
| oligarchs are buying up all the real estate and locking
| the rest of us out and that 's what's wrong with the
| housing market_" is _exactly_ that kind of theory. And
| 3500 unsold units over 5 years is emphatically _not_
| evidence of its veracity.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-
| york-decad...
| sbf501 wrote:
| Ah. I see. I'll stop parroting that line now that I
| understand the impact better. I still think it is shitty
| of rich people to do that, however.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| https://nypost.com/2021/08/05/nearly-half-of-luxury-
| units-em...
| teachrdan wrote:
| There are insane tax breaks these luxury apartments get,
| too, on the order of a 90% discount. It's not like these
| properties are generating huge windfalls for city or
| state government.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/billionaires-
| get-lo...
| dionidium wrote:
| Sure, but they don't cost the city anything, either. They
| sit empty and the city collects money. Meanwhile, the
| owners aren't even there and use _zero_ city services.
| Should those taxes be higher? Fine with me! But these
| apartments are a low-salience /high-visibility
| distraction. They have hardly _anything_ to do with the
| issues in the broader housing market.
| dionidium wrote:
| Seven buildings. That's not representative of...anything.
| It's not even worth talking about. And the effects are
| largely positive for the city, anyway. You've got a few
| big, empty buildings concentrated on one street where
| billionaires park their money, pay a bunch of property
| taxes, and use zero city services. That's an unqualified
| _win_.
| sbf501 wrote:
| It represents several billions of dollars worth of luxury
| real estate left vacant, and obscuring central park.
|
| If you want to call that "nothing" then there is no
| reaching you.
| lupire wrote:
| ineptech wrote:
| No idea why you're being downvoted. This meme (rich
| people buying luxury condos, letting them sit vacant, and
| then profiting somehow) doesn't make any sense, and that
| article posted as evidence for it undermines it by
| depicting those units as being un-rentable due to
| oversupply in the market.
| EricDeb wrote:
| it makes total sense you park your money in an asset that
| will increase in value over time. you don't need to
| actively use it.
| ineptech wrote:
| And in the meantime, they choose not to rent it why? The
| intuitive answer is: they're hard to rent, because
| there's way more luxury condos available to be rented
| than people who want to rent them, and it was a bad
| investment that the rich person will probably lose money
| on (if not in absolute dollars, then in comparison to
| some other property that _is_ desirable to rent). But a
| lot of people in this thread seem to think it 's
| intentional and rich people have some devious way of
| making more from a vacant condo than a rented one.
| EricDeb wrote:
| NYC has super low property tax. It's a win for no one
| dionidium wrote:
| If I were faced with a situation where the taxes were
| sub-optimally low, then I would simply raise the taxes,
| instead of trying to remake the entire concept of private
| property.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Attracting billionaires is a win. Even if they're just
| there for a couple weeks a year they're providing a lot
| of prestige.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Prestige sounds like "paying in exposure" that artists
| keep hearing about.
| surement wrote:
| that's what you get when there's rent control; luxury
| housing doesn't count so there's more of an incentive to
| build that instead
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The only sustainable way to get affordable housing is when
| the market price is affordable.
|
| And the only way to reduce the market price to affordable
| rates is to crack down on the demand - there is no reasonable
| way to expand the offer side in many cities any more since
| they don't have the space. And most demand is driven by the
| fact that rural areas have been left in a decrepit state for
| _decades_ : highways, bridges and other infrastructure is
| crumbling, there is no public transport worth the name,
| forget about fast internet (or fast internet offered by a
| crap monopolist), employers have closed down or moved to
| urban areas, schools and medical services are constantly
| closing or underfunded...
|
| To fix the urban rent explosion problem, we need to fix rural
| areas and make them livable again.
| jwolfe wrote:
| > The solution is to build more, and the success of Vienna
| does not come from public intervention but from the added
| supply. Tokyo is another city with famously cheap housing,
| and the secret is that they make it easy to build.
|
| The other two secrets are tiny apartments (200-400 sqft), and
| an incredibly reliable public transportation system. Tokyo
| has a massive sprawl -- people can and do live far from their
| work. The average one-way commute time in the Tokyo metro
| area is almost an hour.
| jjav wrote:
| > The solution is to build more
|
| I wonder, because it is always stated that if only density
| was increased by building more, housing would become cheap.
|
| But this article is about NYC, the densest city in the US,
| not being cheap at all.
| hailwren wrote:
| I think, fundamentally, the problem is that there is a highly
| speculative market (real-estate) attached to a basic needs
| market (housing).
|
| I think of myself as right-of-center, but think George was
| more or less spot on w.r.t. land.
|
| I wonder if there is a solution in banning rent itself? i.e.
| force owners to transfer a % of ownership equal to rental
| fees received from tenants and allow them to discount
| improvements against that.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Whether housing is rented or owned has no relation to its
| price. Making it illegal to speculate/profit from housing
| doesn't solve the underlying issue that is a massive
| (xx,000,000) unit shortage of housing in the United States.
| hailwren wrote:
| Absolutely it has a relation to its price. A domicile's
| value in any setting is determined by it's speculative
| value + a discounted income model. This model wildly
| decreases the discounted income value without addressing
| the speculative value.
|
| As far as I'm aware there are more housing units than
| people in the US. We do have an incentive structure that
| puts property owners' needs at odds w/ society's needs on
| multiple factors, and some of them (i.e. NIMBYism) can be
| addressed orthogonally to the intractability of housing
| as investment vs housing as housing.
| m_ke wrote:
| I'm no NIMBY but places like NYC will never be able to build
| enough to outpace demand.
| mattwad wrote:
| All over NYC, there are empty buildings and apartments.
| There's space, but landlords are artificially reducing
| supply.
| refurb wrote:
| Read up on rent control in the 70's and landlord's
| burning down their own buildings to collect insurance.
|
| Artificially forcing prices low just reduces supply.
|
| But no doubt NYC will head down that path.
|
| Seems like all major cities are repeating the policies of
| the 60's-80's that causes populations to drop.
| intrasight wrote:
| Flashback to late 1970s driving through the Bronx with my
| family - an annual ritual as most of the extended family
| was still in the NYC area while we had moved to
| Rochester. We would pass blocks of empty high-rise
| apartments in the South Bronx.
|
| As a middle-middle-class suburban kid, I just couldn't
| conceive of how the wealthiest city on earth could have
| sections that looked like a bombed-out and evacuated
| European city following World War II.
|
| I asked my father what had happened here. He answer was
| "rent control".
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Nyc apartments are at 4% vacancy, a decent bit below the
| national average. This meme is just straight up false.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I thought there was a ton of empty housing in NYC, it's
| just insanely expensive.
| slama wrote:
| This isn't true - vacancy rates are below the healthy
| threshold https://citylimits.org/2022/05/17/nycs-latest-
| vacancy-survey...
| eloff wrote:
| And yet it works in Tokyo, a city of almost double the
| population?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Greater Tokyo Area? Tokyo Metropolis? Previous Tokyo City
| limits? New York City metro area? New York City?
| Manhattan? These can be 2 orders of magnitude apart in
| scale but they've all been talked about like it was the
| same location A and location B.
|
| At the small scale Tokyo's densest ward is ~22,700/km^2
| and Manhattan is ~28,800/km^2 with Manhattan being ~4x-5x
| the land area of the former (i.e. the core is a lot more
| dense). At the large scale the Greater Tokyo Area is
| ~2,900/km^2 and the New York Metropolitan Area is
| ~2,053/km^2 (i.e. the urban area around Tokyo is a lot
| more dense).
|
| "Tokyo" is a good example that you can get affordable
| housing by focusing on how to spread the population over
| a large urban area but it's not a good example building
| more housing downtown is a scalable approach.
| [deleted]
| rr888 wrote:
| I'm not sure why you think Tokyo works, it wasn't long
| ago that it was multiple times the price of NYC. It might
| be affordable now but only because of a economic slump
| and Japan's falling population.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Tokyo's population grew, actually.
| Zxian wrote:
| New York City already has a significantly higher
| population density than Tokyo (~11,300/km2 vs ~6,300/km).
| It's easier to develop more housing when you have more
| land.
| coryrc wrote:
| You need to include Newark, Yonkers, Long Island, etc if
| you want to compare those figures.
|
| Tokyo is 13400 sq km, NYC is 780 sq km. If I rounded
| Tokyo's land area to the same sig figs as I did for NYC,
| it would be lowered by half the total area that NYC takes
| up!
| timr wrote:
| > You need to include Newark, Yonkers, Long Island, etc
| if you want to compare those figures.
|
| That's just not an accurate comparison.
|
| Live in NYC. Lived in Japan. The difference is transit.
| It is _far_ easier to get to Saitama or Kawasaki or
| Yokohama or Chiba than it is to get to Long Island from
| NYC. You can do the former in an hour at rush hour. Try
| getting to downtown Manhattan from Bay Shore as a daily
| commute. You 'll go mad.
|
| Here's Tokyo and New York at the same zoom level:
|
| Tokyo:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@35.736739,139.6246444,10z
|
| NYC:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7983574,-73.948053,10z
|
| The gray area of Tokyo on that map is pretty much all
| considered an exurb of Tokyo, more-or-less feasible for
| daily commute by rail. Most of the NYC region is
| inaccessible from Manhattan, except by car. Look at the
| Seibu Shinjuku line, or the Chuo line on the Tokyo map --
| both offer express trains that will take you from the
| distant western exurbs, right into the middle of downtown
| Tokyo:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seibu_Shinjuku_Line
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Line_(Rapid)
| coryrc wrote:
| I understand, but that doesn't change my assertion that
| comparing Tokyo density to only-NYC density makes no
| sense, especially as an argument that there is no room
| for to build more. Hogwash! Half your NYC map is pure
| green, but even leaving that, most of the land area on
| that map that is housing is SFH.
|
| The density of the NYC MSA is 1/3 that of Tokyo: https://
| en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
|
| There's plenty of room to grow up. Just because the
| reason we don't is shitty government organization and
| FPTP voting doesn't mean we can just ignore the vast
| swaths of low-density just outside Manhattan 's borders.
| sixo wrote:
| Incrementally, building improves living conditions. It's
| not all-or-nothing.
| j0hnyl wrote:
| I think they can. The thing is the corporate landlords
| would rather have their high rises sit empty than rent the
| units at reasonable rates.
| mancerayder wrote:
| do you have evidence for this?
|
| Vacancy rates are well low at the moment.
| xhrpost wrote:
| https://www.tiktok.com/@boweryboi/video/71058454244429202
| 38?...
| dougSF70 wrote:
| I think this a feature of accounting practices. Mark down
| rent means you mark down the asset value of the building
| on your balance sheet. This reduces the value of your
| business which means loans secured against the business
| are in jeopardy and it limits the potential to borrow
| more money. This is why commercial rents going down is a
| rare event. Fwiw i am not an accountant and could well be
| wrong.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| NYC rental vacancy is only a bit over 4% city wide. The
| national average is closer to 6%. It is very expensive to
| build in New York, and projects can be scuttled at any
| time due to angry neighbors or intervention by city
| council. The EIS process adds a ton of cost to new
| construction. As a result of this risk banks require high
| returns in NYC than in most places in order to secure
| loans. If you take a development loan the rental price
| for the units is written into the loan.
| suchow wrote:
| Do you know what would motivate this behavior? Naively,
| any rent is more than zero rent, so why let a unit sit
| empty?
| PolCPP wrote:
| IIRC Sometimes some of these units are tied to a
| mortgage. Renting it at a reasonable price could make the
| price of the unit to drop making the money lender wanting
| to renegotiate the mortgage contract.
| macksd wrote:
| My gut feeling is this doesn't entirely explain it, but
| any tenant is also more work than no tenant, so they may
| not want to do the work of signing a new lease and
| dealing with the work it will trigger for less than
| you're making per-head on your current tenants.
|
| There's probably also a fear that if you let a new tenant
| in for lower rent, this might lower the rent other people
| expect and the problem starts snowballing.
| adharmad wrote:
| Surely this works in a short timeframe where a landlord
| can make a tactical decision to let the property sit
| empty rather than rent it out for less than a threshold.
| Landlords can even collude on a minimal rent below which
| they will not rent. (Basically "hold the line"). But how
| is this sustainable in the long run? The money for the
| original mortgage has to come from some place. Not all
| landlords have an infinite supply of money to keep this
| practice going on for a few years. (There is no VC
| funding available for them).
|
| With commercial units (eg - downtown San Francisco) it is
| even harder because with remote work, the jobs are never
| coming back to the city.
| runamok wrote:
| On mobile so don't have a ready link. Iirc a lot of
| commercial real estate can get into a death spiral if the
| loan they have which is based on a certain amount of
| income starts having less income. If I can find the
| explanation I will add it later.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| It keeps the market rate high for other units/properties.
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| That does not make sense from a game-theoretic
| standpoint. You would be helping other landlords at your
| own expense. It would be better to let other landlords
| make that sacrifice and rent our your own properties for
| as much as you can get.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Likely true, but tenant occupied properties do have
| additional maintenance costs.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Lots of empty property - less housing supply - higher
| rents - higher property prices
|
| If property appreciation outpaces the gains one could
| make from renting it out, then it's better to leave it
| empty.
| jjav wrote:
| > Naively, any rent is more than zero rent, so why let a
| unit sit empty?
|
| There's a substantial cost in having a renter living
| there, both in dollars and risk. So if the rent isn't
| enough to cover those, it's cheaper to let it sit unused.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| There's a large (20,000+) volume of empty rent-stabilized
| units - in those cases, landlords say that a recent
| tenant protection law (HSTPA, 2019) makes it uneconomic
| for them to rent due to the expected difficulty of
| evicting non-paying tenants and the strict limitations on
| how much repair and investment work can be recouped from
| increasing rent.
| runeks wrote:
| Why do you believe that?
| m0llusk wrote:
| Cannot speak for the poster, but the big current issue is
| that the value of residential units has gone from being
| strongly linked to wages to residences being an extremely
| valuable chip for playing financial games. Residences,
| especially inherently valuable ones like NYC apartments,
| have sufficient demand from financial game players that
| wage earners are barely able to keep up. Exactly how
| things break down is not clear, but there is this idea
| that demand for residences for financial purposes is
| competing aggressively with people who want homes.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| This is a well studied idea, the percentage of units
| sitting empty is a round error in the total supply of
| housing. At the start of the pandemic there were a paltry
| 4000 vacant condos. For reference there are 2.3 million
| apartments in the city.
| thfuran wrote:
| But how many vacant apartments were there (or how many
| total condos)?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The vacancy rate of apartments is just at or under 4.5%
| which is considered a very tight rental market. I don't
| have the total condo numbers readily at hand.
| m0llusk wrote:
| That is not directly related. People and institutions
| holding residential units for investment purposes usually
| rent them out.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Then they're on the rental market and don't contribute to
| a shortage in supply.
| m_ke wrote:
| Because I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and saw what all
| of the new development did to the demand. The street that
| my grandmother used to rent an apartment for in the early
| 2000s for under $1k/month now only has units that go for
| $5K/month.
|
| Here's greenpoint as an example:
| https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/new-york-
| ny/greenpoint. Same goes for LIC.
| pgodzin wrote:
| Maybe because Greenpoint and LIC became a lot more in-
| demand in those 20 years and development followed the
| demand?
| m_ke wrote:
| You have that backwards. Bloomberg rezoned the queens and
| brooklyn waterfront for his real estate investor buddies,
| which gentrified the shit out of these neighborhoods and
| brought in a ton of people that would have never dared to
| cross the east river.
| pgodzin wrote:
| So they allowed housing to be built to meet the demand of
| living on the waterfront.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| The solution of course is to build more, but it just happens
| that the private initiative always build under demand because
| it is inelastic and it's in their interest to keep the market
| as so.
|
| Of course the Vienna success came from public intervention
| because otherwhise you'd have exactly the same situation of
| hundreds of other cities where rent is always a hefty amount
| of modal income and no matter how easy and cheap is to build
| it just happens those with access to capital never meet
| demand.
|
| You need to build more, in many cite MUCH more, and you need
| vacant housing so floating population can come and go easily.
| patrickthebold wrote:
| The article is about Manhattan. Do you have any idea if it
| has similar problems? In my mind, Manhattan is pretty dense.
| xhrpost wrote:
| > In my mind, Manhattan is pretty dense.
|
| It can be doing so much better. I get a tad excited reading
| about 1,000ft supertall's being built, only to sigh when I
| see it will have a whopping 80 units. I've seen even more
| ridiculous stuff like a 10 story building with 4 units.
| There's been a ton of construction in NYC over the last 5
| years alone but it seems to be mostly luxury and medium/low
| density. There are plenty of older buildings from the 20th
| century that are _much_ denser but it seems that no one
| wants to build these anymore. (Or they can 't, I'm not sure
| which).
| dcolkitt wrote:
| More than 40% of the building square footage in Manhattan
| would be literally illegal to build today.[1] Developers
| would absolutely _love_ to build huge skyscrapers housing
| thousands. However the city has zoning rules with onerous
| setbacks, height and density restrictions. The focus on
| ultra luxury development is a byproduct of heavy handed
| government regulation.
|
| [1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/
| forty-...
| EricDeb wrote:
| Exactly. Libertarians in here love to say it's a lack of
| supply and it's simple supply and demand and you look at
| what's being built and it's 1000ft tall buildings with a
| tiny number of luxury units.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| In the 1990s, the US restricted the number of car imports
| from Japan. As a result, Toyota and Nissan had car
| quotas. They had luxury cars and mass-market cars. Which
| do you think they filled their quota with first?
| Obviously the higher-margin luxury cars. Clearly the
| problem is not a simple lack of supply, right? Toyota and
| Nissan just need to make more affordable cars? Or is it
| obvious that when you restrict supply in a market, only
| the highest-margin (luxury) goods get produced, until
| demand for them is met and manufacturers are forced to
| produce and sell lower-margin mass-market (more
| affordable) goods?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The high prices in Manhattan are caused by the low supply
| of other Manhattan-like density and public transit capable
| cities in the US.
| lupire wrote:
| Manhattan is expensive because rich people want to live
| there. Brooklyn and Queens and Harlem have density and
| transit but cost less.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Transit in Brooklyn and Queens is much worse than
| Manhattan.
|
| See my other comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32098815
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Manhattan is 25% less dense than it was _in 1910_. The
| densest census tract in Manhattan is four times denser than
| borough average. We could easily double the population of
| the island, even without getting into ultra tall
| skyscrapers or reclaiming more land.
| OliverGilan wrote:
| I live in East Village right on the border with the LES.
| There's certainly development happening and new buildings
| coming up but when I walk around EV/LES it sometimes feels
| like I see more 2-3 story buildings than otherwise. There's
| literally no reason any of these buildings should be under
| 6 stories minimum. People think of Manhattan as being dense
| with a bunch of skyscrapers but I suspect in reality
| there's still a whole lot of units that could be added by
| simply building upwards.
|
| I say 6 stories because you can reasonably have a 6-story
| walkup. Anything higher and you would need to add an
| elevator which could make things harder.
| huevosabio wrote:
| I am obviously less informed on Manhattan shenanigans, but
| enough to know that there's plenty of obstacles to new
| construction in NYC and Manhattan proper.
|
| I recall AOC lobbying for stopping an apartment complex in
| a formerly industrial area. And a articles on how certain
| areas of Manhattan don't allow towers. In fact, a quick
| look at the zoning map [0] has, eg, large areas zoned as
| "R8B contextual districts are designed to preserve the
| character and scale of taller rowhouse neighborhoods".
|
| SF is the worst offender, but NYC is still pretty bad.
|
| [0] https://zola.planning.nyc.gov
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Looks like lots of space right here tbh:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/tVwMCYG.jpeg
| sjtindell wrote:
| In my mind it is the same problem everywhere. Supply is too
| low and is kept low for many reasons. There is insane
| demand from around the world to live in Manhattan.
| neilparikh wrote:
| It's more dense than other cities, but there's still a few
| problems. There was a huge controversy when the city tried
| to upzone SoHo/NoHo.
|
| Additionally, the other boroughs aren't super dense. For
| example, much of the land next to LIRR is pretty low
| density, and even SFH [0]. Some people in Manhattan would
| be okay living there, so that does lead to higher rents in
| Manhattan.
|
| 0 - https://www.planetizen.com/news/2021/06/113861-new-
| york-time...
| pjmorris wrote:
| > The solution is to build more, and the success of Vienna
| does not come from public intervention but from the added
| supply.
|
| Population densities (per sq k):
|
| Manhattan: 38000
|
| Tokyo: 6158
|
| Vienna: ~5000
|
| I don't see how supply is Manhattan's problem here.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The problem is that Manhattan is the only truly dense area
| with good transit in a country of 330 million. Tokyo is
| much larger than Manhattan and is dense throughout. Other
| Japanese cities are dense too, so people have options when
| prices out.
