David Byrne: If the 1% stifles New York's creative talent, I'm out of here | Hacker News Reader

David Byrne: If the 1% stifles New York's creative talent, I'm out of here

theguardian.com

47 pointsjamesbritt90 comments

I think New York should welcome the uber-rich with open arms. NY's history is all about 1%ers, like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Bloomberg.

But what is deleterious to the feel of the city, in my view, is the Dubai-ization of the real-estate market. Entire buildings are empty. Apparently the global elite buy and sell New York real-estate like they do oil futures: not to use but as an investment. These folks aren't citizens, like the Billionaires I mentioned above, but transients.

The New York Times had a good article on these empty buildings earlier this year: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/nyregion/paying-top-dollar...

> “I was living on the 16th floor, and I was pretty much the only one there,” said Charlie Attias, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group who rented an apartment at the Plaza for three years and has handled many transactions in the building. “We had the occasional visitor — I mean, the occasional owner — once in a while. Actually, when we saw somebody, it was a big thing,” he added. “Oh wow, somebody’s in my hallway!”

> I think New York should welcome the uber-rich with open arms.

> But what is deleterious to the feel of the city, in my view, is the Dubai-ization of the real estate market.

OK, but that's being done by rich people buying properties as investments.

>>“I was living on the 16th floor, and I was pretty much the only one there,” said Charlie Attias, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group who rented an apartment at the Plaza for three years and has handled many transactions in the building. “We had the occasional visitor — I mean, the occasional owner — once in a while. Actually, when we saw somebody, it was a big thing,” he added. “Oh wow, somebody’s in my hallway!”

I'm pretty sure this is just me, but that sounds awesome. I love the idea of having an entire high-rise to myself and whoever I'm living with.

>NY's history is all about 1%ers, like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Bloomberg.

Not New York's creative history, which is largely based in gradual urban decay and eventually the default. Affordable housing for artists near affordable venues for art are what creates art (if that's not too obvious.)

which is largely based in gradual urban decay and eventually the default.

Indeed. NYC in the '70s and '80s was a dangerously magical (and magically dangerous) place.

Some good resources:

VH1's (no, seriously) "NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1080761/)

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (http://www.amazon.com/Love-Goes-Buildings-Fire-ebook/dp/B005...)

I'd be interested in anyone can recommend good books or movies about the NYC art scene of the late '70s or '80s. (I've seen Downtown 81; it's good, but not a documentary. It does capture the downtown NYC of that time, though.)

The whole loft scene was a result of squatting in empty industrial facilities, thanks to economic downturn.

“In the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, no golf courses, no subdivisions. We thought of the place as a free city, where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter. Downtown we were proud of this, naturally.”

Luc Sante, Low Life.

Interview here: http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_sante

He's almost correct. :)

Perhaps surprisingly, there's a golf course in the Bronx, up in Van Courtlandt Park.

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Van+Cortlandt+Park+Golf+Cours...

It's not new:

"The Van Cortlandt Golf Course opened on July 6, 1895, as the first public golf course in the United States."

http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/X092/highlights/11046

You will find many different films if you like some of the 80's pop icons you might like this documentary on Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568335/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1)

Queens is still here and as ethnically diverse as ever. The Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn West and South, and Manhattan North of 110 Street are all places where people live. You don't see many pied-à-terres on Grand Concourse.

These complaints are from one warring faction of the wealthy. One faction wants total isolation in their neighborhoods and the other wants a sprinkle of the right kind of poor person as scenery. To me it's an irrelevant debate. I couldn't possibly care any less whether young bankers or young artists dominate the East Village.

Let them have their whole foods and their dog walkers and their prestigious addresses. We have an income tax -- they are contributing tax money for the rest of us. Even the absentees are paying property taxes while not consuming any services.

All of this strikes me as the rich complaining about the richer, while trying to couch their complaints in populist rhetoric.

Towards the end of the article, Mr. Bryne touches on a topic that is at the heart of a city devoid of culture --- people who buy large swaths of property and then do not live here. We don't need rent control, but we do need to build affordable housing instead of luxury condo after luxury condo for people to use a few weeks out of the year. The least expensive average rental price for a studio is $1481/month. Landlords require you to earn 40x the monthly rent. That's $60K a year. That's a nice living in most places in the US. In NYC, it's just scraping by. http://www.mns.com/manhattan_rental_market_report

I really think that New York City needs to institute _massive_ tax penalties for people who don't reside in their apartments as a primary residence. I know that our property taxes are already high, but just about everywhere else has big incentives for residing in your property.

