I want a city, not a museum
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Over a 45 year period, 1971-2016, 56 of Toronto’s 140 Official Neighbourhoods had smaller populations in 2016 than they did in 1971 (e.g. The Annex). More than 70% of Neighbourhoods in what was formerly Old Toronto, fall into this category of de-densification. 80% of the City of Toronto’s population growth have come from 20 Neighbourhoods.
First of all, NYC is not an island. It's 5 different boroughs, four of which are spread across 3 islands with one connected to the mainland. Manhattan is just one borough; it's not the biggest by size or population by a long shot (that would be Queens).
Second: I don't know why you think this. Manhattan's grid plan was produced in 1811 by a handful of leading citizen types[1]. It's worth noting that utilities in the sense we mean today weren't really a thing they could plan for in 1811. But, as far as I know, the city's grid really hasn't been an impediment to the city's utility system, besides trash collection.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811
Now -- funny thing: With the PATH, you can get into the financial district faster from Newark than you can from Brooklyn. So the obvious next thing to do is to gentrify Newark. That's been slow though -- money still remembers the 1967 riots.
If you want to change things, start by rezoning the post-WWII single-story / two-story detached housing suburban hellscape. That's where you can make a real difference.
If we're serious about building a dense New York that people want to live in for the next 500 years, then we should probably be looking at building another half dozen subway lines into Southern Brooklyn and Eastern Queens.
1) If you expand housing, demand will go up. People fill jobs, and add demand for local businesses, enable growth in exporting businesses' headcounts, creating more opportunities for others.
2) If families can afford to live somewhere dynamic, then many of their children will want to stay, increasing the population.
My point is simply that noting that 500,000 new homes could be created is important. But even better would be a guide to how growth can continue, density can continue to go up, in an orderly, practical and aesthetically acceptable way.
Otherwise you end up with the same problem a few years later. (Or more likely, you never actually solve the problem even temporarily. Because the housing growth doesn't keep up with demand growth.)
The reasons for this is density itself is valuable. So dense places either get very expensive, or keep getting denser.
I live in Lisbon where we have the same problem as lots of cities - cramming everyone into one square mile. Instead of waiting for some magical solution I wish we got to work building some more city to live in.
Unless you want to have a livable city, and want nature nearby, yes sure, just grow, and grow, and grow. Btw, Shangaians f.e. want a word with you.
Perhaps Lisbon, as many other cities, should impose a limit on newcomers / population and area growth. It would help conditions and feel a lot.
In seriousness though, I do not believe we should shelter existing residents (read homeowners) from the economics they impose on newcomers. Removing tax breaks (Prop 13) would go a long way.
Also in the case of Tokyo, well its Japanese, the housing is tiny (relatively), and dense. There is also a culture of tear it down and build new, unlike the states. (Japanese housing is interesting in this regard, all value is in land not the home on it)
Shenzhen is just sprawling new construction. It will be interesting to see what that looks like in 10 or 50 years. I suspect much of it will be falling apart due low construction standards, low will to maintain standing structures, 100 year lease terms not actual ownership.
Us, Japan, China, and your country of Portugal are all facing declines in population (with the US propped up by immigration). Does building more make sense? Is the decline in construction a harbinger of what's to come? It's going to be an interesting few decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boroughs_of_New_York_City
NYC is not "on an island" either.
But the reason people want to be in the city, is what makes it a city: its density. Even if a city has equal density everywhere, the dynamic place where everyone actually goes becomes the place everyone wants to be near. So prices there will go through the roof if it can't be made more dense.
There are only two dynamic solutions to the circle of density creating demand for more density. They are best used together:
1) Continuous spacial density growth.
2) Continuous temporal density growth. Keep improving the speed and convenience of movement throughout the city.
There is no static, or fixed timescale, solution.
I left Singapore in 2003 because it was getting ridiculously dense. Since then it's only gotten worse. The last time I went back it wasn't the city I knew but a doppelganger with a suspiciously main land Chinese accent.
The author has one thing right though. Transforming NYC into a place where nobody would want to live is a good way to make it more affordable.
One of those (Mast 2019) specifically tracked individual persons to confirm that the mechanism of action is the wealthiest tenants moving into the new building and freeing up units in the slightly-older buildings, where slightly-less wealthy tenants then move in from even older buildings, etc., lowering rents all down the chain.
If the goal is to lower rents down the chain, why not just build more units at every price point? That way everyone, not just the wealthiest, will get new units and not be subjected to old stock in potentially older / worse neighborhoods.
