NYC Has 100k-250k Overpriced Vacant Apartments, 63k Homeless Families | Hacker News Reader

NYC Has 100k-250k Overpriced Vacant Apartments, 63k Homeless Families

nydailynews.com

43 pointscimmanom27 comments

If you want to disincentive properties sitting vacant you can do something like Vancouver: http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-ta...

For whatever reason I like the idea of raising property tax and giving a tax credit if your property is at or near full occupancy. If you goal really is to provide enough cheap housing that no one is missing a house, then you might want to give a housing tax credit for every person you house in a legal space.

Rent control only helps people that already live in a neighborhood, housing assistance requires a good bit of regulation & has stimga attached. If you target the renter instead you can just leave it to the market.

NYC does have something like that now. Both homeowners and renters are eligible for a property tax credit. But the rent credit is only available if rent is less than $450/mo, which is... impossibly low.

450. Yikes that reads as pretty out of date/touch.

For those wondering here is zillow returning zero results under those conditions: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_rent/New-York-NY/house,cond...

Also making a tax credit like that without a gradient produces some pretty nasty effects.

The odd thing is that the credit is fairly new - IIRC, within just the last few years.

"For years, development officials, the real estate industry and think tanks have told us that artificially low rents are holding the city back. Higher rents, the argument went, would free landlords to make a reasonable amount of money and serve as an incentive to increase the housing supply." who are these "geniuses?"

Rent-seeking is a destructive economic behavior. It literally destroys value from an economy. I have no idea how they might suppose permitting some wealthy people to get more wealthy by doing nothing of any value would do anything but provide a vampiric drain on value from the economy of the city.

The question is whether the housing supply has increased faster than rent. The assertion that it’s too expensive to build low-rent apartments in a city where land is about as expensive as it gets us not unreasonable. I have seen little concrete that shows rent control helps supply in general.

Property tax should be: - based on value of unimproved land; to encourage development - include a tax-rebate per full time resident living there

Positive incentives are responded to better than a vacancy tax.

"and 27,009 held off the market for unexplained reasons"

the title of the article is sensationalized. most off the apartments have a legitimate reason for being vacant while there were only 30K that they couldn't find a reason for.

> Additionally, many of the 75,000 temporary apartments are pied-à-terres, weekend or vacation crash pads for the rich, up from just 9,282 in 1987.

And 3x that number that are vacant for pretty questionable reasons.

"weekend or vacation crash pads for the rich"

how is that even remotely "for pretty questionable reasons"? it states right there that the rich are using them as second homes and party pads which is very common.

what ticked me off about the article is they claim that there are close to 250K vacant apartments cause they are "priced out of reach for most renters" which is totally false.

When there are so many homeless people in the city, renting out an apartment that will only be used for a few weekends a year is morally questionable for both the renter and the landlord.

excuse me, take a step back just one minute.

you cannot make a false statements as "And 3x that number that are vacant for pretty questionable reasons" and then turn around and use the sympathy card as justification by stating that what someone is doing with the property they rightfully own as "morally questionable". by doing so, you are no better than the author of the article in my eyes.

i don't like it either that people are sleeping on the streets while these places are "uninhabited" for whatever reason, but the people who own these places have the right to do with them whatever they want.

The people who own and rent these places have a moral obligation to make moral decisions. A landlord deciding that people should be homeless just so they can make some more money is probably morally wrong. I'm sure we could imagine some exceptions, but in the common case I believe this is true.

Your last part about rights seems to be talking about legal rights, which is a bit irrelevant and also factually wrong. There are regulations on renters and owners, and there's no reason a city can't democratically decide they want different regulations.

> A landlord deciding that people should be homeless just so they can make some more money is probably morally wrong.

By the same logic, someone who chooses to save money rather than pay to rent a dwelling for someone homeless is also probably morally wrong.

Sure, and this is sometimes reflected in law as taxes and subsidies or regulations on rent prices.

again... you are trying to play the sympathy card since your original reply was false and rather than admitting it, you chose to take an emotional path in the discussion in an attempt to side step this fact. this discussion is done.

Aren’t you then deciding that people should be car-less? (presuming you have a car - clearly many of us do), and that car sits idle most of the time in a parking lot, isn’t that the same thing?

So are you (and all of us) then acting immoral by not letting a car-less person use our car?

I think your understanding of morality is deeply flawed.

Clearly we need a morality board to determine what is or isn't in the best interest for someone to do with their private property. /s

Slippery slope right there.

We already made fraud and racial discrimination illegal, where will it end??

It's a morally questionable situation, but I wouldn't put the blame and responsibility on the individual renters/landlords. The flaw is in the system that incentivizes and perpetuates such a situation. The people involved are simply rational actors in that system. Problems aren't solved by just hoping everyone acts more morally, but by redesigning the structures and incentives that shape both the outcomes and our values.

Let me mention a case I know of at second hand: penthouse apartment facing Central Park. Assume that the owners decide that it is the socially responsible thing to sell the apartment. Now, clearly, the next occupants will not be formerly homeless: the homeless can't afford it, and the coop board wouldn't have them. What are the odds that the sale causes an effect all the way down from the 5th Avenue world to the sort-of affordable world?

I think selling to someone who will actually live there instead of someone who will just visit sometimes will increase local housing availability. It might also push the price down substantially. That means someone local might be able to afford a penthouse who otherwise would not. And while that individual buyer is probably not homeless, it does take them out of the market for lower-scale apartments which decreases pressure right down the line. It could literally reduce homelessness at a 1:1 rate.

It’s not just sensationalized. It’s a lie. The “overpriced” part is entirely made up and the “63k families” is a misrepresentation of the 63k individuals in homeless shelters.

Not sure how you got there, unless you mean that the new competition on the demand side (rich weekenders) has already been fully discounted by the market somehow and the high prices are actually reflecting material cost rises the rest of us don't know about, say. In other words, I think you're gainsaying, and that doesn't help me figure it all out.

“Overpriced” means the market will not bear the cost. That’s all it means. Most of these vacancies are accounted for in some way already (vacation property, rented but not yet occupied, etc). The article provides no evidence that the majority of the vacant properties are in any way overpriced.

Nor need it.

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