| dionidium wrote:
| > _and property owners provide almost no value, but to provide
| access to housing for people who has no capital for it, which
| is service that could be perfectly provided by a state entity._
|
| Property of course requires maintenance and management, so the
| sleight of hand here is to define away all those aspects of
| ownership so that by definition all that's meant by "landlord"
| is "old guy who cashes checks."
|
| But somebody has to maintain the property, somebody has to
| prioritize upgrades and improvements, somebody has to cut the
| grass, somebody has to pay the taxes, somebody has to -- yes --
| collect and cash the checks. Somebody has to respond to tenant
| requests and emergencies. Somebody has to advertise the
| property when it's vacant. Someone conducts showings and
| screens tenants. And, maybe most important, somebody assumes
| the risk of a bad tenant or a down market or a declining
| neighborhood. And so on and so on.
|
| Whether all this is done by the owner _personally_ or hired out
| is _irrelevant_. There 's no reason to believe government can
| perform these functions better than private owners in a market.
|
| A simple proof that landlording is not free/easy money is to
| realize that millions of middle- and upper-middle class
| Americans who -- if not today, certainly 5 years ago before
| this most recent run-up in prices -- could, if they wanted to,
| afford to buy property and become landlords, but _they mostly
| do not do it_. And since nobody turns down free /easy money,
| landlording simply cannot be free/easy money. QED.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Found the landlord XD.
|
| FWIW, I'm with you, I think rental income ("landlording") and
| airbnb-ing are both legitimate demand, and the system would
| work fairly if we didn't have artificial constraints on
| supply.
|
| Insofar as landlords actively work to constraint supply to
| artificial inflate rents, it is immoral behavior (but 'muh'
| neighborhood) and we should not allow it.
| dionidium wrote:
| Technically true. I owner-occupy a duplex, so I maintain
| exactly one rental unit. Unfortunately for me, I'm too high
| in conscientiousness to be a cutthroat landlord and I keep
| dumping money into improvements without raising rents, even
| though I could easily _do nothing_ and raise my tenant 's
| rent hundreds of dollar per month in this market. What I
| would like is for my work on this property to _mean
| something_ and for all my competition to lose their shirts
| in a market that wasn 't artificially supply-constrained.
| corrral wrote:
| I've repeatedly been told by people who've done it (including
| my parents) never to become a landlord, because it's absolute
| hell and you'll end up making under minimum wage and tenants
| will fuck you over until you're even in the _red_ and it 's
| impossible & expensive to evict anyone even when they're not
| paying and causing more and more damage to the house with
| each passing day.
|
| Then again, I've had others tell me it's awesome, you just
| have to pick your location carefully (one exclusively bought
| very close to nursing schools, which seemed to select for
| tenants who'd stick around at least a couple years and who'd
| pay their rent and not run a meth lab or smear shit on the
| walls or anything like that).
| dionidium wrote:
| Yes, because one thing a landlord does is assume the risk
| of bad tenants and high-turnover. Good, stable, long-term
| tenants _hate this_ -- "Why am I paying so much for rent,
| when my landlord doesn't seem to do anything?" -- but as
| long as you're a renter you're going to pay for this risk
| one way or another. And it's not at all clear that you can
| socialize this risk and still end up with units anybody in
| their right mind wants to live in. Yes, I know about
| Vienna. This ain't Vienna. There's very little evidence the
| U.S. is capable of doing it. Public housing here is
| inevitably a race to the bottom.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Maybe I don't do it because I find it morally questionable,
| not because I don't think it's free and easy money. I'll
| absolutely turn down free and easy money for something I
| think is wrong.
| nix0n wrote:
| > But somebody has to maintain the property, somebody has to
| prioritize upgrades and improvements, somebody has to cut the
| grass
|
| In many buildings these things are simply not done.
| lucaspm98 wrote:
| If a landlord does not maintain the property, over the long
| run they will not be able to charge the same rent versus a
| similar, maintained unit.
|
| I've used this to my advantage before. I moved into a
| building that needed a fresh coat of paint and had poor
| reviews of their maintenance and saved ~10-15% from market
| rent because I didn't care about appearances and am handy
| enough to fix a leaky faucet, etc. myself.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Sure they'll lose relative to the place next door, but
| they'll win relative to their same unit 10 years ago
| because the land underneath their building (and the
| amenities around it) have increased in value so
| dramatically.
| dionidium wrote:
| Right, but who cares? Are we trying to soak rich people
| or are we trying to make sure there's an abundance of
| housing? Are we trying to help the poor? Or are we mostly
| concerned with knocking the rich down a peg?
| ethanbond wrote:
| Uhhh, I care that we create incentives that yield desired
| behavior: building high quality housing that supports
| growth and mitigates urban squalor.
|
| The current state is the actual opposite of that
| incentive. You can just buy up a parking lot in downtown
| Manhattan, pay ~$0 taxes on it, and keep it off the
| market while people continue to struggle to find housing
| and prices continue to climb. Then when the land has
| appreciated (through _no actions of your own_ , in fact
| _in spite_ of your own actions) you can sell for millions
| of dollars of upside.
| dionidium wrote:
| Now that I've said some nice things about landlords, I'll
| say something less flattering: bad landlords find
| convenient cover in _supply-constrained_ markets. Which, of
| course, is what we have. If you want to stick it to lazy,
| cheap, do-nothing landlords, then let somebody build a
| brand-new apt complex right next door to their crappy units
| and see how long they can get away with their insouciance
| in that kind of market.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Maybe they realize that being a landlord is an economically
| and societally destructive measure that saps productive
| capital from working and middle class. It's vampiric. And
| awful.
| kortilla wrote:
| > Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts
| the rest of the economy, and property owners provide almost no
| value,
|
| Have you considered that housing might actually be valuable? If
| it didn't provide value, why do you think that Vienna seized so
| much of it to give out to its citizens? Maybe try to find a
| different way to phrase whatever you're trying to say.
|
| Assuming you're referring to property owners getting by doing
| nothing. That's false unless they are a slumlord.
|
| Let me ask you another question. What do people do who are not
| happy with the housing provided by the govt in Vienna?
|
| > The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing
| people with different monetary and social capital into
| different building and areas
|
| This is not how it works in the US for the last 50 years or so.
| Most places force every new building to include low income
| units.
| 7steps2much wrote:
| > Let me ask you another question. What do people do who are
| not happy with the housing provided by the govt in Vienna?
|
| Rent from another landlord mostly. Vienna has close to two
| million people (give or take some), however only around
| 500.000 of those live in buildings owned by the city [0].
| Those are 1800 buildings by the way, definitely a lot but not
| unbelievably massive.
|
| Compared to some private companies, such as Vonovia the city
| of Vienna is just another big player, but by no means massive
| enough to actually be a monopoly or anything.
|
| It is true that they of course hold a lot of the supply in
| Vienna itself, housing a quarter of the population, but that
| still leaves three quarters not living in any of those
| buildings. It's easy enough to not live in apartments owned
| by the city if you don't want to.
|
| [0]: www.wienerwohnen.at/wiener-gemeindebau/wiener-
| gemeindebau-heute.html (Source in German)
| simonsarris wrote:
| > preferably by doing the same as Vienna
|
| have 2.25 million population before WW1 and then decline in
| population for almost 100 years? They still haven't recovered
| (1.89m). It may be an enormous mistake to read into their
| allocation policy because they've simply had a very easy time
| allocating so far.
|
| St Louis population has declined for 70 years. It is very
| affordable. It's just not hard to accomplish affordability like
| that.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Vienna suffered and suffers housing price inflation like any
| other european city. In world wars not only people dies, but
| housing units are destroyed too.
|
| Also, the point of the social housing in vienna is not only
| the dimension of it, but how they do it. The design, the
| demographics, etc.
|
| There's a clear distinction between their program and the
| myriad of commieblocks in other countries that become low-
| income guettos to sink public money.
|
| Public housing done right is more than just building dense,
| putting poor people in it and be done with it. That's a
| recipe for disaster.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I don't want to live in the projects
| m_ke wrote:
| Which of these "affordable" options are you too good for:
| https://housingconnect.nyc.gov/PublicWeb/search-lotteries
|
| Also recommend checking out this video about Vienna
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY
| missedthecue wrote:
| You're telling me those buildings are own and run by the
| government? Those look like mandatory "affordable units"
| that by law must be built by private developers in new
| buildings.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| No one forces you to do that.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I don't think anyone should have to be subjected to that
| type of treatment.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I don't know what type of treatment you mean. I guess
| you're thinking on a guetto, which is adressed in my
| first message.
|
| Also, people apply voluntarily. You're free to live in a
| private-owned rental
| noelherrick wrote:
| The alternative for many is worse - many roommates,
| incredibly long commute, or homelessness. Remember that
| Googler who lived in his car?
| (https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-
| in-tru...)
| missedthecue wrote:
| The alternative is to literally just let developers build
| new properties. That's all you have to do. Upzone. Stop
| with the rent control. Stop with the mandatory parking
| minimums. Stop with the NIMBY bullshit.
| 8note wrote:
| This alternative being "kick people to the curb"
|
| Its hard to build over top of places that are already
| being lived in, and once you kick those people out, you
| have even more people that need a new place to live
|
| That said, if you're going to kick poor people out of
| their homes for the sake of rich moving in, why not just
| have the rich people live in those homes and call it a
| day?
| beebeepka wrote:
| Oh man, careful what you wish for. Dropping reasonable
| parking spot minimums would likely result in fights
| and/or cars being parked at all the wrong places.
| 690328535p5 wrote:
| I don't understand why you think state intervention would
| actually help. The state has no incentive to solve the problems
| you are talking about.
| fartsucker69 wrote:
| Property owners providing almost no value is just factually
| wrong. Their function is similar to insurance. You pay rent to
| live somewhere because you don't want to take the risk or can't
| get the loans to buy a property yourself. And it costs real
| money and time (i.e. real resources) to build those homes and
| maintain them.
|
| In return property owners (or insurance runners) can get rich
| off your monthly payments as well as the inherent value of the
| property (/insurance company), but because of risk of ruin,
| opportunity cost for other investments and other related
| phenomena, it can mathematically be a total win-win for both
| sides.
|
| What everyone complaining about property prices also always
| seems to forgoe are two things: First, people are clearly able
| to afford them or the prices wouldn't go higher. The myth that
| property investors buy homes on mass and don't rent them out
| which supposedly creates this pricing hike is idiotic. All of
| these big cities with insane rents have very low vacancy rates
| compared to the national average.
|
| In almost all of these places where people complain about rent,
| we are talking about big popular places where everyone wants to
| go even though there are tons of realistic alternatives all
| around the country. The situations where it's economically
| totally necessary for you to move to an expensive place but at
| the same time you can't afford the rent is so rare as to be
| virtually non-existent.
|
| Even the idea that people are displaced from their homes is an
| issue on a smaller scale than people make it out to be. That's
| because income in those expensive places is much higher than in
| cheaper places. There are people displaced from their homes,
| but that's because of poverty and other aspects of
| gentrification that are not necessarily tied to rent.
| enriquto wrote:
| > it costs real money and time to build those homes and
| maintain them.
|
| As a renter of a dangerously unmaintained property, whose
| owner has never worked because he inherited a bunch of
| apartments, I can only laugh hysterically at your
| ridiculously-over-the-top sarcasm.
| noptd wrote:
| This comes back to scarcity as the root cause. If there
| were an abundance of alternatives in the same price range,
| shitty landlords couldn't get away with letting their
| properties deteriorate to such a condition.
|
| The deadbeat landlord problem would solve itself once we
| build ourselves out of scarcity.
| refurb wrote:
| I'm pretty sure neglected maintenance doesn't prove the OP
| statement untrue.
| jmilloy wrote:
| It's easy to agree that property owners provide value, some
| more than others. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not seeing
| the big picture. On the other hand, you seem to be ignoring
| the realities of supply and demand, which can quite simply
| allow rental costs to increase well above the value that
| owners provide.
|
| Obviously I don't know, but I suspect you might be seeing a
| king of survivorship bias. Many people I know were in fact
| displaced from the place they want to live, including careers
| and communities they were a part of, due to cost of living.
| Housing is a big part of that. Are you surrounded by people
| who can afford it, and perhaps unaware of the people who
| can't?
| silverlake wrote:
| Rent has to match supply/demand. If demand goes up, prices
| go up, some existing tenants are priced out. The only
| sinister thing in US housing is communities making it
| difficult to build more. In my corner of NYC one could
| build housing for thousands of people.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| Lol just tax land
| cmurf wrote:
| Empty property tax at up to 1000%. For full time occupied
| properties, a sliding scale rebate toward rent based on income.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| New York City has very little housing available. It's not an
| issue of empty properties.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| You would be surprised at how much commercial real estate
| is vacant in NYC. If that could be converted to housing, it
| would alleviate a lot of problems.
|
| Also, the way commercial buildings are mortgaged is crazy -
| major landlords often have 0% down payments (claiming that
| their ability to attract rental tenants will add 20% equity
| overnight), and keep the building vacant rather than
| lowering rents to maintain the "valuation" of the building.
| Empty units can have their cost tacked on to the end of the
| mortgage. At some point, the bill comes due, but it takes a
| long time.
| treeman79 wrote:
| New York did this. Rent control. It's why they ended up with
| tons of slums.
|
| We have tons of land In the US. Lots of people leave New York
| for cheaper places.
| shmatt wrote:
| I think a lot of office workers would love that idea, except
| they were told in the past ~3 months its back to the NYC
| office or they're fired.
|
| The limited supply (3 years worth of eviction backlog) +
| office mandates hitting this spring are exactly why prices
| went crazy seemingly overnight after a pretty calm 2021
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| supercanuck wrote:
| Very high quality comment and very insightful!
| New_California wrote:
| I already had communism and state-owned housing in my country,
| so no thanks! Never again. You are welcome to move to a state-
| managed economies though.
| lazyier wrote:
| This post is stupid beyond all measure.
|
| One of the principal reasons Manhattan rent is so ridiculous is
| because of state intervention. More intervention, the worse it
| is going to get.
|
| > Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts
| the rest of the economy,
|
| This is a silly statement. Rent is part of the economy. Paying
| rent doesn't damage the economy anymore then paying for food or
| paying your electrical bill.
|
| > and property owners provide almost no value,
|
| They provide and maintain their property.
|
| > but to provide access to housing for people who has no
| capital for it,
|
| And for a wide variety of other reasons. Not everybody wants or
| is a place in their life were massive permanent investment
| makes sense.
|
| > which is service that could be perfectly provided by a state
| entity.
|
| Absolutely not.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Singapore provides that service pretty successfully.
| wowokay wrote:
| Housing/rent is a part of your disposable income. Some people
| live in expensive places because they want too, but no one is
| required to live in an expensive place because they have too. I
| agree in the idea of affordable housing but I don't think it's
| fair to promote sweeping changes because people decide to live
| in expensive cities like NYC.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| A lot of people are born in nyc you realize? And in other
| expensive places?
|
| Also if you evict all the poor people from the expensive
| cities, who do you think is going to work the jobs that make
| it possible and desirable for the rich people to live there?
|
| By what mechanism could this possibly work other than
| exploitation and coercion. I realize that's the current
| status quo, but do you? Do you understand that's what you're
| endorsing here with this argument of "poors gtfo?"
| zjaffee wrote:
| A huge percentage of the people living in NYC live in income
| restricted housing, it's in the millions of people.
| KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
| Hi, what is a non-transable good? You're using a non-dictionary
| word to justify a pretty radical policy, so I'm curious.
| kriops wrote:
| > (...) there should be heavy state intervention (...)
|
| This has been tried so many times throughout different cultures
| and time periods, and by different means. It will not benefit
| whoever is actually living on the properties, but will detract
| from their situation.
|
| Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt has several concrete
| examples of attempted interventions, and is written to give a
| basic intuition on why this happens (Spoiler: Opportunity
| costs).
|
| The only permanent solution is just to build more buildings, or
| at a political level simply making it easier to build new
| buildings, which directly increases supply and thus causes the
| lowering of prices. This makes perfect sense when you think
| about it: There are not enough buildings, so we need to have
| more buildings.
| system16 wrote:
| That's a pretty broad assessment.
|
| It's not without its flaws, but Singapore has an extremely
| effective public housing program run by the government's
| Housing & Development Board (HDB) where 89.9% of Singaporeans
| are homeowners.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/664518/home-ownership-
| ra...
|
| The "just build more" supply argument doesn't hold water when
| you have an unlimited source of demand from institutional
| investors and speculators that use housing as a place to park
| their money.
| daenz wrote:
| Isn't the heavy state intervention already here in the form
| of zoning?
| kriops wrote:
| Those are not even the only regulations, but you are
| absolutely right. Hence the prices.
| eej71 wrote:
| It continues to be disappointing to see so many people turn
| to state power as a solution to the problem of scarcity.
| Scarcity is solved through production not political power.
| rcpt wrote:
| Can't produce more land. Best we can do is tax people for
| hoarding it
| idoh wrote:
| You can increase density.
| kriops wrote:
| Best we can do is certainly not increase the cost of
| land, and thus increase the required price of
| rent/housing to break even.
|
| Less regulatory obstacles to increase supply, i.e. build
| housing, is the correct answer.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Land value tax reduces the cost of the land needed for
| housing since it incentivizes density. Building taller
| means each person lives on less land.
| rcpt wrote:
| Land Value Tax would decrease the cost of land as it
| makes land speculation less attractive. People won't be
| willing to bet on much on real estate if increased prices
| come with a tax penalty.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| EricDeb wrote:
| but what if they just build more 1000ft tall buildings with
| only 40 uber-luxury units? how does that help?
| hpkuarg wrote:
| It sounds like incentives in Manhattan are stacked in a way
| that 1000ft tall buildings with only 40 uber-luxury units
| are the only kind of buildings that can be profitably
| built.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| Isn't "just build more" what we've been doing for decades,
| and exactly how we got into the situation we're in now?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing
| people with different monetary and social capital into
| different building and areas, hurting social mobility,
|
| Maybe some groups of people don't want to live together with
| other groups of people? Different people living in different
| parts of the city is just natural evolution.
|
| Why should the state force them to live together?
|
| And why should the state tell you where to live? Why should the
| state be involved in your private life at all?
| dwater wrote:
| > Different people living in different parts of the city is
| just natural evolution.
|
| A claim like that needs supporting evidence. I see no reason
| why segregation among different members of a single community
| is natural.
|
| > Why should the state force them to live together?
|
| Because segregation breaks down the social bonds in a
| community, which is bad for the social fabric, which is bad
| for the community's ability to live and work together, which
| results in the breakdown of that community.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-03/why-
| segre...
|
| > And why should the state tell you where to live? Why should
| the state be involved in your private life at all?
|
| The state does not exist in Libertarian theory. The state
| already has numerous rules about your private life. You could
| make the same arguments against zoning and building codes.
| noptd wrote:
| >A claim like that needs supporting evidence. I see no
| reason why segregation among different members of a single
| community is natural.
|
| Considering that in-group-out-group psychology has been
| humanity's evolutionary default for tens if not hundreds of
| thousands of years, I'd say the burden of evidence is on
| anyone claiming the contrary.
| ctvo wrote:
| > CMV
|
| Questions more than anything else:
|
| - How does the system decide which applicants out of multiple
| get the unit? Lottery? How does the system decide which units
| get rented first (so the owners get income) e.g. 3 identical
| units on the same floor, in the same building?
|
| - With a sliding scale on price base on income, is there a
| price floor for the owner? E.g. low income tenant pays 500
| euros, but the system guarantees 1000 euros to the owner so the
| system pays the difference?
|
| - Has supply increased with this system in Vienna? Why would
| say an invesntor take the risk of putting capital into
| apartments or condos construction with this system in place?