Because zoning prevents that. This is a highly-idealized thought experiment, but imagine a housing market where there's demand for 100 luxury units, 100 cheaper semi-luxury units, 100 still-cheaper middle-class wage earner units, and 100 cheap working-class units. Then imagine that local zoning regulations will only permit 100 new units to be built, and more that that will prompt voter revolt. Which 100 units will be built? Only the luxury ones, obviously. Nobody's going to build cheaper units if it's a mutually-exclusive choice between building cheap ones and the expensive ones.
Zoning is why you only see expensive new housing get built: it restricts how much can be built, so developers respond by only building that which gives them maximum returns. You know how quarterly sprint planning for software takes every feature request, orders them by priority, and then draws a line under how many man-hours worth of work your team can do? Developers do the same thing: they rank development proposals by profitability and then draw a cutoff line under what current zoning will let them do. Loosen these requirements and just let people supply the required demand, and you'll start seeing the units at every price point that you want.
Where I live, building affordable housing for low and medium income is at the moment financially unattractive, so it isn't undertaken in the numbers required to meet projected demand. Offering luxury housing for the small segment of the population able to afford it, won't make a difference.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/german-housing-shorta...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/german-home-building-...
To the extent that someone in a less expensive form of housing vacates it to take newly built luxury housing, it seems like the marginal effect from that luxury unit existing is to increase the supply of total housing and of more moderately priced housing by exactly one unit.
(To the extent that new luxury housing exclusively attracts outsiders to migrate into the city who otherwise wouldn't, it doesn't help. I doubt that this exclusivity holds.)
In any event, abundant housing is essential to filtering taking place. If there is scarcity, for example, if there's already a pent up demand for luxury units, then those units can be quickly occupied without anybody vacating the older units, and then the price won't go down. It might even go up if low-cost housing was torn down to make room for the luxury units.
It's like when you target funds in a large organization. Yes, your $100 donation goes to, say, fund program X, but money is fungible and the org can just pull $100 of its general funds out of program X and put it in program Y.
Housing is of course less perfectly fungible than dollars, but at the end of the day almost all units of housing house one (1) household, and that household needed somewhere to go, and using this unit of housing for this household frees up more housing for another household.
I agree about the city's existing obligations as well as the warehousing problem; the state of the average NYCHA building is deplorable.
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/york-city-lost-5-3-100000482....
That's not completely accurate. Even your own link includes part of 2022 which is the most recent full year for record keeping. And during 2022, net outmigration from the city totaled approximately 200k, balanced by a natural increase of ~30k, so net total = ~170k.[0] And while I haven't yet seen estimates for just the city for our current year, NY State lost an additional ~100k in 2023 [1].
Sure there's migrants to the city, but for all the hue and cry, they are arriving at the rate of about 100k a year [2], which for a city the size of New York wouldn't necessarily stem the tide of people moving out. It might even make it worse if the influx of migrants is influencing longtime residence on the fence to finally pack up and join the relatives in Florida.
I agree that the 500k estimate is likely to be revised up or down to some extent but it's almost certain it's still going to be a loss of hundreds of thousands.
[0] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-15-2024...
[1] https://www.fox5ny.com/news/new-york-state-population-2023
[2] https://nypost.com/2023/09/21/new-york-city-has-taken-in-950...
> It might even make it worse if the influx of migrants is influencing longtime residence on the fence to finally pack up and join the relatives in Florida.
This is anecdotal on my part, but I see a lot of Texas and Florida plates in my neighborhood, on cars that have been parked on the same block for months. Pretending to live in another state is one of the oldest tax dodge tricks in the city; I expect the city and state's departments of taxation to further scrutinize this as revenue priorities shift.
When one's building has lots of problems, moving to a better place isn't as easy as it used to be. The current market rents keep going up (and seem more coordinated in price increases than they used to), so most of the alternatives at a doable price bump are also old buildings, sure to share some of the same problems to discover. (Plus there's high one-time moving costs, when upfront here is conventionally the legal maximum of 3x monthly rent, plus the expensive professional movers that are a good idea in a city of narrow old staircases and difficult parking. The high one-time cost for each move makes playing Old Apartment Building Roulette risky, since you might be stuck with new showstoppers next time.)
Old apartment building problems here include rats indoors, roaches, bed bugs, mold, leaks, noise pollution, peeling lead paint, lead in pipes, asbestos, various toxic resides from many decades, water outages, heat outages, poorly controlled antique central heat, failing structures, fire hazards, burglaries, fumes from neighbors' drug use and sometimes production, etc. (I've lived in buildings here that had almost all of these, at once.)
