More Housing for Better Public Transit: A Grand Bargain for New York City
manhattan-institute.org
manhattan-institute.org
In other words, the very thing that people move to NYC for can no longer be built in much of NYC. Pretty perverse.
In the 1950s, nice apartments in Greenwich Village or the UES might be $800 – $1,500, adjusted for inflation: https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/what-a-wes... .
What changed between then and now? Zoning: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-...
ALL real estate, everywhere in America, including places that are in no way bound by land, has exploded in cost against inflation.
In no state nor Puerto Rico will the minimum wage pay for an apartment.
You don’t borrow to pay rent. Low interest rates and high asset prices could increase the rate of condo conversion, diminishing the supply of rental housing, but doesn’t in general explain exploding rents.
A tidal wave of cheap money does drive up costs. Most home purchasers have a fixed budget to spend on a home, whether that money pays down interest or pays down principal.
Low interest = higher housing prices, because borrowers will borrow more money at the lower rate.
This is equally true for apartment construction -- if firms can borrow money cheaply, they borrow more of it, and bid more for land.
A pertinent quote from an article about zoning in Politico, hardly an outpost of libertarian free-market thinking: https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/201...
> Rezonings push and prod what planners call the “building envelope,” an invisible outline that hovers over the built city and limits what developers can create. The legacy 1961 zoning created an invisible city with a loose shape, like a dress bought a few sizes too big, that the physical city had plenty of room to grow into. The Bloomberg administration has left behind a building envelope that’s more like a corset, pulled tight to the city’s body, cinching around places that were already small and boosting its curves. The Bloomberg administration’s 120 rezonings did as much to change the city’s shape in places where it limited growth as where it let developers build tall, and, as the city expands, those limits could become a problem.
No one is calling for the immediate doubling of housing stock today. But the notion that we should restrict development in specific areas is ludicrous. Often the places that have development restrictions are wealthy and politically connected; Williamsburg gentrified because the East Village gentrifiers slammed the doors, then Bushwick gentrified because the Williamsburg gentrifiers slammed the doors, and so on and so forth. Development restrictions hurt poor people more by forcing gentrification into other neighborhoods.
The MTA has repeatedly been caught lying to the public about their finances, hiring ghost employees, etc etc. They have the highest capital costs in the world, full stop -- it would cost them a billion dollars to erect a mailbox.
The MTA's annual _capital_ expenditures budget is already larger than any transit system in America. Their operating budgets are among the healthiest in the world, due to very high farebox recovery ratios on the buses and subways, but the fares go up without bound and there is somehow never enough money to get existing service back to 2010 levels, to say nothing of modernization or expansion.
There's no money for new transit in New York City because no one in City Hall _or_ Albany is damn fool enough to believe that tossing additional billions into that bottomless pit will yield meaningful results.
Lastly, property taxes are pretty low in NYC. Property tax is less than 30% of total City revenues. Massively expanding property tax bases in localized areas will not move the needle on the city's budget.
A lot of people are up in arms because if you include Muni bus/rail as "transit hubs," supposedly 96% of San Francisco is vulnerable to significant and sudden height increases (from 4 to 8 stories).
That would, indeed, be a pretty drastic change to the landscape, but more housing is desperately needed, so it seems the pros (better for climate, better for lower income residents, etc.) outweigh the aesthetic cons here.
We have no housing oversite on these councils and even in Sunnyvale where we're talking about voluntarily adding 7k housing units on El Camino, the council's primary concern is the impact on home owners' views. I sat in the council planning meeting and it was all about how to make the buildings tolerable to the council - who are home owners. To my knowledge I was the only renter there. They want to add 400 units along a mostly empty 1 mile stretch (mostly car dealerships), to keep the appearance minimal. But, that means that mile can't support walkable restaurants and those 400 people will be getting in their car on crowded El Camino to do anything.
If they would just build dense enough to support walkability and to have enough riders for transit efficiency to improve! Their compromises pick the worst of both worlds.
And then in Cupertino, the mayor points at Palo Alto and says "why should we build if they aren't?" Darcy Paul literally said this to me at a vallco meeting.
From what I see, I think the city councils say one thing about sb 827 but really they'd love to have the responsibility be taken out of their hands. They just aren't capable of solving their prisoners dilemma.
Edit: paragraph break
https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/03/25/housing-bill-draws-...
Software developers are rarely happy when security people make it harder to ssh into prod machines, but sometimes it's better for some powers to be restricted and more carefully applied.
Also I'm just curious, how many of the mtv city council are renters and how many are home owners?
Edit: typo
Thats a lot of money for the MTA.... it ends being about 12-15k per apt, which is chump change for NYC standards.
Too bad the MTA is a semi-corrupt organization, that can't build efficiently enough.
City revenues are 93 billion annually. The City government could easily fund the extra 5bn/year out of the general fund without any hinky schemes. It chooses not to because the MTA wastes substantially all of its capital spending -- adding City money to the bonfire won't be rewarded by voters.
Given the MTA's track record, an extra $5 billion a year would buy us what, _one_ extra subway station, ten years from now?
it ends being about 12-15k per apt