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Comment by actionablefiber | Hacker News Reader

> As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities.

I would argue that the prices reflect at least an incredibly persistent demand to live in those cities.

Just for different reasons than before. For instance, since the pandemic many cities have invested heavily in bike infrastructure and pedestrianization. E-bikes have become extremely popular. And as the post-COVID reopening has progressed, people have been organizing local hobbyist meetups, many of them having acquired those hobbies during the depths of the pandemic.

There is a huge lifestyle appeal to living in cities, and it will not go away anytime soon. Cities need to recognize that both the massive increase in residential demand and the massive plunge in commercial demand are incredible opportunities to differentiate themselves by converting their dead-after-6pm business districts into thriving, walkable mixed-use hubs.

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Great! Then we don’t have to fill the city with offices and we can have places for humans instead of employees.

Right, well, see, the problem is we already did the former instead of the latter, and it costs billions of dollars to reverse that.

Ok - well, residential in Manhattan is $150/square foot. Commercial $85. So… seems worth it?

And billions of redevelopment investment? GDP and employment!

Where did you find those prices? NYC is so insanely diverse about living/office, I find it hard to quote something here. Average or median is mostly meaningless.

internet commenters are allowed to spitball, obviously a 800 sq ft 1 bdrm can go from anywhere between a quarter mil to 2 mil depending on the neighborhood and the view, OP's point is that converting to residential is a net positive for the real estate owner.

A few real estate trade websites I quickly googled. The $85 for commercial was “top tier” Manhattan commercial office space (the other tiers ranged to over half off IIRC) and the residential was a general average of inventory in 2022. Certainly for my dissertation I would have cleaner references, but I controlled a bit on the supposition by picking P90 vs avg to give the other side the statistical advantage.

I think we'll have to see what the demand for living in big/dense cities looks like in light of at least somewhat reduced demand for living there because of employment. Certainly, there's some demand--especially among younger people in the college-educated demographic.

But it's less obvious what tradeoffs people make in general to the degree that employment isn't part of the equation. I certainly never lived in a city when my company was located well outside.

Just, Devil’s Advocate.

But the whole reason we’re even having the discussion is because of the evidence that more people are remote working. So I’m assuming we’re talking about people who might have to go to their office at max two or three days a week in the extreme cases? Not sure how that will create enough of a market drain to make NYC, Boston, or San Fran living affordable?

I think the suggestion to reclaim business districts is the only rational way forward with any kind of chance of lowering prices. There just don’t seem to be enough people willing to live outside the city to bring down prices. If anything, everything price-wise points to market demand increasing.

2-3 days/week isn't daily but still qualifies as pretty frequent. From first-hand experience, I still don't want more than an hour commute. Of course, I don't need to live right in the city for that but, especially in the absence of a good commuter rail system (which those specific cities have to at least some degree), you can't move that far out.

Depends what "in a city" means. Some people might say I live in the 'burbs, but my postal address still has the city's name in it.

When talking about "living in the city" one generally didn't talk about the postal address, but rather the density.

Oh. Well in that case the vast majority of Americans live in a metro area so I guess they do like the city.

What city? It is probably not very dense.

I don't know if it's the city he's talking about, but by landmass, about half of San Francisco is the burbs.

I'm sincerely curious, and not disagreeing with you: what definition of suburban are you using, and which parts of San Francisco?

Not the person you were asking, but to me, "suburban" is not defined by density, but by how walkable an area is. Even relatively low density neighborhoods can be urban under this definition as long as residential isn't zoned far away from commercial districts and everything is within a few minutes of walking or an easy bus ride. Suburban is when having a car provides an enormous QoL boost, but isn't strictly necessary. And rural is when a car is absolutely required to survive.

These are fairly car centric definitions. But considering the car enabled the suburb in the first place, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use it as the metric.

> But considering the car enabled the suburb in the first place, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use it as the metric.

The first suburbs were a result of trains.

But I think the modern suburbs (in the USA) were more of a "white flight" phenomenon, enabled by cheaper construction methods and perhaps a confluence of a few other post-war trends/policies.

White flight swelled the population of suburbs but they were already substantial. I think it would be a misleading picture if you just choose one point in a continuous process and start from there.

We don't need to create the universe to bake an apple pie from scratch. I agree that a history of the suburbs might begin before WWII, but the general concept of needing to start at the beginning is a slippery slope. I'd say nearly all histories must pick an arbitrary start, mid-stream.

In that case I recommend the commuter train, which created inner-ring suburbs which still exist. Not exactly ancient history anyway.

Technical "car" is short for "carriage" and trains have carriages.

Interesting, TIL. I still think modern suburbs are defined by their relationship to cars, not trains.

I think there is still, even now, a difference between these older, inner-ring suburbs with many people commuting to work by train (and generally smaller plots and the like) and newer outer-ring suburbs or exurbs (or just rings around newer cities) which are more car-focused from the start.

Areas with lots of single family homes where you're more likely to drive to go somewhere than not. Much of sunset, much of richmond, twin peaks, bayview/hunters point, lots of the places around 280 between 101 and 1.

Oh how I wish the suburbs I grew up in could have been as diverse and interesting as those SF "suburbs".

Thus my point about how ambiguous "in the city" is.

Suburban is where it’s unreasonable to walk to school, the doctor or a convenience store.

Only in the US.

Wait, are you saying:

    Suburban is where it’s _reasonable_ to walk to school, the doctor or a convenience store.

If yes, then where?

Or are you scoffing at US suburbs?

Depends which part of the city.

It's too crowded, nobody wants to go there anymore.

I mean at some point do People stop and think, “maybe not everyone thinks like me?”

Some people like crowds. Crowds are fun. Parties are fun. Food is fun. Community is fun. Or not. It’s great we have freedom to choose.

Sometimes I wonder, and then I look and see that people vastly underreport how dense/urban the areas they live in are and I feel that maybe many of the people claiming to feel so different are not being sincere.

Sometimes I wonder, people say they don’t like crowds but are still not living in the wilderness and I feel that maybe many of the people claiming to feel so different are not being sincere.

If you conceive of living in a city as only being in the middle of Manhattan or Shinjuku or wherever then yes I guess what you're saying makes sense, not everyone wants that.

A lot of that demand is for the house/apartment as an investment vehicle or for the idle rich for a party pad. Alternatively, it is a place for people directly or indirectly on welfare of some kind to be funneled to. Those two uses have become increasingly more prominent in US cities. You have to be addled in some way to think these cities are for middle class people, which is why many of them have seen historically massive waves of middle class outmigration in recent years.

Is an American city for you? Are you a( indigent; b( a literal aristocrat or rich enough to be one; or c( a "financial domination" enjoyer who desires to give everything they earn to some combination of landlords and governments when you are not giving all your time to your boss? If you answered yes to any of the above, an American city is for you. If you are a working stiff, the city doesn't want you anyway.

This take does not square in the slightest with my actual experience in the DC area. I make a middle class income, pay a fairly modest rent, and have an active social life and tons of hobbies that are enabled by the trappings of city living - density of educated people, easy mobility on a bike, a wealth of pleasant public spaces.

I would argue that the prices reflect at least an incredibly persistent demand to live in those cities.

Decreasing demand for an asset that has a fixed cost to the supplier (mortgage payments) pushes up prices just as much as increasing demand.

Mega yacht costs bazilions.

Yes, lot of people would not reject idea of having it, but at the same time actual demand (i.e. actual number of people who would think price is worth it, is quite lower compared to spagetti which is much cheaper but has many more buyers)

All in all. high price does not necessarily mean huge demand.

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