Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
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I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we generally get along in the city, across many cultures and backgrounds. I like it has some of the best food in the world.
I think a lot of people are like me. No, we don't want to live in Boston, Chicago, or Washington DC (similar cities with mass transit). Unfortunately demand will continue to outpace supply greatly.
The only alternative I have is moving further out in Brooklyn or Queens. Unfortunately the subway has decent coverage, but moves at a snail's pace, and I'm looking at 50+ minutes for 6 miles into the city.
Certainly no NYC, but they ticked all my recreation, arts, food, people and transport boxes.
Unfortunately, they’re all so goddamn expensive to live in.
My partner and I are looking at Madrid. But yeah, there is no other city in the world that's going to be like NY. Maybe London but of course that has the same problems.
* not specifically talking about London, either.
I could also take issue with comparing Sydney to NY, but I’ll let that one go ;)
Yes, those things are definitely recent "hip" phenomena, not found over the entire millennia of history
That said, there is live music and public art too, just since it isn't Singapore's culture but an import from the west, there's less of it (see my rant on western food).
EDIT removed "white" qualifier for tourist, my brain still thinks in US but really all tourists from wherever go to the malls and idk promenade but miss the kopitiams and markets because it's just not in the touristy areas.
I think these are just human things done since... before civilization?
All that said, I like spending a few days there - again, the food! - but I’d rather be in Bangkok or KL for longer, e.g.
The staples (Chinese, Indian, Malay) are good and probably better, but western food is not great. A few are mediocre and some are great, but the great places lack variety and selection, that is you usually get only one good thing from a given stall or restaurant.
My girlfriend, the first time she went to the US was blown away by the food. She even swooned over freaking gas station pizza I picked up once. Now that I live in sg I understand what she meant by the food in the US having flavor, the staples are great but the western food is pretty mediocre and just is either off or just lacks the proper seasoning, or if it's good, it's easily twice the price (after conversion!) of similar quality food I ate in Ohio.
I seriously miss creole / cajun food for example, but the SG experience of the west is freaking British food which is the bottom of the barrel (fish and chips anyone?) seriously.
Another thing (sorry for the rant but it's fresh in my mind). Good luck getting any amount of vegetables in your meal.
SG has a few decent options once you get over the fact that you’re paying four times the price for a slice of pizza (or, god forbid, cote de boeuf). Ironically the best Cantonese food (IMHO) is in the American club.
this is true in sydney everywhere. May be except thursday nights, some shops open late.
Try some European city with reasonable rents like Warsaw. Even the skyscrapers will remind you of Manhattan.
But yeah, learning Polish is not easy.
Building new mass transport systems like light rail in existing cities from scratch requires a lot of political momentum, basically willingness to crush the pervasive NIMBY mentality and overcome the pull of bureaucratic inertia. Even in European cities that never dismantled their light rail systems, inhabitants often fight back against line extensions, citing noise concerns etc., and are able to delay the construction for years or decades.
Plus such systems aren't cheap and usually require new subsidies on top of existing subsidies. You will still have to maintain the existing road system and bridges, their usage won't drop to zero or even a quarter of current traffic. Some people won't voluntarily switch to public transit ever, for all kinds of reasons.
Maybe this isn't "fundamental", but IMHO the hurdles to overcome are really high and I am not sure if there is any city in the US willing to try this and having the means to do so.
There are plenty of walkable parts of NYC like the South Bronx that have far lower demand to live there than the suburbs in nearby NJ or hell the not so walkable parts of NYC like Staten island, south Bronx or the outer parts of Queens.
What people want is access to amenities in under 10 minutes of travel time, and under 20 minutes of travel to special events they don't go to regularly, as well as a short job commute. This can easily be solved by getting rid of euclidean zoning in suburbs and building out all American suburbs in the style of cities like Portland originally had been.
Much smaller then NY, much more homogeneous, not a major world center of arts or finance.
There are very few cities in the world that check all the boxes he listed for NY, and they're all extremely expensive as well.
I'm not that worried about being murdered. Murders tend to happen between people with a relationship. There are very few random murders. In cities, gangs do the murdering, and outside of cities, it is generally crimes of passion. The NYPD is very, very aggressive about going after gangs and murders. This is at the cost of controlling other types of crime.
The car crashes are easy to explain: NYC is designed so that you drive very slowly, and there is a 25 mph speed limit everywhere a pedestrian might be. Crashes in NYC are almost always non-fatal. It's not that they don't happen. They are just non-fatal.
Personally, I am worried about being mugged or harassed, and that is extremely common in NYC compared to most places. It also happens to be something that happens between unrelated people. That is why I moved out of NYC after having been attacked once and witnessing 2 thefts in 4 years, and that is why the statistics cited in that op-ed are completely useless.
This piece you are citing is from the Opinion section of Bloomberg News. Bloomberg itself being a company whose headquarters are in NYC and whose founder is Mike Bloomberg a NYC resident himself as well as being a 3 term mayor of NYC. The author of this opinion piece, Justin Fox is also a NYC resident. It's worth noting too that Bloomberg LP company famously does not allow remote work and owns the Bloomberg Tower, a 55 story commercial and residential skyscraper that takes up an entire city block in Midtown.
Lastly Bloomberg himself is a polarizing figure since during his long tenure as Mayor he was widely seen as being in bed with big real estate development. His tenure as mayor was notable for the hyper development of luxury real estate. The types of "glass boxes" that are dark most of the year. For more background see:
https://therealdeal.com/2019/11/26/love-hate-and-real-estate...
Overall NYC is much safer than the national average, especially compared to small towns which people often assume are the safest. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-york-city-is-a-l...
If I'm being honest with myself, muggings in DC still scare me more than car crashes in Montana, despite the reality of these stats.
Crime here is comparatively high, and many people still drive.
When I lived in DC I was several times narrowly missed by people blowing red lights, robbed, and once had to wake a driver up at a red light because they and a passenger had both passed out while driving at 11am. It definitely didn't feel like a particularly safe place.
They may not realize the game they're in. But as long as the cost of living keeps hitting new peaks, inevitably people need to bring in more money, or move farther out or elsewhere. Supply is limited, and it is a competition.
And the award for Most Condescending Comment goes to...
But in all seriousness, this has always been happening. NYC is NYC because the cost of living keeps hitting new peaks, over and over, generation after generation. The same with so many high-demand cities. That's how they got to be such massive, dense cities to begin with. We're all just riding the wave.
I probably could have phrased that better. In any case I don't think what we're saying is incompatible. One has no choice but to keep up with the cost of living. My point is that the cost of living in a massively "central" city is defined by a lot of people driven to succeed and be seen succeeding, whether or not that's the mentality of one's group of friends.
Why?, because when you have all these people crammed together - weird stuff happens and that's what makes NYC magical. We're constantly mixing together, in the subways, bars, restaurant, parks ,etc. You get to see firsthand all the humanity of this city. No other city in America has replicated that.
Coming from New Hampshire: this is just fantastically untrue. NYC is about one hundred times more violent than where I live. It is so thoroughly not the same that I can usually tell when people come from cities simply based on how nervous they are. I think most people don't realize how badly it affects them, or how violent cities are versus "the rest of America".
Some crime stats: https://imgur.com/a/qDKqC59
edit: NYC has 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people, which is 45% more violent than the USA median (4.0). I have no idea how 45% more violent got a reputation as "safer than the rest of America" but it's not true.
And while this reminds me of XKCD: Heatmap[0], the density of crime also matters when it's where you live, and the actual proximity you are to frequent violent crimes.
p.s. I really like your content!
I don't think that's true: NYC is at 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000, and the national median sits at 4.0. That's 45% more violent than the median. That's not small! I feel like some PR firm must have implanted this idea in everyone's minds that NYC is somehow magically safer, but it's not showing up in the stats, and if the stats are skewed by reporting its almost certainly worse, not better.
Or maybe they're only comparing themselves to Chicago and Rio de Janeiro?
NY is generally safer than Chicago, LA, Seattle, Boston, and Fort Worth; Wikipedia places it in 59th place for most violent crime per capita amongst the nation’s largest 100 cities.
Granted, sometimes we'd visit smaller, safer college towns, like Purdue's Lafayette Indiana University's Bloomington, or Ball State's Muncie, IN. Only Muncie had a lower crime rate than NYC. Then again, Notre Dame's South Bend (17.3) University of Evansville (10.1), and Rose-Hulman's Terre Haute (14.6) kind of dispelled the idea of college town safefy.
My current town is at 36 violent crime per 1000 residents, but the statistics are collected differently, so it may not be an exact comparison.
NYC isn't safer than the majority of the country. But, compared to where I've been, it's felt pretty safe every time I stopped by.
(My mom felt differently and would often force me to take a car home if I was leaving the office at 10pm in NYC — but my mom would feel that way about any city I lived in.)
In SF, I’ve felt *very* unsafe being out before midnight (I was once propositioned for prostitution 4 times in a 2 block walk). Same in Seattle, where my own neighborhood has felt downright unsafe after 7pm on certain nights. Same in parts of Atlanta. Same in parts of LA.
I can’t compare it to places like New Hampshire or the suburbs — but I’m a female who weighs between 105 and 110lbs and yes, I’m white so that might help me, and I haven’t been to every part of NYC late at night — I’m sure there are places I wouldn’t want to be alone — but I do think that it is generally safe.
I was shocked by how much more crime was in Seattle than where I lived in Brooklyn.
There is another part of New York which is just that people generally leave you alone. So you’re surrounded by people who you can call out for help to, but you’re also not usually badgered by randos on the street.
I can’t talk about statistics but I can talk about how safe I feel. And I feel safer in NYC than any other major US city I’ve lived in or visited.
This passage[1] probably sums up the difference between aggregate crime stats and NYC residents' own assessments:
> Looking at NYPD crime reports for 2010, 2015, and 2020, we find that about 1% of streets in NYC produce about 25% of crime, and about 5% of streets produce about 50% of crime. This is consistent across the three years, showing that a very small proportion of streets in the city are responsible for a significant proportion of the crime problem.
I wonder if this phenomenon is different in different cities. Are the "shapes" of crime all "spiky" in New York, but more spread out in Seattle?
[1] https://www.manhattan-institute.org/weisburd-zastrow-crime-h...
Much of that is because NYC has drastically fewer transportation deaths than most of the US. The worst states have literally twenty times as many traffic deaths as NYC.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
Its trivially true that dense urban environments are going to have different baseline patterns of crime
It also seems pretty clear to me that this is the context OP was speaking in, given that almost everything else he described are features of big cities.
What does that even mean - "generally" safer? Saying "generally" and "the rest of America" are nebulous to the point of being completely meaningless. If I were to compare hunting accidents, wild fires and car accidents in NYC compared to the "rest of the America" then yeah sure. Have a look at these NYPD crime stats from May and tell me that it's safer than the entire "rest of America."
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00050/nypd-citywide-cri...
In terms of homicides though the US is less safe than Pakistan, India, Iran and Egpyt and other big countries.
I think small stuff like this just adds to your total anxiety without you even realizing it. It's really sad how difficult it is to live in extremely safe, small villages like my childhood home nowadays.
I use bike shares opportunistically, but they are not a reliable mode of transport.
As a pure anecdote, my husband had his bike outside in Prospect Heights for 3 or 4 years literally not moved. It had a lock but he didn’t even use the bike. It got weathered and abused and after literal years, I think it was finally stolen. In Seattle, where his has been broken into multiple times in a locked garage in our luxury building, I have no doubt that an untouched bike would have lasted a few weeks at most.
But that’s all anecdotal. I can say that in the 5 years or so that I used the CitiBike system, I never had a problem either finding a bike and the pricing was also more than fair. I frequently would take a bike from near Union Square and ride across the Brooklyn Bridge home on nice afternoons. I never once had a problem getting a bike or returning it to its drop off place near my apartment.
And the app/locator lets you know the status of bikes at any time so you can know if there is a bike at a specific site or not.
This might have changed in the last few years, but if anything, the city had a hard time convincing people to use the bikes. The system is a lot more efficient than the Lime bike/scooter setup that a lot of other cities like Seattle have (people in Seattle also don’t know how to use bike lanes and use the fucking sidewalks like assholes, because Seattle).
It really feels more careless to just ditch your bicycle on the side of the road and forget about it than lock it. I admit it's not a big thing, but as I tried to convey, small things like this add up.
(I am in a doorman building.)
When researching getting a lock for a personal scooter NYC always comes up as ground zero for problems with theft, to the point where much of the advice is to not even lock it up but bring it inside.
Statistically, where I live now is the same or significantly worse than Austin. But with the lower population, there are simply fewer incidents.
Obviously in The Bronx the numbers are much worse (9.28), and in Brooklyn they're a tiny bit better (5.43) but still well over USA median. Queens (3.25) is safer than median, though.
Marble hill was once fully a part of the northernmost point of Manhattan island, but a canal was cut south of it which turned Marble hill into an actual island all by itself. Later, the waterway to the north of Marble hill was diverted into the canal, so Marble Hill became connected by land to the Bronx and separated by water from the island of Manhattan, but it is still considered a part of Manhattan borough...
Garbage in, garbage out.
Parent commenter is completely correct that NYC is safer not just than the average location in America, but also the average rural area.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
Maybe your very specific neck of the woods is very rich and safe but I don’t know why you felt the need to butt in and make the conversation about you, OP never claimed that NYC was the absolute number 1 safest place in the country.
I'll admit I'm surprised it's still an order of magnitude, I share GP's sensibility that the cities are generally much safer than perceived
[1] https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...
For this reason, researchers typically use homocides to make comparisons, because that's consistently defined and tracked across jurisdictions, and because it's harder to manipulate those statistics when recording.
NYC - particularly Manhattan - has a much lower homocide rate than other places.
One of the reasons I left NYC. I'm now in one of the safest neighborhoods, we have virtually no violent crime, except from the occasional visiting criminals.
And I am glad my taxes don't support Democrats' pro-crime policies.
In Portland mobs fully control the streets, drag people out of cars and beat them, they threaten people, while police is just standing and watching. This is on video, not propaganda.
Parts of Florida great. Never been to Texas.
So you follow-up propaganda with hyperbole, and pretend that extreme outliers are somehow a normal representation.
There's also plenty of evidence of Republican-run cities locking up innocent people, or conservatives attempting a violent coup during a transition of power. It's a silly game.
Could you explain that? Crime is trending down in NYC over the last 20 years.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...
But you're also ignoring the fact that in other parts of the country these crime rates are 1-10% of these numbers. NYC could be much safer, if the right policies were applied.
I believe the south has the highest per capita murder rate which is mostly Republican led. It's states with lower education and higher poverty that have high murder rates. I think blaming Democrats or Republicans is misguided. We're a country pretty evenly split and there's no place that's a panacea.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/10/blame-rur...
People use these sorts of stats in Seattle to pretend that crime hasn’t gotten worse in the last few years.
The reality on the ground is much different, most people just don’t bother reporting crime, because it’s not worth the effort and the police probably won’t come anyway.
I know this sounds insulting but you seem like seem to have bought into a narrative of them versus us. There are ills on all sides, we are all humans who are mostly trying to make it through. Yes, there are people that are terrible at their jobs and cause harm. Yes, they are in both parties. If there was a third party they would be there too. Sure, vote and support people that align with your values but life is not a binary thing.
So dishonest. And gaslighting.
I'd also factor in the numbers are higher also because policing is very robust. I can't think of any other city where I saw a cop nearly as often as NYC, they're everywhere.
Anecdotally, I never felt unsafe there. Although where I grew up crime was rampant, common, and expected- so comparatively NYC seemed really safe, and it wasn't hard to avoid high risk places/situations. I do think people hype up the crime numbers, and forget to consider the variables present in a megalopolis which aren't present in smaller cities.
That number doesn't really matter, does it? I'd think the average number of people there each day is much closer to the relevant number.
Yes, and that "average number of people there each day" would include all the non-residents/tourists in the city. Which is a non-trivial number at all for NYC.
So if there really is an 11x increase in crime, along with a 10x increase in yearly population, that's actually a huge increase in crime on a per-person per-day basis.
Correct, but NYC had 66 million visitors in 2019[0], which is way more than 1mil you guesstimated.
Which, conversely, would increase the daily population by 20k*66=1.32mil. 1.32mil is a non-trivial increase in daily population at all.
0. https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/osdc/tourism-industry-ne...
I would still say Manchester, Rochester, Nashua ETC are 10x trashier and more neglected than even the most run down alley in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens.
That said, I shared a Lyft to the airport pre-dawn one time and where we picked up the other rider was a little more exciting than I would ever want to be.
In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from (edit: downtown) Manhattan and you'd really have to go out of your way to get there. Anecdotally I lived in Chelsea and worked in Union Square for a few years and never witnessed any real crime, violent or otherwise. By comparison I also lived in SF where the bad parts are unavoidably located in the center of the city and I've witnessed multiple violent crimes over a similar time period. The neighborhoods in a city you pass through on a day to day basis really matter in terms of defining your experience.
Check out this map for stats: https://maps.nyc.gov/crime/
This makes no sense. It's a mobile city. You can live on the UWS but have to go downtown to see a doctor, or work in midtown but commute in from the Bronx or Queens to go to work. The vast majority do not live and work in the same neighborhood let alone work and live in the same nice and safe neighborhood.
>"Anecdotally I lived in Chelsea and worked in Union Square for a few years and never witnessed any real crime, violent or otherwise."
Not only is that a walking commute but there is literally not a single bad block between anywhere in Chelsea and Union Square.
>"The neighborhoods in a city you pass through on a day to day basis really matter in terms of defining your experience."
Yes exactly, where do you think all of the service workers that are back bone of the city travel through on their commute, often at night? Hint, it's not Chelsea.
If I was thinking of moving to somewhere in NYC, I would want to know just that: could I live there safely? If someone answers that topic with “well, many people are exposed to crime, and it’s really unfortunate, and change is really desired”, that’s all true, but that doesn’t answer my question. If one were to tell me “yes, it can be fairly safe if you have the means to live here, and commute over there, and mostly hang around this place”, that doesn’t somehow minimize or deny the plight of those who are less fortunate. These are two separate topics that are both worth discussing.
