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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

It's astonishing to think of the fact that NYC's total population is down from 8.8 million in 2020 to 8.3 million. That's a steep drop.

With merely 48 percent of office space occupied, and desks in the so-called occupied offices partially empty due to people working from home a few days every week, it's not hard to imagine that the service sector is hurting: restaurants, cleaners, shop owners etc. Many of the people employed in these jobs lived in the other NYC boroughs.

It's not unlikely that the NYC population will decline further in the coming years.

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As someone also from another densely populated city (Mumbai), such things feel like absolute bubbles. Housing is only as valuable as the demand outstrips the (limited) supply.

In the past builders in Mumbai would hold off selling flats at lower prices (apartments in US English I think) until the market caved in. They were almost always successful.

NYC landlords do the same thing. Number of apartments rented has cratered while prices are rising, which means they are doing it now.

How is rent setting record highs, in spite of the population drop?

If the population is dropping because lower income workers are leaving, average rents will go up as occupancy goes down.

Think of it this way - you probably won’t move to a cheaper house just because one becomes available- but you might move to a nicer one of the financials worked.

Working class people are also more likely to have multiple roommates. So if one roommate leaves, maybe the others can no longer afford the full rent so they move too, now the landlord white washes the walls and jacks rent and it goes to a single high income individual who can afford three bedrooms themselves in manhattan.

> Brokers say the lack of apartments for sale, due to higher interest rates, have forced many would-be buyers to rent

Also, rents numbers are usually not given after adjusting for inflation. It makes breaking record a phenomenon you’d expect, similarly how Hollywood keeps constantly breaking its blockbuster records.

In addition to the other comments: high vacancy and landlords who'd rather hold out for prices to come back up. They should be taxed into oblivion.

Not unprecedented. The city didn't surpass their 1940 population until 2000. The population of Manhattan peaked around 1910.

What is so interesting is that back then, you needed to live on Manhattan or very near Manhattan if you worked there. Subways, trains, new suburbs, bridges and tunnels, and cars, enabled people employed by Manhattan businesses to live further away, like further out in the boroughs and towns on Long Island, upstate New York, and New Jersey. Now, the Internet and acceptance of remote work enables people employed by Manhattan companies to live even further away.

The nature of the businesses also changed dramatically, and a lot of that working class work from the late 1800s and early 1900s simply doesn’t exist anymore in manhattan. The highline exists because the industry that brought that elevated freight rail line into the city in the first place no longer exists. It would probably be very worthwhile to redesign the entire transit system today, considering the bulk of it was designed 100 years ago to serve a working population that no longer exists on their commute to jobs that also no longer exist.

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