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| > How does the system decide which applicants out of multiple
| get the unit? Lottery? How does the system decide which units
| get rented first (so the owners get income) e.g. 3 identical
| units on the same floor, in the same building?
|
| I don't know if I understand your question. We're talking
| about public housing, the owner is a public entity. For every
| building there are slots by income and they're filled by a
| FIFO system if you will.
|
| I know in the US this is more difficult but in most euro
| countries the administration can check what you earn yearly.
| It's semi-automated already.
|
| > With a sliding scale on price base on income, is there a
| price floor for the owner? E.g. low income tenant pays 500
| euros, but the system guarantees 1000 euros to the owner so
| the system pays the difference?
|
| The owner is the public housing company. No guarantee for
| anyone. There are different proposals, for me 20% for
| annualized income is simple & good enough, I wouldn't want to
| make it very complicated, but I'm sure it can be.
|
| > Has supply increased with this system in Vienna? Why would
| say an invesntor take the risk of putting capital into
| apartments or condos construction with this system in place?
|
| Overall supply did, but due to political factors the public
| housing system didn't expand at enough rate to keep up with
| demand.
| akvadrako wrote:
| FIFO is terrible since that often means waiting 15 years
| for a flat.
| ctvo wrote:
| I misunderstood and assumed _all_ rentals in Vienna were
| under this system vs. only public ones. I do wonder if the
| city continues to provide supply, what the downward
| pressure on price will be for private units and if that
| eventually harms overall supply. I 'm sure there's data on
| this somewhere, and I'll dig later today.
| ahthat wrote:
| "The big picture: This points to a conundrum. The Fed is raising
| rates to cool inflation. But rate hikes are driving higher rents,
| which are fueling inflation."
|
| Methinks this... might not end well.
| ctvo wrote:
| The problem for me, as a long time NYC resident, is that there's
| no other place in America I want to live even with work from home
| as a possibility.
|
| I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the
| city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that
| it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the
| entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we
| generally get along in the city, across many cultures and
| backgrounds. I like it has some of the best food in the world.
|
| I think a lot of people are like me. No, we don't want to live in
| Boston, Chicago, or Washington DC (similar cities with mass
| transit). Unfortunately demand will continue to outpace supply
| greatly.
|
| The only alternative I have is moving further out in Brooklyn or
| Queens. Unfortunately the subway has decent coverage, but moves
| at a snail's pace, and I'm looking at 50+ minutes for 6 miles
| into the city.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I see Boston as the tech hub of the East more than NYC. New
| York obviously has a large number of tech jobs, but Boston and
| DC both have a higher concentration of tech; in NYC the big
| fish is obviously finance.
|
| I discount DC a little because a lot of that is government and
| defense related (not a bad thing, just not my cup of tea).
|
| Boston has a lot of diversity in tech, lots of health/pharma
| like Moderna, web companies like TripAdvisor and Wayfair,
| robotics like Boston Dynamics, tons of startups doing ai/ml,
| and it seems like every big company has a substantial presence
| here (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce...)
| zjaffee wrote:
| NYC has the second most number of people with software
| development jobs in the US outside of the bay area although
| the number is about the same as Seattle which is a much
| smaller region than NYC, and within NYC the majority of
| developers work at banks in back office roles.
|
| Boston is definitely bigger for every other type of
| engineering though than NYC. Most non programming engineering
| jobs in NYC would either be for a niche startup or would have
| something to do with real estate.
| brightball wrote:
| As somebody with no dog in this fight (I live in the south
| east), I'd tend to agree with the Boston take.
|
| Simply being in the orbit of MIT can have that effect, along
| with everything else you listed.
|
| The issue with NYC from a perception as a hub of any one
| thing is that it's just so big with so many different things
| going on that tech just seems like one of many things going
| on there simply because of all the people.
| ghaff wrote:
| MIT is part of it but Massachusetts is also home to a large
| number of other research universities including BU,
| Northeastern, Harvard, the UMass system, etc.
|
| As you say, NYC (like Silicon Valley) has always been more
| concentrated in terms of technology focus.
| boringg wrote:
| I'd agree with this. Boston area has a lot of high
| quality post secondary educations that feed business and
| talent. I would argue bay area has some of the same
| dynamics (Stanford, UCB & UCSF amongst others).
|
| Silicon Valley has a high degree of tech but also a fair
| bit of climate tech which shouldn't be discounted.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, the Bay Area is probably the one other place in the
| US that has comparable higher-ed quantity and quality to
| the Boston area/Massachusetts. Other good institutions
| are scattered around of course but they're more diffuse.
|
| I think that there's a tendency on the part of a lot of
| people to view "tech" through the lens of web-related
| tech but obviously there's a lot more
| interesting/important work going on than just that--
| whether in the Boston area, Silicon Valley, or somewhere
| else.
| thehappypm wrote:
| The amount of top colleges in the Boston area is
| astounding. A school like Tufts (ranked #28 by US news)
| would be the crown jewel of almost every city in America,
| but it's totally overshadowed in Boston.
|
| Especially if you include Massachusetts as a whole it's
| absurd:
|
| MIT
|
| Harvard
|
| Tufts
|
| Williams
|
| Amherst
|
| Brandeis
|
| UMass Amherst
|
| Boston University
|
| Boston College
|
| Northeastern
|
| Wellesley
|
| Olin
|
| Babson
|
| Smith
|
| WPI
| dayvid wrote:
| Boston's interesting in that it feels more low-key than NYC
| or Silicon Valley. Most of the biotech companies feel a lot
| more secretive and I don't see as many public events.
|
| The valley has a vibe in that everyone you meet is involved
| in tech work in some way and will talk about it to you or in
| public. It doesn't feel that way here, or you have to be a
| part of certain circles maybe. There are some small biotech
| meetup groups, but maybe they all do communication at the
| universities?
| thehappypm wrote:
| That vibe definitely exist, in Cambridge and Somerville,
| and maybe the Seaport, where the tech folks love to live.
| Everyone in Camberville seems to be in tech or tech
| adjacent.
| jghn wrote:
| In my neighborhood the branded swag has shifted from
| mostly tech to mostly biotech over the last several
| years.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of computer-related tech (and defense sector) in
| the Boston area has historically been out in the suburbs,
| e.g. the "Route 128" companies. After Teradyne moved out,
| there was very little tech presence left in the actual
| city. That shifted with biotech/pharma and, more
| recently, with companies in the Seaport and Cambridge and
| the outposts of the big West Coast-HQd companies. But a
| lot of the tech industry is still well to the West and
| North of the city.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| I don't know how anyone who has spent considerable time
| around SV/SF, NYC and Boston could see Boston anywhere close
| to the others.
|
| The Boston tech scene and culture (outside of physically
| being on the MIT campus) is awful. TripAdvisor and Wayfair,
| your examples, are two companies I would aggressively advise
| any friends from even talking to. While all the major players
| are there _now_ it took them a long time to get there. Comp
| in Boston still lags NY and SF considerably, and in general
| Boston has always had a resistance to anything "new", it's
| politically liberal but otherwise a very conservative city.
| The biotech companies there have always been way more heavy
| on the _bio_ than the tech. I 've worked for Boston area tech
| companies multiple times , before and after the tech boom,
| and would _never_ work for a Boston area tech company again.
|
| NYC is on a whole other level. Not only do you have all the
| major players with much larger campuses there are far more
| startups and early IPO companies. There is the also entire
| world of HFT companies (Boston's finance scene is largely
| very old school investment management companies) which alone
| would be worthy of making NYC a techhub. I also disagree with
| your claims about the concentrate of tech companies. Tech
| related meetups and events in NYC are much larger, more
| active and have more exciting participants than in the Boston
| area.
| ghc wrote:
| Indeed, the amount of VC dollars invested in Boston companies
| per years is 3x the per capita of New York's. So while NY may
| have slightly more total dollars invested, a much higher
| percentage of Boston metro area workers (something like 30%)
| work in tech. New York will never really be a tech hub in the
| same way as SF or Boston because tech plays second fiddle to
| other industries.
|
| Still true today: http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
| HFguy wrote:
| "while NY may have slightly more total dollars invested"
|
| NYC is 50% higher in terms of total VC dollars.
| sparc24 wrote:
| Everyone should spend a couple of early years in NYC. You'll be
| better off for it even you end up moving to New Hampshire.
| ghaff wrote:
| Eh. I spent a summer there once. Admittedly in the 80s and
| admittedly as a relatively poor student intern. I like
| visiting NYC for a few days every now and then but I couldn't
| wait to get out at the time.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| If you really like mass transit and want to live without a car,
| America is probably not for you. USA got rid of most streetcar
| systems a long time ago and rebuilding them from scratch in
| current NIMBY climate is basically impossible. And subways,
| which are much more expensive than ground transit, only make
| economic sense in several metropolises.
|
| Try some European city with reasonable rents like Warsaw. Even
| the skyscrapers will remind you of Manhattan.
|
| But yeah, learning Polish is not easy.
| paulgb wrote:
| There's no fundamental reason "America is probably not for"
| people who want high-quality, dense urbanism. The rent in NYC
| is a clear sign that there's demand for it.
| noobermin wrote:
| There is definitely demand, but America won't build that
| demand because the "silent majority" (homeowners who still
| are fearful of minorities and poor people) won't let that
| happen.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Depends on what you call "fundamental reason".
|
| Building new mass transport systems like light rail in
| existing cities from scratch requires a lot of political
| momentum, basically willingness to crush the pervasive
| NIMBY mentality and overcome the pull of bureaucratic
| inertia. Even in European cities that never dismantled
| their light rail systems, inhabitants often fight back
| against line extensions, citing noise concerns etc., and
| are able to delay the construction for years or decades.
|
| Plus such systems _aren 't_ cheap and usually require new
| subsidies on top of existing subsidies. You will still have
| to maintain the existing road system and bridges, their
| usage won't drop to zero or even a quarter of current
| traffic. Some people won't voluntarily switch to public
| transit ever, for all kinds of reasons.
|
| Maybe this isn't "fundamental", but IMHO the hurdles to
| overcome are really high and I am not sure if there is any
| city in the US willing to try this and having the means to
| do so.
| _jab wrote:
| It's also a sign there's not sufficient supply of it. Hence
| that America as a whole sucks at mass transit.
| rory wrote:
| I love Warsaw and think I would personally really enjoy
| living there, but if the GP isn't willing to move to Boston,
| they're not going to like living in Warsaw.
|
| Much smaller then NY, much more homogeneous, not a major
| world center of arts or finance.
|
| There are very few cities in the world that check all the
| boxes he listed for NY, and they're all extremely expensive
| as well.
| te_chris wrote:
| Exactly, although London certainly isn't $5k
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| The pay is also a lot worse in London, for tech at least.
| [deleted]
| Aunche wrote:
| Part of the problem is that most people would rather move to an
| existing desirable city than try to improve their own to make
| it more desirable, myself included. In most major cities, less
| than 20% of people vote for mayor, let alone city council. Most
| of those who do vote in local elections are much old.
|
| http://whovotesformayor.org/
| acchow wrote:
| The goal posts keep moving tho. Even if your city becomes
| closer to NYC circa 2010, NYC is moving towards becoming a
| totally different beast of NYC circa 2030. There will always
| be a massive gap
| [deleted]
| dgunay wrote:
| I don't blame them. It can take decades for the kind of
| change that urbanists want to fully play out, and I bet they
| would rather experience good city life while they can enjoy
| it.
| asdff wrote:
| Exactly. The bike lane network plan in LA county has been
| on the books for 10 years now and its still a patchwork
| mess in the second largest city in this country where you
| could realistically bike to work every day of the year.
| There is no hope elsewhere for change. If you don't already
| have it you won't ever have it or you will be beating sand
| until you die fighting for a mile of bike lane or a single
| train line that waits at red lights.
| Aunche wrote:
| That kind of proves my point though doesn't it? There is
| a definite demand for bike lanes. However, civic
| participation is abysmal for everyone but the elderly who
| tend to be NIMBYs. If more people pitched in, we wouldn't
| have to rely the efforts of a few hyper-dedicated
| individuals.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| You and everyone else buddy, that's why you're going to be
| priced out just like the people before you.
|
| It's nice you enjoyed your ride from $2,000/month to
| $5,000/month. That range was absurd to the people that went
| through an earlier range, and so on and so forth.
| wnolens wrote:
| I feel you here. I'm a relatively new NYC resident and worried
| that I'll be "ruined" forever. I've otherwise lived in Toronto
| and Seattle.
|
| It really comes down to fear of change I think. Humans are very
| adaptable, and the same one can thrive in car-centric suburbs
| as they would in shoulder-to-shoulder metropolises. Given no
| constraints, you prefer city. But throw in kids (requirement
| for more space/better schools), or a dream job (passion), or a
| dying parent (obligation), or a lover.. and suddenly you're
| building a life in a completely different place. And it works.
|
| At least I think/hope.. because outside of a busy city I am
| irritable and sad. But it sure would be nice to slow down on
| the treadmill/rat race a bit..
| neilparikh wrote:
| > I feel you here. I'm a relatively new NYC resident and
| worried that I'll be "ruined" forever. I've otherwise lived
| in Toronto and Seattle.
|
| Just out of curiosity, what do you think NYC has that Toronto
| or Seattle don't have? And what are you thoughts on Toronto
| vs. Seattle? Personally, I've lived in Toronto (which I
| loved), and visited Seattle for a few days (which I liked,
| but hard to say from a short visit), so curious to hear what
| others who have lived in all 3 think (especially since I'm
| planning to move to Seattle soon).
| wnolens wrote:
| They're all great and have something that the other two
| don't/can't have. I could go on for hours about each. Also
| this is a very personal/subjective question, so take with a
| grain of salt:
|
| Toronto: It's Canada. Culture _is_ different than the US.
| My friends and family are here. Since it 's where I formed
| my personality, I like the people here way more. It's the
| only place I experience uncontrollable laughter in reaction
| to what someone said. The inner city is very cool without
| feeling like some over-discovered instagram location. In
| NYC every half decent bar or restaurant is packed with a
| lineup and costs 2x. Transit is okay, not great. But I hate
| Canadian suburbs, so to me the GTA is not hospitable (for
| me) outside of the rectangle of Humber river to Don Valley,
| waterfront to Eglinton. And income to cost of living ratio
| is so much lower compared to tech in the US, it's like..
| minimum 10+ years of working life lower.
|
| Seattle: A true gem of a place. Not overcrowded (yet,
| despite what people there say). Great music, bars,
| restaurants etc. You can get from middle of "city" to
| middle of wilderness in 1.5-2h, and be literally in a
| national geographic photo. Insane income:cost of living
| ratio (only slightly lower income than Bay/NYC, but cost of
| living significantly less). Transit okay, getting better,
| but not too useful inside the city. But it's a very
| monocultural place. So unless you find your "people" here,
| it can be quite boring/exclusive. I fraternized widely, but
| ultimately was left wanting for more socially. Also far-
| left politics are central to social culture here, so it's
| quite literally not a "safe space" to be anything but. I'm
| more of an "east-cost person", if that makes any sense.
|
| NYC: One of a kind place in North America. Feels like you
| truly live _in_ the city, not just in your house/apartment
| with necessary excursions. It can be overwhelming with how
| many people there are and how densely they live, but to me
| that's something special. Cost of living is insane, but it
| doesn't buy you nothing. Subway system can feel archaic and
| let's you down often, but it also enables a special way of
| life for North America (car-less existence, a fixed 30 or
| 50 min ride from almost anywhere you'd need to go). A lot
| of double edged swords. The diversity of people is eye-
| opening. Toronto can feel more ethnically diverse - which
| is interesting in it's own way - but NYC is diverse in
| every other way too. I'm quite worried about having kids in
| NYC someday. From what I hear the school system is
| ruthless. I don't want my kids to undergo such stress. I
| think Toronto wins out huge for raising children.
|
| Anyway.. bit of a ramble.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| I couldn't figure out the kids in the US equation, so I
| left. Of course people can, but I couldn't.
| illamint wrote:
| Recently moved to Seattle from NYC. I'm enjoying Seattle,
| but it's a joke of a city compared to NYC. Seattle's public
| transportation--while improving with light rail--pales in
| comparison. Seattle is, overall, pedestrian-hostile. There
| are neighborhoods that are themselves walkable, but
| sidewalks will disappear when walking between them, or
| you'll be forced into situations where you're uncomfortably
| close to high-speed traffic (e.g. the Ballard bridge).
|
| Seattle has enough good food to keep me relatively happy
| (even pizza and bagels), but for any given cuisine, you
| might have one or two good options. Getting to them
| probably involves driving, and they're probably not open
| late or even open at all early in the week (maybe this is a
| pandemic artifact; I moved here in 2021). Seafood here is
| great, though. I think Seattle wins in that single
| category.
|
| I think NYC's biggest win over Seattle (and every single
| other city in the US) is the combination of quantity,
| quality, and accessibility. You have some of the world's
| best food, shopping, culture, and jobs accessible to you at
| all hours of the day via a subway ride (or in many cases
| within walking distance). The city is your backyard: you
| don't need a huge apartment because there's a good chance
| you won't really be spending much time there.
|
| That said, after 10 years there I grew tired of that
| lifestyle and wanted to spend more time outdoors and
| exploring the west coast. If you really enjoy the outdoors
| --hiking, skiing, mountain biking, climbing, etc.--then NYC
| is vastly inferior to Seattle. I may find myself back in
| NYC some day because I miss the things that it's the best
| at, but for now, I'm enjoying doing something different. I
| think it's very easy to fall into a hedonic routine in NYC.
| maybekerneldev wrote:
| > and they're probably not open late or even open at all
| early in the week (maybe this is a pandemic artifact; I
| moved here in 2021)
|
| No, it's a Seattle thing. One of my major peeves with
| this city (and entire region) is how hard it is to find
| places that close later than 9pm, even in the summer when
| the days are really long.
|
| I think the outdoors culture here is so strong that
| people don't really care about having things to do late
| at night in the city.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| Eh, I think it's kind of an "everywhere-since-the-
| pandemic" thing after all.
|
| Atlanta is the same way and we used to have a HOPPIN'
| late night scene with SO many good late night spots, now
| it's almost a struggle to get something even like fast
| food after 9/10pm. That may be _slowly_ coming back
| though it seems like.
| runnerup wrote:
| Houston too.
| zjaffee wrote:
| I grew up in NYC and currently live in Seattle. The
| appeal of Seattle over NYC is the outdoors, substantially
| cheaper housing (you can get a 4br detatched house in
| seattle that's a 20 minute bus ride to downtown for less
| than this median apartment price), and better weather but
| yeah the food doesn't really compare.
|
| This said, I think LA wins over NYC in the food
| department outside of the very high end michilin type
| stuff and certain specific kinds of ethnic food like
| italian.
| sushxbehshx wrote:
| LooseMarmoset wrote:
| I have lived in San Diego. I have spent time in Los Angeles.
| I have spent time in San Francisco. I am not a stranger to
| large cities.
|
| I can say with certainty I will never live in one of these
| places. I won't even live in Pittsburgh, which is an order of
| magnitude smaller than any of these places. There's no
| escaping people. There's no escaping politics or bureaucracy.
| There's no way to escape petty crime, crazy people, and
| noise. You can't see the sky at night, there's never any
| "dark".
|
| Everything is orders of magnitude more expensive in a city.
| $5000/month rent? And people think this is "reasonable"? I
| don't even pay a third of that on a mortgage on a 2400sq/ft
| house. With a nice yard, decent neighbors, a good school, low
| crime, low taxes, the works. Our night-time intruders are
| turkey, deer, the occasional black bear, raccoons, skunks,
| and screech owls.
|
| Do I have to drive to get anywhere? Yes.
|
| Do I get the highest-paying jobs? Do I have immediate access
| to cute little bodegas and trendy little shops and night
| life? No.
|
| But I can let my kids go outside and play at night. I can
| leave my doors unlocked. Nobody breaks into my car and steals
| my stereo. I can leave my house with my garage door up and
| all my stuff inside, and my neighbors will call/text me to
| remind me.
|
| Is this an adequate trade-off? For me, absolutely yes.
|
| I get why people like living in big cities. I will never
| again live in one myself, though.
| archagon wrote:
| Drawn like moths, we drift into the city
|
| The timeless old attraction
|
| Cruising for the action
|
| Lit up like a firefly
|
| Just to feel the living night
|
| Some will sell their dreams for small desires
|
| Or lose the race to rats
|
| Get caught in ticking traps
|
| And start to dream of somewhere
|
| To relax their restless flight
|
| Somewhere out of a memory
|
| Of lighted streets on quiet nights
| wnolens wrote:
| > I get why people like living in big cities. I will never
| again live in one myself, though. I totally get your take
| as well. In fact.. sounds like a really nice life that I
| hope to live one day.
|
| But perhaps it's your stage of life & social context that
| makes the difference (it does for me). If you were single,
| didn't have many friends/family (or they were all in the
| city), or were dedicated to a career/passion whose nexus is
| in a city.. suddenly you might be running towards those
| people and institutions ;)
|
| It's not all about the cute bodegas. The sheer number of
| single women in my demographic nearby is worth inflated
| rent for the next few years. $5k for a single person is
| some maxima, I'm living alone in a big apartment in a
| nice/safe neighborhood for $3k, 2 blocks from the train.
| The salary possibility in NYC easily covers the delta to
| smaller cities/towns.
| kortilla wrote:
| > Given no constraints, you prefer city.
|
| That's definitely not a given. I know a bunch of people that
| given no constraints they would live at the edge of a lake
| with the nearest city being 100+ miles away. But they get
| forced into a city by the need for a job, or the same
| constraints you laid out.
| mortehu wrote:
| "you" refers to GP, so it's literally given.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| I'm confused what the "problem" is, is it that things you
| really like are expensive? I really like driving a Porsche, but
| it would seem a bit odd to lament a wild increase in new
| Porsche prices or my salary not keeping up with owning one as a
| "problem". I also really like that in Paris you can affordably
| get a glass of real champagne with every meal, but I hardly
| consider it a "problem" that in the US this isn't really
| reasonable.
|
| Things are getting more expensive, for some people that means
| they can't eat steak as much as they like, for others it means
| they need to move in with their parents, for you it means you
| might not live in the heart of one of the most expensive and
| desirable cities in the world.
|
| I've always found it a bit odd that in the tech community there
| is this assumption that people have the right to live wherever
| they want, and that somehow living in NYC or SF during it's
| prime isn't its own variety of luxury good. I enjoy champaign
| when I'm in Paris, and am glad that at least for today I can
| drive a Porsche. I've spent plenty of years in a beat-up old
| Ford and drinking yuengling, won't be terribly surprised if I
| spent plenty more doing the same in the future.
| legohead wrote:
| Have you been affected by the rent increase yet? Curious how
| much power the landlords have there. Can they raise your rent
| without warning, are they trying to force you out, etc.
| stomczyk09 wrote:
| Not personally. I know some of my friends have been who moved
| back well after the "Covid Discounts" were a thing, got a
| little bit of an inflated deal, and now are facing like at
| least 3k for 1 bedrooms in places like around Williamsburg &
| Lower Manhattan(west village, soho, etc.). That's one of the
| better case scenarios I've heard as well. Truly a shame :(
| frutiger wrote:
| They can't push you out. In uncontrolled apartments, the rent
| gets renegotiated at the end of every lease term (usually 1
| or 2 years).
|
| There are exceptions for rent controlled and rent stabilized
| apartments, where the landlords have even less power on price
| setting.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| The city is safer?