Edit:
I now live in Dallas. I don’t know about crime stats at the moment, but if you’ll allow me to speak of how safe I feel in the city: I would say that there’s no way to live in Dallas (assuming you want an active social life that involves music, drinks, shows, etc) that feels safe. The usual hangout spots in Dallas (e.g. Deep Ellum) are right next to shady overpasses, sections of street with vacant buildings with busted out windows and broken street lights. So much of the city is in a state of disrepair. I feel like I’m gambling with my life if I go anywhere remotely interesting in Dallas.
When I lived in Carrol Gardens in Brooklyn, I could walk to the coffee shop, or go to dozens of great restaurants and shops, get late night tacos or pizza, and never feel like I was in a sketchy area. Granted, I was privileged to have the means to live where I did.
If someone then asks me where I would prefer to live on the basis of apparent safety, I would say Brooklyn. If I was then asked if everyone feels safe in Brooklyn, I would say “no” — if you live in a low income, high crime area, you’re not going to feel safe — and that’s an unfortunate reality for many people. Both things are simultaneously true.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/23/business/goldman-sachs-employ...
East Harlem (part of Manhattan) is as dangerous as the Bronx and is very different from the Chelsea where you live. Manhattan is not a uniformly safe place. Also, NYC subway is filthy, disgusting and sometimes plain dangerous. Car traffic is worse than before COVID. There seem to be more cars on the streets, for people are avoiding subway and are using cars more often than before.
(There are lots of attractions to the neighborhood: old buildings, pretty side streets, good food, convenient access to museums, and one of the most reliable subway lines in the system.)
I didn't fit the traditional Harlem demographic (ex-FAANG employee, startup founder, etc) but found the neighborhood to have solid access to the rest of Manhattan, an increasing number of amenities, proximity to Central Park, and an overall appealing character compared to the increasingly sterile areas of Manhattan
If/when I move back to NYC I would certainly consider living in Harlem again.
"Where things happen", aka Manhattan? Tbh, Manhattan kinda blows these days. It's more or less a sterile, disneyified, yuppy, consumerist grazing ground from 100th down, with the exception of alphabet city and Chinatown. But even Chinatown's changing, unfortunately. Feels like the old Chinatown Fair shutting down was a signal.
Idk Manhattan has a few solid areas that have held up over the years, but I personally try to avoid it unless my boys and I have a skate session or heading to a museum.
Also, the commute from the boroughs really isn't bad. If you really need to get to Manhattan you're probably looking at 45-50 min on average, which is whatever... unless you live in bumfuck nowhere where there's not a stop within a mile or two.
It's more or less 30 min minimum to get anywhere regardless of location and there are beautiful and interesting spots all over this city, not just Manhattan. Why not explore?
Which is not really the same thing at all…
That's not true, and my stats above are solely Manhattan.
The implication there is that the areas with fewer tourists have higher true rates of crime than the official stats, which makes the overall case worse...
As others remarked correctly, aggregated numbers are useless and not representative for the avg person. If you truncate NYC’s crime numbers by stripping out high crime areas such as Brownsville or the South Bronx, crime here is shockingly low. Even more so if you correct for crime that would be er affect you unless you’re in some sort of drug gang (many of the violent crimes are gang on gang crimes).
Also saw folks here mention East Harlem — I assume that’s a joke?! That hasn’t been a “dangerous” neighborhood for 35+ years. It’s now a very sought after area esp. for families, and it’s got plenty of artisanal BS stores that come with gentrified areas. I can’t afford to rent there.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
I find it amazing that in the US, you can walk from one neighborhood into the other, and suddenly have it be 100x more dangerous.
It’s so apparent that I’m still surprised.
From a random search, I got 2.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people citywide, which means all 5 boroughs. For just New York county (Manhattan), the most official statistic I could find is 4.57 in 2019[2].
[1]: https://www.lx.com/community/nyc-crime-rates-how-dangerous-i...
[2]: https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/individual_charts/v...
I think, at least in today's culturally polarized environment, there are a lot of people who would be understandably nervous and on guard traveling to rural America, and it has nothing to do with what crime looks like in their home city.
Personally, I'd rather be alone on foot in NYC than alone on foot in some small town where I'd stand out. Maybe because I grew up in a city and have traveled to many places, maybe because of my characteristics that make me feel vulnerable when I'm the outsider in a less diverse area, or maybe because I've lived in a city far more violent than NYC- so for me the things I visit for are worth the possible risk of crime.
NYC isn't even on the top 50 most violent cities in the world, which is quite a feat when you consider how things used to be there in the 80s/90s.
There’s hospital quality, time spent in private automobiles (one of the most dangerous things Americans do), risk of natural disaster, etc etc.
I think it’s very reflective of an anti-urban bias
I don't have stats for Amherst specifically, but here is a comparison between NYC and NH as a whole:
NYC: 5.5 murders per 100k + 1.6 auto fatalities per 100k = 6.1 deaths per 100k
NH: 1.0 murders per 100k + 8.9 auto fatalities per 100k = 9.9 deaths per 100k
However, I do also think an important question is "safe for whom?" Depending on your race, sexual orientation, gender presentation, etc, rural American communities can foster their own distinct unease. Those are the places where you keep your head down, self-censor, try not to draw attention. When is the absence of reported crimes in a state which is 92.8% white "safety" and when is it something else?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crime-newyork-statistics/...
If you want to demonstrate that NYC is less safe (and it may well be), focus on the high risk factors, not the salient ones.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191720/traffic-related-i...
The way I would put it is -- in New York, it is more of a hassle to have a car than to go without. In all those other cities, while there is some mass transit, you will find yourself wanting a car.
Parking is such a dice roll in DC that using a car for intra-city travel is not efficient.
Lots of DC residents don’t have cars; most housing doesn’t include parking.
NYC has the largest train system in the entire world, especially when you combine the various nearby train systems that aren't a part of the main subway like LIRR, NJ transit, path and Metro north (in China which technically is longer they count long distance commuter rail). The subway alone has more stops than any train system in the world.
Even areas further away, like Prospect Heights or Crown Heights, with decent access to transportation have seen quite the uptick in price and availability.
I'm sorry, but... you might be able to get to FiDi from downtown BK in 20 minutes, door to door. If you live anywhere else in BK, from Greenpoint to Sheepshead Bay, you're looking at 30 minutes minimum to get into manhattan -- probably closer to an hour door-to-door.
Not trying to be rude here, but your statement does not seem to match my lived experience. Maybe you can get 20 minutes door-to-door on a citibike?
It really comes down to fear of change I think. Humans are very adaptable, and the same one can thrive in car-centric suburbs as they would in shoulder-to-shoulder metropolises. Given no constraints, you prefer city. But throw in kids (requirement for more space/better schools), or a dream job (passion), or a dying parent (obligation), or a lover.. and suddenly you're building a life in a completely different place. And it works.
At least I think/hope.. because outside of a busy city I am irritable and sad. But it sure would be nice to slow down on the treadmill/rat race a bit..
That’s definitely not a given. I know a bunch of people that given no constraints they would live at the edge of a lake with the nearest city being 100+ miles away. But they get forced into a city by the need for a job, or the same constraints you laid out.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think NYC has that Toronto or Seattle don't have? And what are you thoughts on Toronto vs. Seattle? Personally, I've lived in Toronto (which I loved), and visited Seattle for a few days (which I liked, but hard to say from a short visit), so curious to hear what others who have lived in all 3 think (especially since I'm planning to move to Seattle soon).
Seattle has enough good food to keep me relatively happy (even pizza and bagels), but for any given cuisine, you might have one or two good options. Getting to them probably involves driving, and they're probably not open late or even open at all early in the week (maybe this is a pandemic artifact; I moved here in 2021). Seafood here is great, though. I think Seattle wins in that single category.
I think NYC's biggest win over Seattle (and every single other city in the US) is the combination of quantity, quality, and accessibility. You have some of the world's best food, shopping, culture, and jobs accessible to you at all hours of the day via a subway ride (or in many cases within walking distance). The city is your backyard: you don't need a huge apartment because there's a good chance you won't really be spending much time there.
That said, after 10 years there I grew tired of that lifestyle and wanted to spend more time outdoors and exploring the west coast. If you really enjoy the outdoors—hiking, skiing, mountain biking, climbing, etc.—then NYC is vastly inferior to Seattle. I may find myself back in NYC some day because I miss the things that it's the best at, but for now, I'm enjoying doing something different. I think it's very easy to fall into a hedonic routine in NYC.
No, it's a Seattle thing. One of my major peeves with this city (and entire region) is how hard it is to find places that close later than 9pm, even in the summer when the days are really long.
I think the outdoors culture here is so strong that people don't really care about having things to do late at night in the city.
Atlanta is the same way and we used to have a HOPPIN' late night scene with SO many good late night spots, now it's almost a struggle to get something even like fast food after 9/10pm. That may be slowly coming back though it seems like.
This said, I think LA wins over NYC in the food department outside of the very high end michilin type stuff and certain specific kinds of ethnic food like italian.
Don't live in Seattle, but my friends who do live there joke that someday the people moving there from NYC and complaining about the city they just moved to will figure out that the airlines fly routes in both directions.
Seattle looooves to pat itself on the back for being pedestrian/bike/commuter-friendly … but it has a VERY low standard for "friendly."
Toronto: It's Canada. Culture is different than the US. My friends and family are here. Since it's where I formed my personality, I like the people here way more. It's the only place I experience uncontrollable laughter in reaction to what someone said. The inner city is very cool without feeling like some over-discovered instagram location. In NYC every half decent bar or restaurant is packed with a lineup and costs 2x. Transit is okay, not great. But I hate Canadian suburbs, so to me the GTA is not hospitable (for me) outside of the rectangle of Humber river to Don Valley, waterfront to Eglinton. And income to cost of living ratio is so much lower compared to tech in the US, it's like.. minimum 10+ years of working life lower.
Seattle: A true gem of a place. Not overcrowded (yet, despite what people there say). Great music, bars, restaurants etc. You can get from middle of "city" to middle of wilderness in 1.5-2h, and be literally in a national geographic photo. Insane income:cost of living ratio (only slightly lower income than Bay/NYC, but cost of living significantly less). Transit okay, getting better, but not too useful inside the city. But it's a very monocultural place. So unless you find your "people" here, it can be quite boring/exclusive. I fraternized widely, but ultimately was left wanting for more socially. Also far-left politics are central to social culture here, so it's quite literally not a "safe space" to be anything but. I'm more of an "east-cost person", if that makes any sense.
NYC: One of a kind place in North America. Feels like you truly live _in_ the city, not just in your house/apartment with necessary excursions. It can be overwhelming with how many people there are and how densely they live, but to me that's something special. Cost of living is insane, but it doesn't buy you nothing. Subway system can feel archaic and let's you down often, but it also enables a special way of life for North America (car-less existence, a fixed 30 or 50 min ride from almost anywhere you'd need to go). A lot of double edged swords. The diversity of people is eye-opening. Toronto can feel more ethnically diverse - which is interesting in it's own way - but NYC is diverse in every other way too. I'm quite worried about having kids in NYC someday. From what I hear the school system is ruthless. I don't want my kids to undergo such stress. I think Toronto wins out huge for raising children.
Anyway.. bit of a ramble.
I can say with certainty I will never live in one of these places. I won't even live in Pittsburgh, which is an order of magnitude smaller than any of these places. There's no escaping people. There's no escaping politics or bureaucracy. There's no way to escape petty crime, crazy people, and noise. You can't see the sky at night, there's never any "dark".
Everything is orders of magnitude more expensive in a city. $5000/month rent? And people think this is "reasonable"? I don't even pay a third of that on a mortgage on a 2400sq/ft house. With a nice yard, decent neighbors, a good school, low crime, low taxes, the works. Our night-time intruders are turkey, deer, the occasional black bear, raccoons, skunks, and screech owls.
Do I have to drive to get anywhere? Yes.
Do I get the highest-paying jobs? Do I have immediate access to cute little bodegas and trendy little shops and night life? No.
But I can let my kids go outside and play at night. I can leave my doors unlocked. Nobody breaks into my car and steals my stereo. I can leave my house with my garage door up and all my stuff inside, and my neighbors will call/text me to remind me.
Is this an adequate trade-off? For me, absolutely yes.
I get why people like living in big cities. I will never again live in one myself, though.
But perhaps it's your stage of life & social context that makes the difference (it does for me). If you were single, didn't have many friends/family (or they were all in the city), or were dedicated to a career/passion whose nexus is in a city.. suddenly you might be running towards those people and institutions ;)
It's not all about the cute bodegas. The sheer number of single women in my demographic nearby is worth inflated rent for the next few years. $5k for a single person is some maxima, I'm living alone in a big apartment in a nice/safe neighborhood for $3k, 2 blocks from the train. The salary possibility in NYC easily covers the delta to smaller cities/towns.
The timeless old attraction
Cruising for the action
Lit up like a firefly
Just to feel the living night
Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight
Somewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights
The caravan thunders onward
Toward the distant dream of the city
The caravan carries me onward
On my way at last, on my way at last
You will be. And that's OK. It's a good thing: nothing else can compete with New York, so you're relieved of the pressure of equalling/one-upping it.
What do you do when you've summited the highest mountain? You take up scuba diving.
Is there any data to back this up? The latest NYPD crime statistics, show a city with increasing crime.
"Overall index crime in New York City increased by 27.8% in May 2022 compared with May 2021 (10,414 v. 8,149). Each of the seven major index crime categories saw increases, driven by a 42.1% increase in grand larceny (4,116 v. 2,897); a 28.3% rise in burglary (1,239 v. 966); and a 26.2% increase in robbery (1,506 v. 1,193)." See:
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00050/nypd-citywide-cri...
The main point I want to make: even with those high rents, we tend to forget how much our cars cost us, directly and indirectly.
Directly: AAA's average new car TCO is close to $10,000 a year. Multiply by two for a typical couple and that's $1600 a month you could dump into your NYC apartment's high rent. Unlimited MTA rides only cost $1500/year/person.
Indirectly: There's the obvious car crash issue, the top killer of children (well, guns just passed that, but luckily NYC is safer than the average American city in that regard), but the other main example is health. We're not supposed to sit all day. My doctor moved from a car suburb to the city and admitted they lost weight and walk a lot more. When walking is the easier option compared to attempting to drive to your daily errands, it's much better for you and extends your life, especially when considering your high-quality years of life.
Number one premature killer is heart disease, by far.
Even if you're just walking to the subway, that's a lot more activity than your commute to your garage.
NYC's obesity rate is half of the national rate. HALF! That's downright incredible.
In NYC I see very old people walking everywhere, stereotypically playing chess in the park, meanwhile I have suburban relatives struggling to walk across the Walmart parking lot and they haven't even hit 70 years old. They may live into their 80's but it will not be pleasant for them. The difference in alertness is noticeable. As a bonus, old people in NYC never had to drive so they never have a retired life feeling isolated to their home.
I think the best way to try and stabilize rent is to buy a condo. It's not a silver bullet due to property taxes and HOA fees that rise with inflation, but it's still a slower rise than renting, I think. You can definitely find 2 bedroom condos with monthly payments under $5000 in Manhattan.
If you're interested in what NYC apartments are really like and how far your money gets you (along with some general YouTube vlogging entertainment), a channel I recommend is Cash Jordan. I won't link it but I'm sure you can find it. Like any other real estate market, it's all about compromises. If you want to live in NYC and pay $1000/month/person, you can definitely do it. You can also pay $10,000/month if you want.
The big caveat to everything I'm saying is that the poor are unlikely to live in the most walkable areas, and a lot of them will perhaps have to own a car. This is definitely the case in Chicago, where the most walkable areas are also the most desirable and affluent (I wonder why that is? Maybe our whole country would be more desirable and affluent if it wasn't designed to be a cash funnel where we dump our income into constructing vehicles, maintaining the infrastructure and utilities utilities of nearly unused land, and burning oil?)
First, you can get by just fine without a new car. My car was $26k new - 18 years ago. I’ve put another $10k over the years in maintenance (tires, oil, repairs). Insurance is $500/year. Gas is maybe $2k/year at $4/gal. Not even close to $10k/year.
That caveat you apply to averages for rent also applies to cars. Some people are obsessed with having a new car. That’s not the price of having a reliable car.
Second, if you’re a couple, you don’t need two cars. That’s another luxury that many people get by without.
Finally, the car takes me out of town monthly into the mountains. So you would need to factor in car rentals for leaving NYC in your equation if you wanted a fair comparison of what people actually get out of their cars.
> NYC's obesity rate is half of the national rate. HALF! That's downright incredible.
Cause or effect? A lot of people with mobility issues end up obese and having mobility issues is a fucking nightmare in NYC. You just forced the unhealthy people out of the city by design.
> As a bonus, old people in NYC never had to drive so they never have a retired life feeling isolated to their home.
+1. It’s a great place to live… if you don’t have health issues that make mobility a problem.
“Living on the top of Mt. Everest is so healthy! Look at all of the healthy people up here!”
Insurance $500 a year as you stated, and then you've got a typical driver driving somewhere around 15,000 miles a year if not more. [2] If you've got a 30MPG car [2.1] at $4.50 a gallon [2.2], you're paying $2,250 just to fuel it, before any expenses for maintenance, oil changes, tires, etc. If you've got a car payment like 35% of Americans, the average payment for a used car is around $500 [2.3], but since we're dealing with averages and vehicles whose lifespans exceed their loans, maybe we can just go ahead and cut that in half to $250/month.
Don't forget that the poorest Americans get the worst auto loan rates, so their payment may be pretty high for a car that has already depreciated significantly. They're losing money to interest that isn't even technically being put into the vehicle itself.
So our grand TCO for this hypothetical car is $5,750, which is really close to the averages that you see in my first reference. [1]
I think this is a really, really reasonable ballpark estimate.
How are you supposed to own only one car if you are a dual-income household in the suburbs and work two different jobs at different locations? Owning one car per person is not a "luxury" in this country, it is just about the norm (1.88 cars per person in the USA). [3]
If it was a "luxury," the entire freaking country wouldn't be doing it.
You really think NYC has a lower obesity rate as an effect rather than a cause, as in, all the people with obesity just say "well, I guess I can't live here anymore, I'll go move to the suburbs?" Do you have any information to back up that type of thinking?
