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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

As a New Yorker myself I do wonder where this ends up. Me and my relatively well paid friends can afford to live here but we depend on a lot of lower paid folks for the city to function. Grocery store clerks, delivery drivers, coffee baristas, all that sort of thing. Maybe right now they have a half hour subway ride to work and that’s acceptable. But as they get pushed further and further out it’s going to break down somewhere, no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere.

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.

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Moreover artist communities flourish in urban spaces with cheap rent, like New York in the 1970s, Paris in the 1920s, Berlin in the 1990s and so on. Without that you just end up with Dubai or Monaco with shittier weather.

> Without that you just end up with Dubai or Monaco with shittier weather.

Well put, had to laugh.

Exactly. Wealthy residents should at some point realize that culture and entertainment venues/options are (often) created by lower income residents. If that disappears you get soulless places which are dramatically less fun to live in. Not to mention the service industry workers, who also need to come from somewhere.

How simple. Have any suggestions for implementation?

You can get all that online. So it might make sense to move these communities to somewhere very very cheap. Or even distribute them around.

>You can get all that online.

No, you can't.

Isn't it known as Tiktok?

Ah yes let’s go to each other’s massive meta verse homes (we all really live in those cell room apartments) to view NFT galleries.

Yeah lol, all these people think we are gonna do it online. Nobody wants to waste their life looking at that stuff for entertainment

Tell me you haven’t attended an artist commune without telling me you haven’t attended an artist commune. There’s very little like seeing someone’s performance art in person, or walking through an art installation with other artsy friends, or attending a workshop (the fees paying local artists).

Not even so esoteric as communes and performance art! Even 'normal' galleries, theater, music, are inherently analogue, physical experiences that don't translate to digital reproduction.

If they could get it online, they wouldn't be bothering to pay the premium to live in Manhattan.

That's a pretty grim scenario to imagine. Art and artists 'moved' off somewhere, while the putatively rich consume their produce through screens. All so real estate prices can climb higher?

My wife and I watched Chris Rock from the front row at the Comedy Cellar last summer. Total cost was like $75 with drinks. Absolutely incredible. I could watch every incredible stand up special available online and it wouldnt be anywhere close to that in person experience.

The big guys tour. It's the little guys that are interesting....

He was performing at the comedy cellar unannounced to a 50 person room...

Would it be such a bad thing if those artists move to, say, St. Louis and create the next big thriving art hub there?

Artists tend towards progressive locales.

See, for example, Marfa, TX.

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.

Why would an artist who wants an opportunity to live somewhere as exciting as NYC want to move to St. Louis? Even if St. Louis did manage to become an artistic hub, what would stop it from going through the usual gentrification cycle and becoming unaffordable to regular people the way Portland, Austin, Oakland (not to mention Bushwick, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy) have?

Might as well be in Chicago, which has probably the most reasonable CoL for any big city in the US.

Have you checked the recent rent surges? I'm not sure if it's the summer, but any hotel room in the loop is $300+ per night. Airbnb is just a scam there.

For an interesting explanation of why rents are affordable in Chicago, see this post from Tyler Cowen: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/ch...

"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."

Good for St. Louis, bad for NYC.

Indeed, be careful NYC.

It’s a place full of amazingly creative people but let the rents climb and you’ll end up like London.

Half hour? That's been debatable for some time now. As an example, it takes 20-30 minutes to commute from the Upper East Side to Midtown West, barring any subway issues.

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).

> 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").

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.

The waitlist for NYCHA apartments in incredibly long, or units set aside for low-income tenants in new developments. But regular rent stabilized apartments don't have wait lists, those just go on the market to get scooped up like any other place.

I'm a well paid software eng in nyc and I have a 30-45 minute commute to work, I think the people you're talking about are already commuting 60-90 minutes if they work in desirable Manhattan neighborhoods. But I agree with your message.

Hate to break it to you and your relatively high paid friends but that bodega cashier is spending an hour on the subway both ways from their current working class neighborhood. Furthermore, half of that persons salary is going to groceries due to inflation. There has to be a breaking point at where NYC will hit stagflation and hopefully all useless instagram coffee shops will be hit by "market conditions".

Also as a New Yorker, worth noting that many of the lowest paid workers are undocumented, and their flexibility to pursue higher paying work is limited. Sadly, this means that 60-90 minute commutes are not out of the ordinary.

Commuting 60+ mins on the subway is not terrible compared to some 3rd world countries. NYC is a full incentive driven place. It may seem inhumane to some, but that's just the way the world works. It's normal to have a super small apartment in HK or Tokyo, even if you're upper middle class. Just economic incentives at work.

> no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job

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.

Do the costs of goods and services need to go up?

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.

Ehhhh.

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.

…which in turn would make people less inclined to go there, driving the costs down, making it possible for the small shops to come back.

I’m surprised that Walmart et al haven’t started pushing for higher wages to kill competition- they must not care much about the smaller competitors.

McDonalds and Starbucks eat a wage increase in stride, small restaurants and businesses just go under.

It's because any potential of increased profit from less competition would still be less that the amount of profit they make by fleecing their workers.

>no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere

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.

As a Bay Area resident, I have been surprised by how far people will commute for minimum wage jobs. Just Monday, I think, our public radio station had their morning local topics show where the subject was the city of Stockton. There was a lengthy discussion about low-income commuters coming daily from Stockton to Palo Alto, to work in and around the tech campuses of SV. Personally, I have known people to come from Modesto and Merced, even one from the far side of Sacramento. Daily!

Given that, I'm just not sure where the breaking point is.

> But as they get pushed further and further out it’s going to break down somewhere

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.

"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."

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.

It can go a lot further before people revolt. We don't yet have Calcutta style slums or impoverished favelas like San Paulo.

Or course it'd be great if we weren't heading that direction but try convincing voting demographics that property values should be lower.

Longer and longer commute for your grocery store workers. See fig. 1 (San Francisco)

> 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.

Which shouod decrease the number of people living there, putting a limit on cost growth.

Isn't it a big talking point that wages aren't a large component of costs anyway for these services/goods provided by near minimum wage workers?

It's all debt which inflation will wash away and the landlords will come out on top.

Wages will rise

> no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere.

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...

That's an ... interesting take.

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.

It's as cruel as life. Pretending like there aren't any negative learned behaviors that cause vicious cycles from poverty is naive. When all you know is suffering, the human mind has to come up with some justification for it, some reason it's "worth" continuing on. Nobility is often that conjured reason.

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.

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