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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

NYC vacancy rates are single digit, while Shanghai is around 15% and Nanning is around 25%. It’s incomparable. Imagine if 25% of the apartments in NYC were completely vacant.

https://landgeist.com/2021/11/04/housing-vacancy-rate-in-chi...

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Sounds absolutely great, since when is having a surplus of basic needs a bad thing? if a country produces too much food, water or electrity everyone thinks its great, but somehow housing is different?

What would majority of NYC residents who rent think of that market?

since when is having a surplus of basic needs a bad thing?

When there was economy destroying debt used to create it and people aren't buying.

The problem is debt and you are only looking at the comment you replied to, not what the thread is talking about.

that overcapacity is built on credit to developers and home buyers. Most of these loans extimate a bubble level price of decades of earnings of average household (should be 2-5 times your income), justified by the old speculative rush to flip the property to the next speculator few years down the line. The toy is broken and a lot of families cant even afford the interest on the loan. Banks and regulators are freaking out. Developers are also overleveraged, sold a lot of offplans properties that the bank cant even seize bcs these projects never got built/finished.

First, having extreme excesses of anything is a waste. Imagine a city where 25% of the houses were abandoned. That’s Detroit. It’s not good. It’s blight.

Second, they are being financed in a Ponzi scheme with rents that are so high no one can rent them. They aren’t really built to be lived in. They’re being built to be built to drive debt investments.

Third, if you produced way too much food, it rots. If you produce too much electricity, it is wasted into the ground. Water into the ocean. That’s pointless and a waste.

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