New York (due to NYC) is the most physically active state according to FitBit, and you're gonna jump on here and claim that this completely disconnected obesity rates? [4]
It's not hard to figure out that higher levels activity help prevent obesity. Calories in calories out, walking and walking up and down stairs burns more calories than sitting. [4.1]
The 65+ commuters in NYC are actually the most active commuting segment of the population and over half walk 10 blocks or more per day. [5] I have a hunch they might still be alive and productive because they're so active!
NYC's subway system will be 95% accessible by 2055, [6] which is really quite soon on the scale of city planning and development. About 25% of stations are currently accessible, and really a subway system 25% the size of NYC's system is still a vast transit network. This also doesn't include New York's vast bus system, which is essentially 100% accessible. Tell me, how do you expect the vision impaired to get around in areas that require cars?
When it comes to your point about getting out to the mountains, it's important to note that NYC has plenty of transit-accessible outdoor spaces, including perhaps the best city park in the entire world, Central Park. NYC is extremely well-connected to regional rail and other methods of transit to all sorts of destinations, including outdoor spaces. [6.1] And, yes, New Yorkers can rent a car once in a while, it's a lot cheaper than owning one! They can even stop paying for their MTA fares while they're out of town, while car owners continue to pay for insurance even if they're spending time away from home. A lot of those car owners are even paying daily to park their car at the airport!
Last point: How hard is it really to live in a small apartment, when most people are drowning in clutter and wasteful purchases? [7] How much space in your house is dedicated to storing your vehicle? How much space in your home is dedicated to storing things you rarely or never use? Holiday decorations?
[1] https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/
[2] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/average-miles-dri...
[2.1] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-fuel-efficiency-us-light...
I'm also being generous, the national average is 25MPG not 30MPG.
[2.2] https://gasprices.aaa.com/
[2.3] https://www.finder.com/car-loan-statistics
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/551403/number-of-vehicle...
[4] https://www.ibtimes.com/do-new-yorkers-walk-10000-steps-day-...
[4.1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...
[5] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/survey/survey-...
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/nyregion/nyc-subway-acces...
[6.1] https://www.outdoors.org/resources/amc-outdoors/adventures/8...
[7] https://www.thesimplicityhabit.com/statistics-on-clutter-tha...
Ask yourself why only 35% have payments. Also, half is pretty pessimistic since a car loan on the long end is 6 years.
> How are you supposed to own only one car if you are a dual-income household in the suburbs and work two different jobs at different locations? Owning one car per person is not a "luxury" in this country, it is just about the norm (1.88 cars per person in the USA). [3]
One person drops the other off. This isn’t a difficult problem and it’s how my parents did it for nearly 15 years way back in the 70s and 80s. Clearly car ownership is a foreign concept to you, but at least try to steelman it to get a decent argument.
> You really think NYC has a lower obesity rate as an effect rather than a cause, as in, all the people with obesity just say "well, I guess I can't live here anymore, I'll go move to the suburbs?" Do you have any information to back up that type of thinking?
Are you seriously asking for proof that obese and disabled people aren’t the biggest fans of having to walk everywhere?
>New York (due to NYC) is the most physically active state according to FitBit, and you're gonna jump on here and claim that this completely disconnected obesity rates
You’re getting confused again and assuming that the city is causing activity rather than just forcing the inactive people out by being an unfriendly environment to them.
> The 65+ commuters in NYC are actually the most active commuting segment of the population and over half walk 10 blocks or more per day. [5] I have a hunch they might still be alive and productive because they're so active!
The segment of the population who does X tends to do X! News at 10! This doesn’t say anything about the community that can’t walk.
> NYC's subway system will be 95% accessible by 2055, [6] which is really quite soon on the scale of city planning and development. About 25% of stations are currently accessible, and really a subway system 25% the size of NYC's system is still a vast transit network. This also doesn't include New York's vast bus system, which is essentially 100% accessible.
“Accessible” doesn’t mean convenient. The elevators are fucking shit in the stations that are accessible and getting to/from the stations is still shit. I took a wheelchair bound aunt to a play on broadway maybe 10 years ago, and it was awful even with me pushing her. Accessibility isn’t a checkbox.
>Tell me, how do you expect the vision impaired to get around in areas that require cars?
Non sequitur, I’m not talking about blind people. I’m talking about mobility impaired people.
> including perhaps the best city park in the entire world, Central Park
It’s an amazing park, but it’s just a park. The comparison to wilderness is laughable.
> Last point: How hard is it really to live in a small apartment
Depends on if you treat your apartment as a box to shit in and sleep in between spending all of your time elsewhere or as a place to actually live and spend huge parts of the daytime. There is a reason NYC was one of the worst places to be quarantined.
> I'm also being generous, the national average is 25MPG not 30MPG.
No you’re not, you quoted $4.50/gal for gas when that hasn’t been an average people have paid until the Ukrainian invasion.
It is true that older people in NYC are seemingly healthy, but they're definitely a very specific type of person.
Live in SF or LA and you’ll face similar costs and still need a car on top of it.
I discount DC a little because a lot of that is government and defense related (not a bad thing, just not my cup of tea).
Boston has a lot of diversity in tech, lots of health/pharma like Moderna, web companies like TripAdvisor and Wayfair, robotics like Boston Dynamics, tons of startups doing ai/ml, and it seems like every big company has a substantial presence here (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce…)
The valley has a vibe in that everyone you meet is involved in tech work in some way and will talk about it to you or in public. It doesn't feel that way here, or you have to be a part of certain circles maybe. There are some small biotech meetup groups, but maybe they all do communication at the universities?
Simply being in the orbit of MIT can have that effect, along with everything else you listed.
The issue with NYC from a perception as a hub of any one thing is that it's just so big with so many different things going on that tech just seems like one of many things going on there simply because of all the people.
As you say, NYC (like Silicon Valley) has always been more concentrated in terms of technology focus.
Silicon Valley has a high degree of tech but also a fair bit of climate tech which shouldn't be discounted.
I think that there's a tendency on the part of a lot of people to view "tech" through the lens of web-related tech but obviously there's a lot more interesting/important work going on than just that--whether in the Boston area, Silicon Valley, or somewhere else.
Especially if you include Massachusetts as a whole it’s absurd:
MIT
Harvard
Tufts
Williams
Amherst
Brandeis
UMass Amherst
Boston University
Boston College
Northeastern
Wellesley
Olin
Babson
Smith
WPI
Still true today: http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
NYC is 50% higher in terms of total VC dollars.
Boston is definitely bigger for every other type of engineering though than NYC. Most non programming engineering jobs in NYC would either be for a niche startup or would have something to do with real estate.
The Boston tech scene and culture (outside of physically being on the MIT campus) is awful. TripAdvisor and Wayfair, your examples, are two companies I would aggressively advise any friends from even talking to. While all the major players are there now it took them a long time to get there. Comp in Boston still lags NY and SF considerably, and in general Boston has always had a resistance to anything "new", it's politically liberal but otherwise a very conservative city. The biotech companies there have always been way more heavy on the bio than the tech. I've worked for Boston area tech companies multiple times , before and after the tech boom, and would never work for a Boston area tech company again.
NYC is on a whole other level. Not only do you have all the major players with much larger campuses there are far more startups and early IPO companies. There is the also entire world of HFT companies (Boston's finance scene is largely very old school investment management companies) which alone would be worthy of making NYC a techhub. I also disagree with your claims about the concentrate of tech companies. Tech related meetups and events in NYC are much larger, more active and have more exciting participants than in the Boston area.
There are exceptions for rent controlled and rent stabilized apartments, where the landlords have even less power on price setting.
Obviously this is all just my opinion! I know tons of people love it there.
Things are getting more expensive, for some people that means they can't eat steak as much as they like, for others it means they need to move in with their parents, for you it means you might not live in the heart of one of the most expensive and desirable cities in the world.
I've always found it a bit odd that in the tech community there is this assumption that people have the right to live wherever they want, and that somehow living in NYC or SF during it's prime isn't its own variety of luxury good. I enjoy champaign when I'm in Paris, and am glad that at least for today I can drive a Porsche. I've spent plenty of years in a beat-up old Ford and drinking yuengling, won't be terribly surprised if I spent plenty more doing the same in the future.
I know that in MANY countries, one is precluded from owning any property if not a citizen. Obviously this leads to a bunch of corruption issues with bribing and marrying nationals for access to property, but the USA has literally zero control on property ownership.
You know how much foreign money laundering is done through US property ownership?
MOST of it.
A vertical zoning law might be an option:
There are places like Singapore where you cant build a high-rise unless the subterranian aspects of the project dont include a connection to other sub services, like the walkway malls and such.
I say do a % split on a vertical level which must include subterranian levels as a course:
The building MUST include underground parking, a commerical section and a range of income level sections.
You cant just build a high-rise of $millions apartments.
Look at Millennial Tower in SF. What a disaster. I HUGE legal BS and not a single person with a net worth of south of 10 million was accommodated in that disaster - but it still cost the city (i.e. tax payers who are NOT worth >10 million -- millions of dollars.
this is a different metric than:
What % of luxury "apartments" are uninhabited in extremely high cost situations where an average person isnt renting the "apartment" - but laundering money by owning such place and paying a tax placeholder fee...
And in addition CHURN
What % of apartments are experiencing churn and whilst during so, what is the rent increase on each new wave of tenants...
This would be a really intresting tower defence game.
You are the landlord/super/scumlease
You have apartments that will constantly dwindle in desireability
so you have upkeep.
You can accept the upkeep cost, or, for a lesser price, evict the current tenant and accept a new tenant at a fraction of the upkeep cost to keep revenues going into the future with % rates you like that keep you slum lord-ship going... or you kill them all, demolish and build a new building gentrify the neighborhood and blame it on rats, older policies etc...
We need a TRUMP LORD 2000 NYC SIM module.
Instead of installing new sewar, water, fire PREVENTION systems
You are needed to install new RAT, SUPER, COP-INTERFERENCE-BRIBERY schemes to keep your shit going...
Like the trump Water Heater Scandal. (this buildingz gunnaz needz a newz water heatahz...
My cousin tony iz dah only guyz who gunna do dis
Pay mah kidz what dez needz be paid, and you can stay)
---
THIS IS AN ACTUAL THING THAT HAPPENED IN NYC
The apartment I grew up in, in lower manhattan, today would cost more than 20-30 times what my parents paid for it in the 90s, and it wasn't a nice apartment. There was no laundry in the unit, it faced a dark courtyard, the tempurature of the apartment was never that comfortable, had yearly huge bug infestations, but it was in a great location and was about 5 rooms more or less.
I think people just romanticize a life different than the one they grew up with. I certainly miss some aspects of the city culturally, but life on the west coast, I've had considerably better living arrangements ever since I've graduated college than the one I grew up in, and my parents were both professionals with graduate degrees, it's even worse for a lot of other people.
That plus making it easier/safer to get around by bike/scooter/etc. That’s something even NYC doesn’t seem to do well; have to look at international peers to see good examples of that.
I will say, depending on how close you are to a train station, Brooklyn isn’t bad. Yeah, it’s 45 minutes door to door, but you get to walk and listen to podcasts or whatever on the train. As commutes go, it’s definitely doable. But I totally agree with you that many people don’t want to live anywhere else and people who don’t love New York might not understand that, but New York is different from every other major city in the US.
I’m still carless in Seattle (I don’t drive and have no desire to drive) but it’s so much harder (my husband does have a car but I can’t rely on that for my own needs). And although Seattle is somewhat cheaper than Brooklyn (it’s really not but my luxury building in Capitol Hill definitely costs less than a luxury building in Williamsburg foot for foot — I pay about 70% more in Seattle than I did in Brooklyn, however), the things I’ve lost compared to New York are massive. I’ve definitely considered moving back now that I’m at a fully-remote company (that does have office space in NYC), but there are some practical realities about being in Seattle for my job that makes that hard. Maybe when my lease is up next year, I’ll reassess.
For me, personally, I'm disappointed by how few world cities the US has. NYC and Chicago are really it. My silly benchmark for what makes a city a world city is that it operates 24hrs a day (at least parts of it). Chicago barely does but I think it counts. Everywhere else in the US just dies past 10pm and especially past 2am.
Edit: None of this comment was meant to detract, just a comparison in agreement to the city I'm nore familiar with. Maybe Toronto's different
Las Vegas operates 24 hours a day if that's what you want.
I think what you mean by "World City" is actually just "Party Zone".
> except in a few specific areas
Yeah that's what I meant. I don't mean "the whole city is awake". I mean that there are amenities available in certain areas more or less 24/7, because of the density, there is a critical mass of 2nd and 3rd shift workers, and other "off-hours" workers who have different schedules and make use of it.
For those interested, here's where the alpha beta gamma and -/ /+[+] classification system comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_World_Cities...
You've got a very cosmopolitan view of what the world is. You should consider changing that.
On NYC, it has the best subway system in the US, but by global standards, it is filthy, disgusting, and unreliable. Any criticism leveled at the NYC subway is countered by Newyorkers saying "but we have 24/7 service while city XYZ does not!" However that same 24/7 service is arguably a big contributing factor for the NYC subway's many ills.
Seoul, and perhaps Tokyo and Hong Kong and other cities, arguably have an even more hardcore workaholic and party culture than NYC, but get along just fine with subways that don't run 24/7 so basic maintenance and cleaning can take place.
Miami also meets every single one of these metrics and has later night life than NYC. New Orleans has 24 hr night life. Vegas too.
Los Angeles has a higher foreign born population than NYC.
Unfortunately this is pretty unlikely unless there happens to be another political genius like Moses who also happens to love public transportation. Maybe an Andy Byford-Robert Moses combo?
Then make all public transit free and turn half of the roads into bus, pedestrian and bike only paths.
It's nice you enjoyed your ride from $2,000/month to $5,000/month. That range was absurd to the people that went through an earlier range, and so on and so forth.
My parents also used to go there a lot in the 90s and the city has come a long long way since then- for the better.
For example, I live in a nice town in CT and the crime rate is 3.99 per 1000 vs NYC which is currently about 13.3 per 1000, making NYC (as a whole — I understand your point about neighborhoods within the city) 3x higher in crime.
I understand the other things you appreciate about the city. It's great to able to walk outside and have amazing restaurants and other amenities a few feet away; there's a reason many people like the city.
Isn't most of that true for most large cities anywhere in the world?
Consider Amsterdam.
- Mass transit? Yes.
- Not owning a car? Sure.
- Safer than America.
- Tech hub, yes.
- Finance hub? uhh, does it really matter?
- Everybody gets along, across many cultures.
- Food? Depends on your taste, but all kinds of cuisine are available.
Or consider Singapore/London/Gothenburg/Paris/Toronto/so-many-others. Similar deal. Sometimes even a better deal, depending on your priorities.
Of course, I fully agree that NYC is a cool place :)
Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy, and property owners provide almost no value, but to provide access to housing for people who has no capital for it, which is service that could be perfectly provided by a state entity.
The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas, hurting social mobility, which could be improved by the setup described above. Many attempts at public housing failed because they just tried to provide housing for low-income people in separated and/or undesirable areas, with a predictable outcome.
CMV
This is great policy if you want to make housing unaffordable. When supply is less than demand, prices go up. Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices). Capping prices prevents the price mechanism from working, leaving a shortage of housing.
> Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy
I’m happy (perhaps not quite the right word…) to pay rent. I don’t want to own property. It’s a large, illiquid investment with high transaction fees, carry costs, and concentration risk. My landlord takes all the risk of owning the property (prices don’t always go up after all).
Ahh yes, walking around in NY seeing building projects to increase the supply of housing in the 4th dimension where land is plentiful and the rivers are clean /s
Have you tried obtaining building permits in NYC? My understanding is that it’s not easy. If you don’t allow builders to construct new housing then you won’t get new housing, regardless of price level.
I can only speak of Berlin where land prices and construction prices have increased by demand so much, that new construction is coming in at 4x than 10 years ago (from 2k per sqm to 8k). I don't see how the market is really solving anything here.
I advocate for the free market because it's been the most reliable way of elevating humans from subsistence levels of consumption and improving their quality of life. It's been the driving force in elevating billions of people from poverty over recent decades. I'd wager that most people, free market advocates or otherwise, would consider that a good thing.
To be clear, there are cases where markets fail. In those cases, government intervention can actually produce more efficient outcomes. Consider the case of basic research. Private enterprises would have be foolish to pay for glowing worms and shrimp treadmills; there's just no clear payoff. But this seemingly silly research is critical to progress. For example, the research on glowing worms (GFP added to C. Elegans) ended up winning the Nobel Prize and is crucial for observing biological processes in living organisms.
> new construction is coming in at 4x than 10 years ago... I don't see how the market is really solving anything here.
It sounds like high prices incentivized builders to increase construction by 400% over 10 years? That seems like the price mechanism is driving an increase in housing supply, exactly as one would want when there's a shortage of housing.
The "free market" did not establish the US interstate highway system and power grid, or lift 1.4 billion people in China out of poverty in a single generation. The free market did not establish railroads in the US (monopolistic robber-baron markets are not free markets). Free markets did not elevate Europeans from 1500-1950 (colonial slavery). Free markets did not sustain American agriculture for one hundred years after slavery was abolished (prison labor).
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The real point of this is: Maybe it's okay if we have a China-style or 1930-1950's USA-style planned economy to spark a domestic renaissance via:
- Massive housing initiative, starting with the base (bringing more people into trades, greatly expanding domestic material supply, and a fierce fight against NIMBY-ism). This will have to first cause a glut of material and labor, while keeping the excess labor happy (paid) and future material supply expanding (subsidies). Free market isn't great at pushing through local optimums...but cheaper supply should lead to increased utilization eventually!
- All new housing should be luxury. High efficiency, high comfort -- these will be what everyone is living in 20 years from now. It doesn't cost that much more to build but it makes a massive difference in QoL. Personally I dream of mid-rises and high-rises where people can practice tuba/piano/drums without bothering the surrounding units, or lift weights, or run a small woodshop. Have access to spaces where larger projects can be undertaken: DIY car repair, for example. This should greatly improve entrepreneurialism.
