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> We're talking thousands of apartments, literally.

To add some more concrete numbers, in 2015 there were 14,357 units completed in New York. Permits were issued for 56,528 units. (Only 20,000 permits were issued in 2014. They were down 65% in Q1 2016.)

For a city of over 8 million people, I would expect 50,000 units/year to be the sustainable level. 20,000/year seems quite low.

http://www.nycrgb.org/downloads/research/pdf_reports/16HSR.p...

In a place like NYC, don't they have to tear down an existing building to put up a new one? That is, what you're really interested in is net adds, and completed units is only half the equation.

Although it's a densely populated city it's not without its surface parking lots. They're just smaller than in other cities where half the downtown core seems to be parking lots. You can squeeze in a bit of development here and there without necessarily having to raze buildings.

There's also opportunities to upgrade old industrial space to residential, no net loss in housing.

In Manhattan they almost never tear down, but rather do extreme gut renovations on the framework of older buildings. As a result additional units don't get added (by building up for example), the existing units are just upgraded.

The reason for this is new buildings have to follow modern regulations which drops the usable square footage of properties considerably (for example, having the building X feet back from the street etc). In Manhattan where every square foot counts this is of course unacceptable. Old buildings are grandfathered into older, less restrictive, regulations.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

Anyone that claims one easy fix to a complex problem is most likely talking out of their ass. Just like with anything else in life, the answer is way more complicated than the zealots on both sides would have you believe.

Like you pointed out, NYC is the most dense city in the US, followed by SF. Naturally, building shit will be difficult in these cities. SF and NYC suffer from a unique set of problems, well not totally unique, but these problems are magnified in these cities:

Space constraints

Very desirable places to live

Neighborhoods with world famous character

Large amount of wealthy people willing to pay high prices

Boom & bust industries constantly changing the rate of population migration and also the wealth of the population

Pretending that everyone else is so dumb that they don't understand supply/demand or there is some evil conspiracy to prevent building doesn't help anyone. There are actual difficulties here with no easy solution. Building in these cities used to be difficult, it's difficult today, and it will continue to be difficult. There is no fix that will magically make these problems go away.

> Like you pointed out, NYC is the most dense city in the US, followed by SF.

SF isn't the second most dense place in the country.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

I always thought the lack of density was SF's problem! Too many nice old houses in the way of proper apartment buildings.

Poster said city; that list is any incorporated area with >10000/sqmi. The top incorporated area on that list is physically smaller than Google's main campus.

If you restrict it to the saner list of cities with more than 100,000 people, San Francisco is indeed second.

Your list is the best representation of the true density of South Florida, though. It is carved up into so many independent towns that just using total populations doesn't show the true picture.

The difference in cost between building a $1000/mo apartment and a $3000/mo apartment is negligible to the builder. Stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors, granite countertops, etc are practically free compared to the cost of the land and erecting the basic structure. If you have a chance to substantially increase your future revenue with minimal additional cost, how could you not?

Add to that, most of these projects are going to be financed by debt of some sort, and lenders are not going to be keen on seeing that you could pursue a higher profit margin and choose not to.

There's no question about that. And it definitely is an issue that nearly everything new is luxury, or semi-quasi-luxury at least. With that said there are lower income requirements usually as part of the tax packages for these new projects, and also the glut of somewhat higher end studios and one bedrooms clearly puts downward pricing pressure on all the second-tier and older units nearby as well.

As mentioned, NYC isn't perfect but it has a reasonably functioning democratically elected city government that at least tries to deal with major urban issues and occasionally succeeds. Which I've heard anecdotally at least makes it a little different from San Francisco.

This is fine because a 10 year old apartment with chipped granite countertops, dingy hardwood floors, and aging appliances will rent out for cheaper. Apartments in wealthy cities are always "trickle down" more than "build cheap."

It would be pretty exceptional for a landlord to knock 2/3 off of the rent for an apartment just because its getting run down. It would have to be a real renters market for a good long while to push prices down that far.

My point was that an increase in supply of new luxury apartments does almost as much to generate a renters market as an oversupply of new modest apartments, and it's way easier to get builders to do the former than the latter.

Trickle down housing actually works though because real estate gets used (in high demand areas). Developers build at the high end for the most profit. When those that can afford it move into new fancy digs their vacated units become available to others for less.

This is fine for new construction. Building more at the high end puts downward pressure on prices in the middle, which in turn puts downward pressure on prices in the affordable housing space. This is called "filtering" and it's been shown to work.

A relevant quote from City Observatory summarizing research and implications:

But very little private housing in the United States was originally built for low-income people. Instead, homes built for the middle or even upper classes gradually became cheaper as they aged, as people with high purchasing power moved into trendier, more modern homes in “better” neighborhoods. As higher income households move on, the now somewhat older homes or apartments they formerly occupied are sold or rented to people with more modest incomes.

This process is called “filtering.” While the evidence that filtering is a real phenomenon has been around for a long time—the core of nearly every American city contains neighborhoods with once-luxurious homes now occupied by people of modest incomes—the first study to provide a rigorous measure of how it happens was published only in 2013. In it, Stuart Rosenthal of Syracuse University uses nearly 40 years of data from the American Housing Survey to figure out the average pace of filtering across the country, and what makes housing filter more quickly in some places than others. [1]

[1] http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/

>The difference in cost between building a $1000/mo apartment and a $3000/mo apartment is negligible to the builder.

So you decrease the square footage from 1400 to 700.

You have to have customers willing to buy your product, and there are only so many $3000/month apartments you can make before you run out of people willing to pay that much. Either large numbers of last year's luxury places are moving downmarket or you won't be able to sell the building for what you expected.

It is difficult to build in NYC from a zoning and building regulation perspective, but not nearly as difficult as SF. That people conflate the two is a mystery.

NYC is quite challenging to develop. For the story of some of those units in Brooklyn you're talking about, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Park,_Brooklyn

That's not even remotely representative of the general climate for development in the area, and wasn't one of the projects I was talking about. That was a huge and high profile project to reshape the busiest street and transit hub in a borough of 2.5 million people involving the relocation of a pro sports franchise, building over railroad tracks, etc.

It was bound to be complicated, and it's worth noting that it got built anyways. I've lived walking distance from the neighborhood in question for 17 years, and that project has nothing to do with a developer wanting to put up a regular old high rise rental apartment building or three, which seems to happen nearly daily around here. The Fulton/Flatbush corridors have been transformed literally in a matter of months.

Pacific Park has been a uniquely challenging and contentious project. It's an extreme outlier.

Brooklyn had four different tallest buildings in 2016, and all were residential [1]. Pacific Park is an outlier.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_B...

NYC is a bastion of a "make it happen" mentality that should make every other municipality jealous.

Hmmmm having lived in the UWS I can say this is definitely not the case. Have you been to a CB meeting in New York? Just as much NIMBYism and obstructionism (look at what happened with that bike lane opposition from rich old people near prospect park). The difference is the laws on the books in New York vs the bay.

yes, but then I look at Chelsea/"Hudson Yards" and I'm like "oh my god how did they even build all of this so fast"

Indeed. And downtown Brooklyn, and LIC, and Industry City, and so on and so on. NYC is capable of adding a dense "downtown" that would dwarf the entire CBD of most American cities every year or three. There's really no comparison at all in this country at least.