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| paulgb wrote:
| Despite the popular Murdoch-media narrative that big cities
| have become hellholes, yes.
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-
| new...
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| That Bloomberg article is a really interesting experiment
| in cherry-picking data: it focused specifically on deaths,
| and only on deaths due to specific causes that helped its
| case. Yes, New York has fewer homicides and car crash
| deaths than rural towns, but if you look at most other
| data, which is arguably more relevant, the opposite story
| shows up.
|
| I'm not that worried about being murdered. Murders tend to
| happen between people with a relationship. There are very
| few random murders. In cities, gangs do the murdering, and
| outside of cities, it is generally crimes of passion. The
| NYPD is very, very aggressive about going after gangs and
| murders. This is at the cost of controlling other types of
| crime.
|
| The car crashes are easy to explain: NYC is designed so
| that you drive very slowly, and there is a 25 mph speed
| limit everywhere a pedestrian might be. Crashes in NYC are
| almost always non-fatal. It's not that they don't happen.
| They are just non-fatal.
|
| Personally, I am worried about being mugged or harassed,
| and that is extremely common in NYC compared to most
| places. It also happens to be something that happens
| between unrelated people. That is why I moved out of NYC
| after having been attacked once and witnessing 2 thefts in
| 4 years, and that is why the statistics cited in that op-ed
| are completely useless.
| bogomipz wrote:
| It's amusing that you bring up a mogul's "media narrative"
| and then cite a link from Bloomberg News. Michael Bloomberg
| is of course also a billionaire with his own empire and
| media company.
|
| This piece you are citing is from the Opinion section of
| Bloomberg News. Bloomberg itself being a company whose
| headquarters are in NYC and whose founder is Mike Bloomberg
| a NYC resident himself as well as being a 3 term mayor of
| NYC. The author of this opinion piece, Justin Fox is also a
| NYC resident. It's worth noting too that Bloomberg LP
| company famously does not allow remote work and owns the
| Bloomberg Tower, a 55 story commercial and residential
| skyscraper that takes up an entire city block in Midtown.
|
| Lastly Bloomberg himself is a polarizing figure since
| during his long tenure as Mayor he was widely seen as being
| in bed with big real estate development. His tenure as
| mayor was notable for the hyper development of luxury real
| estate. The types of "glass boxes" that are dark most of
| the year. For more background see:
|
| https://therealdeal.com/2019/11/26/love-hate-and-real-
| estate...
| showerst wrote:
| NYC is relatively safer than other large cities. particularly
| Manhattan. https://realestate.usnews.com/places/new-york/new-
| york-city/...
|
| Overall NYC is much safer than the national average,
| especially compared to small towns which people often assume
| are the safest. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-
| york-city-is-a-l...
| rory wrote:
| For people wondering the drivers here: car crashes, drug
| overdoses, suicides. So the claim isn't really referring
| about the things people usually consider when it comes to
| "safety" (interpersonal attacks), although it's talking
| about things that we perhaps *should* think about more when
| it comes to safety.
|
| If I'm being honest with myself, muggings in DC still scare
| me more than car crashes in Montana, despite the reality of
| these stats.
| showerst wrote:
| I'm on my phone right now so hard to check, but I don't
| think DC actually is safer than most places.
|
| Crime here is comparatively high, and many people still
| drive.
| rory wrote:
| It's not listed as a particularly safe or unsafe place by
| the measure of the Bloomberg article.
|
| When I lived in DC I was several times narrowly missed by
| people blowing red lights, robbed, and once had to wake a
| driver up at a red light because they and a passenger had
| both passed out while driving at 11am. It definitely
| didn't feel like a particularly safe place.
| throwk8s wrote:
| People that want to be conspicuous have to display their
| success where it's going to be seen. Living in a place that is
| "central" in so many ways is a competition to see who can hang
| in there. The only way to stay is to keep winning bigger.
| standardUser wrote:
| What? Most people I know in Manhattan are just people with
| jobs who enjoy living in the city. There is no "displaying
| their success" or "keep winning bigger" mentality to be found
| in my sprawling NYC-based friend group. Sounds like something
| from TV or the movies.
| throwk8s wrote:
| > There is no "displaying their success" or "keep winning
| bigger" mentality to be found
|
| They may not realize the game they're in. But as long as
| the cost of living keeps hitting new peaks, inevitably
| people need to bring in more money, or move farther out or
| elsewhere. Supply is limited, and it is a competition.
| standardUser wrote:
| "They may not realize the game they're in."
|
| And the award for Most Condescending Comment goes to...
|
| But in all seriousness, this has _always_ been happening.
| NYC is NYC because the cost of living keeps hitting new
| peaks, over and over, generation after generation. The
| same with so many high-demand cities. That 's how they
| got to be such massive, dense cities to begin with. We're
| all just riding the wave.
| throwk8s wrote:
| > And the award for Most Condescending Comment goes to...
|
| I probably could have phrased that better. In any case I
| don't think what we're saying is incompatible. One has no
| choice but to keep up with the cost of living. My point
| is that the cost of living in a massively "central" city
| is defined by a lot of people driven to succeed and be
| seen succeeding, whether or not that's the mentality of
| one's group of friends.
| g9yuayon wrote:
| Sounds we should really build walkable city with convenient
| mass transit in the US and Europe. It's a shame that building
| anything infrastructure in the US is prohibitively expensive.
| zjaffee wrote:
| Building single family homes is much cheaper in the US
| because of prefabrication. It's something like 3x less per
| square foot than a 5/1.
| EricDeb wrote:
| I feel like the main deterrent for boston and chicago is the
| weather but I could be wrong.
| mynameishere wrote:
| I'm picturing this guy riding around on a New York City subway
| car and thinking to himself "Yep, this is worth $5,000 a
| month."
| samstave wrote:
| What % of available living space is not lived in, and further
| what % is owned by foreign nationals.
|
| I know that in MANY countries, one is precluded from owning any
| property if not a citizen. Obviously this leads to a bunch of
| corruption issues with bribing and marrying nationals for
| access to property, but the USA has literally zero control on
| property ownership.
|
| You know how much foreign money laundering is done through US
| property ownership?
|
| MOST of it.
|
| A vertical zoning law might be an option:
|
| There are places like Singapore where you cant build a high-
| rise unless the subterranian aspects of the project dont
| include a connection to other sub services, like the walkway
| malls and such.
|
| I say do a % split on a vertical level which must include
| subterranian levels as a course:
|
| The building MUST include underground parking, a commerical
| section and a range of income level sections.
|
| You cant just build a high-rise of $millions apartments.
|
| Look at Millennial Tower in SF. What a disaster. I HUGE legal
| BS and not a single person with a net worth of south of 10
| million was accommodated in that disaster - but it still cost
| the city (i.e. tax payers who are NOT worth >10 million --
| millions of dollars.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| My quick google says 4% of apartments are vacant in nyc. Got
| to believe the vast majority of that is structural vacancy
| while landlords clean units and look for new tenants. feels
| like a none issue to me.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| I live in Brooklyn and feel the same way. Even if you discount
| all the empty luxury apartments held by foreigners who never
| show up, there are still tons of people who want to move here.
|
| Why?, because when you have all these people crammed together -
| weird stuff happens and that's what makes NYC magical. We're
| constantly mixing together, in the subways, bars, restaurant,
| parks ,etc. You get to see firsthand all the humanity of this
| city. No other city in America has replicated that.
| neon_electro wrote:
| I won't argue/disagree with you as far as NYC's comparably
| higher degree of what you describe, but having lived in
| Philadelphia's core, there's plenty of the mixing magic
| happening in other cities, but it's definitely not "the
| same".
| namose wrote:
| Philly is also probably the closest approximation to NYC in
| this way. Most other cities in the US are so segregated
| that wealthier neighborhoods feel like suburbs (looking at
| DC and Boston here).
| zjaffee wrote:
| As someone who grew up in NYC, the only lasting appeal to me is
| family and specific ethnic culture that is much less in every
| city in the US that isn't NYC.
|
| The apartment I grew up in, in lower manhattan, today would
| cost more than 20-30 times what my parents paid for it in the
| 90s, and it wasn't a nice apartment. There was no laundry in
| the unit, it faced a dark courtyard, the tempurature of the
| apartment was never that comfortable, had yearly huge bug
| infestations, but it was in a great location and was about 5
| rooms more or less.
|
| I think people just romanticize a life different than the one
| they grew up with. I certainly miss some aspects of the city
| culturally, but life on the west coast, I've had considerably
| better living arrangements ever since I've graduated college
| than the one I grew up in, and my parents were both
| professionals with graduate degrees, it's even worse for a lot
| of other people.
| thex10 wrote:
| I grew up in NYC, in an even worse apartment. Despite no
| longer having family there, I would return in a heartbeat. I
| loved it and wish I could raise my kid there (in a better
| apartment, mind you)
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| An escooter might be a good transportation choice.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Move to SF. Having lived here and Manhattan I think many of the
| things you like about NY are present here. Just don't listen to
| the headlines.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| As someone who has also lived in both places (and lives in
| neither of them currently), I'd have to vehemently disagree.
| SF is not only comparably expensive, it's also incredibly far
| behind in transit, far more homogeneous in all sorts of ways,
| much less culturally interesting and significant, and-
| despite my agreeing that the headlines are blowing it out of
| proportion- pretty clearly headed in the wrong direction
| overall. It has some potential advantages (weather, proximity
| to nature, stronger tech job market), but I relate to the OP
| comment a lot, and for me SF just cannot even slightly
| compare to NY.
|
| Obviously this is all just my opinion! I know tons of people
| love it there.
| simonsarris wrote:
| > I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of
| America.
|
| Coming from New Hampshire: this is just fantastically untrue.
| NYC is about _one hundred times_ more violent than where I
| live. It is so thoroughly not the same that I can usually tell
| when people come from cities simply based on how nervous they
| are. I think most people don 't realize how badly it affects
| them, or how violent cities are versus "the rest of America".
|
| Some crime stats: https://imgur.com/a/qDKqC59
|
| edit: NYC has 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people, which is 45%
| more violent than the USA median (4.0). I have no idea how 45%
| more violent got a reputation as "safer than the rest of
| America" but it's not true.
| brandonwags wrote:
| Safety in crowds, this is a big generalization. As someone
| who just moved in from Chicago, I feel exponentially safer in
| NYC.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Totally. I said this in another comment too. Being around
| so many other people does have a sense of safety to it.
| Especially late at night.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > It is so thoroughly not the same that I can usually tell
| when people come from cities simply based on how nervous they
| are.
|
| I think, at least in today's culturally polarized
| environment, there are a lot of people who would be
| understandably nervous and on guard traveling to rural
| America, and it has nothing to do with what crime looks like
| in their home city.
| FredPret wrote:
| Why would crime stats be expressed by square mile? To
| purposefully make NYC look bad?
| [deleted]
| neogodless wrote:
| The other graph is Per Capita.
|
| And while this reminds me of XKCD: Heatmap[0], the density
| of crime also matters when it's where you live, and the
| actual proximity you are to frequent violent crimes.
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/1138/
| derekdahmer wrote:
| The NYC crime rate varies wildly by neighborhood so I don't
| think its very useful to compare city-wide crime stats. For
| example, the felony assault rate is literally 10x higher in
| parts of the Bronx than on the UES. If you live and work in
| safer neighborhoods the city will appear to be very safe to
| you.
|
| In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from
| (edit: downtown) Manhattan and you'd really have to go out of
| your way to get there. Anecdotally I lived in Chelsea and
| worked in Union Square for a few years and never witnessed
| any real crime, violent or otherwise. By comparison I also
| lived in SF where the bad parts are unavoidably located in
| the center of the city and I've witnessed multiple violent
| crimes over a similar time period. The neighborhoods in a
| city you pass through on a day to day basis really matter in
| terms of defining your experience.
|
| Check out this map for stats: https://maps.nyc.gov/crime/
| helloworld11 wrote:
| Whats up with Manhattans South Precinct (the roughly square
| section south of Central Park? For just about all of the
| categories of crime on this map, it consistently ranks as
| the worst area in the whole city across all five boroughs.
| Seems weird for this to be happening in a core section of
| Manhattan itself.
| derekdahmer wrote:
| That precinct has Times Square as well as multiple train
| and bus stations (Port Authority, Penn Station and Grand
| Central). So tons of people passing through daily, many
| of whom are easy crime targets like tourists.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| It's midtown so it's a tourist hub. Tourists are more
| likely to be targeted for almost all crimes. Plus they
| report it more.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > Plus they report it more.
|
| The implication there is that the areas with fewer
| tourists have higher true rates of crime than the
| official stats, which makes the overall case worse...
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| But other places also have underreported crime. In a
| place where police take 30 minutes to arrive it might not
| be worth it to call the police for some minor things.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"The NYC crime rate varies wildly by neighborhood so I
| don't think its very useful to compare city-wide crime
| stats. For example, the felony assault rate is literally
| 10x higher in parts of the Bronx than on the UES. If you
| live and work in safer neighborhoods the city will appear
| to be very safe to you."
|
| This makes no sense. It's a mobile city. You can live on
| the UWS but have to go downtown to see a doctor, or work in
| midtown but commute in from the Bronx or Queens to go to
| work. The vast majority do not live and work in the same
| neighborhood let alone work and live in the same nice and
| safe neighborhood.
|
| >"Anecdotally I lived in Chelsea and worked in Union Square
| for a few years and never witnessed any real crime, violent
| or otherwise."
|
| Not only is that a walking commute but there is literally
| not a single bad block between anywhere in Chelsea and
| Union Square.
|
| >"The neighborhoods in a city you pass through on a day to
| day basis really matter in terms of defining your
| experience."
|
| Yes exactly, where do you think all of the service workers
| that are back bone of the city travel through on their
| commute, often at night? Hint, it's not Chelsea.
| lr1970 wrote:
| > In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from
| Manhattan
|
| East Harlem (part of Manhattan) is as dangerous as the
| Bronx and is very different from the Chelsea where you
| live. Manhattan is not a uniformly safe place. Also, NYC
| subway is filthy, disgusting and sometimes plain dangerous.
| Car traffic is worse than before COVID. There seem to be
| more cars on the streets, for people are avoiding subway
| and are using cars more often than before.
| woodruffw wrote:
| East Harlem is a relatively small neighborhood, the Bronx
| is an entire borough. There are parts of the Bronx that
| are both significantly more and less dangerous than East
| Harlem (Mott Haven and Riverdale come to mind,
| respectively).
| artemisyna wrote:
| None (or at least few) of the folks you're gonna see on
| HN are going to be in the income bracket where they're
| going to be living in East Harlem. It's about half an
| hour from the places where things happen, at least, and
| might as well be an outer borough for most intents and
| purposes, given transit times, even if it's technically
| within the stated geographical limits of Manhattan.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This might have been true 25 years ago, but all of South
| and East Harlem has been experiencing steady
| gentrification for the last decade. Most of that is
| coming from young families, from my experience living in
| South Harlem.
|
| (There are lots of attractions to the neighborhood: old
| buildings, pretty side streets, good food, convenient
| access to museums, and one of the most reliable subway
| lines in the system.)
| deet wrote:
| Former Harlem resident chiming in here as an additional,
| concurring datapoint.
|
| I didn't fit the traditional Harlem demographic (ex-FAANG
| employee, startup founder, etc) but found the
| neighborhood to have solid access to the rest of
| Manhattan, an increasing number of amenities, proximity
| to Central Park, and an overall appealing character
| compared to the increasingly sterile areas of Manhattan
|
| If/when I move back to NYC I would certainly consider
| living in Harlem again.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Eh. I wouldn't jump the gun on that claim.
|
| "Where things happen", aka Manhattan? Tbh, Manhattan
| kinda blows these days. It's more or less a sterile,
| disneyified, yuppy, consumerist grazing ground from 100th
| down, with the exception of alphabet city and Chinatown.
| But even Chinatown's changing, unfortunately. Feels like
| the old Chinatown Fair shutting down was a signal.
|
| Idk Manhattan has a few solid areas that have held up
| over the years, but I personally try to avoid it unless
| my boys and I have a skate session or heading to a
| museum.
|
| Also, the commute from the boroughs really isn't bad. If
| you really need to get to Manhattan you're probably
| looking at 45-50 min on average, which is whatever...
| unless you live in bumfuck nowhere where there's not a
| stop within a mile or two.
| MrMan wrote:
| 45 minutes each way in the subway so I can hang with my
| boys in a non Disney outer borough
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| So essentially, the assertion should be "NYC has some of
| the safest neighborhoods in fhe country"
|
| Which is not really the same thing at all...
| brailsafe wrote:
| That's gotta be similarly true for a lot of major cities
| though don't you think? Vancouver, BC is broadly quite
| safe, unless you drive, have a car centric cycling route,
| or walk down certain streets in the downtown Eastside
| during particular times of the week or day alone
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| But a city is the sum of all its residents. Saying that
| the well-off parts of the city are safe and ergo, the
| city is safe reeks of incredible privilege - that crime
| is okay as long as the people who suffer from it are the
| poor.
| simonsarris wrote:
| > In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from
| Manhattan
|
| That's not true, and my stats above are solely Manhattan.
| derekdahmer wrote:
| You are right, I meant downtown Manhattan. There are
| plenty of neighborhoods above 96th street with
| disproportionate amounts of crime.
| esoterica wrote:
| The sheer audacity of comparing crime in cities to rural
| areas on a per square mile basis.
|
| Parent commenter is completely correct that NYC is safer not
| just than the average location in America, but also the
| average rural area.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-
| new...
|
| Maybe your very specific neck of the woods is very rich and
| safe but I don't know why you felt the need to butt in and
| make the conversation about you, OP never claimed that NYC
| was the absolute number 1 safest place in the country.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| It's weird that "safety" in America always comes back to
| violent crime.
|
| There's hospital quality, time spent in private automobiles
| (one of the most dangerous things Americans do), risk of
| natural disaster, etc etc.
|
| I think it's very reflective of an anti-urban bias
| orange_joe wrote:
| NYC is _generally_ safer than the rest of America. NH is
| typically the safest region in the entire country. But the
| truth is that there are high numbers of relatively rural
| areas that are substantially more dangerous than NYC. Also, I
| think that crimes /mile is fairly un-instructive because of
| how much the legal boundaries of a city shift/as well as the
| amount that a person will travel in a given location (I live
| in NYC, and probably live/work/eat within a 1.5-2 mile
| range).
|
| p.s. I really like your content!
| lancesells wrote:
| I don't agree with being generally safer but NYC is pretty
| safe. The United States is pretty safe. A lot of the world
| is pretty safe.