- Pharmaceutical / healthcare reform
- Intellectual property reform (exponentially growing annual fees for patents, etc)
- Import/export/sales tax reform (regulatory compliance is incredibly hard and expensive, sales tax is super regressive and anti-entrepreneurial because it encourages vertical integration to avoid "sales" being taxed, VAT would be much more friendly to a true free market for niche value-adds to gain foothold).
- Massive education reform (pay teachers enough ($120k+) to have a surplus of expert labor migrate in from engineering / management / trades / science careers.
- Migrate manufacturing out of China and into disparate continents (South America, Africa, greater Asia). Domestic manufacturing would obviously be amazing but I think USA is too economically fragile to handle the increased costs of safety and environmental controls which the US people would rightly demand.
People are worried that if the housing market experiences a glut that people who saved all their money into their home as an investment will lose their retirement. However, I believe that as additional high-density units are built, the land those homeowners can sell will increase greatly in value -- because the house can be torn down and a mid-rise or skyscraper can be placed there instead, turning it from an unaffordable single-family "value" to a very affordable 10-50 family "value". That land would be worth way more if a midrise or highrise could be built on it.
Or before that? When the civilian conservation corps employed huge amounts of Americans to build Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam?
The decades immediately leading up to the construction of the interstate highway USA was one of the least free our market has ever been.
Do not take me to advocate for centralized planning, but we do have to have democratic governmental intervention to prevent the free market from chewing us all up and spitting us out.
Yeah, people complain on their iphones, with their increased lifespans, and surfeit of food, so that even the poor are fat. Cry me a river.
More importantly, try arguing that it is morally correct that a hard-working laborer ought to fund a Webb telescope by non-optional taxes, when he sees no direct value in it. Why even 1 penny? Because his betters in a grant agency know better what to do with the fruits of his labor than he does?
It was disgusting to witness Biden take a victory lap for the Webb telescope. It wasn't his money nor engineering and scientific effort, that's for certain.
Please, no utilitarian defenses of funding basic research by taxes. We need a moral defense. I don't see it at all. You can only defend it if you think people are too stupid to know their own interests.
There is an optimal level of spending on basic research for society, and it's not 0. Was it a bad idea to launch unproven satellites into space in the 1970s? Your laborer didn't see the immediate benefit, but now that worker has GPS, which almost certainly improved the worker's life. In fact, the technologies enabled by GPS were unimaginable at the onset of the project. Should the project have been scrapped entirely?
It's impossible to say whether research will produce valuable results a priori. But it's not true that your laborer doesn't see benefit. The price we pay to live in organized society is taxation. Should that same laborer argue that he shouldn't pay taxes for highways built 400 miles away? Is it possible that this laborer may not know what's best 100% of the time?
Also, some poorer people would pay to fund research in the absence of gov't funding. They actually already do, for disease research.
You can use utilitarian arguments to force people to do things that they otherwise would refuse. Isn't that a kissing cousin to indentured servitude?
Also, do you knot think I understand the riskiness of research? As if I haven't endured a few decades of poverty as a result?
From an economic perspective, it's likely the level of funding would be less than the optimal level of funding. If the goal is to maximize public welfare, government funding is necessary.
> Why does the committee's judgement take precedent?
Ultimately someone needs to make decisions on resource allocation. Is a committee necessarily the best way? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not qualified to tell NIH how to operate.
> You can use utilitarian arguments to force people to do things that they otherwise would refuse
Agreed entirely, it's a very difficult issue to grapple with.
Another product of the free market, if you will ;-)
Similar story currently underway from Manhattan's Lower East Side a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_Crossing
Even if it's already densely built, there is plenty of space that can be better used.
CMV
The "let the free market take care of it; government intervention can only make it unaffordable" view is standing on extremely shaky legs today.
The term “NIMBY” is commonly used to describe people who prevent new construction of housing. They typically use legal maneuvers (like requiring years of environmental review) to do this. By allowing this to continue, government intervention supports unaffordable housing.
Of course this does not work if building new housing is illegal, in which case you might as well have the rent control.
Or make it possible to build new housing. Rent control is a subsidy to existing residents to the detriment of people who would otherwise move to the area.
Also, read carefully, I don't want price control directly onto the private sector but the adminsitration controlling a big chunk of the offer.
If the government sets prices for 40% of the market, it’s price control by definition.
Maybe such situation would actually push investors to be innovative with housing for once. If regulations allow that, of course, which is important too.
Supply is always less than demand in dense cities/countries, leaving it for the 'invisible hand' only ensures that the whole market is unaffordable and/or gentrified. Like what we are seeing in this news piece.
I don't know exactly how it works here in the Netherlands, but as far as I understand the government leases land to the constructors at its own pace, with strict quotas on social housing, to let vs to buy ratio, and free-market properties. It isn't perfect (massive bubble on the free market right now) but seems to work well enough.
Is that the case in Detroit? I’d wager there’s substantially more supply than demand.
> It isn't perfect (massive bubble right now) but seems to work well enough.
If there’s a massive bubble then it seems like that system didn’t control prices.
The bubble mostly affects new home buyers, which are the ones who need the least protection.
Rent is inflation-adjusted and can't be raised at will, so there is a very long delay between market prices increasing and most tenants actually bearing the cost. Everyone living in social housing still has a home, and won't be evicted so that another person can come in to pay 2x the rent. Seems pretty good to me.
I don't know much about Detroit but it seems to demonstrate that the simple supply-demand model does not reflect reality. Prices should have dropped significantly, but instead it followed the same curve as the rest of the USA, with those $500 properties being a localized phenomenon.
So now you (or more generally the government) get to decide who is more deserving of appropriately priced housing? Why do new home buyers need less protection?
> Rent is inflation-adjusted and can't be raised at will, so there is a very long delay between market prices increasing and most tenants actually bearing the cost.
This is precisely the problem with this policy. When price doesn’t feed through to the market, the market can’t adjust. People simultaneously argue that the free market doesn’t work while endorsing policies that prevent the market from working.
> it seems to demonstrate that the simple supply-demand model does not reflect reality
The population dropped from its peak by 1.2mm people. Prices subsequently fell so much that it was possible to buy houses for $500. That’s exactly what the supply/demand model would predict.
"In June 2022, Detroit home prices were up 32.3% compared to last year, selling for a median price of $99K. On average, homes in Detroit sell after 27 days on the market compared to 23 days last year. There were 463 homes sold in June this year, down from 512 last year."
[0] https://www.redfin.com/city/5665/MI/Detroit/housing-market
Agreed that you can find $300k houses (and cheaper). I was just surprised that the nicer areas were still pricy. I mean Indian Village, and the neighborhoods you mentioned, have some nice homes, but those neighborhoods feel like an oasis surrounded by areas that are dealing with very tough economic situations.
Again, I was just surprised at the price for places I liked. If I wanted to take a chance on a neighborhood that might turn around in the next few years I could find some deals (although a lot of those homes need a lot of work).
No it doesn't. We have massive wait lists for social housing, and being middle class arguably leaves you in a worse state due to social housing eligibility only applying to very low incomes, and anyone with an office job close to the city will easily earn too much for social housing, but not enough for private norms. Meanwhile those with social housing are incentivized to stay as the costs are far lower than private, and the repercussions are lacking.
The problem has been obvious for decades, yet the government felt zero incentive to do anything when it was possible. To top it off, there's a general reluctance to build due to emission limits. And our government is actively bending over to the farmers making things even worse.
The Netherlands is the perfect example of what not to do when trying to intervene.
I don't expect it to change either. Too many students still under the impression earning 2.5k-3.5k gross out of college is "great", despite that exact salary putting them in the uncanny valley of renting (no social housing, not enough too entice landlords). Unless you left your student time with a partner to share, which has become increasingly more rare.
Because intended purpose differs from actual outcome, and such regulation almost always creates different consequences.
Best intentions pave the road to hell.
> Prices are controlled for social housing, and flexing supply allows you to influence the free market prices.
When you control prices, you destroy investment in supply.
The issue, empirically, is that (a) we don't see the right housing being built, and (b) we don't see quality housing being built. We see a lot of high-end luxury units being built, but what we need are more 1- and 2-bedroom units within 20 minutes (preferably, by affordable public transit) of where people work. We also see a lot of large (and therefore expensive) but cheaply built McMansions that'll be falling down in 20-40 years, so the long-term picture of the housing stock is not improved.
What we need is for the government to step in and build affordable housing as a floor at a controlled price ("commie blocks"). No one will be forced to live in one, of course, but they'll be an option; the rich can still buy property on the market if they're so inclined.
> My landlord takes all the risk of owning the property (prices don’t always go up after all).
If you own your house and control your geography (i.e., you'll never be forced to move due to economic inopportunity) then you have the truly risk-free position. Renters are at much higher risk (log transform, Kelly Criterion) than landlords, because real estate costs are such a high percentage of their budgets.
The problem, of course, is that owning a house, while it gives you a zero beta to the housing market in theory, still does have the risks you described. For one thing, other people can do things that damage your house's value--both its subjective value as a place to live, and its objective market price--such as building highways and obstructing sun/view. The other issue is that, in today's hypercompetitive world where in decent employment every job search is national (and possibly international) it's impossible to control your geography... you could be laid off and forced to relocate to get your next position.
So, you're not wrong in general. I think it's a wise financial decision for a young person to keep renting one's place--as opposed to renting money to buy a place--but I also think it's inaccurate to imply that landlords are taking more risks than they really are. It really gets on my nerves when rich people and employers talk about how they're "taking all the risk" and therefore deserve more, when the truth is that the poor (involuntarily) take all the risk, because each $100 means so much more to them.
E.g. out to this new neighbourhood
Bay Area could learn a lot from Vienna. Especially about building up.
This is not reality though. Here in the UK our housing is in major crisis because people simply cannot afford the insane price increases. Pretty much everyone I know shares their living situation, on their own they would not be able to afford basic amenities.
The guardian today published an article showing:
>Average monthly rental payments were now 40% higher than they were 10 years ago, while typical mortgage payments for the same properties were up 13%.
Landlords and property owners are hiking the prices way beyond reasonable value, in some parts of the country rent is up by over 20% in the last year alone. By your logic there should be an incentive for builders to increase the housing stock, but private enterprise aren't building anymore homes now than they were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.
We do however have a situation where the average mortgage is about £900 per month, whereas the average rent has skyrocketed to £1600 per month (£1100 outside of London, £2200 in London). Available rental stock is down 25%, with demand up 5%. It's great for property speculators, buy-to-let landlords and property developers, people are offering above asking prices simply to secure a home.
>My landlord takes all the risk of owning the property (prices don’t always go up after all).
Sure there is risk, but when you charge 30% more than you repay for the mortgage, while at the same time property prices rise 75% in 10 years, it's safe to say that the cash cow is being thoroughly milked for every last drop and as a result many people are suffering.
Ultimately there shouldn't be 'risk', this mindset is a big problem. Homes are a fundamental, basic human need. Using them as an investment method, business model or means to hedge against inflation, is causing rampant speculation and quite honestly extorting people that have no other choice, exploiting vulnerable families that need a home. It should be an extremely tightly controlled market, with sufficient funding to ensure that quality & affordable housing is available for everyone.
The housing in UK is in crisis because there have not been enough homes built. My rent has gone up too, but it's not because my landlord is greedy. The cost of maintaining the building has gone up thanks to inflation (plumbers/electricians/superintendent/etc.) all have to be paid higher wages. Replacing broken fixtures is more expensive. If the landlord has a floating rate mortgage, the cost of paying the mortgage went up. For commercial apartment rentals, those companies have debt that now needs to be rolled over at higher rates.
> By your logic there should be an incentive for builders to increase the housing stock, but private enterprise aren't building anymore homes now than they were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.
So is it a problem that they aren't building more or not? If we agree that more housing needs to be built, then the proper incentives must be in place. And a proper incentive may actually be as simple as eliminating a disincentive (e.g. 4 years of environmental review prior to the project's approval).
> Available rental stock is down 25%, with demand up 5%. It's great for property speculators, buy-to-let landlords and property developers, people are offering above asking prices simply to secure a home.
It's great until it isn't. Interest rates are rising, and mortgages in the UK are much shorter term than in the US. That means the impact of rate hikes is more immediate on housing prices. And if available stock being down is a problem (which it is), the obvious solution is to produce more. Alternatively, I have a modest proposal [0] that would also solve the problem.
> Ultimately there shouldn't be 'risk', this mindset is a big problem.
Risk is omnipresent. If I purchase property, I have all sorts of risk. My building may burn down. My neighborhood may become undesirable to live in. I might not be able to take a job in a new location. I tried to pick examples that aren't about investment. These are risks that the landlord assumes for me.
And this is a part of why it should be administered by governments and not just let loose to market forces. Homes can't just be built wherever, whenever. It should be meticulously planned and integrated with various public services. There's no real financial incentive to build 100,000 houses in the middle of nowhere, it needs to have schools, hospitals, infrastructure etc. A property developer would rather squash a bunch of apartments or buy some old stock, refit everything and charge a premium.
>It's great until it isn't. Interest rates are rising, and mortgages in the UK are much shorter term than in the US.
They actually suggested recently to offer multi-generational mortgages... That's how crazy the market is getting.
>These are risks that the landlord assumes for me.
Those are risks your landlord should have insurance for. In a world where property isn't such a commodity, those risks don't really have the same meaning or value.
We've largely left house building to the 'market forces' and it is failing us, that is the reality. What happened to the second largest construction firm in the UK? "The largest ever trading liquidation in the UK – which began in January 2018" - Carillion collapsed with £7 billion in liabilities.
"One of the UK's biggest landlords, owns over 1,000 properties, tried to ban 'coloured' people from renting because of the curry smell" - What happens to people that are 'undesirable' to landlords, they need a home too or should they simply be destitute or constantly bounced around the lowest standard of housing stock available?
Rent caps are probably not effective or radical enough to actually solve this crisis. I think if we really want to do something, it's going to hurt a lot of peoples 'net worth'.
That's exactly what the Chinese government did, only at a larger scale. It hasn't worked out well.
> They actually suggested recently to offer multi-generational mortgages... That's how crazy the market is getting.
I saw that, it's absolutely wild.
> Those are risks your landlord should have insurance for. In a world where property isn't such a commodity, those risks don't really have the same meaning or value.
There are risks that can't be insured against. Suppose my employer relocates to another region, and I have the choice of following or finding a new job. If I own a house, I now have to sell it (incurring a 3-6% transaction cost and lots of headache). I can only sell it if there's a willing buyer, and there's no guarantee there will be any.
My rent is covering the building's mortgage, taxes, and maintenance, which I would be paying if I owned the property. It may be marginally higher than the cost of ownership, but I have a strong preference for flexibility. That flexibility is worth the liquidity premium to me.
> What happens to people that are 'undesirable' to landlords
In the US, there’s legislation that prohibits discrimination across a variety of protected classes (race, religion, sex, etc.) Does the UK have similar legislation? Putting aside ethics for a moment — discrimination is inefficient. It’s in everyone’s best interest to eliminate such behavior, whether through market forces or legislation.
We live in a world where it is entirely feasible for every person to have good quality shelter, clean water, food and energy. For the most part, we allow market forces to control the access to goods and services. Wealth is being concentrated, property along with other vital services, are just another asset in the portfolio. It's missing humanity. We need homes, healthcare, water, food.. I think it's about time we prioritise this vs high profit, monetary gain, corporate excess and 'free markets' (they're never really free, always tipped in favour of the owners of capital).
I don't know about the UK, but here in California, prices have skyrocketed, but so has the price of construction.
There are two reasons that has happened:
1) Shortage of construction workers. The ones that are here are either (well paid) first generation immigrants, make more than Silicon Valley windfall money because they speak fluent English and are competent, or are completely incompetent. We don't have enough of the first group, so be prepared to pay 2-3x the cost of materials to get anything done (with the second group acting as middle men, and the third group taking your money, only to have you pay someone else to fix it later).
2) Policies that discourage the building of new rental units:
2a) We have a vacant house on our property. A non-structural remodel for it would cost > $50K to get through permitting, and we're looking at >> $300 sq/ft for the actual remodel. If we did all that, we could either pay a special tax on vacation homes owned by individuals in unincorporated areas that the townies just passed (to help the housing crisis by somehow freeing up housing units in town, where the tax does not apply), or we could rent it out. If we rented it out to a problem tenant, we could literally never get rid of them (unless they decided to not pay rent, but even then, it's 5+ years of court battles). So the house stays vacant.
2b) We just built a house. It took almost a year to clear permitting, and $100K's of wasted nonsense work. Many developable plots in this area are purchased, planning bankrupts the new owners, and then they're sold to the next saps. According to the neighbors, getting permits to build a house around here in under 3 years is unheard of. The result? We have a house, but we are way, way, under water in terms of money put in vs. current valuation. At the lower valuations, the houses around here are not "affordable" by any means. However, if you look at what it would have cost us to develop this land anywhere else in the country, we would have paid way under market value.
Problem (1) could be fixed by encouraging contractors from out of the state to fly in to work here. Apparently, the state has erected licensing barriers to make this hard. I think a lot of money ($1B) is waiting to be taken off the table via arbitrage.
Problem (2) is consistently worsened by voters that think that capping housing costs, "protecting tenants" and other things that further constrict housing supply will somehow lower prices.
The easiest way out of this problem is (1) allow out-of-state firms to build housing and (2) fast-track all new housing permits, including financial liability if the planning commission creates unnecessary delays, unnecessary work, or approves / passes inspection on substandard work.
They should also replace the state wide mandate to reduce commuter miles (which is basically a mandate to increase congestion by tearing out roads) with a mandate to reduce the total carbon emissions per capita spent on transit (which would be a mandate to invest in public transit, bike lanes, and in reducing congestion).
None of those things are politically tenable, so I guess the millennials will just live in RVs or 4-to-a-bedroom until the voting population turns over.
It's really hard to see a way out of this for me without extreme interference by government..
Question though... why, exactly does that have to be the case? Especially with something like housing where say there is mostly a fixed supply at any point and you can't just turn a machine on/off to produce more.
The only reason the prices go up is because of greed basically- because people say "hey I can just charge more and people will pay more!". And there in lies the bullshit of the free market once again. It always benefits the people with money, who can afford to pay that amount more "just to get what they want".