The city does keep building a lot of dense nice, new apartments, but with income restrictions targeted at families near the poverty line. People above that level tend to either be wealthy, to live outside of the close-in cities, or to pay small fortunes but still have roommates. Or, frequently, they move to the SF Bay Area, NYC, or Austin, so that they get better lifestyle for their money. Almost everyone with whom I went to grad school fled the Boston area shortly after graduation, for one of those more attractive cities.
The big universities have real estate investment sidelines, and maybe at least that facet is happy that most educated alumni leave the area, rather than putting down roots and showing up to zoning hearings. People will still come to the universities, to study and work, because of the brand prestige, rather than the lifestyle.
I'm here in an old (1926) brick house in Cambridge and we have noise and might have asbestos inside the old boiler. (And surely have toxic residues from various items, but so do brand new buildings, possibly in greater amounts.) Noise is a people and density problem more than an age of building problem.
The rest of that list of problems can be addressed by proper maintenance/upkeep/pest control (and asbestos can as well, but intact asbestos is best left undisturbed if not required to be disturbed). Lots of rental properties are probably not maintained the way an owner-occupant would maintain their property; that's hardly shocking.
But even large old apartment buildings that became owner-occupied condos (without extensive building-wide renovation) have problems that are nonviable to solve, or don't get solved for complicated reasons.
I know one such building, where units are valued higher than new McMansions most places, and monthly condo fees alone are more than rents in most cities-- yet the building is still overrun with problems. IIUC, the problems are a mix of: prohibitively expensive without gutting the building, problems that could in theory be solved with assessments on top of regular fees, and a lot of corner-cutting and incompetence on what should be smaller costs (because many owners already overextended and alarmed, by increasing fees and problems, and some crazy politics worse than the new subdivision HOA pettiness we read about).
I get the impression that the sheer cost of things has people with properties worth a fortune making sacrifices and tradeoffs not unlike we've heard of for different socioeconomic classes as "it's expensive to be poor".
Best of luck to everyone currently playing the overpriced old housing stock lottery. :)
It sounded like the reason wasn't just the usual skilled trades preferences for kinds of work (e.g., new construction), but rather, yet another unpleasant surprise of old rotting apartment buildings.
> Forty percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today.
Frankly, even the NIMBYs should be concerned by stuff like this. Political bodies have this strongly held belief that by banning what is known to be possible, something better will spring up instead. I'd bet places that work harder to leave people alone turn out to be more desirable places to live. Western powers seem to have a real problem where building things is often illegal in practice. That bodes poorly for the future. People should be allowed to build stuff.
1. Reconstruction and refurbishment of the bridge, where look and capacity would remain same. However it would require another reconstruction in few decades in perpetuity because structure is essentially broken and reconstructions would be jut keeping the bridge on living support for a little bit longer. Historical conservatives were very much in favor of that one
2. Ripping old bridge apart (except pylons) and building a new one for same amount of money as solution 1) and without a need of perpetual reconstruction, just regular maintenance. Luckily this solution has won.
https://english.radio.cz/rail-bridge-connecting-vyton-and-sm...
Two of the neighborhoods mentioned (the UWS and Brooklyn Heights) are some of the wealthiest in the city.
They will even fly in their own workforce.
Maybe a living history museum like Colonial Williamsburg.
Obviously we'll never move to this model, because it would depress property values.
No it isn't. That's just looking for something easily spotted to pin the blame on, to appear smart during dinner table discussions.
The author seems to have a laser focus on this one specific point without having done any research into housing issues, which is a broad spectrum of subjects.
Attacking these "museum pieces" won't solve the problems being mentioned. Increasing population in an area also comes with its own set of issues but no mention has been made of those.
This is a pretty poor quality submission even for HN and NYT.
1. The multitude of empty commercial buildings that could house people but can't because building codes require apartments to have windows. Sorry, but affordable housing doesn't mean you get a window. Does this mean we eliminate all building codes? No it means we relax them so unused space gets used.
2. Apartments intentionally kept empty by real estate investors or pied-a-terres.
Item 1 is the biggest offender and is a huge problem for NYC.
They'd rather build luxury apartment buildings for the ultra wealthy, because that's where the highest margins are. The regulations don't allow building them without offsetting it with new affordable housing projects, but the developers are skirting the regulations by any means necessary, and the regulations aren't enforced with enough teeth to make them comply.
Funny how that happens when legislators depend on campaign contributors from the very same people/companies they're supposed to regulate.