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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Physical space in desired locations is limited. Aka each marginal spot will be higher in price with the last spot having a price of infinity.

So yes as long a location is desirable (think Manhattan or Shanghai) , sky is the limit in terms of prices.

Skyscrapers can help a bit by making this 2d problem to 3d but still there are limits.

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Skyscrapers are very expensive to build. What would actually help is allowing ~10 story buildings everywhere in the five boroughs with a fast and simple permitting process.

Geology factors into this. There is a reason only downtown and midtown have skyscrapers.

There is a reason, but it is not geology. https://www.6sqft.com/the-bedrock-myth-the-evolution-of-the-...

To elaborate; downtown and midtown are the two transport nexuses in New York City where most if not all suburban labor markets are easy to access, and employers want to have their pick of employees.

NYC is an archipelago separated by large bodies of water, and it is hard to avoid going through Manhattan to go between the western suburbs, the northern suburbs/Bronx, and the eastern suburbs/Brooklyn/Queens. What few links exist are always horribly congested.

That wasn’t always the case - there used to be street cars between Brooklyn and Queens for example.

Geology is the reason there aren’t skyscrapers in the west village etc though.

The streetcars were equivalent to today’s buses, and were about as fast. Brooklyn and Queens is still only about 4m of the 21m total population of the metro area, so it’s still a small share. Even Nassau to Brooklyn or Queens takes overly long and/or is too expensive.

The West Village is actually not very well connected transport wise, and historically the waterfronts were docks-oriented. Downtown is the historic core where pre-bridges, all the ferries went, and where many bridges still exist. Midtown is the location of the rail terminals, so a suburbanite can walk to their job without having to pay a second fare. (IIRC Grand Central is where it is because at some point the city banned surface-level steam trains below.)

Yes, but why has downtown and midtown always been the two main population centers? Because that’s where the exposed bedrock is. Geology.

Transportation.

Downtown is where all the ferry landings were, and where a lot of the bridges were built after.

Midtown is where the rail terminals stop, so suburbanites can quickly walk to their jobs instead of paying a second fare for subway/bus/taxi.

There is no correlation between bedrock depth and height in Manhattan, as explained in the article of the grandparent comment. In fact, most of Downtown is landfill.

Manhattan is not the world. Also downtown/midtown were the center of New York before skyscrapers.

I know. I’m not from NYC anyway. But it was the grandparent that started talking about the five Burroughs.

I think your causality is backwards. Why has downtown and midtown always been the two main population centers, and not one continuous city? Because that’s where the exposed bedrock is, with some swampy midlands in between in the West Village. Geology.

Not if you keep allowing investors to buy up all the new housing. Vancouver did this: build, build, build and investors bought, bought, bought.

Nearly 50% of all new housing built in Vancouver is bought up by investors. To purchase a place in Vancouver you 10x the local median salary.

Because they're not building enough.

Investors buy housing because there's not enough of it, making it valuable. It wouldn't be a good investment if we built enough.

There are not nearly enough homes yet.

> These 12 cities alone say they will need a total of more than 250,000 new homes built over the next five or 10 years to meet demand from current residents who are inadequately housed and future residents who will move to Metro Vancouver.

https://vancouversun.com/business/real-estate/many-new-homes...

Living in Vancouver, 10x seems like a very low multiplier.

Investors are the ones who finance new housing. You want the investors to be purchasing land and financing new construction.

Unfortunately there tends to be a lot of interventions which make building adequate housing difficult. But remote work has allowed more developer friendly places like Texas and Florida to attract net migration.

Austin is number one (or close to) for new housing permits and every few months I see the city council changing ordinances to make it even easier. Imagine San Francisco did this 20 years ago instead of stifling every effort to build something?

Blaming developers is one of the reasons housing is expensive. Yes, they make money, but they do it because they’re providing a good that’s in demand. Thats how a market based economy works. When things are in short supply, price goes up which incents new supply/competition.

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