The last few years in particular have made me so tired of hearing about people talk about supply & demand like it is some unarguable hard scientific fact. It's not even close to that. It just represents how much people like to price gouge because "they can"
>Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices). Capping prices prevents the price mechanism from working, leaving a shortage of housing.
And the following part of this is also just more bullshit. I'm not saying you are "wrong", but you say it as if that is how things have to work and there is no other alternative.
Every word of what you said is based on greed and squeezing the most you possibly can from people. Please realize that.
Such price signals are a basic element of the efficiency of the free market.
Supply/demand is a basic tenet of economics. You can visualize the model with supply/demand graphs [0], which help make the model more intuitive.
The issue of the fixed supply is known as 'stickiness'. Most things in the economy lag policy, and data that we use to observe the economy also tends to lag. This is why it's really bad to have poorly designed policy; course correction is difficult, and people are hurt in the meantime.
> Every word of what you said is based on greed and squeezing the most you possibly can from people. Please realize that.
It could be fun to channel Gordon Gecko, but I disagree that this is about greed. I care about well designed economic policy because I care about people's well-being.
[0] https://www.edrawmax.com/article/supply-and-demand-graph.htm...
Say there’s one free apartment in NYC and two marginal buyers submit bids: Alice and Bob. If Alice offers $1000/month and Bob offers $1200/month, then Bob gets the lease. The marginal rent is $1200.
If another apartment is built then Alice leases it and the marginal rent is $1000. Similarly, if a new buyer Charlie enters the market and bids $1500 then $1500 is the marginal rent.
The number of people with apartments depends only on the number of apartments built. Which buyers get apartments depends on their relative ability to pay. The price depends on what the marginal apartment-buyer will pay. That is the lowest amount offered that still gets an apartment.
Fundamentally, the only way that more people can be satisfied with the housing they have access to is to produce more of the housing people want.
Building new houses is intrinsically linked to supply. When you build a house, that increases the supply of housing. NIMBYs oppose new construction precisely to prevent the value of their properties from decreasing.
I'm sympathetic to the difficulties people are facing right now, and I've seen the stories about housing being purchased by investors. The issue is that the data doesn't seem to indicate a structural change in ownership [0]. Home ownership appears to have peaked at 69.4% in 2004 and now sits at 65.4%, the same level as in 1980.
Rent is high because the demand in large cities majorly out strips supply.
All policies that attempt to address housing costs that don't increase supply are treating a symptom and not the underlying cause.
A gross oversimplification, but if you somehow make ten thousand new apartments available in Manhattan at $1k/month, they will eventually fill up with low-income tenants, which will make them undesirable. Pressure on all the existing $5K properties will remain the same.
The entire basis of capitalism in the US is that the work of the poor is exploited by those with the capital to build factories and businesses which extract labor and resources from the poor people
That's why they can't invest. You have it entirely backwards
If people paying $5k would prefer to pay $3k for their units, why would this logic not also apply to people who are currently paying $3k?
If lower rents would make the city become undesirable, why did people want to move there in the year 2000, when rents were much lower?
The inherent property of a 5k rental he's referring to is that it costs 5k. Most people paying 5k for a studio just _don't want people around their houses_ specially if they are poorer than them. Otherwise they would be paying less than 3k for a room with a shared kitchen and bathroom or renting a bigger place with roommates.
Having said that, what's even worse than me is "low income" consumers. A lot of affordable housing, especially HDFC apartments, end up in the hands of the children of the rich. Not only are they not producing anything of value, they're also costing us tax dollars.
Which will ensure that absolutely no one develops anything in that state again
Vienna hasn't seized those properties, they just invested and built them themselves. NYC could to the same.
How is that even a city? Single family zoning is a suburban desert at best. Even remote villages have more life and vibrancy than that.
If you are instead suggesting some form of eminent domain of low density housing, and then building higher density housing in its stead, with a target of 40% of housing controlled by the state, I'm more inclined to think that would work.
To my mind though, I think targeting meeting current demand + demand growth (or some margin therein) would be the target, rather than what feels to me the arbitrary target of 40% (unless you have figures that show that's where demand+growth meets.)
I’m sick of these economic abstractions that constantly try to explain away our problems, and take away the responsibility from the human actors that cause these effects. It’s not some abstract “supply and demand” that we should focus on—it is the landlords and renters and their decisions that are to blame. We need to introduce some agency and accountability back into our discussions of economics otherwise capitalism will continue to be an abstract machine in which horribly unethical actions are justified by removing human actors and human culpability from the equation. Belief in “the market” is not dissimilar to religious belief. Furthermore, analyses in capitalist terms often lead us to more problems. If the problem is “supply”, people will say “ok build more homes”, but that first of all never seems to actually work and secondly has a large number of additional negative effects such as increasing overcrowding and climate problems.This ridiculous tendency to not actually blame the people responsible for these negative conditions is ridiculous. It’s a large part of the reason we’re in this mess.
The hard fact is that people want to live in large cities. Even if you were to legislate that all landlords had to provide housing at cost + 5%, there would still be a demand for more housing as people desperately bid to enter those areas. Further more, you'd see people never give up those rentals because there would be a mile long waiting list for every property that is under rent control.
I have a lot of sympathy for people disgusted by the greed landlords display, but at the end of the day, the issue here is that more people want to live in these places than there are homes for them. So the wealthy bid their way in and everyone else be damned or destitute in order to compete.
If you want radical policy, eminent domain low density housing in city limits and build apartment rises on them.
I think the solution will require a mix of infrastructure solutions (building more homes) and regulatory solutions. I’m not saying landlords can’t make money, but there should definitely be greater restrictions around how much they can raise rates (which did exist, but which NYC is steadily removing) and renters need to be afforded more rights and protections too.
First off, city limit property is already seeing this effect.
Tenant protections in the USA suck. Big Time.
However landlords raising rates are a great signal that your infrastructure is failing somewhere. This is useful because it means you can look for and address the problem.
Some locations are going to be incredibly desireable and thus expensive, and that's okay, as long as there are options available for everyone else who can't afford them.
And as far as regulation solutions, removing mixed zoning restrictions would be a massive step forward in allowing development of construction that could address some of these issues. Being able to live within a minutes walk of groceries, restaurants etc. is such a freeing experience that is taken from too many due to zoning restrictions. Regulatory reform could fix that.
If your system only works when everyone cooperates, you don't need the system in the first place. Believing that we can all live in this utopian ideal is more religious than "believing in the market"
Many of these landlords are up charging on properties that have not been materially improved at all, because, as I said, people are making dumb decisions to live where they want to, so they can arbitrarily increase the price up to the limit of what someone will pay. This is great for landlords since they can double their money without doing any work.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m really frustrated by these incoming renters too. A lot of these people fled and abandoned the city like complete cowards when the pandemic hit and suddenly they want to return while they left the responsibility of keeping the city going on all the rest of us that are actual residents that stayed. These semi-nomadic people are just as bad as the landlords and want to live somewhere only so long as it benefits them—they have no allegiance to a community. This, in conjunction with land owners behavior creates disastrous effects for actual long-term residents who invest in the local communities and don’t run away the second things get hard.
Tell me how you want to reinvent taxes and rent control, without knowing that you want to reinvent taxes and rent control.
> I’m really frustrated by these incoming renters too.
You are passing judgment to all these different groups of people, without any shred of fundamental principle to justify why they need to act the way you want.
They don't owe anything to you or the city. Stop complaining like a spoiled child.
Of course not. And I don’t owe them anything either. By the same terms of your argument there’s no reason I should be satisfied with just letting them do what they want when it affects me directly since you’re stating that I should not try to do anything that affects them directly. I have my desires, which requires placing demands on their behavior since they are ignorant of the conditions of other human beings, act entirely selfishly and in a vacuum, and ruin things for the rest of us.
The fundamental principle is that people that are short-term renters disrupt communities in negative ways by having economic effects that harm long-term residents and ultimately break the existing community. I’m passing judgement on them because I witnessed the mass exodus that happened in 2020 and I witnessed all the struggle those who stayed had to endure and I witnessed the mass return of people that fled to “safer” spaces come back as though nothing happened and absolutely screw over everyone that stayed.
You must not have ever been subject to gentrification. You’ve got a real empathetic heart. I’m not “complaining” I’m trying to speak to the problem and suggest that existing solutions clearly are not enough. If anything is childish it’s your post, which tries to effectively say “we tried everything, there’s no possible other solution” and “in spite of the insane number of problems currently evident in our economics capitalism is fine and people should be able to manipulate the market without bound”. Your post has effectively no intellectual content. Being upset about something, evoking an opinion, and trying to advocate that we need a solution that will not only benefit myself but also the thousands of others affected by insane rent costs is not “acting like a spoiled child”, in my opinion. Do I have that solution? No, of course not. I’m not qualified. But if we restricted commentary on hacker news to professionally qualified individuals this thread would have close to 0 comments.
I don’t think I’m the child here.
Unless someone straight up breached their contract to evict and give "your" apartment to someone else, you were not affected "directly" by anything.
> I have my desires, which requires placing demands on their behavior
Desires? Is this really the word that you want to use? The more you write, the more you are displaying your sense of entitlement.
> (your post) which tries to effectively say “we tried everything, there’s no possible other solution”
There is absolutely no point where I said anything like that. Please stop assuming things. If you want to restart the conversation around that, by all means let's do it. But if you want to argue by baseless statements, I'm not your person.
My rent increased significantly for no reason other than a shift in market rates. I struggle to see how this does not count as being directly effected.
Yes. Desires. People have them. Usually they dictate behaviors. It’s why people move to New York. It’s why you’re quoting my comments and writing replies—you want to show me that you’re “smarter” and that my dissatisfactions are illegitimate and you think a great way to do so is to write targeted quips that take one or two lines of text out of context, but unfortunately you’re not succeeding. It’s clear you have no interest in actual persuasion or discussion—if you do, I highly recommend taking a few writing or debate classes, maybe brushing up on what it means to empathize, learn about logos/ethos/pathos, read some philosophy, things like that.
When this is your first statement following your attempted "apology", how can anyone be interested in continuing with the conversation?
> You seem to want your interlocutor to follow all the polite rules of discussion while abandoning them all yourself.
It's not about "politeness". It's about honesty. I'd rather have a honest-but-dry conversation than a pleasantly-dishonest one.
> your position (which you haven’t actually ever elaborated)
My position (if it couldn't even be called that) is that NYC is a victim of its own (relative) success compared to all the other cities in the US. The best way to get NYC to become more affordable would be to rescue other cities. There are just too many people with too much money chasing not enough houses in urban areas that are desirable, so of course the prices will go up in the places that are.
Rent control is not going to solve this. It's only going to create a privileged class that is going to cling on to their old leases. Landlords will have zero incentive to invest. Developers will have less incentive to build, and then only the existing stock will continue to be around.
It's supply that needs to be fixed. Also, it may seem counter-intuitive at first, but to fix cities in North America you need to get rid of suburbia.
I think NYC’s location is one of the difficulties involved with such a plan. NYC is partly desirable because its locality makes it an easy hub for travel to and from Europe. You can make other cities attractive by other means, but it will be hard to beat this and the entrenchment of current residents and businesses.
The idea of eliminating suburbs to fix supply is interesting. I do think that could be beneficial, but at the same time, that also would require regulations or policies that push development away from suburbs and into cities. Either way you’ll need some kind of regulatory intervention.
The question is whether or not supply increase is sufficient to alter the market, I’m skeptical of such a claim because new residential developments crop up in NYC all the time but it doesn’t seem to help drive down rates at all. Furthermore, NYC’s population for the decade had its peak in 2016, yet prices then were more affordable[1]. Maybe there’s data that shows there’s an extreme influx of individuals now and the population in NYC surpassed this number in 2022, but I’d be surprised if that were the case esp. when you factor in new building developments that occurred in the meantime. I don’t think it boils down to a simple supply problem. It may be due to the fact that brokerages are snatching up properties and charging more than individual landlords, it may be a side effect of inflation, it may be predatory profit seeking after the pandemic. I don’t know, but I don’t think merely throwing up a bunch of new buildings will necessarily fix things, and as I mentioned before, we need to consider the other negative consequences of such a plan (density, the consequent environmental impacts etc.)
[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-l...
I misspoke. By "getting rid of suburbia", I mean getting rid of American-style, car-centric suburban development. You'll absolutely want to have development in the suburbs.
And to do that, you don't need a lot of changes in regulations. Surely, you'll have to fight with NIMBYs, but these changes do not require massive regulations:
- Upzoning all R1 zones, and abolish Euclidian Zone. Just by getting rid of exclusive single-family zones that are so prevalent in the US, and start allowing multi-family townhouses, mixed-use areas, you could recover basically every city that is not part of coastal metro area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
- Transit-oriented development. City Beautiful has a great video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYsqWIGyRVk
Thanks also for sticking through the conversation in spite of some rough patches.
We all have dependencies on one another to get access to our basic needs. If your ISP, gas or whatever provider decided to suddenly charge you double for no apparent upgrades you would not be happy. You might have to option to go to another provider. If you didn’t, you’d have to move somewhere that has cheaper services. Moving is not zero cost. It both financially and emotionally affects people depending on how tied they are to their communities. The problem with rentals is that this is happening to long term residents that have no other option because the overall market price for the area is crazy. People are being removed from their communicates because there are no restrictions on landlords that make money will producing nothing the vast majority of the time. Capitalism is supposed to reward production, products. In most cases renting is a parasitic form of raising capital that doesn’t contribute to any material improvements, it just uses existing scarcity of resources of basic needs and exploits the fact to make capital without producing anything.
I think the solution to housing cost is to make smaller cities, towns and the countryside more attractive by having higher local tax rates in cities. This source of income could be used to build better infrastructure in the rest of the country.
Also no thanks to wealth redistribution. The rest of the country sucks outside the coasts sucks and its mostly because they have regressive politics. It's their own damn fault nobody wants to live there.
I believe that allowing more units will lower prices, but what if it didn't? What if all that happened is that a whole bunch more people got to live where they want to live, productivity increased, and the largest cities got more dynamic and interesting? What if that's all that happened?
> by having higher local tax rates in cities
You already pay taxes on par with Denmark if you live in NYC and have sufficient income to afford to live there without subsidized housing. Tax policy is an insane way to prop up little towns. Cities offer a lot of economic and environmental benefits, and are generally already generating more tax revenue than they receive in benefits.
People are asking how you would lower the price though.
If you don't _want_ lower prices, then the NIMBY positions make sense, don't build more to meet rising demand, keep prices high and poorer people out.
So are the ones that do increase supply, so long as they are not doing it in a way which deliberately undercuts the fact that there are positive feedback loops at work (and cutting those positive feedback loops means reducing quality of life and economic opportunity in ways no one wants.)
Among the thing that drives demand for housing is available work (demand for labor). Increasing housing supply so more of that demand is met increases demand for local services, and thereby available work, increasing demand for housing. That's not the only positive feedback loop involved, but it's one of them.
What you propose is a very socialist solution. I've read somewhere that in the USSR paying more than 4% of your income to housing was considered criminal (as they calculated that's what housing would cost using cost-based-pricing).
Fortunately that was the only criminal activity in the shining beacon of freedom and prosperity that was the USSR.
I don't think this is a useful way to approach any of these problems, and I'm sure neither do you, so why try to score cheap points this way.
My primary intention wasn't to refer directly to the morality of the USSR. Economically speaking, the USSR was a disaster, so I'm skeptical that we should implement the policies that quite literally destroyed a nation.
But yes, the USSR was a murderous state led by men who were happy to kill tens of millions of people for personal gain. I find that morally reprehensible.
Think also that the program can avoid deficit by not having only low-income tenants, providing more opportunities for social mobility and allowing more consumption which means more VAT taxes, specially if you're smart enough to provide your tenants with supermarkets, bars, etc, which isn't difficult if you pack enough people and provide space for bussiness in the ground floors.
Socialism is a left-wing political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. [0]
Government ownership of housing, as opposed to private ownership, is unambiguously socialist policy, regardless of policy intentions.
> specially if you're smart enough to provide your tenants with supermarkets, bars, etc, which isn't difficult if you pack enough people and provide space for bussiness in the ground floors.
Here's the issue with central planning. How does the government know which services residents will find desirable? This difficulty is known as the local knowledge problem. I don't drink alcohol; why should I be forced to pay for a bar I don't use? And more importantly, why is the government encouraging an activity that causes the death of 140k Americans a year?
I didn't say that government runs the bussiness. The public hoosuing buildings have space at ground level that is rented for businesses.
In many european contries you have supermarkets for the neighborhood in those spaces.
This is not public housing, but the lowest income neighborhood in my city, serves as example of where bussineses can be located. https://www.google.es/maps/place/Gadis/@43.3576146,-8.416073...
Another example: https://www.google.es/maps/place/Eroski+Center/@43.3754534,-...
I misunderstood what you meant as to who would choose which services to provide. Completely agree with you about mixed zoning, it's really beneficial to have the businesses near residents.
The ideal would be to them having everything they need in <5min walk.
Also, maybe you can rent to bussiness at a market rate, since their clients have more disposable income.
Questions more than anything else:
- How does the system decide which applicants out of multiple get the unit? Lottery? How does the system decide which units get rented first (so the owners get income) e.g. 3 identical units on the same floor, in the same building?
- With a sliding scale on price base on income, is there a price floor for the owner? E.g. low income tenant pays 500 euros, but the system guarantees 1000 euros to the owner so the system pays the difference?
- Has supply increased with this system in Vienna? Why would say an invesntor take the risk of putting capital into apartments or condos construction with this system in place?
I don't know if I understand your question. We're talking about public housing, the owner is a public entity. For every building there are slots by income and they're filled by a FIFO system if you will.
I know in the US this is more difficult but in most euro countries the administration can check what you earn yearly. It's semi-automated already.
> With a sliding scale on price base on income, is there a price floor for the owner? E.g. low income tenant pays 500 euros, but the system guarantees 1000 euros to the owner so the system pays the difference?
The owner is the public housing company. No guarantee for anyone. There are different proposals, for me 20% for annualized income is simple & good enough, I wouldn't want to make it very complicated, but I'm sure it can be.