|
| In terms of homicides though the US is less safe than
| Pakistan, India, Iran and Egpyt and other big countries.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"NYC is generally safer than the rest of America."
|
| What does that even mean - "generally" safer? Saying
| "generally" and "the rest of America" are nebulous to the
| point of being completely meaningless. If I were to compare
| hunting accidents, wild fires and car accidents in NYC
| compared to the "rest of the America" then yeah sure. Have
| a look at these NYPD crime stats from May and tell me that
| it's safer than the entire "rest of America."
|
| https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00050/nypd-citywide-
| cri...
| simonsarris wrote:
| > NYC is generally safer than the rest of America.
|
| I don't think that's true: NYC is at 5.8 violent crimes per
| 1,000, and the national median sits at 4.0. That's 45% more
| violent than the median. That's not small! I feel like some
| PR firm must have implanted this idea in everyone's minds
| that NYC is somehow magically safer, but it's not showing
| up in the stats, and if the stats are skewed by reporting
| its almost certainly worse, not better.
| nanidin wrote:
| I don't think the relative percent is a good way to
| compare 5.8 per 1000 vs 4.0 per 1000. It can easily be
| flipped to show that NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the
| national median.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Now look at dangers in general and not just crime and the
| picture is very different[1]. Judging by the total number
| of deaths from external causes, NYC was the second safest
| metro area in the country behind only Boston.
|
| Much of that is because NYC has drastically fewer
| transportation deaths than most of the US. The worst
| states have literally twenty times as many traffic deaths
| as NYC.
|
| [1]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-
| new...
| function_seven wrote:
| I have a sneaking suspicion that New Yorkers who think
| NYC is safe are comparing it to 1980s NY, rather than
| contemporary $other_region.
|
| Or maybe they're only comparing themselves to Chicago and
| Rio de Janeiro?
| rprospero wrote:
| I grew up in Indianapolis, where the violent crime rate
| is 8.7 per 1000. Growing up, we had plenty of trips to
| Columbus, OH (16.6), Detroit, MI (21.8), Cincinnati, OH
| (8.9), and, yes, Chicago, IL (9.9).
|
| Granted, sometimes we'd visit smaller, safer college
| towns, like Purdue's Lafayette Indiana University's
| Bloomington, or Ball State's Muncie, IN. Only Muncie had
| a lower crime rate than NYC. Then again, Notre Dame's
| South Bend (17.3) University of Evansville (10.1), and
| Rose-Hulman's Terre Haute (14.6) kind of dispelled the
| idea of college town safefy.
|
| My current town is at 36 violent crime per 1000
| residents, but the statistics are collected differently,
| so it may not be an exact comparison.
|
| NYC isn't safer than the majority of the country. But,
| compared to where I've been, it's felt pretty safe every
| time I stopped by.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I've heard this stat before, but comparing to large
| cities.
|
| NY is generally safer than Chicago, LA, Seattle, Boston,
| and Fort Worth; Wikipedia places it in 59th place for
| most violent crime per capita amongst the nation's
| largest 100 cities.
| ghaff wrote:
| The problem with any of these comparisons is that cities
| are very heterogeneous. In Boston, the Back Bay !=
| Roxbury and in NYC, the West Village != the South Bronx.
| However, at least absent a doorman, I probably wouldn't
| leave a door unlocked or an accessible window ajar the
| way I routinely do in my (only) semi-rural home in New
| England. When I visit people in cities, I have to
| consciously remember that they'll be unhappy if I am
| casual about such things like I am at home.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I mean...or it's that some of us have lived in New York
| for decades and not experienced even a little bit of
| violent crime. Born and raised New Yorker here.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I don't know. I never felt generally unsafe in New York
| if I was out late at night (after midnight or 1am) and
| walking alone to the subway or whatever. Part of it I
| think is that the city "never sleeps" so you don't get
| the feeling of being alone. There's always other people
| around.
|
| (My mom felt differently and would often force me to take
| a car home if I was leaving the office at 10pm in NYC --
| but my mom would feel that way about any city I lived
| in.)
|
| In SF, I've felt *very* unsafe being out before midnight
| (I was once propositioned for prostitution 4 times in a 2
| block walk). Same in Seattle, where my own neighborhood
| has felt downright unsafe after 7pm on certain nights.
| Same in parts of Atlanta. Same in parts of LA.
|
| I can't compare it to places like New Hampshire or the
| suburbs -- but I'm a female who weighs between 105 and
| 110lbs and yes, I'm white so that might help me, and I
| haven't been to every part of NYC late at night -- I'm
| sure there are places I wouldn't want to be alone -- but
| I do think that it is generally safe.
|
| I was shocked by how much more crime was in Seattle than
| where I lived in Brooklyn.
|
| There is another part of New York which is just that
| people generally leave you alone. So you're surrounded by
| people who you can call out for help to, but you're also
| not usually badgered by randos on the street.
|
| I can't talk about statistics but I can talk about how
| safe I feel. And I feel safer in NYC than any other major
| US city I've lived in or visited.
| function_seven wrote:
| I think this is where statistics fails me. You (and a
| couple sibling comments) are responding to my comment
| with your experiences to the contrary, and I--never
| having lived in NYC--just don't have access to that.
|
| This passage[1] probably sums up the difference between
| aggregate crime stats and NYC residents' own assessments:
|
| > _Looking at NYPD crime reports for 2010, 2015, and
| 2020, we find that about 1% of streets in NYC produce
| about 25% of crime, and about 5% of streets produce about
| 50% of crime. This is consistent across the three years,
| showing that a very small proportion of streets in the
| city are responsible for a significant proportion of the
| crime problem._
|
| I wonder if this phenomenon is different in different
| cities. Are the "shapes" of crime all "spiky" in New
| York, but more spread out in Seattle?
|
| [1] https://www.manhattan-institute.org/weisburd-zastrow-
| crime-h...
| [deleted]
| wutbrodo wrote:
| I've only ever heard the claim made in reference to other
| large cities, not suburban, rural, or exurban parts of
| the country.
|
| Its trivially true that dense urban environments are
| going to have different baseline patterns of crime
|
| It also seems pretty clear to me that this is the context
| OP was speaking in, given that almost everything else he
| described are features of big cities.
| orange_joe wrote:
| I think that overall crime rates can have severely skewed
| reporting. Homicide rate in NYC is 5.5 vs US average of
| 7.5, But manhattan's is even lower. The last time the
| city reported the borough by borough breakdown (2019),
| had a homicide rate of 3.2.
| vjk800 wrote:
| Indeed. I come from a rural village where I could leave my
| bicycle unlocked over night at the center of the village and
| it wouldn't get stolen. When I moved to a city, one
| realization I made was that cycling is just a lot less
| convenient if you have to worry about your bicycle getting
| stolen. Also I can't leave my home door unlocked when I go
| somewhere (and thus have to remember to take the keys with
| me).
|
| I think small stuff like this just adds to your total anxiety
| without you even realizing it. It's really sad how difficult
| it is to live in extremely safe, small villages like my
| childhood home nowadays.
| googlryas wrote:
| There are big city fixes for this. For example, most big
| cities offer bikeshares with docking stations all over the
| most popular places. So you can just use one of those bikes
| and not have to worry about theft.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Yeah but they're somewhat less convenient, you never know
| the quality of the bikes or whether there will be one
| available, and over time it's usually far more expensive
| (I literally just did this calculation for myself in DC,
| took about 6m of daily commuting to be even and then
| after that you're saving money). Luckily I work in a
| neighborhood crawling with cops so there is very little
| risk when I lock my scooter outside, but I definitely
| don't take it to other neighborhoods and leave it outside
| (I've had some funny conversations checking it with the
| coatcheck at events after work).
| vjk800 wrote:
| This is not a fix. It's exactly the sort of extra thing I
| don't want to deal with when I'm cycling.
|
| It really feels more careless to just ditch your bicycle
| on the side of the road and forget about it than lock it.
| I admit it's not a big thing, but as I tried to convey,
| small things like this add up.
| googlryas wrote:
| At least in NYC, there are bike docks - you don't just
| leave them wherever. This was quite controversial because
| I think each bike dock(which supports about 20 bikes)
| takes up 1-2 street parking spaces, so drivers were up in
| arms that these bike docks would destroy street parking
| in NYC..
| hamandcheese wrote:
| In SF those aren't very cheap, and you also replace the
| anxiety of "will my bike be stolen" with "will there be
| any bikes left when I need one?" and "will there be any
| docking stations available near my destination?"
|
| I use bike shares opportunistically, but they are not a
| reliable mode of transport.
| Jcowell wrote:
| In NY I've yet to see this happen. Rather it's an issue
| of , is there anywhere to dock the bike. The outer
| boroughs are also experimenting with Electric Scooters.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| CitiBikes in NYC are a bit different than in SF.
| Honestly, bike theft is an anecdotal thing and it's def a
| problem in New York, but I definitely think it is worse
| in SF.
|
| As a pure anecdote, my husband had his bike outside in
| Prospect Heights for 3 or 4 years literally not moved. It
| had a lock but he didn't even use the bike. It got
| weathered and abused and after literal years, I think it
| was finally stolen. In Seattle, where his has been broken
| into multiple times in a locked garage in our luxury
| building, I have no doubt that an untouched bike would
| have lasted a few weeks at most.
|
| But that's all anecdotal. I can say that in the 5 years
| or so that I used the CitiBike system, I never had a
| problem either finding a bike and the pricing was also
| more than fair. I frequently would take a bike from near
| Union Square and ride across the Brooklyn Bridge home on
| nice afternoons. I never once had a problem getting a
| bike or returning it to its drop off place near my
| apartment.
|
| And the app/locator lets you know the status of bikes at
| any time so you can know if there is a bike at a specific
| site or not.
|
| This might have changed in the last few years, but if
| anything, the city had a hard time convincing people to
| use the bikes. The system is a lot more efficient than
| the Lime bike/scooter setup that a lot of other cities
| like Seattle have (people in Seattle also don't know how
| to use bike lanes and use the fucking sidewalks like
| assholes, because Seattle).
| JackFr wrote:
| Haven't locked my door in 25 years in NYC.
|
| (I am in a doorman building.)
| alach11 wrote:
| What building do you live in?
| rayiner wrote:
| That's not a "city" thing, it's a "New Yorker" thing.
| People in Tokyo routinely leave things unattended in
| public, including valuable and easily carried things like
| laptops.
| asdff wrote:
| Its an american city thing really. The same thing would
| happen when I live in big cities on the west coast and in
| smaller cities in the midwest too. In the midwest was
| where my friend got a window smashed for their micro usb
| cable that couldn't have been more than $2.
| bluGill wrote:
| The miswest city I live on sees lots of unlocked bikes
| outside the gym. I wouldn't do that in some areas, but
| where I live it seems safe
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Or that's a Tokyo thing. I can't think of a single city
| in europe where you could leave a laptop unattended and
| expect to see it again.
| hgomersall wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true. I think people are generally
| more honest that people assume. It's prudent to assume it
| will be stolen, but I suspect most of the time,
| accidentally leaving something somewhere for a short
| while would be just fine.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Sure but in how many cities would people be comfortable
| leaving a laptop unattended? I don't think many. It's
| pretty unrealistic to use that as the bar for NYC
| hgomersall wrote:
| My point was that perceptions don't necessarily correlate
| with reality.
| brandall10 wrote:
| I mean, Kryptonite literally has a 'NYC' line of bicycle
| locks.
|
| When researching getting a lock for a personal scooter NYC
| always comes up as ground zero for problems with theft, to
| the point where much of the advice is to not even lock it
| up but bring it inside.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup. that's been true for decades. Literally, I lived in
| Manhattan for a while in the 1980s and never even
| considered leaving my bicycle outside, either at home or
| at work locations. It was ordinary to see stripped frames
| still locked to a post, some just appeared, some sitting
| for many weeks. Crime has risen and fallen significantly
| since I left, so I have no good relative comparison,
| other than that this is not new.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| This is what I love about my tesla (I wonder if other makes
| do the same) -- when I get out and walk away, it rolls up
| the windows, locks the doors, and turns on security camera
| all automatically. I don't have to think about it. It does
| remove some background anxiety (did I click the lock button
| on my remote? did I leave the window down?)
| mcguire wrote:
| A lot of this is simply a raw population effect. When I
| lived in Austin, I got in the habit of locking every door I
| went out of. Now that I live in rural Alabama, I frequently
| leave the house doors unlocked. I've forgotten to close the
| garage door for a day or so. My truck is frequently
| unlocked.
|
| Statistically, where I live now is the same or
| significantly worse than Austin. But with the lower
| population, there are simply fewer incidents.
| nanidin wrote:
| I don't think the relative percent is a good way to compare
| 5.8 per 1000 vs 4.0 per 1000. It can easily be flipped to
| show that NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the national
| median.
| Reubachi wrote:
| Also in NH, and I would say my perception is the opposite of
| your facts.I've spent lots of time all over the city at
| different times of day/year across decades.
|
| I would still say Manchester, Rochester, Nashua ETC are 10x
| trashier and more neglected than even the most run down alley
| in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens.
| tclancy wrote:
| I think that would be stretching it, but yeah, everywhere
| has good and bad. I walked a lot of SF at night when
| visiting for work and went to some less than savory places
| that felt no riskier than the worst of Rochester, but
| that's a low bar.
|
| That said, I shared a Lyft to the airport pre-dawn one time
| and where we picked up the other rider was a little more
| exciting than I would ever want to be.
| fritztastic wrote:
| Someone's feeling of safety/nervousness has more to do with a
| variety of different variables that are unique to them, the
| place in question, and the situation they're in.
|
| Personally, I'd rather be alone on foot in NYC than alone on
| foot in some small town where I'd stand out. Maybe because I
| grew up in a city and have traveled to many places, maybe
| because of my characteristics that make me feel vulnerable
| when I'm the outsider in a less diverse area, or maybe
| because I've lived in a city far more violent than NYC- so
| for me the things I visit for are worth the possible risk of
| crime.
|
| NYC isn't even on the top 50 most violent cities in the
| world, which is quite a feat when you consider how things
| used to be there in the 80s/90s.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Where did these numbers come from? You linked to a screenshot
| of a spreadsheet, but not its source.
|
| From a random search, I got 2.8 violent crimes per 1,000
| people _citywide_ , which means all 5 boroughs. For just New
| York county (Manhattan), the most official statistic I could
| find is 4.57 in 2019[2].
|
| [1]: https://www.lx.com/community/nyc-crime-rates-how-
| dangerous-i...
|
| [2]: https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/individual_char
| ts/v...
| simonsarris wrote:
| I'm using NeighborhoodScout. Here's Manhattan:
|
| https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ny/new-york/crime
| [deleted]
| irrational wrote:
| I had similar thoughts. I live on the west coast and feel so
| safe that I don't even lock the front door to my house, ever.
| I wonder if OP feels safe enough to always have their front
| door unlocked.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I wonder how much people think the typical flimsy locks on
| a residential door will actual stop someone who goes up to
| the door with the intention of entering. It would almost
| require someone to want to enter but iff the door was
| unlocked, which seems like a poor strategy for a burglar.
| esoterica wrote:
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Woof, the elitism in what you said was palpable.
|
| I'm in a rural area. I wear my seatbelt, along with
| everyone else I know. I don't even drink. The only people
| I've ever known that have driven drunk were dumb
| teenagers. I lock my door, but I not only kept my high
| school car unlocked - I left the keys in it.
|
| For two years I did that, and the only time it was
| "stolen" was when my friends skipped class, used it to
| drive to the bakery for some doughnuts, and deliberately
| parked it elsewhere as a prank. Do you really think
| that's how it would have worked out in any major city?
|
| I remember it being major news when a few houses were
| burgled when I was a kid.
|
| Now, the biggest town in the county? Crime happens there
| all the time. It's only 20,000 people but a lot of them
| are...lower rung.
|
| I think that's the real difference. When I walk in a
| major city or even that town, crime might happen to me.
| In the 20 mile radius around my house it's very unlikely,
| and I very rarely see a cop unlike in NYC.
| usrn wrote:
| >for the same reason they don't wear seatbelts and drive
| drunk everywhere. They just don't care.
|
| This doesn't match my experience living in a rural area.
| Most of the people I knew either avoided drinking (your
| WASP) or drank with their neighbors (your redneck.)
| irrational wrote:
| The thing is, I don't live in a rural area. I live in a
| suburb of a major city.
| tmh88j wrote:
| > Whether or not you lock your door has more to do with
| cultural attitudes towards risk
|
| > People in rural areas don't lock their doors for the
| same reason they don't wear seatbelts and drive drunk
| everywhere. They just don't care.
|
| Do you think the attitude towards risk is because they
| truly don't care about having their belongings stolen, or
| because they know there is less risk of that happening?
| Having lived in a rural area and in a few cities, my
| experience is the latter. No one wants to be robbed.
|
| Also, people in rural areas driving drunk is mostly due
| to lack of transportation options. I'm certainly not
| condoning it, but Uber doesn't travel out into the sticks
| and there is no bus or train to hop on.
| lovich wrote:
| > Also, people in rural areas driving drunk is mostly due
| to lack of transportation options. I'm certainly not
| condoning it, but Uber doesn't travel out into the sticks
| and there is no bus or train to hop on.
|
| I don't think that refutes their point that they don't
| care. Having come from a rural area myself, the decision
| was to drink at home or a friends I was staying over at
| rather than drive drunk. They don't care about the
| consequences compared to doing what they want
| tmh88j wrote:
| They're suggesting caring less is the primary reason for
| rural people driving drunk. The primary reason is a lack
| of transportation options. Caring less is a byproduct of
| that, not the reason they do it in the first place.
| lovich wrote:
| I see how you can interpret his comment that way, but I
| view it differently with the inclusion of cultural
| attitudes. The fact that some people started doing it
| because of lack of transportation made it into a cultural
| value.
|
| Being called a pussy for instance for not wanting to
| drive while smashed isn't a result of a lack of
| transportation.
| dahdum wrote:
| > They don't care about the consequences compared to
| doing what they want
|
| I also come from a rural area and I think you're missing
| some detail in the individual calculus. The chance of
| negative consequences drop so precipitously in some areas
| that, coupled with poor transportation options, it
| becomes primarily an individual risk in their eyes. They
| don't see a big issue with being over the limit when it's
| a road they drive everyday and encountering even a single
| vehicle on the way back is rare. It's not a lack of
| caring, it's just a different calculation.
|
| I've never drove drunk (or even buzzed) and I'm not
| defending the practice, just trying to explain their
| point of view.
| periphrasis wrote:
| One thing this thread has reminded me of is that for all the
| lip service conservatives pay to toughness and manly
| traditional gender roles, they certainly seem to live in
| abject terror of being the victim of a crime.
| kristjansson wrote:
| 100x is shocking, so I explored a bit. Over 2010-2020 Amherst
| PD reported ~5 violent crimes per year[1], in a town of
| ~10000, or about 50 per 100000. NYPD reported ~49k per year
| over the same period[ibid], on about 8.3m residents, or about
| about 590 per 100000. So about 11x difference in per-capita
| reported-to-local-PD crime.
|
| I'll admit I'm surprised it's still an order of magnitude, I
| share GP's sensibility that the cities are generally much
| safer than perceived
|
| [1] https://crime-data-
| explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...
| kristjansson wrote:
| Too late to edit, but I should emphasize a comment down
| thread that this is a crude, worst-case estimate of the
| difference between OP's town and NYC. Don't take this as
| 'NYC is 10x more violent', take this as 'The difference is
| at least 10x _smaller_ than stated'
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| I am not surprised. NYC gave up on violent crime. It's
| Democrat's policy. Same as in Chicago, SF, Los Angeles, and
| many other Democrat-run cities.
|
| One of the reasons I left NYC. I'm now in one of the safest
| neighborhoods, we have virtually no violent crime, except
| from the occasional visiting criminals.
| exogeny wrote:
| Good. I'm glad you got the fuck out of our city with your
| alarmist, non-factual nonsense.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| It's not alarmist. I look at the crime stats instead of
| listening to propaganda.
|
| And I am glad my taxes don't support Democrats' pro-crime
| policies.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| But you're sharing propaganda instead of crime stats. So
| all you've done is repeat a Republican party "talking
| point", which in the context of crime over time is
| nonsense.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Plenty of evidence of DAs in Democrat-run cities not
| prosecuting violent criminals.
|
| In Portland mobs fully control the streets, drag people
| out of cars and beat them, they threaten people, while
| police is just standing and watching. This is on video,
| not propaganda.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| I'm glad you enjoy Florida or Texas. Don't get anyone
| pregnant accidentally cos you know why...
