Do you have kids? Because this glib reaction signals that you don't, or you'd be aware that the areas you are touting as affordable have terrible public schools. That's why they're relatively cheap. That, and the hour-plus commutes (each way) to where most middle-class jobs are.
There are affordable parts of Long Island and Connecticut with great public public schools less than an hour from Manhattan by train.
We've grown accustomed to overporting our post-war suburban archetype of what a "middle class" family "deserves," i.e. lots of bedrooms, garages and lawn space, while diminishing previously (and still!) common practices like having roommates when young, not owning a car, et cetera.
When a good chunk of those years had interest rates in the 10%+ range, and when the years that were lower than 10% ended with "The Housing Bubble Pop" and "Great Recession", that 6% compounded growth is actually kinda awful.
In any case, compound growth is the center of most economies. Being the owner of things entitles you to profits, be it in stocks, bonds, or real estate.
The "buying on debt" depends on the rate that you got in at. If you're complaining that people in the 1970s were able to get 15% mortgages to earn lol 6% on Real Estate, then I don't think you fully appreciate the history of Stagflation and the 80s bond market.
---------
All in all, housing prices have rose because interest rates have fallen. More people can afford a house when mortgages are at 4% instead of at 15%, and the price of homes go up to compensate.
Unless rates drop dramatically in a short-period of time (like in 2012), refinancing opportunities are rare. From the 1980s, you wouldn't have had a refinance opportunity until the mid 90s.
Nonsense. I'm a New Yorker. You literally CAN'T get to DOWNTOWN Manhattan from any part of Connecticut in under an hour. The first metro-north stop in CT (Greenwich, which, BTW, is NOT affordable to live near) is over 40 minutes from Grand Central at the best of times. And then you have to change to the subway to get downtown. Nuh-uh. An hour each way is not happening.
I'm not sure what your point was about suburban deserts (in the sense of things deserved,) but the point of the article is that even with things like not owning a car priced in, housing (in cities with jobs) is still unobtanium for people in the hole between section 8 and tech salaries, who didn't already buy their homes when they were cheaper. Editorializing a bit, this sucks in the long-term. The upper east side of manhattan west of park, which was expensive before "gentrification" was a word, shows what this leads to: a limestone-clad desert made of vertical money and not much else.
I live in Midtown. This time of year, I can't get downtown in less than an hour :).
It's reasonable for a productive person to demand any two of: space, a great location and disposable income.
My household of two chooses to enjoy our neck of Manhattan. We make do with like 400 square feet. If we had kids we would need to live in a city we get to enjoy less frequently or commute from the suburbs. Neither is particularly appealing to me, but I've heard kids are nice.
> "gentrification"...leads to a limestone-clad desert made of vertical money and not much else
Gentrification can lead to density in addition to urban deserts. Ironically, activists seem to prefer restricting housing supply. That means the latter.
Apparently you know your comment wasn't too truthful which is why you backed off with "I live in Midtown [..even so..] I can't get downtown in less than an hour". So, what exactly was the point of your comment?
Also note: household of 2 is not a household when talking about middle-class income. Why? Well, household of 2 adults is basically the best case scenario financially (both have jobs without additional dependents).
As a anecdote/data point: even making >300+k with both parents working still is a drag in NYC when you have 2 kids, regardless of what BS you hear online.
I've lived in Stamford. I would not want to live there again. Between ample space, proximity and disposable cash, I chose the latter two. If I wanted more space, Connecticut offers a fair deal for saving money or being close to the train station.
> you know your comment wasn't too truthful
Not sure why you went straight for the deep end. It's the holidays. I'm budgeting 45 minutes to the Upper West Side. The smiley implied facetiousness.
It's 50 minutes from Grand Central to Stamford [1]. That's comparable to the average American's 25-minute commute [2]. My core and recurring point is simply that cities are defined by density. If you want lots of space, you're fighting the current.
[1] http://as0.mta.info/mnr/schedules/sched_form.cfm
[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/05/america...
Your point of "choose 2" isn't anything more than a compromise you've made. That is, not something that is "correct" but a compromise you've settled on. I'm happy for you to settle on that as a baseline for your life, but it irks me to hear you spout it as a "truth".
Cities are defined by density. What makes them valuable is density. Density is people per unit of space. You can do some things going vertically, but there are costs and limits associated with that, both practical and political.
Lots of people in high density means low average space per person. If you want more space it will be expensive and eat into your cash. If you want to keep that cash, you don't have options in a high-density city.
Yes, you can have all three with lots of cash. But you can't have a city with most having lots of space, because that means they live in low density and are no longer in a city.
"People's lives are too good, we need to make them worse."
What's your angle? What do you gain from advocating against mobility and personal space? Are you upset because you didn't have these things, and don't want "undeserving" people to have them? Or do you just want us all to live in worse conditions for the fun of it? I genuinely can't understand what moves someone to push for "people should not have their own bedrooms or time-efficient commutes."