> Has supply increased with this system in Vienna? Why would say an invesntor take the risk of putting capital into apartments or condos construction with this system in place?
Overall supply did, but due to political factors the public housing system didn't expand at enough rate to keep up with demand.
It’s not ideal.
1 out of 20 of the city's residents, 1 in 8 if you count voucher programs. That's far from nothing, but you're right, there's definitely room for improvement if you can cut through the red tape of nimbyism and corruption.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Housing_Authorit...
Also recommend checking out this video about Vienna https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY
Also, people apply voluntarily. You're free to live in a private-owned rental
Its hard to build over top of places that are already being lived in, and once you kick those people out, you have even more people that need a new place to live
That said, if you're going to kick poor people out of their homes for the sake of rich moving in, why not just have the rich people live in those homes and call it a day?
have 2.25 million population before WW1 and then decline in population for almost 100 years? They still haven't recovered (1.89m). It may be an enormous mistake to read into their allocation policy because they've simply had a very easy time allocating so far.
St Louis population has declined for 70 years. It is very affordable. It's just not hard to accomplish affordability like that.
Also, the point of the social housing in vienna is not only the dimension of it, but how they do it. The design, the demographics, etc.
There's a clear distinction between their program and the myriad of commieblocks in other countries that become low-income guettos to sink public money.
Public housing done right is more than just building dense, putting poor people in it and be done with it. That's a recipe for disaster.
Also, the way commercial buildings are mortgaged is crazy - major landlords often have 0% down payments (claiming that their ability to attract rental tenants will add 20% equity overnight), and keep the building vacant rather than lowering rents to maintain the "valuation" of the building. Empty units can have their cost tacked on to the end of the mortgage. At some point, the bill comes due, but it takes a long time.
We have tons of land In the US. Lots of people leave New York for cheaper places.
The limited supply (3 years worth of eviction backlog) + office mandates hitting this spring are exactly why prices went crazy seemingly overnight after a pretty calm 2021
That's a bold claim. What led you to believe that's the case? And what is a "non-transable good"?
Compare: "Abortion is a non-transable good and therefore there should be heavy state intervention in it." "Video games are non-transable goods and so there should be heavy state intervention in it." "Cryptography is a non-transable good and therefore should heavily be regulated by the government."
All of these are BOLD claims regardless of what non-transable means, and it's appropriate to ask what non-transable means in order to understand why the bold claim stands.
Unless there's a definition, saying that this property calls for heavy state intervention is indeed a bold claim.
Asking the original poster for clarification of terms would be the move before assuming something
Basically you cant move supply around.
Sounds like a creative way of saying "make sure the poors have enough rich people near them that they feel compelled to stay in line and keep a low profile."
There are few things that make apartment living worse than having neighbors who think your standards of behavior are too low and who you have to avoid pissing off.
Streetcar suburbs[2] not only work, but are imminently sustainable compared to other forms of urban/suburban extension.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_lines_in_Bro...
The solution is to build more, and the success of Vienna does not come from public intervention but from the added supply. Tokyo is another city with famously cheap housing, and the secret is that they make it easy to build.
I personally think that achieving affordable housing prices via mainly government intervention is not a sustainable approach. You end up consuming both economic and political capital.
A more sustainable approach sets clear, transparent rules that specify under what conditions do you get to build by right. Then 90% gets satisfied by the market, the remaining 10% can be addressed by government investments, if needed.
The only sustainable way to get affordable housing is when the market price is affordable.
Land, on the other hand, is another story. There is strong economic evidence that many of the observations of Henry George [1] are spot on: Land rents tend to take a massive toll in the economy, cause inequality and misery, all without requiring their owners to provide any added value. The proposed solution, again with solid economic fundamentals, is to tax the unimproved value of land at 100%. Henry George further argues that the proceeds should be equally divided among citizens, a citizen dividend if you will.
[0] e.g. it takes 4 years on average to get a new building permit in SF, 90% of the city is zoned for single family housing, any neighbor etc.
Tokyo is 13400 sq km, NYC is 780 sq km. If I rounded Tokyo's land area to the same sig figs as I did for NYC, it would be lowered by half the total area that NYC takes up!
That's just not an accurate comparison.
Live in NYC. Lived in Japan. The difference is transit. It is far easier to get to Saitama or Kawasaki or Yokohama or Chiba than it is to get to Long Island from NYC. You can do the former in an hour at rush hour. Try getting to downtown Manhattan from Bay Shore as a daily commute. You'll go mad.
Here's Tokyo and New York at the same zoom level:
Tokyo: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.736739,139.6246444,10z
NYC: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7983574,-73.948053,10z
The gray area of Tokyo on that map is pretty much all considered an exurb of Tokyo, more-or-less feasible for daily commute by rail. Most of the NYC region is inaccessible from Manhattan, except by car. Look at the Seibu Shinjuku line, or the Chuo line on the Tokyo map -- both offer express trains that will take you from the distant western exurbs, right into the middle of downtown Tokyo:
The density of the NYC MSA is 1/3 that of Tokyo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
There's plenty of room to grow up. Just because the reason we don't is shitty government organization and FPTP voting doesn't mean we can just ignore the vast swaths of low-density just outside Manhattan 's borders.
At the small scale Tokyo's densest ward is ~22,700/km^2 and Manhattan is ~28,800/km^2 with Manhattan being ~4x-5x the land area of the former (i.e. the core is a lot more dense). At the large scale the Greater Tokyo Area is ~2,900/km^2 and the New York Metropolitan Area is ~2,053/km^2 (i.e. the urban area around Tokyo is a lot more dense).
"Tokyo" is a good example that you can get affordable housing by focusing on how to spread the population over a large urban area but it's not a good example building more housing downtown is a scalable approach.
There's probably also a fear that if you let a new tenant in for lower rent, this might lower the rent other people expect and the problem starts snowballing.
With commercial units (eg - downtown San Francisco) it is even harder because with remote work, the jobs are never coming back to the city.
If property appreciation outpaces the gains one could make from renting it out, then it’s better to leave it empty.
It totally makes sense for the rental property owners.
There's a substantial cost in having a renter living there, both in dollars and risk. So if the rent isn't enough to cover those, it's cheaper to let it sit unused.
Vacancy rates are well low at the moment.
Here's greenpoint as an example: https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/new-york-ny/greenpoint. Same goes for LIC.
Artificially forcing prices low just reduces supply.
But no doubt NYC will head down that path.
Seems like all major cities are repeating the policies of the 60’s-80’s that causes populations to drop.
As a middle-middle-class suburban kid, I just couldn't conceive of how the wealthiest city on earth could have sections that looked like a bombed-out and evacuated European city following World War II.
I asked my father what had happened here. He answer was "rent control".
See my other comment:
I recall AOC lobbying for stopping an apartment complex in a formerly industrial area. And a articles on how certain areas of Manhattan don't allow towers. In fact, a quick look at the zoning map [0] has, eg, large areas zoned as "R8B contextual districts are designed to preserve the character and scale of taller rowhouse neighborhoods".
SF is the worst offender, but NYC is still pretty bad.
It can be doing so much better. I get a tad excited reading about 1,000ft supertall's being built, only to sigh when I see it will have a whopping 80 units. I've seen even more ridiculous stuff like a 10 story building with 4 units. There's been a ton of construction in NYC over the last 5 years alone but it seems to be mostly luxury and medium/low density. There are plenty of older buildings from the 20th century that are much denser but it seems that no one wants to build these anymore. (Or they can't, I'm not sure which).
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...
Additionally, the other boroughs aren't super dense. For example, much of the land next to LIRR is pretty low density, and even SFH [0]. Some people in Manhattan would be okay living there, so that does lead to higher rents in Manhattan.
0 - https://www.planetizen.com/news/2021/06/113861-new-york-time...
I say 6 stories because you can reasonably have a 6-story walkup. Anything higher and you would need to add an elevator which could make things harder.
If you want to call that "nothing" then there is no reaching you.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/billionaires-get-lo...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/american-h...
"But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times."
Sorry, but I trust the Atlantic over you unless you got some facts.
> Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015, or 3,695 of 7,727 apartments, remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts by Nancy Packes Data Services, a real estate consultancy and database provider.
So we're talking about 3,695 unsold apartments. There are 3.5 million housing units in New York City. So that's about a tenth of one percent .
The problem here isn't that the statistic is wrong; it's that anybody thinks 7k new units over a 5 year period in a metro area of 20 million people is anything more than a curiosity.
The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that it offers a sensational explanation -- usually some foreign, outside force -- for a complex problem, absolves the believer of any culpability, and provides an easy, unsympathetic target on which to dump all their rage. "Foreign oligarchs are buying up all the real estate and locking the rest of us out and that's what's wrong with the housing market" is exactly that kind of theory. And 3500 unsold units over 5 years is emphatically not evidence of its veracity.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-york-decad...
And the only way to reduce the market price to affordable rates is to crack down on the demand - there is no reasonable way to expand the offer side in many cities any more since they don't have the space. And most demand is driven by the fact that rural areas have been left in a decrepit state for decades: highways, bridges and other infrastructure is crumbling, there is no public transport worth the name, forget about fast internet (or fast internet offered by a crap monopolist), employers have closed down or moved to urban areas, schools and medical services are constantly closing or underfunded...
To fix the urban rent explosion problem, we need to fix rural areas and make them livable again.
The other two secrets are tiny apartments (200-400 sqft), and an incredibly reliable public transportation system. Tokyo has a massive sprawl -- people can and do live far from their work. The average one-way commute time in the Tokyo metro area is almost an hour.
I think of myself as right-of-center, but think George was more or less spot on w.r.t. land.
I wonder if there is a solution in banning rent itself? i.e. force owners to transfer a % of ownership equal to rental fees received from tenants and allow them to discount improvements against that.
As far as I'm aware there are more housing units than people in the US. We do have an incentive structure that puts property owners' needs at odds w/ society's needs on multiple factors, and some of them (i.e. NIMBYism) can be addressed orthogonally to the intractability of housing as investment vs housing as housing.
Population densities (per sq k):
Manhattan: 38000
Tokyo: 6158
Vienna: ~5000
I don't see how supply is Manhattan's problem here.
I wonder, because it is always stated that if only density was increased by building more, housing would become cheap.
But this article is about NYC, the densest city in the US, not being cheap at all.
Of course the Vienna success came from public intervention because otherwhise you'd have exactly the same situation of hundreds of other cities where rent is always a hefty amount of modal income and no matter how easy and cheap is to build it just happens those with access to capital never meet demand.
You need to build more, in many cite MUCH more, and you need vacant housing so floating population can come and go easily.
In return property owners (or insurance runners) can get rich off your monthly payments as well as the inherent value of the property (/insurance company), but because of risk of ruin, opportunity cost for other investments and other related phenomena, it can mathematically be a total win-win for both sides.
What everyone complaining about property prices also always seems to forgoe are two things: First, people are clearly able to afford them or the prices wouldn't go higher. The myth that property investors buy homes on mass and don't rent them out which supposedly creates this pricing hike is idiotic. All of these big cities with insane rents have very low vacancy rates compared to the national average.
In almost all of these places where people complain about rent, we are talking about big popular places where everyone wants to go even though there are tons of realistic alternatives all around the country. The situations where it's economically totally necessary for you to move to an expensive place but at the same time you can't afford the rent is so rare as to be virtually non-existent.
Even the idea that people are displaced from their homes is an issue on a smaller scale than people make it out to be. That's because income in those expensive places is much higher than in cheaper places. There are people displaced from their homes, but that's because of poverty and other aspects of gentrification that are not necessarily tied to rent.
As a renter of a dangerously unmaintained property, whose owner has never worked because he inherited a bunch of apartments, I can only laugh hysterically at your ridiculously-over-the-top sarcasm.
The deadbeat landlord problem would solve itself once we build ourselves out of scarcity.
Obviously I don't know, but I suspect you might be seeing a king of survivorship bias. Many people I know were in fact displaced from the place they want to live, including careers and communities they were a part of, due to cost of living. Housing is a big part of that. Are you surrounded by people who can afford it, and perhaps unaware of the people who can't?
I think you have no idea how much things break and need fixing. I have a friend that owns a few houses that he rents out, and it's a part time job just keeping up with fixing things. Between them, there's a few thousand items that can and do break and need maintenance. He would not be profitable if he hired out to fix things. Outside Labour can easily be $100/hour and if you need something even a little bit more serious its easily $1000/day.
This is the hidden cost of manufacturers making things as cheaply as possible, and often out of plastic. Property taxes and utility bills and problem with tenants. Navigating disputes, noise complaints, missed rent, move outs and move ins, signing new lease agreements, landscaping, leaky plumbing, damaged flooring, overgrown trees, it's endless. It's a part time job.
Maintaining and improving structures is work. Nobody disagrees with that. Simply owning the thing is not work. Churchill said it best:
https://www.landvaluetax.org/history/winston-churchill-said-...
Property of course requires maintenance and management, so the sleight of hand here is to define away all those aspects of ownership so that by definition all that's meant by "landlord" is "old guy who cashes checks."
But somebody has to maintain the property, somebody has to prioritize upgrades and improvements, somebody has to cut the grass, somebody has to pay the taxes, somebody has to -- yes -- collect and cash the checks. Somebody has to respond to tenant requests and emergencies. Somebody has to advertise the property when it's vacant. Someone conducts showings and screens tenants. And, maybe most important, somebody assumes the risk of a bad tenant or a down market or a declining neighborhood. And so on and so on.
Whether all this is done by the owner personally or hired out is irrelevant. There's no reason to believe government can perform these functions better than private owners in a market.
A simple proof that landlording is not free/easy money is to realize that millions of middle- and upper-middle class Americans who -- if not today, certainly 5 years ago before this most recent run-up in prices -- could, if they wanted to, afford to buy property and become landlords, but they mostly do not do it. And since nobody turns down free/easy money, landlording simply cannot be free/easy money. QED.
In many buildings these things are simply not done.
I've used this to my advantage before. I moved into a building that needed a fresh coat of paint and had poor reviews of their maintenance and saved ~10-15% from market rent because I didn't care about appearances and am handy enough to fix a leaky faucet, etc. myself.
The current state is the actual opposite of that incentive. You can just buy up a parking lot in downtown Manhattan, pay ~$0 taxes on it, and keep it off the market while people continue to struggle to find housing and prices continue to climb. Then when the land has appreciated (through no actions of your own, in fact in spite of your own actions) you can sell for millions of dollars of upside.
FWIW, I'm with you, I think rental income ("landlording") and airbnb-ing are both legitimate demand, and the system would work fairly if we didn't have artificial constraints on supply.
Insofar as landlords actively work to constraint supply to artificial inflate rents, it is immoral behavior (but 'muh' neighborhood) and we should not allow it.
Then again, I've had others tell me it's awesome, you just have to pick your location carefully (one exclusively bought very close to nursing schools, which seemed to select for tenants who'd stick around at least a couple years and who'd pay their rent and not run a meth lab or smear shit on the walls or anything like that).
One of the principal reasons Manhattan rent is so ridiculous is because of state intervention. More intervention, the worse it is going to get.
> Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy,
This is a silly statement. Rent is part of the economy. Paying rent doesn't damage the economy anymore then paying for food or paying your electrical bill.
> and property owners provide almost no value,
They provide and maintain their property.
> but to provide access to housing for people who has no capital for it,
And for a wide variety of other reasons. Not everybody wants or is a place in their life were massive permanent investment makes sense.
> which is service that could be perfectly provided by a state entity.
Absolutely not.
Also if you evict all the poor people from the expensive cities, who do you think is going to work the jobs that make it possible and desirable for the rich people to live there?
By what mechanism could this possibly work other than exploitation and coercion. I realize that's the current status quo, but do you? Do you understand that's what you're endorsing here with this argument of "poors gtfo?"
This has been tried so many times throughout different cultures and time periods, and by different means. It will not benefit whoever is actually living on the properties, but will detract from their situation.
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt has several concrete examples of attempted interventions, and is written to give a basic intuition on why this happens (Spoiler: Opportunity costs).
The only permanent solution is just to build more buildings, or at a political level simply making it easier to build new buildings, which directly increases supply and thus causes the lowering of prices. This makes perfect sense when you think about it: There are not enough buildings, so we need to have more buildings.
Less regulatory obstacles to increase supply, i.e. build housing, is the correct answer.
It's not without its flaws, but Singapore has an extremely effective public housing program run by the government's Housing & Development Board (HDB) where 89.9% of Singaporeans are homeowners.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/664518/home-ownership-ra...
The "just build more" supply argument doesn't hold water when you have an unlimited source of demand from institutional investors and speculators that use housing as a place to park their money.
Maybe some groups of people don't want to live together with other groups of people? Different people living in different parts of the city is just natural evolution.
Why should the state force them to live together?
And why should the state tell you where to live? Why should the state be involved in your private life at all?
A claim like that needs supporting evidence. I see no reason why segregation among different members of a single community is natural.
> Why should the state force them to live together?
Because segregation breaks down the social bonds in a community, which is bad for the social fabric, which is bad for the community's ability to live and work together, which results in the breakdown of that community.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-03/why-segre...
> And why should the state tell you where to live? Why should the state be involved in your private life at all?
The state does not exist in Libertarian theory. The state already has numerous rules about your private life. You could make the same arguments against zoning and building codes.
Considering that in-group-out-group psychology has been humanity's evolutionary default for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, I'd say the burden of evidence is on anyone claiming the contrary.
To your other points yes. Land Value Tax now! There's simply no good reason for why we're all taxed so heavily on our labor while land speculators get away for pennies.
So the taxpayers should pay so the people with low income or no income can live iny Manhattan? Why not also provide them with expensive cars and exotic vacations?
Yes. It's a city not a luxury resort. If people are to work all kinds of jobs at all levels of income there, then people at all income levels should be able to live there as well. This mechanism accounts for that.
> Why not also provide them with expensive cars and exotic vacations?
Maybe they should idk. Seems completely unrelated though and no one is arguing for that here so I don't know why you want to or why I should.
Why should taxpayers subsidize employers unwilling to pay a living wage?
They're definitely closely related issues but I don't know that you can completely solve for one in terms of the other though.