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > In Portland mobs fully control the streets
|
| So you follow-up propaganda with hyperbole, and pretend
| that extreme outliers are somehow a normal
| representation.
|
| There's also plenty of evidence of Republican-run cities
| locking up innocent people, what's your point?
| lancesells wrote:
| > NYC gave up on violent crime. It's Democrat's policy.
|
| Could you explain that? Crime is trending down in NYC
| over the last 20 years.
|
| https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_a
| nd_...
| matheweis wrote:
| Garbage in, garbage out.
|
| People use these sorts of stats in Seattle to pretend
| that crime hasn't gotten worse in the last few years.
|
| The reality on the ground is much different, most people
| just don't bother reporting crime, because it's not worth
| the effort and the police probably won't come anyway.
| lancesells wrote:
| In what year did the stats become garbage then? If they
| were always garbage then crime has gone down. Do the
| stats become worse each year while crime goes up?
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| When the DAs in Democrat-run cities stopped charging
| criminals. I think there's a case in Seattle where one
| guy assaulted 23 people, one at a time, and they just let
| him go over and over again. No charges.
| lancesells wrote:
| So the current Seattle district attorney is a current
| Republican and an ex-Democrat. So crime should get better
| then? Is she materially better at her job after switching
| parties a year ago? Do you see how weird the logic is to
| blame Democrats for all that goes wrong?
|
| I know this sounds insulting but you seem like seem to
| have bought into a narrative of them versus us. There are
| ills on all sides, we are all humans who are mostly
| trying to make it through. Yes, there are people that are
| terrible at their jobs and cause harm. Yes, they are in
| both parties. If there was a third party they would be
| there too. Sure, vote and support people that align with
| your values but life is not a binary thing.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Even according to this, murder and manslaughter is
| significantly up in the last 2 years.
|
| But you're also ignoring the fact that in other parts of
| the country these crime rates are 1-10% of these numbers.
| NYC could be much safer, if the right policies were
| applied.
| octernion wrote:
| curious what you think the "right policies" are; the vast
| majority of high crime areas are republican controlled,
| so it can't be that.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Isn't manslaughter up all across the US in the last 2
| years... attempting to use a pandemic as a stat and then
| say it's a trend is on the border of unethical.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| Violent crime is up in many places. In fact it has
| increased more in Rural America more than it has in NYC.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/10/blame-
| rur...
| lancesells wrote:
| No doubt it could be safer but I'm asking you to explain
| how NYC gave up on crime. In 20 years the crime rate
| looks like it went down maybe ~45%?
|
| I believe the south has the highest per capita murder
| rate which is mostly Republican led. It's states with
| lower education and higher poverty that have high murder
| rates. I think blaming Democrats or Republicans is
| misguided. We're a country pretty evenly split and
| there's no place that's a panacea.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| For some reason no one wants to blame a lack of
| education, poverty or a lack of opportunity on crime (per
| your above statement). Everyone wants to get into these
| weird, esoteric arguments about what might have cause the
| crime rates that aren't germane to the actual, easily
| identifiable problems... most likely so no one has to try
| and solve those issues.
| selfportrait wrote:
| Crime is up after the lull that was the COVID lockdowns.
| Less crimes occurred when everyone was at home and the
| economy was essentially halted. Great argument.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| "Violent crime" is not a consistently defined or tracked
| category across cities, so it isn't comparable. The NYPD
| has a notoriously... loose definition of "violent crime",
| to the point where it counts things that no reasonable
| person would be thinking of when they hear that term.
|
| For this reason, researchers typically use homocides to
| make comparisons, because that's consistently defined and
| tracked across jurisdictions, and because it's harder to
| manipulate those statistics when recording.
|
| NYC - particularly Manhattan - has a much lower homocide
| rate than other places.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kristjansson wrote:
| Very fair point, my comment should be read as a worst-
| case estimate of the comparison. In homicide terms, GP's
| town averages ~2 per 100k (although they haven't had one
| for the last few years) while NYC averages ~4 per 100k.
| fritztastic wrote:
| NYC gets dozens of millions of visitors annually, in
| addition to people commuting in daily and people transiting
| through the city. So, while the number of crimes is high,
| the number of people actually in the city at any given time
| is multiple times the number of people who reside there.
| Probably the total number of people in the city anually is
| 10x the people who live there.
|
| I'd also factor in the numbers are higher also because
| policing is very robust. I can't think of any other city
| where I saw a cop nearly as often as NYC, they're
| everywhere.
|
| Anecdotally, I never felt unsafe there. Although where I
| grew up crime was rampant, common, and expected- so
| comparatively NYC seemed really safe, and it wasn't hard to
| avoid high risk places/situations. I do think people hype
| up the crime numbers, and forget to consider the variables
| present in a megalopolis which aren't present in smaller
| cities.
| googlryas wrote:
| Presumably OP was just talking about Manhattan or something,
| maybe even Manhattan below 110th st, and not the less nice
| parts of the Bronx or Queens or Brooklyn that they never go
| to.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I can't find similar numbers to yours for any definition of
| 'violent crime' I found numbers for, but assuming they're
| true, it's still missing the point. Amherst is a wealthy
| community in a wealthy, low crime state. It'd be like
| pointing to a border town to make the opposite argument.
| simonsarris wrote:
| As I mentioned down-thread, NYC has 45% more violent crime
| than the national median. It's simply not a "low crime"
| place, despite the PR.
| idontpost wrote:
| And as has been explained to you multiple times, you're
| using inconsistently defined and reported data across
| jurisdictions with different practices.
|
| Garbage in, garbage out.
| esoterica wrote:
| NYC has a lower homicide rate than America, and that is
| the only category of crime that is mostly consistently
| reported across jurisdictions. Every other category of
| crime basically varies by an order of magnitude from
| place to place depending on accuracy of reporting.
| HFguy wrote:
| This is important point. Apples and oranges.
| nanidin wrote:
| Yes, but using the same data, NYC is only 0.18% less safe
| than the national median. We are venturing deeply into
| "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics" territory.
| staticassertion wrote:
| What about Manhattan? What about lower Manhattan? The
| reality is that NYC is large and there's bodies of water
| separating huge parts of the city. Talking about crime in
| NYC seems really silly because you're going to be talking
| about tons of neighborhoods that you're just never, ever
| going to end up even close to.
| simonsarris wrote:
| We are already talking about Manhattan (New York, NY), it
| is where these numbers are from, and what the OP article
| is about.
|
| Obviously in The Bronx the numbers are much worse (9.28),
| and in Brooklyn they're a tiny bit better (5.43) but
| still well over USA median. Queens (3.25) is safer than
| median, though.
| googlryas wrote:
| New York _county_ (or borough) is Manhattan(for the most
| part), but that is talking about the city of New York,
| which includes Manhattan, Queens, Kings(~Brooklyn),
| Bronx, and Richmond(~Staten Island).
| Jcowell wrote:
| I wonder how many people think New York City is only
| Manhattan and not the 5 Boroughs together. For anyone who
| see this, yes it includes the "suburbs" that exists
| within all of the outer boroughs (even the Bronx!)
| googlryas wrote:
| Funny...one of my favorite pastimes as a new yorker was
| collecting New York esoterica...a fun related
| one(relevant to my "for the most part" parenthetical in
| my original post) is the fact that Manhattan is an island
| and a borough, but part of the island is actually
| connected to the mainland in the Bronx.
|
| Marble hill was once fully a part of the northernmost
| point of Manhattan island, but a canal was cut south of
| it which turned Marble hill into an actual island all by
| itself. Later, the waterway to the north of Marble hill
| was diverted into the canal, so Marble Hill became
| connected by land to the Bronx and separated by water
| from the island of Manhattan, but it is still considered
| a part of Manhattan borough...
| ryukafalz wrote:
| As someone who currently lives in Philly... yeah, I feel this.
| I love being able to get around on foot and by transit, but
| Philly is still a pretty car-centric place compared to what
| I've seen of NYC, and I wish it weren't.
|
| That plus making it easier/safer to get around by
| bike/scooter/etc. That's something even NYC doesn't seem to do
| well; have to look at international peers to see good examples
| of that.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| How much of the rising rents are risk premia for future cases
| of "government says you dont have to pay rent and cant be
| evicted" that we experienced in 2020-present? I'm curious if
| there has been a Natural Experiment comparing rent increases in
| places which did vs didn't have eviction moratoriums during
| COVID.
| [deleted]
| jandrese wrote:
| You are clearly not alone. Skyrocketing rents are a symptom of
| more people wanting a place to live than there are available
| spaces. It's not like NYC is bereft of skyscrapers either.
| tmaly wrote:
| NPR was talking about the lack of housing across the US
| today. Their solution was to get involved with zoning
| meetings and work to change the zoning laws.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| There are many, many places to live with crime rates far lower
| than NYC so I'm not sure I really understand this. Maybe you
| mean compared with most places you could see yourself living?
|
| For example, I live in a nice town in CT and the crime rate is
| 3.99 per 1000 vs NYC which is currently about 13.3 per 1000,
| making NYC (as a whole -- I understand your point about
| neighborhoods within the city) 3x higher in crime.
|
| I understand the other things you appreciate about the city.
| It's great to able to walk outside and have amazing restaurants
| and other amenities a few feet away; there's a reason many
| people like the city.
| tails4e wrote:
| Honestly don't get what is so special about NY... It's not bad,
| but on the flipside is pretensious, expensive, and difficult to
| travel to/from.... also all of the things you mention that are
| positive points are by no means unique to new york.
| fritztastic wrote:
| I went to NYC many many times when I lived in New England, my
| cousin went to school there and took the train down multiple
| times a week for years, her mother worked and lived there for
| decades, my father went there every week for work for many
| years. Anecdotally our experiences have been that the city is
| generally safe, none of us have any crime stories to tell.
|
| My parents also used to go there a lot in the 90s and the city
| has come a long long way since then- for the better.
| mushufasa wrote:
| Having grown up in DC and New York, I would say more strongly
| that there's no other city in the USA that has comparable mass
| transit.
|
| The way I would put it is -- in New York, it is more of a
| hassle to have a car than to go without. In all those other
| cities, while there is some mass transit, you will find
| yourself wanting a car.
| ghaff wrote:
| What's pretty much unique about NYC, especially Manhattan, in
| the US is that there's no cultural expectation that a well-
| paid professional will own a car. By comparison, people can
| get by without owning a car in Boston/Cambridge--I did as an
| undergrad--but get out of school and a lot of your friends
| probably live in the suburbs/exurbs, you need a car to head
| off to the mountains, etc. Sure, you can rent and Uber up to
| a point but most people find it 1.) gets old and 2.) As a
| practical matter means they mostly just stay in the city
| because doing otherwise is too much of a hassle.
| flatline wrote:
| DC is still easier to navigate by car than by metro and bus,
| at least when I last lived there in 2016. Red line from MD
| would regularly shut down or have delays, and you were
| looking at a 2+ hour commute into the district. If you could
| get a parking spot you could reliably beat metro by about 10
| minutes with much less variance. And you cannot navigate a
| circumferential route in a reasonable time, the purple line
| is the first to really attempt this and is like a drop in the
| bucket. If you live and work in the city it's doable, but
| cross a river or the beltway and it's really not. I had
| friends in Baltimore that could not get by without a car
| either, and they made a really dedicated effort. Mass transit
| in the US - outside of NYC - is just not viable at scale.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Metro being within 10 minutes of driving is quite good.
| Coming from the silver line, you'd be lucky if you can get
| within 30 minutes.
|
| Parking is such a dice roll in DC that using a car for
| intra-city travel is not efficient.
|
| Lots of DC residents don't have cars; most housing doesn't
| include parking.
| efficax wrote:
| eh, having lived in both chicago and nyc, chicago's transit
| system is pretty much on par with nyc to me. MTA is all built
| around going to and from manhattan and it can be a struggle
| if you have to do something else, like going from parts of
| queens to brooklyn. Chicago's hyperrational grid and busses
| make up pretty well for the gaps in the L. now the cabs in
| new york, nothing beats them (although these days more and
| more cabbies don't seem to actually know the city very well)
| paxys wrote:
| Agree with everything except the last part. Brooklyn is a
| fantastic place to live, and takes 20 mins or so door to door
| to get to most parts of Manhattan.
| ctvo wrote:
| The rent in areas adjacent (downtown Brooklyn included) to
| Brooklyn Heights is nothing to sneeze at. You're looking at
| equal or higher prices to Manhattan.
|
| Even areas further away, like Prospect Heights or Crown
| Heights, with decent access to transportation have seen quite
| the uptick in price and availability.
| dont__panic wrote:
| 20 minutes to _most parts of manhattan_?!?!
|
| I'm sorry, but... you might be able to get to FiDi from
| downtown BK in 20 minutes, door to door. If you live anywhere
| else in BK, from Greenpoint to Sheepshead Bay, you're looking
| at 30 minutes minimum to get _into_ manhattan -- probably
| closer to an hour door-to-door.
|
| Not trying to be rude here, but your statement does not seem
| to match my lived experience. Maybe you can get 20 minutes
| door-to-door on a citibike?
| tfbkggjjji wrote:
| tmaly wrote:
| Train from White Plains is only like 30 min, but yeah it is a
| much different vibe.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of
| America."
|
| Is there any data to back this up? The latest NYPD crime
| statistics, show a city with increasing crime.
|
| "Overall index crime in New York City increased by 27.8% in May
| 2022 compared with May 2021 (10,414 v. 8,149). Each of the
| seven major index crime categories saw increases, driven by a
| 42.1% increase in grand larceny (4,116 v. 2,897); a 28.3% rise
| in burglary (1,239 v. 966); and a 26.2% increase in robbery
| (1,506 v. 1,193)." See:
|
| [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00050/nypd-citywide-
| cri...
| dangus wrote:
| Before I start with my comment, I'll remind everyone that
| averages skew very high when there are outliers. NYC has a high
| quantity of extremely high rent tenants. I wish more news
| articles used medians and median per capita when discussing
| rents.
|
| The main point I want to make: even with those high rents, we
| tend to forget how much our cars cost us, directly and
| indirectly.
|
| Directly: AAA's average new car TCO is close to $10,000 a year.
| Multiply by two for a typical couple and that's $1600 a month
| you could dump into your NYC apartment's high rent. Unlimited
| MTA rides only cost $1500/year/person.
|
| Indirectly: There's the obvious car crash issue, the top killer
| of children (well, guns just passed that, but luckily NYC is
| safer than the average American city in that regard), but the
| other main example is health. We're not supposed to sit all
| day. My doctor moved from a car suburb to the city and admitted
| they lost weight and walk a lot more. When walking is the
| easier option compared to attempting to drive to your daily
| errands, it's much better for you and extends your life,
| especially when considering your high-quality years of life.
|
| Number one premature killer is heart disease, by far.
|
| Even if you're just walking to the subway, that's a lot more
| activity than your commute to your garage.
|
| NYC's obesity rate is half of the national rate. HALF! That's
| downright incredible.
|
| In NYC I see very old people walking everywhere,
| stereotypically playing chess in the park, meanwhile I have
| suburban relatives struggling to walk across the Walmart
| parking lot and they haven't even hit 70 years old. They may
| live into their 80's but it will not be pleasant for them. The
| difference in alertness is noticeable. As a bonus, old people
| in NYC never had to drive so they never have a retired life
| feeling isolated to their home.
|
| I think the best way to try and stabilize rent is to buy a
| condo. It's not a silver bullet due to property taxes and HOA
| fees that rise with inflation, but it's still a slower rise
| than renting, I think. You can definitely find 2 bedroom condos
| with monthly payments under $5000 in Manhattan.
|
| If you're interested in what NYC apartments are really like and
| how far your money gets you (along with some general YouTube
| vlogging entertainment), a channel I recommend is Cash Jordan.
| I won't link it but I'm sure you can find it. Like any other
| real estate market, it's all about compromises. If you want to
| live in NYC and pay $1000/month/person, you can definitely do
| it. You can also pay $10,000/month if you want.
|
| The big caveat to everything I'm saying is that the poor are
| unlikely to live in the most walkable areas, and a lot of them
| will perhaps have to own a car. This is definitely the case in
| Chicago, where the most walkable areas are also the most
| desirable and affluent (I wonder why that is? Maybe our whole
| country would be more desirable and affluent if it wasn't
| designed to be a cash funnel where we dump our income into
| constructing vehicles, maintaining the infrastructure and
| utilities utilities of nearly unused land, and burning oil?)
| zjaffee wrote:
| I grew up in NYC and just completely disagree with your
| analysis here. There are a lot of hidden costs to live in NYC
| such as some of the highest income and sales taxes in the
| country, apartments where even if you own if a problem is
| found the forced maintenace costs can go up thousands a month
| and you get evicted for not being able to pay. Health driven
| by sin taxes on soda and tobacco, and much more along those
| lines than just people walking places.
|
| It is true that older people in NYC are seemingly healthy,
| but they're definitely a very specific type of person.
| dangus wrote:
| Just to be clear, I am not saying NYC is literally cheaper
| than other places overall. I'm saying that this one major
| cost component of car ownership is not there, so the high
| sticker price of housing should be lessened by some amount.
|
| Live in SF or LA and you'll face similar costs and still
| need a car on top of it.
| kortilla wrote:
| > AAA's average new car TCO is close to $10,000 a year.
| Multiply by two for a typical couple and that's $1600 a month
| you could dump into your NYC apartment's high rent.
|
| First, you can get by just fine without a new car. My car was
| $26k new - 18 years ago. I've put another $10k over the years
| in maintenance (tires, oil, repairs). Insurance is $500/year.
| Gas is maybe $2k/year at $4/gal. Not even close to $10k/year.
|
| That caveat you apply to averages for rent also applies to
| cars. Some people are obsessed with having a new car. That's
| not the price of having a reliable car.
|
| Second, if you're a couple, you don't need two cars. That's
| another luxury that many people get by without.
|
| Finally, the car takes me out of town monthly into the
| mountains. So you would need to factor in car rentals for
| leaving NYC in your equation if you wanted a fair comparison
| of what people actually get out of their cars.
|
| > NYC's obesity rate is half of the national rate. HALF!
| That's downright incredible.
|
| Cause or effect? A lot of people with mobility issues end up
| obese and having mobility issues is a fucking nightmare in
| NYC. You just forced the unhealthy people out of the city by
| design.
|
| > As a bonus, old people in NYC never had to drive so they
| never have a retired life feeling isolated to their home.
|
| +1. It's a great place to live... if you don't have health
| issues that make mobility a problem.
|
| "Living on the top of Mt. Everest is so healthy! Look at all
| of the healthy people up here!"
| dangus wrote:
| Here are some numbers that are not focused on new cars
| specifically. If the $10k figured I gave you is high, you
| can still expect that Americans are still going to spend
| thousands per year on their car, maybe around $5,000 a
| year. [1]
|
| Insurance $500 a year as you stated, and then you've got a
| typical driver driving somewhere around 15,000 miles a year
| if not more. [2] If you've got a 30MPG car [2.1] at $4.50 a
| gallon [2.2], you're paying $2,250 just to fuel it, before
| any expenses for maintenance, oil changes, tires, etc. If
| you've got a car payment like 35% of Americans, the average
| payment for a used car is around $500 [2.3], but since
| we're dealing with averages and vehicles whose lifespans
| exceed their loans, maybe we can just go ahead and cut that
| in half to $250/month.
|
| Don't forget that the poorest Americans get the worst auto
| loan rates, so their payment may be pretty high for a car
| that has already depreciated significantly. They're losing
| money to interest that isn't even technically being put
| into the vehicle itself.
|
| So our grand TCO for this hypothetical car is $5,750, which
| is really close to the averages that you see in my first
| reference. [1]
|
| I think this is a really, really reasonable ballpark
| estimate.
|
| How are you supposed to own only one car if you are a dual-
| income household in the suburbs and work two different jobs
| at different locations? Owning one car per person is not a
| "luxury" in this country, it is just about the norm (1.88
| cars per person in the USA). [3]
|
| If it was a "luxury," the entire freaking country wouldn't
| be doing it.
|
| You really think NYC has a lower obesity rate as an effect
| rather than a cause, as in, all the people with obesity
| just say "well, I guess I can't live here anymore, I'll go
| move to the suburbs?" Do you have any information to back
| up that type of thinking?
|
| New York (due to NYC) is the most physically active state
| according to FitBit, and you're gonna jump on here and
| claim that this completely disconnected obesity rates? [4]
|
| It's not hard to figure out that higher levels activity
| help prevent obesity. Calories in calories out, walking and
| walking up and down stairs burns more calories than
| sitting. [4.1]
|
| The 65+ commuters in NYC are actually the most active
| commuting segment of the population and over half walk 10
| blocks or more per day. [5] I have a hunch they might still
| be alive and productive because they're so active!
|
| NYC's subway system will be 95% accessible by 2055, [6]
| which is really quite soon on the scale of city planning
| and development. About 25% of stations are currently
| accessible, and really a subway system 25% the size of
| NYC's system is still a vast transit network. This also
| doesn't include New York's vast bus system, which is
| essentially 100% accessible. Tell me, how do you expect the
| vision impaired to get around in areas that require cars?
|
| When it comes to your point about getting out to the
| mountains, it's important to note that NYC has plenty of
| transit-accessible outdoor spaces, including perhaps the
| best city park in the entire world, Central Park. NYC is
| extremely well-connected to regional rail and other methods
| of transit to all sorts of destinations, including outdoor
| spaces. [6.1] And, yes, New Yorkers can rent a car once in
| a while, it's a lot cheaper than owning one! They can even
| stop paying for their MTA fares while they're out of town,
| while car owners continue to pay for insurance even if
| they're spending time away from home. A lot of those car
| owners are even paying daily to park their car at the
| airport!
|
| Last point: How hard is it _really_ to live in a small
| apartment, when most people are drowning in clutter and
| wasteful purchases? [7] How much space in your house is
| dedicated to storing your vehicle? How much space in your
| home is dedicated to storing things you rarely or never
| use? Holiday decorations?
|
| [1] https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/
|
| [2] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/average-
| miles-dri...
|
| [2.1] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-fuel-efficiency-
| us-light...
|
| I'm also being generous, the national average is 25MPG not
| 30MPG.
|
| [2.2] https://gasprices.aaa.com/
|
| [2.3] https://www.finder.com/car-loan-statistics
|
| [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/551403/number-of-
| vehicle...
|
| [4] https://www.ibtimes.com/do-new-yorkers-
| walk-10000-steps-day-...
|
| [4.1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-
| source/obesi...
|
| [5] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/survey/su
| rvey-...
|
| [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/nyregion/nyc-subway-
| acces...
|
| [6.1] https://www.outdoors.org/resources/amc-
| outdoors/adventures/8...
|
| [7] https://www.thesimplicityhabit.com/statistics-on-
| clutter-tha...
