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Comment by L_Rahman | Hacker News Reader

I'm as far from NIMBYism as is possible for a person to be [1] but the urban neighborhood growth curves seem to inexorably point to either of:

1. open air mall with prestige housing and office space (SoHo) 2. steel and glass mall with prestige housing and office space (LIC, Hudson Yards)

I know it's possible for there to be growth that is for people and not plutocrats. I live in the East Village and I love the density we have here but any attempts to upzone other neighborhoods to equivalent density seems to result in this kind of soulless mediocrity.

[1]: I support Tokyo style zoning, abolishing street parking and private vehicle traffic in urban cores, and would gladly have someone start building a twenty story apartment building next to where I live. If a majority of the units get allocated to poor families at risk of losing housing, even better :)

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I feel like the desired reaction to this is that gentrification or whatever you want to call this is bad but I think that is the wrong conclusion to draw. It is better to view this as a historical retrospective. Otherwise why not pine for the days when there were factories, or brothels or fields for that matter.

The whole reason the artists came there in the first place was because rent was cheap since it was a dilapidated dump not because it has some inherent attribute that made for better art. It isn't like artists have been wiped out as a profession they have just moved to places that are what SOHO used to be. A place with cheap rent.

It wasn't just that rent was cheap; rent was cheap in many other places as well.

It's that rent was cheap in close proximity to the buyers and dealers artists needed to make a living, with a subway to get around on nearby, and (eventually) a critical mass of like-minded creators to hang around with.

This basically doesn't exist nowadays. You can move to western New Jersey to lower your bills, but it's a long haul to New York when you need to do business, and unless you get others to move with you, you'll be working in isolation or with a small handful of peers.

It's true. In my experience of talking to artists...they work very differently, but most don't work alone and need a community to function. Sharing the Atelier, contacts to the business side of the art-world etc.

Another very big factor: A (suprisingly) large amount of artists don't really make most of their money through the selling of their art. They do art workshops with adults and children and therefore absolutely need the proximity to their clientel.

Yes, I guess one solution to this could also be to create nodes outside of Manhattan. Who cares if SoHo, Chelsea and the West Village are large malls if the soul of the city moves somewhere else?

But that would require sustained public infrastructure development at a scale America hasn't done since the immediate post WWII era.

> If a majority of the units get allocated to poor families at risk of losing housing

Those programs, by and large, do not work at all. The biggest bargaining chip a poor family has is the threat to move to cheaper apartment (if the supply is there). Forcing them into sub-standard subsidized apartments is a band-aid where they are afraid to make more money.

Source?

It is currently illegal to build 20 story residential towers in the village. If you think this is ridiculous you should get involved with http://opennewyork.city/

There is currently a rezoning process going on in SoHo/NoHo which is the main reason these articles are currently getting written.

I also think the cycle of neighborhoods is a bit more complicated than you make out, at least historically, where it's not just a one way trip towards neighborhoods getting more expensive.

>It is currently illegal to build 20 story residential towers in the village...

Even if it weren't illegal, it'd be nearly impossible to make a profit doing it. Land acquisition alone would just sink that kind of a project. Say, 40000 sq ft plates, less luxury but moderate common, less mechanical, less safety. You're talking what, maybe 25 or 30 thousand sq ft? And you have to divide that up into profitable spaces with only 20 or 30 floors worth of them to pay off your investment. (And those numbers are all wildly optimistic.)

I don't know man? Maybe it can be done? But I'm just not so sure.

Well, maybe I should walk that statement back a bit? I'm positive it can be done, but I'm not sure anyone other than more rich people would be able to afford the prices required to support the development. Only thing that law really does is keep more rich people from being able to find spaces in the Village.

You didn't do the numbers, so I went looking for properties in the area...

In NoHo (if anyone is looking for an investment) there is this: [0]

48 units, 20,000 square feet, cost of 26,000,000USD.

According to Zillow [1], apartments in that building go for roughly 3000USD a month -> 144000USD per month -> ~1.8 million USD a year.

So, if we take those numbers and apply it to new construction, 20 floors, 20,000 sq ft rentable space per floor (I'm assuming that's what you meant by plate).

Given real-estate costs in the area we can expect to spend 16 million [1], just for land. To get a contiguous acre (~40000 sq feet) on the island would probably cost us more.

Next, cost for construction would be something like 1000USD per sq ft [3], so ~400 million USD for all 20 floors.

If we, like the above mentioned apartment, have ~400 sq ft apartments at 3000USD a month, we would have 960 units total, and ~2.8 million in income per month.

I have no idea what the monthly payments for utilities, insurance, etc. would be, not to mention servicing a half billion dollar loan. The numbers are all sourced from non-vetted sources, so we could probably multiply costs by 3 and have relatively accurate picture of something like this.

[0] http://www.showcase.com/property/302-Mott-Street/New-York/Ne...

[1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/302-Mott-St-Apt-25,-New-York,-N...

[2] https://pocketsense.com/average-acre-land-new-york-7488311.h...

[3] https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-cr...

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