Perhaps only as part of a way to ease those with low income. But this is no good in general. You are charging one person more than another for the same good simply because of higher income. This is price discrimination and is unjust. Usury can work in an analogous way, such as when someone raises prices to exploit increased need even though the cost of production of the good sold is the same.
> property owners provide almost no value
They provide shelter and must maintain that property. Problems occur when they begin to charge unjustly for services rendered. This calls for regulation, not state ownership. No need to go to extremes.
> The current setup creates guettos [sic] by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas, hurting social mobility
Social mobility isn't the only consideration and not the summum bonum and it exists precisely to allow people to sort themselves into social classes (otherwise, why have social mobility in the first place). People of a given social class tend to live closer to each other because they share class cultural similarities, concerns, and affinities. That doesn't mean there is no contact between people of different classes, but the solution isn't to mix everyone up into a uniform mass. There's a middle way between the hermetically sealed ghetto and uniform distribution, and it doesn't involve violating the principle of subsidiary.
Ultimately, it is poverty that is a problem, not having a lower or higher income as such.
Have you considered that housing might actually be valuable? If it didn’t provide value, why do you think that Vienna seized so much of it to give out to its citizens? Maybe try to find a different way to phrase whatever you’re trying to say.
Assuming you’re referring to property owners getting by doing nothing. That’s false unless they are a slumlord.
Let me ask you another question. What do people do who are not happy with the housing provided by the govt in Vienna?
> The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas
This is not how it works in the US for the last 50 years or so. Most places force every new building to include low income units.
Rent from another landlord mostly. Vienna has close to two million people (give or take some), however only around 500.000 of those live in buildings owned by the city [0]. Those are 1800 buildings by the way, definitely a lot but not unbelievably massive.
Compared to some private companies, such as Vonovia the city of Vienna is just another big player, but by no means massive enough to actually be a monopoly or anything.
It is true that they of course hold a lot of the supply in Vienna itself, housing a quarter of the population, but that still leaves three quarters not living in any of those buildings. It's easy enough to not live in apartments owned by the city if you don't want to.
[0]: www.wienerwohnen.at/wiener-gemeindebau/wiener-gemeindebau-heute.html (Source in German)
So the other landlords are providing some value the city is not. That’s my point.
The city is providing value, approximately 500.000 housing units worth of value. Private landlords provide value, the remaining one point something million units worth of housing.
You could of course replace either provider, it doesn't make a practical difference whether you are renting from the city or a private landlord, at least not if we are looking at this from a top down perspective with hundreds of thousands of units.
But the whole point of the city buying into the market was to create competition and ensure that the property market isn't used as an investment/doesn't pay as great as another investment. So with that in mind the current system is actually kind of what they were aiming for.
Put another way, if you accept that housing scarcity is bad, going to the public and saying "How do you want housing in your city to be?" is only going to make it worse.
Wages will need to go up, which means the costs of goods and services will need to go up, and the city will get even less affordable.
Well put, had to laugh.
No, you can't.
Artists seek low costs.
They tend to create progressive locales.
Then the gentrification cycle sets in.
I'm not saying all low-rent regions will attract art, but it's possible to generate some pretty significant cultural shifts.
San Francisco / Berkeley becoming capitals of counterculture was not an entirely obvious outcome from the perspective of the 1930s, 40s, or 50s. A friend recalls the Haight-Ashbury when it was largely a Greek ethnic neighbourhood.
"I would put it this way: there are many ways to impose a Georgist land tax, fiscal insolvency being one of them. Very wealthy people and institutions know that if they relocate to Chicago, they will be required to ante up for the final bill. And so they stay away. For a city of its size and import, Chicago just doesn’t have that many billionaires, nor do I think a rational billionaire should consider moving there.
In other words, there is a pending wealth tax. Either directly or indirectly, this will place fiscal burdens on Chicago land, the immobile factor. And this keeps down rents in Chicago now."
It’s a place full of amazingly creative people but let the rents climb and you’ll end up like London.
There are very few grocery store clerk, delivery drivers, and coffee baristas who live in UES. They've already been pushed out to the edges of Manhattan and other boroughs.
The 20-30 minute commutes have been snapped up by younger people who have been priced out of the 10-15 minute commutes. You currently see a lot more ads for rentals that seem to stretch the boundaries of neighborhoods (e.g. West 110th Street == "Upper West Side").
The wait lists for rent stabilized apartments are incredibly long, so the chances of a grocery store clerk, delivery driver, or coffee barista getting into more affordable housing closer to their place of work is pretty slim.
And good luck if you're an hourly employee with a long commute when the MTA lets you down in the form of a delayed train, or express-turned-local, etc. You're either penalized by your employer (or angry customers) for arriving late, or you penalize yourself by leaving the house 30-45 minutes earlier and sitting around unpaid until it's time for your shift to start (ignoring any cost of leaving the house earlier, e.g. cost of extra child care, or risk of being unreachable on the subway by a dependent).
To be fair, they've been doing that particular editorialization for over 20 years. Bloomingdale was subsumed into the expanding morass of the UWS in the early 2000s; Morningside is next.
Or do the places paying low wages now just need to accept a smaller profit margin or lower executive pay?
It's unquestionably true that there are some places that pay low wages that cannot afford to pay better wages without increasing prices; however, we seem to have collectively decided that that's the only way wages can increase. But that ignores the fact that corporations in all (or at least many) sectors have been enjoying record profits recently, and executive-to-worker pay ratios are absurdly high.
Remember that next time you see someone claiming that raising wages necessarily means that prices will need to rise.
I don't disagree for a second that, say, Starbucks could take a hit, reduce profits and still be able to operate successfully in New York. But I'd argue a lot of what makes New York the city it is is things like small independent restaurants that already operate on very thin margins. They also have no fat cat executives pocketing the spoils.
So, perhaps, yes, the city could survive without increasing wages but I worry it would result in a very faceless city filled with nothing other than big corporate entities that are able to swallow the cost.
McDonalds and Starbucks eat a wage increase in stride, small restaurants and businesses just go under.
Perhaps not minimum wage, but if the Bay Area is any evidence, people will commute that much time for a low wage job.
They are often losing out longer term (i.e. not considering the accelerated depreciation of their car), but in the thick of day to day survival they might not see that slowly happening.
They absolutely will, this concern has never really made sense to me. Poverty is like a badge of honor for many folks, and the harder one works for the lower the pay ends up being a little game some folks like to engage in, almost as a self flagellation; "I suffer therefore I'm noble."
Just look at some of the most oppressive places in the world, and how people continue to opt into that abject horror because it's a path to marginally help themselves or others they care about. NYC is nowhere near approaching the levels of, say, Qatar, in how it treats its workers, and a 90 minute commute each way wouldn't do much to push NYC closer to Qatar on that particular front.
You think we're at the bottom? No, we can go so much lower. So very much lower...
Another is these people are stuck. It takes money to pack up and leave. If the everything is costing more and more and more, their ability to save and leave goes down and down and down. Eventually they'll be forced to leave (somehow); the haves will see to it.
> "I suffer therefore I'm noble."
That's cruel.
Have you really never met anyone who's oddly proud of how hard they work, despite how little they earn? I grew up around these people, this view was more common than drug use, more common than gambling, almost consensus that the poor folks were the real heroes of the story.
"Stuck" is indeed the right word, but no they won't get "unstuck"; their lives will just get worse and worse. Like I said, there's just so much lower we can go here, people don't even realize where the bottom is.
That is already what happened. It just never stopped happening. The end game is... it keeps happening. It's just more noticeable right now because of high inflation and the stark contrast from the pandemic years.
Which shouod decrease the number of people living there, putting a limit on cost growth.
It seems that higher rent is more likely to reduce standard of living first. Low wage earners who really want to be in the city will find a way, which generally means having a roommate and then I guess having even more roommates. I do wish NYC would build more dense buildings though so that a barista doesn't need to have 6 roommates.
A few things:
1. The premise there (when there are plenty of jobs elsewhere) is kinda flimsy -- its already easier to find jobs in larger cities (that's why people move there), and nothing guarantees this won't get worse
2. Yes, there is a breaking point where people can't afford (in terms of time and/or money) a long and/or expensive commute. Humans have a workaround for that. Its called slums.
Given that, I'm just not sure where the breaking point is.
Or course it'd be great if we weren't heading that direction but try convincing voting demographics that property values should be lower.
Maybe about 5 years ago I would have said that people making 200k are wealthy. Today I would say that they are a lot of people that have been duped into a lifestyle where they "think" they are wealthy but are not. They spend MOST of their salary on non-essential and non-asset building things. So in a sense they are people that should be rich, but are not. Instead they don't own property (renters) buy lattes, restaurant food (for every meal) and the rest of that income is just going to payments - the tesla, rv/campers/boats, storage facilities for the stuff that doesn't fit in the apartment.
Those people certainly could become winners of the economic system if they stopped paying everyone else - but they identify with wealthy people making 400k but have absolutely no appreciating assets (ok except for their self driving module that Elon duped them into - which it turns out isn't actually "sellable" to the next owner anyway!).
I don't think these people identify with working class - instead they are pushing a narrative for themselves as poor to feel less guilty about that large salary and how poorly it's being pissed away.
That's the closest I can "explain" that from my personal perspective at least.
Honestly - you sound really out of touch and like you know no one who makes $200k/yr in SF. Where would you put your boat if you even could afford one? Where would you put a camper? Do you think people at 200k in sf are renting houses often? Houses with space for boats and campers?!
Sounds a lot like someone who likes to bitch about avocado toast. I wish people like this didn’t even post on HN - because it’s clear they don’t live in SF and don’t have a clue.
I'm interpreting "living in SF" to mean broadly within the SF Bay Area metro region, which would include much of the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Contra Costa. Arguably parts of Marin and Santa Cruz. For some of the longer commutes, Sonoma, Solano, Yolo, Sacramento, and San Joaquin.
Housing is scarce and expensive throughout the region. It's one of few economic hubs in the US let alone the state. And people have increasingly been priced out, or simply unable to find housing (including replacement after natural disasters).
"Choice" isn't a binary, or absent profound implications, opportunities, and/or consequences.
Ok Mr. Old Republican Avocado Toast hating throwaway troll account - wish you the best of luck in your distorted world. Your worldview is a sad deeply inaccurate take and I hope you realize that before its too late.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...
My suspicion, though, is that ballooning upper middle class salaries, combined with tax rates on the upper middle class lower than the Reagan era, really are a key driver of housing price inflation.
Investment firms, certainly, are a red herring: https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-blac... (“However, the idea that institutional investors are somehow largely to blame for the current housing market catastrophe is wrong and obscures the real problem. Housing prices have been skyrocketing due to historically low supply, low mortgage rates, and the largest generation in American history entering the market looking for starter homes.”).
The vast vast majority of homes in the US are owned by single family homeowners. And even if that wasn't true it wouldn't make much of a difference. Investment firms don't purchase homes to let them sit there, they purchase homes to rent them out. To whatever degree they're competing against single family homeowners they're just causing a small percentage of housing to shift from owner occupied to rental housing which should actually lower the cost of rentals.
Especially in NYC and SF the cause is very simple: local government has made it illegal to build enough housing to keep pace with demand.
Homeowners?
Mortagage generators & holders (that is, creditors)?
Developers?
What of markets with significant concentration of property ownership?
Or of commercial property owners, who can also skew zoning and construction / land-use patterns?
What of interest groups which can create red-tape nightmares even through good intentions by various mandates: setbacks, offsets, minimum clearances, ramp requirements, etc.
Podcats / video channels / blogs such as StrongTowns or Shane Philips (UCLA Lewsi Centre) are all great starting points for how a tangle of minimum requirements and/or prohibitions starts blocking any possible change from traditional urban-sprawl patterns. Most have observed that the highly-desireable dense development of older cities and towns (1870s -- 1950s, typically) simply isn't possible under current laws and regulations.
I'm generally a fan of regulation, but it's got to be good and effective, rather than simply piled on. As with software, code requires occasional refactoring.
The upper extremes of wealth are truly mind-boggling.
And for a family with a few million in nonliquid assets --- housing which they require to live, and investments earmarked for retirement --- a million-dollar cushion at the end of working life is not much.
(The fact that many people reach retirement with far less is not only a tragedy but a looming national catastrophe for the US.)
Why everyone and their dog says Fed is raising rates, when Fed just barely raised rates. Year over year inflation is 9.3% and Fed interest rate is only 1.5%, while it should be 2% points over inflation.
Do you really think we solved central banking in 1992 [1], and if only you were one of the central bank chiefs we would be fine?
As I like to say, we launch spacecraft based on models of celestial mechanics from the 1680s. Doesn’t make them wrong or disaster-prone. If you replied to someone that “oh you think celestial mechanics was perfected in the 1680s?”, then a lay reader should be equally confused as to why they should doubt the person you replied to.
If you have a reason some rule is invalid, post it, FFS. Don’t just say it’s from $YEAR. And definitely don’t rely on ambiguity as a way to look smart and unquestionable.
But of course, he’s a longtime poster, so I guess he gets a free pass.
Covid has been the greatest transfer of wealth upward in our lifetime, but sure it’s cheap personal debt.
how is higher rents fueling inflation? People paying higher rents (but on the same income) will have to forego some spending, thus reducing demand for some goods/services. So you'd actually expect that higher rents would drive _down_ inflation!
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...
if rents rise, and other CPI items also rise, then it's not true that this is "all else being equal". If other items also rise, it means that there's more money being spent, which implies that people have more money to spend, and thus, income must be rising.
If rent rises are offset by costs of other items going down, then CPI won't rise - and this would happen if the rent is consuming more proportion of income, and thus, less is left available for the other CPI items.
I dont know which situation we are currently in today. I suspect that income is rising, and thus, inflation is high. Increasing rates would push up rent, but not push up income, and thus the proportion of rent vs income grows higher and thus lower inflation (in the future).
Or they will increase costs; which is (1) people (labor) demanding higher wages or (2) business increasing the costs of good to cover rent costs. Given that rent is already the biggest cost and has been growing steadily, it may be the case the other spending areas have been dialed to a minimum already.
This doesn't make sense to me. Rate hikes decrease spending overall, so why would rent be any different?
And rate hikes make it harder to purchase a home, by raising the cost of them. That forces out of the home-buying market those who would have bought a home at the pre-hike rate … and forces them back into the rental market. Seems to me like demand goes up.
(Certainly, it makes it harder for landlords to acquire new properties, but I think corporations are going to weather it better than people — i.e., people will be forced out of that market before corporations.)
This ignores the realities of the market. A much lower rate than 11.3% (e.g. a 4%) would lead to a deep recession due to a shrinking money supply, which in turn would "counteract" inflation.
Rate hikes appear to be doing the opposite to rents here in NZ
Where did you see the $4k number? This looks like condo and co-op numbers mostly?
Cheap apartments are illegal and the legal ones don't get financed/constructed. There's a cutoff much higher than zero for housing costs everywhere in the US and I'd imagine it's pretty high in NYC.
No rent is really worth 5k/mo at that money you can buy a palace an hour or two out of the city.
In a way it's a rhetorical question but in another way it's not. Sure some will move there for a job but I'm sure not everyone is there just for work. Why do people put up with all that? Is it just the dream of living in NYC.
This is the DC map:
https://www.wmata.com/schedules/maps/upload/2019-System-Map....
If two friends move to the outer edges of different legs of the system, then your travel time and inconvenience multiplies a lot.
It is the same reason Manhattan is so popular compared to the outer boroughs:
People in manhattan can go west, south, east, north anytime anyhow with few or no connections. People in the outer boroughs have to many times go via Manhattan to get where they are going.
Now take a look at a map of a good subway system:
https://www.tokyometro.jp/en/subwaymap/
Paris is another good one:
https://www.ratp.fr/en/plan-metro
You can get from anywhere to almost anywhere without having to go to the middle of Tokyo.
The Tube is okay, but still has the problem of the lines not connecting once you get out of a certain radius:
Having said that, yes, it could still well be (too lazy to figure it out properly) that inside this city core the Paris Metro is still more dense than the Underground in London – but on the other hand beyond that, where the vast majority of inhabitants of the whole urban agglomeration of Paris live, you have similar problems regarding radial travel as elsewhere:
https://www.ratp.fr/plan-de-ligne/img/rer/Plan-RER-et-transi...
For me, I started to age out of it which made it less worth it. But it's more than a dream or "fomo" - it truly is the most enjoyable place to be in the US. I visit nowadays and it's just as magical as it used to be.
That no longer seems to be the case. Yeah, it is expensive here, but when I talk to my friends living in those other cities, they aren't paying that much less! Their rent is cheaper or they get more for the money, but it isn't a whole different ball game like it used to be.
You're paying for an accentuated CELL in urban hell.
Just because you have a "dope spot to show how urban your display is"
You dont have shit.
Cut off all your power, access to food stuffs, equipment, necessities (pwr, wtr, fd, transport)
Yeah, you have a death-trap.
In any disaster scenario, 99% of the people, environment and resources surrounding them are foreign.
You have no idea of what "price" means.
`I killed your mother in front of you because she was attempting to stop your father from doing X... but at what PRICE?`
Put a price on your [everything]
It might make sense if you're 24 and you're happy living with roommates in a $3k/month studio that has been converted into a 3-bedroom (which I have actually seen).
And if you want to have a family with 3 kids, then you'd better be pulling down $800k annually.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/area-...
You don't need to be original to do that kind of work, but it still needs to be done.
To meet the requirement of many landlords to earn in excess of 3x rent, one would have to earn 15k a month after tax, or 180k a year after tax. To earn 180k after tax in NY, you need to earn 300k pre tax.
Your Income Taxes Breakdown Tax / Marginal Tax Rate / Effective Tax Rate / 2021 Taxes* /
Federal 35.00% / 25.05% / $75,152
FICA / 2.35% / 4.70% / $14,104
State / 6.85% / 6.12% / $18,356
Local./ 3.88% / 3.73% / $11,193
Total Income Taxes / 39.60% / $118,804
Income After Taxes: $181,196
Retirement Contributions: $0
Take-Home Pay: $181,196
In investment banking, only VPs, SVPs, and directors start earning salaries of that magnitude: https://mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banker-salary/
The average annual household income in Manhattan is $143,680, while the median household income sits at $117,926 per year. Residents aged 25 to 44 earn $144,670, while those between 45 and 64 years old have a median wage of $126,981. In contrast, people younger than 25 and those older than 65 earn less, at $57,813 and $47,547, respectively: https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Manhattan-Dem...