What works in the suburbs isn't sustainable in cities. Suburbia is built for personal spaces. It's terrible, however, at supporting the rich social fabrics densely-packed humans spontaneously weave. (There's also the problems of commute and it's environmental impact.)
City-centre richness is a direct product of density. If everyone gets large, personal spaces you're back to suburbia and all its disadvantages.
Living in a city means accepting less personal space in exchange for the benefits of density. The only alternative is to have fewer people with more personal space, which means rationing or auctioning off that limited housing as well as a less "city-like" urban core.
This is true on the x-y plane but not the z-axis. We can have substantially more sqft available per sqft desired in the same land footprint by building up, which is currently heavily regulated or outright illegal.
It's better than yards and boulevards, but a building of three-bedroom apartments to the edge of space will have a different human dynamic from one with mostly one-bedrooms.
You can get your human dynamic just fine on sidewalks, cafes, parks, etc. It doesn't need to be in-building. And even ~70 stories by elevator is still only a few minutes, nothing like the hour-plus train rides middle-class people in cities currently need to endure.
More density means fewer [EDIT: more] people within walking distance of each café, park and restaurant. That, in turn, affects how many of them there are and how eclectic they can be.
Density is people over space. If you give each person more space, you reduce density. This can't be avoided.
> nothing like the hour-plus train rides middle-class people in cities currently need to endure
They don't need to endure it. Stamford, CT and Rochester or Port Jefferson, NY are nice cities with middling densities.
But many people don't want that. They want restaurants and nightclubs and parks with rotating art installations that only emerge and make sense when you pack people together.
Sure, you can put one or two large units in the mix without screwing things up. But not a lot, not for everyone. Else you end up with urban deserts.
You really think a neighborhood of 70-story buildings can sustain these things as long as people share bedrooms, but can't the instant that children and young adults have their own doors to close?
>More density means fewer people within walking distance of each café, park and restaurant.
Vertical distance costs almost nothing in terms of time, given modern elevators and scheduling. I'll skip the cafe because it's a 40 minute walk instead of 10. You'd really skip the cafe because it's 20 floors down instead of 5? That's, like, one minute on a really bad day.
>If you give each person more space, you reduce density.
Well sure, but the advantages of density really come from compactness in time/ease of transportation rather than space. It doesn't matter that the restaurant is far away from its customers on the vertical axis, because elevators are fast.
If you mandated one bedroom per person you'd have to expel 31 to 38% of the population or increase the number of bedrooms by 45 to 60%.
Manhattan's 33.6 square miles [5] are populated with 70,826 people per square mile. If we go the culling-people route, that drops to 44,000 to 49,000 people per square mile. That's the population density of West New York, in New Jersey [6]. Manhattan and West New York are radically different places.
If we go the building-units route, consider that Manhattan gained 13,189 units between 2011 and 2014, i.e. 4,400 a year [1; Table 2]. To build the 500,000 to 600,000 bedrooms we need you'd need to make 415,000 to 500,000 units, i.e. a century of construction. (If you built only three bedrooms, you'd cut that time down to 167,000 to 200,000 units, i.e. a mere 38 to 45 years.) To build them in 20 years, you'd need to increase construction by 4.7 to 5.7x (90% to 2.3x if only 3BR), and that's ignoring any additional infrastructure that new population may need as well as population growth.
Cities are a product of density. If you try to make a city with suburban-sized personal spaces, you end up with neither city nor suburbia. Building up is better than sideways, always, but we shouldn't delude ourselves regarding realistic sets of trade-offs.
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/2014-HVS-initi... Page 1
[2] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/n... Table 1
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Manhattan
[4] http://furmancenter.org/files/FurmanCenter_FactBrief_RentSta... Table F
Of course, the proportion of married couples could be much lower in Manhattan, and it's not necessarily the same 43%, but you get the idea.
More to the point I'm very interested what tradeoffs you think are worth literally never having the chance to be alone in a room. Without a shadow of a doubt I'd kill myself, and I'd never dream of brining a child into that miserable existence.
[0] https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US3651000-new-york-...
50% of the Manhattan population lives alone, the same as the fraction that has never married [1]. So yes, what you outlined is approximately what's going on. (Just 12% of New Yorkers in rent-regulated apartments had more than 1 person per room; 4.4% more than 1.5 [2].)
The status quo isn't crowded per se. It's just crowded relative to suburbia. The point of my illustration was that small tweaks to density, e.g. one instead of one and a half bedrooms per person, quickly spiral at the scales and within the constraints of a city.
[1] http://nypost.com/2010/01/05/all-the-single-people-in-manhat...
[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/2014-HVS-initi... Table 19
The K-12 school situation doesn't make them not affordable. It makes them less desirable, but cddotdotslash already pointed out that it's the desirable parts of the city that are unaffordable.
Sooner or later, society will have to realize that white/middle class flight is a direct cause of terrible public schools; and that by reversing the trend these schools will become less terrible.
https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/middle-class-ki...