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Comment by anewaccount2021 | Hacker News Reader

anewaccount2021

> Strongtowns and Citylab were both conceived by single, childless white people

You're talking through your rear orifice. Strong Towns was founded and is led by a fairly conservative guy who lives in small town Minnesota and talks all the time about his wife, two kids and dog.

This. And much of the content is a constant advocacy for avoiding the type of infrastructure investments that become very expensive to maintain for rural towns/counties (where a paved road may cost an order of magnitude more for upkeep than a gravel road).

I don't know anything about Citylab (never heard of it) but for StrongTowns this is just a blatant slanderous lie.

https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2015/12/why-conserv...

> NYC and SF are emptying, while suburbia is seeing bidding wars.

Yes, during the lockdowns. Let's see what happens in 1-2 years when people are allowed to socialize "normally" again.

Do you see the same thing in AU and NZ where they actually managed the pandemic in a proper fashion so extended lockdowns weren't as necessary? Are Sydney and/or Auckland emptying out?

> Are Sydney and/or Auckland emptying out? Sydney and Auckland aren't, but Melbourne (in the State of Victoria) is, which endured highly restrictive lock downs for 7-9 months.

From friends and family there, it sounds like apartments in the Melbourne CBD (aka. Downtown / City Centre) are effectively ghost towns, with tenants leaving the city, while still paying rent, and rated rental prices dropping by 25%. The general sentiment seems to be that no-one is interested in being forced into close proximity in home & work situations like you'd find on public transport and apartment blocks. So free standing houses, townhouses with separate entrances are at a massive premium.

From friends and family in New Zealand, it's hard to tell, because the already over-priced and rising market is reaching utterly insane levels, potentially (disclaimer: anecdotal based speculation here) driven by New Zealanders returning home from overseas from countries that are now seen as unsafe.

[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-... - Graph: "Residential property prices, quarterly percentage change, September quarter 2020"

Melbourne CBD is an exception because of the huge amount of residents on temporary visas and students, both of which are locked out of the country at the moment. The rest of the inner city is back to normal, some parts like Chapel Street and Fitzroy St which definitely weren't thriving pre-covid seem to be now.

It's like watching nature come back after a fire, not every tree survives but the forest rebounds.

The whole point of both of those is that suburbia as currently conceived is a massively-subsidized unsustainable mode of living that is an aberration from how successful settlements were built.

The whole point leans on the fact that building cities where residents are required to lock in 15% of their earnings to automotive expenses to be economically productive is insane.

> Covid authoritatively decimated their theses.

I think Covid demonstrated that there's a much lower appetite for living in dense cities during pandemics, not in general. Maybe this will have aftereffects that extend into "in general", but it seems premature to say this.

> NYC and SF are emptying

As an NYC renter who's been spending a lot of time looking at sales listings in the NYC housing market recently: This is not true. You are repeating a lie.

If it were true, I and my other renter friends would at least be able to keep our rents steady. My rent went up during covid, as did others'. And we're in perfectly generic apartments.

A couple of loud rich people are posting thinkpieces about leaving. A couple of folks who hate NYC and SF are aggressively retweeting those posts. And, perhaps, growth is slowing down. But the city is not "emptying."

But if it helps you feel more oppressed and backs up your identity politics, believe whatever you want.

According to every major outlet NYC has like Crains' NY, Bloomberg, and even realtor reports, show that every indicator for NYC at least, that the city demand for real estate is dramatically shrinking.

Rents are down 22%. Listings at an all time high. Vacancies at record 6.2%. Time of listings are also getting longer. Some of these numbers are 10 to 20 year highs.

SOURCE: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/manhattan...

https://www.crainsnewyork.com/residential-real-estate/cheap-...

Hm. I wonder if what's happening is that the very top of the market is falling out. There exist apartments for rent in the tens of thousands per month range in Manhattan, and it totally would not surprise me that if you wanted a place to live with a large family, it's no longer interesting to do that in a skyscraper by Central Park.

If that were true, that would explain why the median rent is down 22% - the top end of the curve got lopped off - but I'm certainly not seeing rents down even 0%, let alone 22%, in my range!

(That would also line up with the article's claim that 80% of groups looking for homes are 1-2 person groups. The 20% is quite profitable.)

This feels right - the benefits of living in the city were always more about being close to other people for nightlife etc than being near the office anyway. Most people always did leave central London/NYC/etc in their 30s when they start a family - Covid may have temporarily changed some people's plans but I do think it's temporary.

But office space in major cities is looking pretty vulnerable I think. Moving from planning space based on everyone spending 5 days a week in the office to planning based on work from home 2/3 days per week on average allows you to give workers more space per head (for their days in the office) while also still using less space in total and saving money - it's a win/win. Not everyone will do this but it will be widespread enough to make a real difference I suspect. There will be knock on impact to that in all the businesses which serve office workers too. And eventually it probably feeds into a change in the mix between office space and residential which could (via more supply) put some downward pressure on residential rents.

Rents in my building in Manhattan have dropped by at least 15-20 pct. Sales prices for condos have gone down (I know people who had to lower prices). Forget both my and your experiences, just look at the median rents and look at any online publication on the topic, even a brokerage report that comes out every quarter.

Manhattan definitely has emptied quite a bit.

I am a devoted dense urban city lover, but I completely agree with this take on Citylab.

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