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| As a New Yorker who had to move to Seattle for a job five years
| ago and misses the city every single day, I totally agree with
| you.
|
| I will say, depending on how close you are to a train station,
| Brooklyn isn't bad. Yeah, it's 45 minutes door to door, but you
| get to walk and listen to podcasts or whatever on the train. As
| commutes go, it's definitely doable. But I totally agree with
| you that many people don't want to live anywhere else and
| people who don't love New York might not understand that, but
| New York _is_ different from every other major city in the US.
|
| I'm still carless in Seattle (I don't drive and have no desire
| to drive) but it's so much harder (my husband does have a car
| but I can't rely on that for my own needs). And although
| Seattle is somewhat cheaper than Brooklyn (it's really not but
| my luxury building in Capitol Hill definitely costs less than a
| luxury building in Williamsburg foot for foot -- I pay about
| 70% more in Seattle than I did in Brooklyn, however), the
| things I've lost compared to New York are massive. I've
| definitely considered moving back now that I'm at a fully-
| remote company (that does have office space in NYC), but there
| are some practical realities about being in Seattle for my job
| that makes that hard. Maybe when my lease is up next year, I'll
| reassess.
| dcow wrote:
| Just to provide a 3rd party reaction here: it sounds like
| you've circularly reasoned yourself into a trap of your own
| making. You don't want to live anywhere else because you like
| _NYC_. Because no other city is exactly like NYC, you aren 't
| interested in living anywhere else. The reason it's "circular"
| is because there _are_ cities with good transit, good arts,
| great food, have a tech scene, and even have financial
| districts and you 'd be surprised to find out how well diverse
| cultures get along in a log of smaller towns across the US (far
| fewer racial/cultural over/under-tones) and how safe they are
| (safer than NYC). Yeah, no other place is _the_ center for any
| of these things save SF being the tech nexus and maybe having
| better renditions of some types of cuisine. So if you have to
| be in _the_ center of the world, then yeah, you 're not going
| to find other centers of the world.
|
| For me, personally, I'm disappointed by how few world cities
| the US has. NYC and Chicago are really it. My silly benchmark
| for what makes a city a world city is that it operates 24hrs a
| day (at least parts of it). Chicago barely does but I think it
| counts. Everywhere else in the US just dies past 10pm and
| especially past 2am.
| nradov wrote:
| That seems like a silly criteria. How many people really care
| about doing things at 3:00 AM? We're talking about a small
| niche of shift workers and childless young people.
|
| Las Vegas operates 24 hours a day if that's what you want.
| dcow wrote:
| Have you lived in or visited a world city? The feel and
| vibe is very different. It's why New York is called the
| city that never sleeps. When you get dense enough, there's
| always something to do and people out wanting to do it or
| at least wanting to serve it to you.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| What else do you qualify as a world city? London is dead
| at 2AM except in a few specific areas, the tube shuts
| down. Paris as well.
|
| I think what you mean by "World City" is actually just
| "Party Zone".
| nradov wrote:
| Yes I have visited. I don't see any advantage to that.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I think your last point is an interesting arbitrary
| distinction, if you're going to make one. While Vancouver is
| pretty well regarded as a NA city with pretty decent transit
| infrastructure and other nice qualities, it does basically
| close after 2am which isn't as nice as a night owl. Transit
| stops almost completely around that time too.
|
| Edit: None of this comment was meant to detract, just a
| comparison in agreement to the city I'm nore familiar with.
| Maybe Toronto's different
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| You just need to gentrify Newark. The PATH is faster than the
| subway from Brooklyn/Queens.
| weeksie wrote:
| My partner and I have been agonizing over this exact dilemma.
| We have an income number and an expenses number and when those
| cross a certain point, we've gotta go somewhere else. So
| there's a very good chance that we'll immigrate somewhere in a
| few years. But yeah, try as we might, we couldn't come up with
| another US city that either of us would want to live in.
| greggsy wrote:
| To me, only other places that compare to NYC are Singapore
| and Sydney. Great food in Singapore, great weather (usually)
| in Sydney. The people can be a bit busy in Singapore though.
|
| Certainly no NYC, but they ticked all my recreation, arts,
| food, people and transport boxes.
|
| Unfortunately, they're all so goddamn expensive to live in.
| te_chris wrote:
| Singapore?? To New York????? Sorry what? Singapore is fine
| as far as a hot place with incredible food and good hotels
| to spend a few nights, but it's also quite possibly the
| most boring major city I've been to outside of that and
| there doesn't seem to be any cultural life beyond shopping
| - based on my own experience and that of friends who've
| lived there.
|
| I could also take issue with comparing Sydney to NY, but
| I'll let that one go ;)
| noobermin wrote:
| In defense of sg, the only reason you said this is you
| never left orchard rd. You can experience worlds of
| culture just eating food at any given neighborhood coffee
| shop or going to a wet market in the morning. It just is
| a different culture, one that doesn't try to emulate
| America too much (hipster shit like live music or public
| art or things like that).
| acchow wrote:
| > hipster shit like live music or public art
|
| I think these are just human things done since... before
| civilization?
| te_chris wrote:
| Not American, live in London. Not to get into a pissing
| contest, but I can go to Ridley Rd for a wet market and
| still have any amount of cultural stuff to do. SG does
| have the food, but it's a company town entirely driven
| around (conspicuous...) consumption. Less shit Dubai.
|
| All that said, I like spending a few days there - again,
| the food! - but I'd rather be in Bangkok or KL for
| longer, e.g.
| throwaway_4ever wrote:
| > hipster shit like live music or public art
|
| Yes, those things are definitely recent "hip" phenomena,
| not found over the entire millennia of history
| noobermin wrote:
| There is a certain kind of live music and public art that
| (honestly) tourists are looking for which the person I
| was referring to didn't see. There is "music" and
| "performance" that fit into the guise of culture but it
| isn't really for tourist consumption.
|
| That said, there is live music and public art too, just
| since it isn't Singapore's culture but an import from the
| west, there's less of it (see my rant on western food).
|
| EDIT removed "white" qualifier for tourist, my brain
| still thinks in US but really all tourists from wherever
| go to the malls and idk promenade but miss the kopitiams
| and markets because it's just not in the touristy areas.
| noobermin wrote:
| If you're comparing NYC food to Singapore I don't know how
| you could say sg food is great.
|
| The staples (Chinese, Indian, Malay) are good and probably
| better, but western food is not great. A few are mediocre
| and some are great, but the great places lack variety and
| selection, that is you usually get only one good thing from
| a given stall or restaurant.
|
| My girlfriend, the first time she went to the US was blown
| away by the food. She even swooned over freaking gas
| station pizza I picked up once. Now that I live in sg I
| understand what she meant by the food in the US having
| flavor, the staples are great but the western food is
| pretty mediocre and just is either off or just lacks the
| proper seasoning, or if it's good, it's easily twice the
| price (after conversion!) of similar quality food I ate in
| Ohio.
|
| I seriously miss creole / cajun food for example, but the
| SG experience of the west is freaking British food which is
| the bottom of the barrel (fish and chips anyone?)
| seriously.
|
| Another thing (sorry for the rant but it's fresh in my
| mind). Good luck getting any amount of vegetables in your
| meal.
| blabberwocky wrote:
| This is pretty true throughout Asia. Bangkok's probably
| best for western food. But nothing like NY.
|
| SG has a few decent options once you get over the fact
| that you're paying four times the price for a slice of
| pizza (or, god forbid, cote de boeuf). Ironically the
| best Cantonese food (IMHO) is in the American club.
| weeksie wrote:
| I lived in Sydney for five years! Great city. Lived there
| before I came here.
|
| My partner and I are looking at Madrid. But yeah, there is
| no other city in the world that's going to be like NY.
| Maybe London but of course that has the same problems.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| * less guns.
|
| * not specifically talking about London, either.
| archagon wrote:
| Have you lived in Sydney? I spent a day there recently and
| I loved it, but I got the sense that things tend to wind
| down in the evening (at least around Surry Hills where I
| was staying). Curious if I got the wrong impression: my
| recollection of NYC is that there's something going on at
| pretty much any hour, day or night.
| blabberwocky wrote:
| Having lived in both New York and Singapore, I can't say
| I'd recommend Singapore to anyone who loves NY for the
| aspects you mention (but there are other reasons to love
| SG!). I think the scale of opportunities for recreation,
| arts, and really just a diversity of experience is vastly
| different. In APAC, I'd suggest Hong Kong (where I've also
| lived) instead, though that is even more like London than
| NY.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Yeah, HK is (or was) way better than SG, and much more
| NY-like. Even more beautiful than NY, actually. HK's
| inevitable destruction by the CCP is a fucking tragedy.
| There are very few cities in the world like that.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I have a fantasy where a Robert Moses-type figure builds out
| super fast trains that connect Long Island, NJ, upstate New
| York, and effectively urbanize the entire tri-state area. New
| York becomes this super city where you can go from White Plains
| to the tip of Long Island in an hour. Housing becomes cheaper
| as neighborhoods that were previously impractical become
| feasible for New Yorkers. Car ownership drops in the outer
| suburbs as people embrace public transportation. Gentrification
| stays an issue but because of more housing, it's less brutal.
|
| Unfortunately this is pretty unlikely unless there happens to
| be another political genius like Moses who also happens to love
| public transportation. Maybe an Andy Byford-Robert Moses combo?
| m_ke wrote:
| I'd love to see someone brave enough to marge north east
| jersey and lower Connecticut into NYC and connect them with
| proper transit, pretty much merge LIRR, Path and MTA under
| one NYC administered transit system, then add some high speed
| rail along the old train lines.
|
| Then make all public transit free and turn half of the roads
| into bus, pedestrian and bike only paths.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > The average price of a rental apartment in Manhattan surged
| above $5,000 in June for the first time, hitting $5,058,
|
| Key word: average. Always a dangerous - and clickbait friendly -
| metric.
|
| Keep in mind...
|
| This does not mean the top went up. Let's not be naive, the
| further you move up the financial / wealth food chain the less
| price sensitive you are. An increase on the upper end has few
| consequences.
|
| On the other hand, you can move the bottom up and the average
| will also increase as increase. This is typically not the first
| thing that comes to mind but it's a reasonable idea. Unlike the
| high-end, the low end of the market is very price sensitive.
| People "living paycheck to paycheck" are far less likely to brush
| off increases. What happens when they can't make rent? _That_ is
| The Question.
|
| As things get uglier, those with not much will have nothing to
| lose. If we don't see voters react this November, they'll be
| primed for future Novembers. They also might decide that voting
| isn't going to make a difference. The number of people in this
| situation is significant. The math is simple.
|
| The rest will be history.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Property is a tough nut to crack because there are a bunch of
| different issues creating this problem and some of them are
| local. NIMBYism is a big one obviously but so many are inveted in
| the value of their house that increasing property prices becomes
| a political goal. Worse, property becomes a tool for the ultra-
| rich to park money in a way that is hedged against inflation.
|
| Rents tend to follow property prices but they lag.
|
| Manhattan also has a big problem with the type of property that
| gets built, being ultra-luxury property (that sells for >$5k/sq
| ft). Part of the demand for this is parking money but there are
| other reasons. Insurance is a big one thanks to the infamous
| "scaffolding law".
|
| But the main point I want to raise here is that politicians,
| regardless of party (in the US at least), have zero interest in
| fixing this problem. Why? Because they're all bought and paid for
| by the capital-owning class. NYC politics in particular serves
| property developers first, police unions second and whatever
| third is nobody cares.
|
| A budget shortfall is built into your existence. This keeps you
| showing up to work and diminishes your ability to negotiate
| (since walking away isn't an option). This creates a compliant
| workforce that doesn't hurt profits by, say, wages going up even
| with just inflation.
|
| This is what neofeudalism looks like.
| fny wrote:
| This is a price signal. Anyone who's calling for intervention
| needs to wake up.
|
| The proper response is for people _to leave_. If you drive across
| America, you 'll find economically, depressed areas which have
| suffered from brain drain. Many aspire to attend an out of state
| college, go work in the Valley, join some VC-funded startup,
| megacorp, consulting firm, and strike it rich.
|
| In all likelihood, you will (1) not strike it rich (2) have a
| worse quality of life on a cost adjusted basis (3) forgo
| developing a local community. Perhaps you'll enjoy more culture,
| but that might have been something that have developed in a
| smaller community had you not run off to a megacity.
|
| Developing local communities is what America needs today. Just
| drive across this country and you'll find a tremendous amount of
| land coupled with tremendous economic depression. It's high time
| that price signals like rent drive people out of high cost of
| living areas into more depressed areas to promote broader-based
| growth.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Sure, but this is totally antithetical to american culture
| which is extremely selfish, entirely oriented around acquiring
| money, and obsessed with pop culture which generally leads
| people to pursue positions that are high paying and locales
| that are "the place to be".
|
| When the only values that remain are the acquisition of
| capital, self-love, and fame, the majority of the population
| will elect to be in the places that present those possibilities
| to them, even if it requires making short-term decisions that
| harm them (absurd renting costs), because they believe they
| might make it work given time.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Maybe, but you are also advocating for climate arson. Every
| person who leaves NYC for any other American city other than
| Berkeley is raising their carbon footprint, dramatically in the
| case of most cities. So that isn't great.
|
| The other perspective that you need to consider is there are
| huge populations who simply will not consider living in the
| cities you mentioned. Women, for example, do not want to move
| to Ohio. Homosexuals would rather not live in Oklahoma. People
| who are not white can rule out a happy existence in 90% of
| American cities. It's true that a single, straight, white male
| with no children can pick up and move anywhere, but that's a
| relatively small fraction of the people.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Look, I'm as pro-urbanism as any online nerd. I don't own a
| car and I bike everywhere. But nobody has a fucking moral
| obligation to live in NYC and dump all their paycheque into
| their landlord's pocket, so they can "save the planet".
| That's just insane. Batshit crazy. You sound like Pol Pot in
| reverse.
| rendang wrote:
| > People who are not white can rule out a happy existence in
| 90% of American cities
|
| Why in the world would that be the case?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Because America is built on, and much of it (and not only
| the historically obvious bits) is still drowning in,
| racism.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It is not just the racism but also practical facts. There
| are American cities without a black barber. A given city
| may lack the food culture or language of some ethnic
| group. The incredible whiteness of some cities is self-
| perpetuating.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Do you think that "whiteness" is a bad thing? What is
| wrong with white people? Do you not like us for some
| reason?
| dllthomas wrote:
| It's possible for there to be no problem with white
| people, regardless of how "white" they are being, while
| there is still a big problem with structural barriers to
| others moving to areas that might otherwise be the best
| choice for themselves and their family. I think the
| parent intended the latter, pointing at overwhelming
| _prevalence_ of white people (rather than - as you seem
| to have read it - overwhelming... intensity(?) of white
| people) as being an indicator of the persistence of such
| barriers.
| jeffbee wrote:
| There isn't anywhere near enough space in this box to
| answer the question "What is wrong with white people" and
| that isn't my purpose here. I'm trying to tell you why
| there are non-obvious reasons why people don't just
| immediately move to Lincoln, Nebraska, when the rents
| change in Manhattan. It's because there aren't any
| Persian restaurants, or whatever people view as an
| amenity.
| _dain_ wrote:
| But you _do_ think there is something wrong with white
| people? You actually do think there 's something wrong
| with me, on account of the colour of my skin?
| speakfreely wrote:
| You're not going to have any more luck reasoning with
| them than a black person would have trying to reason with
| a klan member. If you've decided you hate people because
| of the color of their skin, no online discourse is going
| to change your mind.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Yes it just seems like he's prejudiced against certain
| people and he's invented some complicated-sounding
| intellectual justification for it.
| arolihas wrote:
| Doesn't really sound that complicated, people wanting to
| live in a place where barbers know how to style their
| hair and restaurants serve the food they enjoy eating.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Do you think that "whiteness" is a bad thing? What is
| wrong with white people?
|
| "Whiteness" is not the same thing as "white people".
| There's nothing wrong with white people _qua_ white
| people. (There 's lots of things wrong with people as
| individuals, some of which are significantly more common
| among White people than other groups--e.g., sealioning
| about racial issues on internet fora--but that is a
| different issue.)
|
| There's something in particular wrong with whiteness,
| which is grounded in identifying with, valorizing, and
| perpetuating shared experience as the oppressing class
| under the system of White supremacy.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Well I remember people used to say the same thing about
| other groups -- they'd say "oh it's not that I don't like
| Jews, I just don't like _Jewishness_ ", whatever that
| means. And then that Dave Chapelle routine about black
| people. I don't see how what you're doing is any
| different.
|
| I hadn't heard of that "sealioning" term before, and
| honestly I'm just even more baffled having Googled it. I
| guess I'm like the sealion in the comic, and the sealion
| is meant to be ... obviously in the wrong? But ... he's
| not? People are mouthing off about him and he wants them
| to explain themselves. Why is he in the wrong? You're
| mouthing off about me and people like me, where I can
| hear you, and you think you're just entitled to do that
| and nobody can say a word? If you have a problem with
| people like me, why don't you be a man and say it
| plainly? Instead of trying to squirm out of it with these
| silly little clique terms.
|
| And "oppressing class under white supremacy"? What is
| this gobbledegook? My family is working class, I come
| from a long line of iron-mongers, my great grandfather
| had rickets because the smog blotted out the sun. They
| peddled this same race-war nonsense back in Czarist
| Russia, all the Elders of Zion conspiring to keep
| everyone down, it's a siren call of hatred. Snap out of
| it.
| speakfreely wrote:
| Whenever someone wants to talk about what's wrong with
| group of people with skin color (X), you already you're
| talking to someone with the wrong priorities.
| [deleted]
| elzbardico wrote:
| There is an elephant in the room that people refuse to look at
| when it comes to rents: Airbnb.
| soared wrote:
| Id love to see a breakout of Airbnb rentals by number of
| bedrooms. 1 and 2 bedroom airbnbs are seemingly never
| economical anymore compared to hotels, at least in the places I
| visit.
| golergka wrote:
| Should people who come to the city for a couple of weeks not be
| able to find any accommodation? Why do you think that they
| should have less rights that people that live in the city full-
| time? They already have obvious market forces working against
| them (short-term rents are always more expensive than long-
| term).
| dont__panic wrote:
| Yes? People who live in the city have families, friends,
| jobs, and other community structures that they contribute
| toward. It's where they LIVE.
|
| People who "come to the city for a couple of weeks" are at
| best visiting for work or family -- in which case, they can
| get work to subsidize the housing, or stay with the family
| they're visiting -- and are at worst tourists who are only
| visiting the city to have fun.
|
| People's lives should be prioritized over fun affordability.
| Or work saving a buck when employees visit HQ in person. Or
| even the affordability of someone choosing to visit family.
|
| The people who live in the city are the people who work
| there, bleed there, eat there, love there, etc. etc. etc.
| They are the city. The people who visit are just passing
| through. Livers should not subsidize visitors.
| secludedrelish wrote:
| > The people who live in the city are the people who work
| there, bleed there, eat there, love there, etc. etc. etc.
| They are the city.
|
| Vote there. Obviously, laws will (and should) side with
| voters.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Ah. Yeah, fuck the 50 billion dollars a year NYC makes from
| tourism every year!
| kristjansson wrote:
| > any accommodation
|
| That's an exaggeration. The alternative to airbnb is not no
| accommodation, it's better-regulated and therefore more
| expensive accommodation. Regulations force tourists to bear
| the costs of their trip (hotel taxes, etc.) and give the city
| some pricing power to control quantity of tourism.
| Entinel wrote:
| You act like hotels, inns, and short term stay apartment
| hotels will suddenly disappear if Airbnb is cracked down on
| but to answer your question yes, people who live in the city
| should be prioritized over people who want to come over for a
| quick stay.
| eachro wrote:
| Consider how laws are set. Politicians answer to their
| constituents. If the people who live in the city do not want
| certain things (short term Airbnb rentals here), you can
| expect them exert pressure on their representatives to make
| those things go away. That's exactly what has happened in
| NYC.
|
| The question of "Why do you think that they should have less
| rights that people that live in the city full-time?" doesnt
| really matter. Because the reality is that they have no
| power/sway over the politicians who are responsible for
| governing the city.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I'd love for someone to do an analysis where they look at the
| number of AirBnB's in a city, and model out what would happen
| to the rents in that city if those units were put back into the
| rental market.
|
| Would be absolutely fascinating if there was a tight
| correlation
| afavour wrote:
| NYC has technically outlawed Airbnb rentals of less than 30
| days already. They just need a lot better enforcement of that
| law.
| michaelchisari wrote:
| | _They just need a lot better enforcement_
|
| If only there was a website where you could search a
| geographic area and get the address of every airbnb there...
| twoheadedboy wrote:
| 1. Rent an airbnb for a period of time. 2. Tenant reaches
| out to host and asks to stay longer (or vice versa) 3. They
| agree to a deal outside airbnb that works better for both
| of them.
|
| - no rules have to be followed
| pphysch wrote:
| 4. Tenant refuses to pay "rent", exercises squatter's
| rights
| wil421 wrote:
| Yet I can still find rooms for this weekend in Manhattan
| ranging from sub $100 to about $250 a night.
| afavour wrote:
| > they just need a lot better enforcement of that law.
|
| Perhaps also worth asking why Airbnb continues to host
| listings it knows are in violation of the law.
| cpascal wrote:
| Seems pretty easy to enforce. Fine Airbnb for each
| listing in violation of the law.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| they need to start implementing and enforcing extremely
| high fines on illegal listings and then actually go out
| and try to enforce it. That's the only way it ends imo.
