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Comment by billytetrud | Hacker News Reader

You seem to be massively misunderstanding what he meant by "basically a ghost town". All he meant is that lots of people will leave, opportunity will be reduced, etc. You seem to be taking it far too literally.

And no, it's not obnoxious or self centered to say that if the NY government doesn't fix it's massive number of problems that bad things are going to happen. It seems pretty clear that's the case.

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Yep, what OP is getting at is that in time, as a side-effect of out-migration the cool things that draw people to NYC will start to slowly disappear entirely. The small bakeries, the things that bring charm to neighborhoods all over the city. Safety is by far the biggest one. Chelsea is legitimately a dangerous place to walk around and I've lived in pretty seedy areas before, especially in college (where my neighbor was robbed at knife-point and my apt was broken into by heroin addicts multiple times).

What he means is that the people who remain will be those who are too poor to leave. Whom will be slowly replaced by wealthier and wealthier transients. Which is sad, by far the worst kind of gentrification.

> Yep, what OP is getting at is that in time, as a side-effect of out-migration the cool things that draw people to NYC will start to slowly disappear entirely. The small bakeries, the things that bring charm to neighborhoods all over the city.

You don't need any kind of net migration to do this, gentrification has already done it over the last 20 years. People who move there now don't care about that, though. They care about the city being Disneyland for rich people.

>The small bakeries, the things that bring charm to neighborhoods all over the city.

You're starting to see this in bits and pieces already. New rental space is primarily going to chain restaurants and box stores because the rent is too damn high for anyone not corporate to get started. _The Atlantic_ was talking about the issue of lots going vacant for months at a time because the owners are holding out for insane lease prices...in part because they need to pay insane taxes on the property.

I love New York (in small doses) but it's not tenable as it exists right now.

All of this is wrong. Leaseholders are holding out for higher rents not because of taxes but because of property values and the corresponding loans they have.

If they rent out something for a discount, it will read to a reevaluation of their entire property, which would then lead to them being underwater and impossible for them to borrow more money.

This is true not just in New York but all of the US where property owners are heavily indebted and rely on debt to both grown and maintain their businesses.

Having to default means that they basically can’t borrow anymore and can’t continue their businesses.

It has nothing to do with taxes, which would drop if they rented out their property for less.

Using the right words is the responsibility of the person uttering them. Expecting others to read your mind is unrealistic.

It’s better to say what you mean than expect others to figure it out.

Communication is a two way street dude. As a speaker, its your responsibility to consider your audience when encoding your thoughts as incredibly inefficient, verbose, and imprecise human language. As a listener, your responsibility is to consider the speaker and what they mean in their context. Its also your responsibility to clarify things that you think its possible that you have misunderstood. It is of course the speaker's responsibilty then to double check that you've understood things if they get the chance.

I think we should expect better use of vocabulary from the audience at HN, who tend to be better educated than the general population. Expecting people to say "people will become discouraged and leave" instead of "NY will become a ghost town" -- when the former is what they actually mean -- is not unreasonable.

Sure, I will concede that it is the listener's responsibility to seek clarification when responding to an ambiguous statement or claim. But here, there was no ambiguity, just hyperbole.

Hyperbole is used far more often here (and on the Internet in general) than it ought to be. We can, and should, have nuanced discourse here. Let's keep the bar high.

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