> To meet the requirement of many landlords to earn in excess of 3x rent, one would have to earn 15k a month after tax, or 180k a year after tax. To earn 180k after tax in NY, you need to earn 300k pre tax.
The ratio is on pre-tax income. To pay $60K/yr in rent, you need 3x that in pre-tax income, or $180K/yr pre-tax. To earn $180K/yr pre-tax, you have to earn $180K/yr pre-tax, no calculator needed.
But that's household income not individual ?
Source: rented and invested in NYC apartments for more than 20 years.
Your yearly gross income (before any taxes, in aggregate, including other sources) must be greater than 40x the rent price. The example of 5k would require a gross income of 200k or higher, making it much easier to qualify for than what you're assuming. Is it a good idea to spend 5k on rent when you earn 200k is a different question.
For $5k monthly rent you need $200,000 pre-tax income.
What? I thought that in U.S. taxes would be so much lower than in EU!
In Bavaria, Germany, the income after taxes on €300,000 euros is €168.131,35 in the highest contribution bracket, and €178.251,07 in the lowest!
(Yes, NYC has a higher burden than most places, but the cities where many Americans live tend to have higher tax burdens in general, regardless of the politics of the leadership.)
The major difference is that instead of comprehensive social services, our taxes buy us the world's most expensive military.
Edit: I take that back, I see you used an effective tax rate including the standard deduction for a single filer instead of the marginal rate. This would be slightly better if you’re married filing jointly or have other deductions.
Prices on the coasts — like 5k rent — are astronomically high compared to prices in, say, the midwest. This shocks many people.
You could easily make the same comparison between the midwest and some non-developed nation. The difference is, nobody is shocked about how prices are higher in the USA midwest compared to an arbitrary less-developed country. Why is that exactly?
I loathe these insane prices, but my question is: could it be reasonable to view these high prices as a /good/ thing, as a sign of development?
Because there's no freedom of movement, legal or cultural, between the midwest and the large coastal US cities.
If the average salary in Manhattan would be 300k per year I think no one would care. But it is not.
Sure, they’re long distance apart, and drastically different, but that’s not on people’s minds.
The problem with these insane prices isn't really that you have disparity within the same country, but that a significant amount of people in these places cannot afford to live in there. You can't have a restaurant because you need to hire waiters but you can't pay waiters enough for them to pay the rent. So your service industry is disrupted or alternatively: people need to commute 1 or 2 hours to get to these jobs.
The reason it is not shocking that people in the midwest pay more than people in developed countries is because in the midwest most people have a relatively better life than most people in those developing countries. Whereas, say, a waiter living in San Francisco is not going to live a very different life from a waiter living in the Midwest who will, in turn, be living a much better life than a waiter in a developing nation.
So I think people are shocked because they realise their quality of life is not so different but there is a huge disparity in prices. Same country, similar quality of life, hugely different prices? This is definitely an anomaly!
Haven't you described a problem that fixes itself through market forces? Restaurant waiters move to other cities, restaurants (and millions of other businesses) close, city becomes less desirable, rents go down.
The reality is that trends in the rental market are very slow to reverse outside of the collapse of a bubble like in 2008. At the moment it is completely dysfunctional since nearly every city in the Anglophone world is experiencing both a housing shortage and massive speculation in the housing market.
Additionally peoples' housing decisions are much less fluid than their decisions on to say buy a particular product - the entire basis of their financial security is tied up in where they live. Just because rent is lower in a less desirable city that's no help if they can't find a decent job in the less desirable city, or if due to high costs where they already live they don't have the liquidity to finance a major move.
And that's not even getting into the social cost - uprooting yourself from your home can cost you resources that can't easily replaced, such as a social safety net in the form of family and close friends, potentially providing things like free childcare, help in emergencies, rides to work if you can't drive/can't afford a car, interest-free loans etc etc. Because of all this people will stick with unbearable rents until long after they stop being able to comfortably afford them.
Housing responds to market forces, but since the supplier has a far more captive market than most industries the time horizon for changes is very slow. It doesn't really help people to claim that the market will sort itself out so just put up with this misery for 10-20 years - especially when in the past 10 years the market has only become if anything more dysfunctional.
So with that backdrop, it seems the problem is people who think they're the same get shocked to find out they're not.
I do think that development on a global scale has given people the ability to move to places like Manhattan, and so development outside, as well as within could create the demand for higher rent.
Affordable apartments may not be developing at high enough rate to keep up with demand - but in a place like Manhattan, surely it is difficult to develop affordable housing.
A lot of talk of supply side issues, economics 101, etc in these threads.
Greetings from New Zealand, where just like so many other anglosphere economies we've been playing the low interest property speculation game for decades now. We got really, really good at it. The last couple of years saw 50% increases in property prices. Madness.
A funny thing's been happening in just the last six months though. Interest rates have gone up. 2.5% to 6% roughly. In the capital the number of homes for sale doubled compared with the year before. Prices are down 20% since the November peak.
Here's the interesting thing. While this crash is happening the number of rentals available has almost almost doubled and rents are going down. This is after tenants experienced the tightest rental market in decades just a year ago.
Where did all those new rentals come from?
Hint: there are two sides to supply and demand (no one really looks at the demand side too closely but that's where the real policy failures are).
It does seem like this year could bring a paradigm shift. We might have come to the end of the road with lowering interest rates and the social housing system appears to have totally fallen apart and been overwhelmed at the same time.
A decent property market correction will be good for everyone in the long run, but it's going to be difficult for a lot of people. It'll be interesting to see how middle New Zealand handles it when the crisis is at their door and not just 'out there' for more unfortunate people to worry about.
Perhaps also worth asking why Airbnb continues to host listings it knows are in violation of the law.
If only there was a website where you could search a geographic area and get the address of every airbnb there...
- no rules have to be followed
People who "come to the city for a couple of weeks" are at best visiting for work or family -- in which case, they can get work to subsidize the housing, or stay with the family they're visiting -- and are at worst tourists who are only visiting the city to have fun.
People's lives should be prioritized over fun affordability. Or work saving a buck when employees visit HQ in person. Or even the affordability of someone choosing to visit family.
The people who live in the city are the people who work there, bleed there, eat there, love there, etc. etc. etc. They are the city. The people who visit are just passing through. Livers should not subsidize visitors.
Vote there. Obviously, laws will (and should) side with voters.
That's an exaggeration. The alternative to airbnb is not no accommodation, it's better-regulated and therefore more expensive accommodation. Regulations force tourists to bear the costs of their trip (hotel taxes, etc.) and give the city some pricing power to control quantity of tourism.
The question of "Why do you think that they should have less rights that people that live in the city full-time?" doesnt really matter. Because the reality is that they have no power/sway over the politicians who are responsible for governing the city.
Would be absolutely fascinating if there was a tight correlation
Owners of rental units should be limited to a maximum number of units at any given time. For an individual I would say 5 to 10 units. For a corporation, I would want it limited to something like 50.
The goal being to enforce more competition and avoiding consolidation.
A terrible practice owners of rental units use is to keep available units off market in hopes of getting a better price in the short term future (typically 3-12 months). This practice should be made illegal. If you own rental units, you should be forced to list them when vacant.
Foreign ownership should also be seriously curtailed. Taxes should be extreme for units that aren't used except for 2 weeks a year. NYC should be for New Yorkers, Americans, immigrants, and people who choose to come to this city and create their life here, not for those who fly in on a private jet to stay 3 of the year. They can stay in a hotel.
I also don't believe owners of rental units should be able to own them indefinitely. Owners of rental units should be forced to sell to after they have recouped their investment and I'd say 3 times their investment cost. This creates enough upside (300% return) to incentivize purchasing of units to rent which thus incentivizes building.
After that point, the owner should be compelled to offer to renters the ability to buy their apartment or sell to another owner. Similar to how the velocity of money helps encourage economic activitiy, this is creating a velocity of housing.
I have no problem with individuals looking to create a passive income stream, and this should be allowed but up to a point. Similarly we need a system that will incentivize development of new buildings and construction, so there has to be enough upside opportunity down the stack from the owner to the builder to the banks financing it all. But it should be limited and real estate should not be treated as an investment grade security.
We need to build more units. It’s really that simple. Any regulation that leads to less units should be heavily reconsidered. Limiting the number of units someone can own would be horrible for increasing supply.
Please refute with data
Rents tend to follow property prices but they lag.
Manhattan also has a big problem with the type of property that gets built, being ultra-luxury property (that sells for >$5k/sq ft). Part of the demand for this is parking money but there are other reasons. Insurance is a big one thanks to the infamous "scaffolding law".
But the main point I want to raise here is that politicians, regardless of party (in the US at least), have zero interest in fixing this problem. Why? Because they're all bought and paid for by the capital-owning class. NYC politics in particular serves property developers first, police unions second and whatever third is nobody cares.
A budget shortfall is built into your existence. This keeps you showing up to work and diminishes your ability to negotiate (since walking away isn't an option). This creates a compliant workforce that doesn't hurt profits by, say, wages going up even with just inflation.
This is what neofeudalism looks like.
I think you've misdiagnosed the problem.
Key word: average. Always a dangerous - and clickbait friendly - metric.
Keep in mind...
This does not mean the top went up. Let's not be naive, the further you move up the financial / wealth food chain the less price sensitive you are. An increase on the upper end has few consequences.
On the other hand, you can move the bottom up and the average will also increase as increase. This is typically not the first thing that comes to mind but it's a reasonable idea. Unlike the high-end, the low end of the market is very price sensitive. People "living paycheck to paycheck" are far less likely to brush off increases. What happens when they can't make rent? That is The Question.
As things get uglier, those with not much will have nothing to lose. If we don't see voters react this November, they'll be primed for future Novembers. They also might decide that voting isn't going to make a difference. The number of people in this situation is significant. The math is simple.
The rest will be history.
Fortunately, I got to live in an insanely nice luxury apt (30% under market rent) for a year in 2019 while construction was being finished on an adjacent high rise. Even though I had an incredible view of the Hudson from the 26th floor on W57th street tbh that kind of luxury is overrated in my opinion. Finance people are also generally pretty boring and / or degenerate. That said - I'll always miss pre-covid New York.
Granted, every single person I know in finance got a huge raise / bonus last year so this increase isn't exactly surprising. Looks like Louis Rossman was right with his prediction of New York becoming a city where "only rich finance and tech workers can afford to exist".
Remember housing prices going down doesn't turn to a lower monthly cost (it keeps at pace typically). This is pure wealth loss (which is the point so we can cut inflation).
This is already happening in NYC (and this article is the outcome of that).
More details: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/11/business/economy/rent-inf...
Interest rates up. House prices down (-20% in my city). Number of available rentals up (almost doubled in some markets). Rental prices down (looks like around -10%).
It looks like underutilised housing is being flushed out due to high servicing costs. The jig is up.
Intuitively to me, if you make one thing harder to do (buy a house), unless people disappear or you suddenly build more rentals, they go in the other direction and create more strain there (renting).
Where are these people living if they can't buy but are renting less? Are both demands are dropping?
No one really considers it, but in a booming market you might be more likely to have a higher percentage of underutilised properties. When the market turns, those properties that were making money just by virtue of existing now lose money. A second home or a holiday home is one example. A house being slowly renovated is another. Plain old land-banked properties, etc.
Put it this way. As the property market has boomed, the proportion of properties owned by investors has increased. Because only investors will underutilise a property (homeowners occupy it by definition), the proportion of underutilised properties increased. When the market turns, capital gains look less certain, and holding costs increase, investors try to get out. The underutilised properties get flushed out.
governments are not interested in building new affordable property (at least in the UK).
so those of us who can afford to rent in these cities, but not buy, we should all leave these places...let the landlords default on their speculative house of cards.
i see remote working as the default option being a step in the right direction.
It would be lovely if the solution for skyrocketing rents in the big 2-3 urban centers didn't simply shift the problem to every other city, but there's no indication at all that will happen.
You need eminent domain from the government to fix this. At this point - it’s complete class warfare and landowners are fucking over many generations.
There are plenty of landowners that want to build. The issue is that NIMBYs have largely captured the city government and zoning restrictions have made new building mostly illegal. We jut need a government that legalizes new construction.
-- good quote from a good leader
Hope this inflation doesn't reach Toronto.
In Toronto they lease their basements too which is not seen much in NYC.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/23-05-2022/why-berlin-voted...
But their huge apartment would have been over $5K back in 1994.
Methinks this... might not end well.
The reality is that the daily commute, expenses, and crowds is worse than other places. Your daily life matters much more than the few weeks of the year that you can take your visitors around the city.
The fuel that drives people to live in NYC is propaganda from TV, films, and books.
It might be fun to live for a few years, but imagine raising a family with multiple kids in a tiny apartment. There are better ways to live than that.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/find.html?locat...
I guess it depends on your definition of central London.
for a one bedroom if your rent is above 2000 GBP you're living in a luxury apartment
Even in Kensington and Chelsea, average rent of £2.5K or even £3K GBP is only $3K-$3.5K USD these days.
https://www.homeviews.com/renting/average-rent-in-london-for...
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/when-private-equity-becom...
100% of this price hike is going into landlord's pockets, it's not a result of inflation.
Rent control is basically subsidizing existing grandfathered tenants by fleecing those new wishing to move in, without fixing the underlying housing shortage in any way.
The solution is always, always, having (building) more supply than the demand, yet nobody seems to get it.
What if there’s a feedback loop between building more supply and increased (induced) demand?
Let's not kid ourselves, real estate prices there are insane due to monetary policies, bureaucracy and NIMBYism restricting building/supply for a million reasons, and not due to the lack of real estate in that area.
It is easy to hand wave "more building supply", but that's a medium to long term solution. What do we do in the short term?
Are we supposed to just allow landlords to hike people's rent anywhere between 10-40% year-over-year forcing them to be displaced?
There needs to be some middle ground.
YES! It's the long term solution which if it were implemented in a timely manner in the past, would have saved us today, but even though we are in a mess today, it's not being implemented even to this day due to bureaucracy, NIMBYism and various political issues which beat around the bush, instead of saying it straight: "Build more today so we can live easier tomorrow!"
>What do we do in the short term?
Also, build more. If you don't build in the short term, there will be no long term.
> 100% of this price hike is going into landlord's pockets
This is true, and the solution to this is a land-value-tax and to use that to offset the city's sales tax, which disproportionately impacts the poor. Hell, it would probably be enough if the city just assessed property taxes more accurately. My TL was bragging about his home being assessed at $800k, when it's easily worth $2M.
Tax, safety, cost of living, dirtiness, noise... left after 27 years to the Cascades. Never been better.
With the right moralizing as your hammer, every problem becomes a convenient supportive nail for your story.
The proper response is for people to leave. If you drive across America, you'll find economically, depressed areas which have suffered from brain drain. Many aspire to attend an out of state college, go work in the Valley, join some VC-funded startup, megacorp, consulting firm, and strike it rich.
In all likelihood, you will (1) not strike it rich (2) have a worse quality of life on a cost adjusted basis (3) forgo developing a local community. Perhaps you'll enjoy more culture, but that might have been something that have developed in a smaller community had you not run off to a megacity.
Developing local communities is what America needs today. Just drive across this country and you'll find a tremendous amount of land coupled with tremendous economic depression. It's high time that price signals like rent drive people out of high cost of living areas into more depressed areas to promote broader-based growth.
When the only values that remain are the acquisition of capital, self-love, and fame, the majority of the population will elect to be in the places that present those possibilities to them, even if it requires making short-term decisions that harm them (absurd renting costs), because they believe they might make it work given time.
The other perspective that you need to consider is there are huge populations who simply will not consider living in the cities you mentioned. Women, for example, do not want to move to Ohio. Homosexuals would rather not live in Oklahoma. People who are not white can rule out a happy existence in 90% of American cities. It's true that a single, straight, white male with no children can pick up and move anywhere, but that's a relatively small fraction of the people.
Why in the world would that be the case?
“Whiteness“ is not the same thing as “white people”. There's nothing wrong with white people qua white people. (There's lots of things wrong with people as individuals, some of which are significantly more common among White people than other groups—e.g., sealioning about racial issues on internet fora—but that is a different issue.)
There's something in particular wrong with whiteness, which is grounded in identifying with, valorizing, and perpetuating shared experience as the oppressing class under the system of White supremacy.
I hadn't heard of that "sealioning" term before, and honestly I'm just even more baffled having Googled it. I guess I'm like the sealion in the comic, and the sealion is meant to be ... obviously in the wrong? But ... he's not? People are mouthing off about him and he wants them to explain themselves. Why is he in the wrong? You're mouthing off about me and people like me, where I can hear you, and you think you're just entitled to do that and nobody can say a word? If you have a problem with people like me, why don't you be a man and say it plainly? Instead of trying to squirm out of it with these silly little clique terms.
And "oppressing class under white supremacy"? What is this gobbledegook? My family is working class, I come from a long line of iron-mongers, my great grandfather had rickets because the smog blotted out the sun. They peddled this same race-war nonsense back in Czarist Russia, all the Elders of Zion conspiring to keep everyone down, it's a siren call of hatred. Snap out of it.
It's such an extraordinary claim people are using Paris (not an Eastern European capital) as a counter example, but let's not move the goal post.
That doesn't affect my initial claim though: indeed, the quoted Manhattan rents in the original article include existing contracts, including decades-old regulated rental contracts, and do not represent average prices of new rentals signed now.
Those prices would mean a software engineer in Europe would not even have money for rent after paying taxes, much less anything else.
Very much the story of lot of South European engineers. I used to pay 800 euros as rent when I was earning 1200 euros/month fresh out of university in Madrid.
In Warsaw you would get top tier places with private pool and cleaning service for no more than 2500 USD per month.
> If those numbers seem low — after all there are headlines about 40% rent increases — it's because the CPI measure includes renewal rents, the price you pay when you renew your lease.