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| Very simply, the income they generate from violating the
| law is more than the fines they will receive if those
| violations are brought up.
| afavour wrote:
| As a New Yorker myself I do wonder where this ends up. Me and my
| relatively well paid friends can afford to live here but we
| depend on a lot of lower paid folks for the city to function.
| Grocery store clerks, delivery drivers, coffee baristas, all that
| sort of thing. Maybe right now they have a half hour subway ride
| to work and that's acceptable. But as they get pushed further and
| further out it's going to break down somewhere, no one is going
| to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job when there are
| plenty of jobs available elsewhere.
|
| Wages will need to go up, which means the costs of goods and
| services will need to go up, and the city will get even less
| affordable.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| > no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job
| when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere.
|
| They absolutely will, this concern has never really made sense
| to me. Poverty is like a badge of honor for many folks, and the
| harder one works for the lower the pay ends up being a little
| game some folks like to engage in, almost as a self
| flagellation; "I suffer therefore I'm noble."
|
| Just look at some of the most oppressive places in the world,
| and how people _continue_ to opt into that abject horror
| because it 's _a_ path to marginally help themselves or others
| they care about. NYC is nowhere near approaching the levels of,
| say, Qatar, in how it treats its workers, and a 90 minute
| commute each way wouldn 't do much to push NYC closer to Qatar
| on that particular front.
|
| You think we're at the bottom? No, we can go _so_ much lower.
| So very much lower...
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| That's an ... interesting take.
|
| Another is these people are stuck. It takes money to pack up
| and leave. If the everything is costing more and more and
| more, their ability to save and leave goes down and down and
| down. Eventually they'll be forced to leave (somehow); the
| haves will see to it.
|
| > "I suffer therefore I'm noble."
|
| That's cruel.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| It's as cruel as life. Pretending like there aren't any
| negative learned behaviors that cause vicious cycles from
| poverty is naive. When all you know is suffering, the human
| mind has to come up with some justification for it, some
| reason it's "worth" continuing on. Nobility is often that
| conjured reason.
|
| Have you really never met anyone who's oddly proud of how
| hard they work, despite how little they earn? I grew up
| around these people, this view was more common than drug
| use, more common than gambling, almost consensus that the
| poor folks were the real heroes of the story.
|
| "Stuck" is indeed the right word, but no they won't get
| "unstuck"; their lives will just get worse and worse. Like
| I said, there's just so much lower we can go here, people
| don't even realize where the bottom is.
| mattzito wrote:
| Also as a New Yorker, worth noting that many of the lowest paid
| workers are undocumented, and their flexibility to pursue
| higher paying work is limited. Sadly, this means that 60-90
| minute commutes are not out of the ordinary.
| [deleted]
| danjac wrote:
| Moreover artist communities flourish in urban spaces with cheap
| rent, like New York in the 1970s, Paris in the 1920s, Berlin in
| the 1990s and so on. Without that you just end up with Dubai or
| Monaco with shittier weather.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Would it be such a bad thing if those artists move to, say,
| St. Louis and create the next big thriving art hub there?
| popularrecluse wrote:
| Artists tend towards progressive locales.
| devb wrote:
| Why would an artist who wants an opportunity to live
| somewhere as exciting as NYC want to move to St. Louis?
| Even if St. Louis did manage to become an artistic hub,
| what would stop it from going through the usual
| gentrification cycle and becoming unaffordable to regular
| people the way Portland, Austin, Oakland (not to mention
| Bushwick, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy) have?
| fantod wrote:
| Good for St. Louis, bad for NYC.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Might as well be in Chicago, which has probably the most
| reasonable CoL for any big city in the US.
| gringoDan wrote:
| For an interesting explanation of why rents are
| affordable in Chicago, see this post from Tyler Cowen: ht
| tps://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/c
| h...
|
| _" I would put it this way: there are many ways to
| impose a Georgist land tax, fiscal insolvency being one
| of them. Very wealthy people and institutions know that
| if they relocate to Chicago, they will be required to
| ante up for the final bill. And so they stay away. For a
| city of its size and import, Chicago just doesn't have
| that many billionaires, nor do I think a rational
| billionaire should consider moving there.
|
| In other words, there is a pending wealth tax. Either
| directly or indirectly, this will place fiscal burdens on
| Chicago land, the immobile factor. And this keeps down
| rents in Chicago now."_
| csomar wrote:
| Have you checked the recent rent surges? I'm not sure if
| it's the summer, but any hotel room in the loop is $300+
| per night. Airbnb is just a scam there.
| cies wrote:
| > Without that you just end up with Dubai or Monaco with
| shittier weather.
|
| Well put, had to laugh.
| v7p1Qbt1im wrote:
| Exactly. Wealthy residents should at some point realize that
| culture and entertainment venues/options are (often) created
| by lower income residents. If that disappears you get
| soulless places which are dramatically less fun to live in.
| Not to mention the service industry workers, who also need to
| come from somewhere.
| Ekaros wrote:
| You can get all that online. So it might make sense to move
| these communities to somewhere very very cheap. Or even
| distribute them around.
| zx8080 wrote:
| Isn't it known as Tiktok?
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Tell me you haven't attended an artist commune without
| telling me you haven't attended an artist commune.
| There's very little like seeing someone's performance art
| in person, or walking through an art installation with
| other artsy friends, or attending a workshop (the fees
| paying local artists).
| kristjansson wrote:
| Not even so esoteric as communes and performance art!
| Even 'normal' galleries, theater, music, are inherently
| analogue, physical experiences that don't translate to
| digital reproduction.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| My wife and I watched Chris Rock from the front row at
| the Comedy Cellar last summer. Total cost was like $75
| with drinks. Absolutely incredible. I could watch every
| incredible stand up special available online and it
| wouldnt be anywhere close to that in person experience.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| The big guys tour. It's the little guys that are
| interesting....
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Ah yes let's go to each other's massive meta verse homes
| (we all really live in those cell room apartments) to
| view NFT galleries.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| If they could get it online, they wouldn't be bothering
| to pay the premium to live in Manhattan.
| kristjansson wrote:
| That's a pretty grim scenario to imagine. Art and artists
| 'moved' off somewhere, while the putatively rich consume
| their produce through screens. All so real estate prices
| can climb higher?
| jjulius wrote:
| >You can get all that online.
|
| No, you can't.
| sorkin78 wrote:
| mclouts91 wrote:
| Wages will rise
| msoad wrote:
| Longer and longer commute for your grocery store workers. See
| fig. 1 (San Francisco)
| oogali wrote:
| Half hour? That's been debatable for some time now. As an
| example, it takes 20-30 minutes to commute from the Upper East
| Side to Midtown West, barring any subway issues.
|
| There are very few grocery store clerk, delivery drivers, and
| coffee baristas who live in UES. They've already been pushed
| out to the edges of Manhattan and other boroughs.
|
| The 20-30 minute commutes have been snapped up by younger
| people who have been priced out of the 10-15 minute commutes.
| You currently see a lot more ads for rentals that seem to
| stretch the boundaries of neighborhoods (e.g. West 110th Street
| == "Upper West Side").
|
| The wait lists for rent stabilized apartments are incredibly
| long, so the chances of a grocery store clerk, delivery driver,
| or coffee barista getting into more affordable housing closer
| to their place of work is pretty slim.
|
| And good luck if you're an hourly employee with a long commute
| when the MTA lets you down in the form of a delayed train, or
| express-turned-local, etc. You're either penalized by your
| employer (or angry customers) for arriving late, or you
| penalize yourself by leaving the house 30-45 minutes earlier
| and sitting around unpaid until it's time for your shift to
| start (ignoring any cost of leaving the house earlier, e.g.
| cost of extra child care, or risk of being unreachable on the
| subway by a dependent).
| woodruffw wrote:
| > You currently see a lot more ads for rentals that seem to
| stretch the boundaries of neighborhoods (e.g. West 110th
| Street == "Upper West Side").
|
| To be fair, they've been doing that particular
| editorialization for over 20 years. Bloomingdale was subsumed
| into the expanding morass of the UWS in the early 2000s;
| Morningside is next.
| dml2135 wrote:
| The waitlist for NYCHA apartments in incredibly long, or
| units set aside for low-income tenants in new developments.
| But regular rent stabilized apartments don't have wait lists,
| those just go on the market to get scooped up like any other
| place.
| standardUser wrote:
| "Wages will need to go up, which means the costs of goods and
| services will need to go up, and the city will get even less
| affordable."
|
| That is already what happened. It just never stopped happening.
| The end game is... it keeps happening. It's just more
| noticeable right now because of high inflation and the stark
| contrast from the pandemic years.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Wages will need to go up, which means the costs of goods and
| services will need to go up, and the city will get even less
| affordable.
|
| Which shouod decrease the number of people living there,
| putting a limit on cost growth.
| lbrito wrote:
| >no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job
| when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere
|
| A few things:
|
| 1. The premise there (when there are plenty of jobs elsewhere)
| is kinda flimsy -- its already easier to find jobs in larger
| cities (that's why people move there), and nothing guarantees
| this won't get worse
|
| 2. Yes, there is a breaking point where people can't afford (in
| terms of time and/or money) a long and/or expensive commute.
| Humans have a workaround for that. Its called slums.
| xhrpost wrote:
| > But as they get pushed further and further out it's going to
| break down somewhere
|
| It seems that higher rent is more likely to reduce standard of
| living first. Low wage earners who really want to be in the
| city will find a way, which generally means having a roommate
| and then I guess having even more roommates. I do wish NYC
| would build more dense buildings though so that a barista
| doesn't need to have 6 roommates.
| rcpt wrote:
| It can go a lot further before people revolt. We don't yet have
| Calcutta style slums or impoverished favelas like San Paulo.
|
| Or course it'd be great if we weren't heading that direction
| but try convincing voting demographics that property values
| should be lower.
| danans wrote:
| > no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job
|
| Perhaps not minimum wage, but if the Bay Area is any evidence,
| people will commute that much time for a low wage job.
|
| They are often losing out longer term (i.e. not considering the
| accelerated depreciation of their car), but in the thick of day
| to day survival they might not see that slowly happening.
| mayormcmatt wrote:
| As a Bay Area resident, I have been surprised by how far people
| will commute for minimum wage jobs. Just Monday, I think, our
| public radio station had their morning local topics show where
| the subject was the city of Stockton. There was a lengthy
| discussion about low-income commuters coming daily from
| Stockton to Palo Alto, to work in and around the tech campuses
| of SV. Personally, I have known people to come from Modesto and
| Merced, even one from the far side of Sacramento. Daily!
|
| Given that, I'm just not sure where the breaking point is.
| sigmaskipper wrote:
| Hate to break it to you and your relatively high paid friends
| but that bodega cashier is spending an hour on the subway both
| ways from their current working class neighborhood.
| Furthermore, half of that persons salary is going to groceries
| due to inflation. There has to be a breaking point at where NYC
| will hit stagflation and hopefully all useless instagram coffee
| shops will be hit by "market conditions".
| usrn wrote:
| It's all debt which inflation will wash away and the landlords
| will come out on top.
| rngname22 wrote:
| I'm a well paid software eng in nyc and I have a 30-45 minute
| commute to work, I think the people you're talking about are
| already commuting 60-90 minutes if they work in desirable
| Manhattan neighborhoods. But I agree with your message.
| googlryas wrote:
| Isn't it a big talking point that wages aren't a large
| component of costs anyway for these services/goods provided by
| near minimum wage workers?
| danaris wrote:
| _Do_ the costs of goods and services need to go up?
|
| Or do the places paying low wages now just need to accept a
| smaller profit margin or lower executive pay?
|
| It's unquestionably true that there are some places that pay
| low wages that cannot afford to pay better wages without
| increasing prices; however, we seem to have collectively
| decided that that's the _only_ way wages can increase. But that
| ignores the fact that corporations in all (or at least many)
| sectors have been enjoying record profits recently, and
| executive-to-worker pay ratios are absurdly high.
|
| Remember that next time you see someone claiming that raising
| wages _necessarily_ means that prices will need to rise.
| afavour wrote:
| Ehhhh.
|
| I don't disagree for a second that, say, Starbucks could take
| a hit, reduce profits and still be able to operate
| successfully in New York. But I'd argue a lot of what makes
| New York the city it is is things like small independent
| restaurants that already operate on very thin margins. They
| also have no fat cat executives pocketing the spoils.
|
| So, perhaps, yes, the city could survive without increasing
| wages but I worry it would result in a very faceless city
| filled with nothing other than big corporate entities that
| are able to swallow the cost.
| GaylordTuring wrote:
| ...which in turn would make people less inclined to go
| there, driving the costs down, making it possible for the
| small shops to come back.
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm surprised that Walmart et al haven't started pushing
| for higher wages to kill competition- they must not care
| much about the smaller competitors.
|
| McDonalds and Starbucks eat a wage increase in stride,
| small restaurants and businesses just go under.
| dml2135 wrote:
| It's because any potential of increased profit from less
| competition would still be less that the amount of profit
| they make by fleecing their workers.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I keep hearing the notion that we should prohibit corporations
| from owning residential property, and I kind of like the idea.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| This is a great idea that would never be allowed to made into
| legislation because of corporate lobbyist.
| joshlemer wrote:
| Eh, I think the ability to internalize the costs and profits of
| an apartment building allows for a more efficient and incentive
| aligned situation than a bunch of condo owners with a condo
| board where there's a kind of tragedy of the commons to look
| after the building.
| asdff wrote:
| I can tell you've never lived in a corporate owned mega
| apartment complex and had a maintenance issue
| pyrophane wrote:
| It used to be the case that NYC was expensive, but most of the
| rest of the country was cheap. If you didn't want to pay the
| ridiculous rent in New York, you could always move to a "second
| tier" US city like Seattle, Austin, or Denver, and enjoy a cool
| urban environment at a comparatively very reasonable price.
|
| That no longer seems to be the case. Yeah, it is expensive here,
| but when I talk to my friends living in those other cities, they
| aren't paying that much less! Their rent is cheaper or they get
| more for the money, but it isn't a whole different ball game like
| it used to be.
| acchow wrote:
| This is temporary, right? Those tier 2 cities will feel much
| cheaper once NYC rents rise another 30%.
| asdff wrote:
| And then the tier 2 cities rents will also be legging up
| because they also aren't adding enough housing for the job
| infux they are seeing
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I'm paying $1600 for a 3 bed in one of chicagos hottest
| neighborhoods. The trick is density, Chicago is made up of 3/4
| flats and apartment blocks with solid public transport, so
| supply meets demand at a reasonable price. Of course the shitty
| weather and corruption helps lower demand too, but I'd say $600
| a month housing cost is worth it.
| antiverse wrote:
| This boils down to greed and selfishness, but people even on HN
| don't want to call spade a spade so they dance around it and give
| complex somersault answers because they are afraid/too socially
| conscious to speak the truth.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| "We clearly just need more Jesus"
|
| With the right moralizing as your hammer, every problem becomes
| a convenient supportive nail for your story.
| vondur wrote:
| As someone from California, I've always assumed that Manhattan
| was sort of comparable to something live Beverly Hills/Century
| City here in Los Angeles. Basically, you had to be fairly wealthy
| to live there.
| asdff wrote:
| It's more like Hollywood as a whole. You have wealthy areas
| where the landed gentry live, and you have extremely
| impoverished areas where multiple working class families share
| a bedroom in a run down apartment and can't save enough to
| leave and find better prospects.
| mouzogu wrote:
| i think remote work goes a long way in resolving this problem.
|
| governments are not interested in building new affordable
| property (at least in the UK).
|
| so those of us who can afford to rent in these cities, but not
| buy, we should all leave these places...let the landlords default
| on their speculative house of cards.
| mwt wrote:
| It's just diffusing the problem from urban centers to mid-sized
| cities elsewhere in the united states. Say for simplicity that
| the core result of the problem is that people not making
| astronomical tech/finance/etc. salaries can't live in NYC
| because people making those salaries are scooping up supply and
| driving up rent ($5,000/month and higher). Then say the
| solution is to let some amount of people move to smaller cities
| and work remotely, enough that NYC prices somehow magically
| drop 20%. Well, where are those jobs going to go / how much of
| a salary penalty are people going to take to move from NYC to
| STL, Austin, Nashville, Columbus, Denver, Ann Arbor, and
| Raleigh? Because they're not going to suddenly be making the
| same salaries that engineers already in those cities make,
| they're going to want more. And they're going to scoop up
| housing supply and put pressure on those housing markets. The
| same forces keeping NYC rent at $5,000 have caused places like
| Nashville to become unlivable for the lifers; your grocery
| store workers and baristas can't get by with $3,000/month rent
| there either.
|
| It would be lovely if the solution for skyrocketing rents in
| the big 2-3 urban centers didn't simply shift the problem to
| every other city, but there's no indication at all that will
| happen.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Remote work is essentially what created a large housing cost
| increase in other cities. Also for cities like NYC, reducing
| demand will be difficult. NYC has always been a city where lots
| of people want to live(maybe not you or me, but it does attract
| a lot of attention). It is historically significant, vibrant,
| and many parts are beautiful. People will flock there, even as
| others are leaving.
| mouzogu wrote:
| there is a demographic issue for sure, one which is global,
| and driven by huge wealth inequality.
|
| i see remote working as the default option being a step in
| the right direction.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I think the widespread option of remote work is a good step
| forward. The fact that it came about in such a quick
| fashion was not ideal for the re-shuffling of the real
| estate market, but hopefully it will even out in the coming
| years!
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| And then the residents in those cities will hate remote tech
| workers for taking all their affordable rentals. There is not
| an easy answer here.
| arbuge wrote:
| This might turn out to be the saving grace of the distressed
| office market. Office landlords have a lot of empty or almost
| empty buildings in areas like downtown NYC. I'm thinking they can
| be profitably repurposed as apartments at these rental rates.
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