There's a lot of apartments in manhattan that are only lived in ~4 weeks a year and aren't rented out otherwise. I wouldn't be opposed to a higher tax rate for those properties. They're effectively jacking up other people's rents and making them have to commute from farther away.

Would such tax penalties stop the rich from renting/owning in NYC? I doubt it, they are rich after all. Would those tax penalties convince them to declare those homes their primary residence? Maybe, if they were American. But would declaring those homes to be their primary residence actually get them to spend more time in them? No.

Is it really a problem that rich people aren't living in all of their homes simultaneously? No. That is their own business, don't worry about what they do, worry about what you do.

What is next, complaining that middle class families often leave one car sitting idly in their driveway?

It could put some tax money into subsidized housing to offset their market effect of increasing other peoples' rents and commute times.

It really kind of is a problem because of the effects that it has on the housing market. It's completely different from somebody having an idle car in their driveway because nobody else could park on their property. This is a situation where this is an apartment somebody else could rent and live in and decrease sprawl.

If the objective is just to raise more money for subsidized housing, there are more ways to do that than just whining about rich people having underused apartments. Hell, tax caviar; a tax for cheap housing doesn't have to attack rich housing. The only reason to that is pandering to the envious.

And I stand by my car analogy, a car a rich person has is a car that a poor person doesn't have. Artificially high demand for cars ('artificially high' in the sense of people buying more cars than they need) increases their prices. If you want more cheap cars for poor people, then get more cheap cars for poor people. Don't complain about how many cars rich people have.

These arguments don't work when you have supply limitations, which with housing and cars we kinda do.

It's not about taxing the rich. It's about taxing where appropriate to get the market effects you want.

This is the same reason we have such high tax on cigarettes.

Taxing rich people more for having multiple homes isn't going to make them give up those homes (we are talking about "1%"ers, right?), all it is going to do is increase your tax revenue. If you plan is to use that additional revenue to provide housing for the poor, the knock yourself out, I think that is a swell plan. However focusing on where that money comes from is a distraction.

Rich people having multiple homes is a distraction that is engineered to tug on irrational anti-rich sentiment. Tax them if you want, but don't mistake them for the actual problem.

I don't know if taxing is the right idea. I just know that a city void of actual residents is a city without a soul. NYC is becoming like parts of Florida, except at least in FL, the residency is tied to a season, so you get a critical mass of people together in one place.

NYC should remove zoning restrictions so that developers can build dense quickly. Density is what makes NYC great. Density is also what will bring down the rents. Increase the supply.

We also need to remove parking minimums across the whole city, currently they don't apply in Manhattan. Parking minimums can increase the cost of apartments up to 50% http://dc.streetsblog.org/2013/09/16/apartment-blockers/

I have a book of jokes from the 1970's. One of the jokes is "if it weren't for the muggings, there would be no human contact in New York." I remember reading it recently and finding it so anachronistic. The idea of getting mugged in Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn seems so alien to me today (though I remember as a visitor in the early 1990's the same areas seemed quite post-apocalyptic).

My point is... take off the rose colored glasses.

If we're talking personal anecdotes, I live in Brooklyn and know three people who have been mugged in Brooklyn or Manhattan within the last five years.

I've never personally felt unsafe anywhere I go in Brooklyn at any time of the day/night, but my female friends do not share the same feelings. For them, walking alone at night in areas of Crown Heights or Bedstuy is not the best idea.

yep. first weekend of a friend moving to brooklyn, just outside williamsburg, my friend was mugged at knifepoint on the train. shitty things still happen :/

Quote from the article: "I don't romanticize the bad old days. I find the drop in crime over the last couple of decades refreshing. Manhattan and Brooklyn, those vibrant playgrounds, are way less scary than they were when I moved here. I have no illusions that there was a connection between that city on its knees and a flourishing of creativity; I don't believe that crime, danger and poverty make for good art. That's bullshit. But I also don't believe that the drop in crime means the city has to be more exclusively for those who have money. Increases in the quality of life should be for all, not just a few."

What he fails to raelize is that the drop in crime is the result of the "Disney-ization" of New York City. All that "1%" money has been funneled into policing, redevelopment, etc.

Contrast: Philadelphia. In the 1970's, New York and Philadelphia were pretty similar. But New York was fortunate to be host to the financial boom of the 1980's, 1990's, and early 2000's, while Philadelphia saw its core industries continue to decline. Today, the per-capita murder rate in Philadelphia is more than 4x higher than New York's.

Not all that 1% money. But some of it.

Philly is way better than it use to be, it just hasn't improved nearly as rapidly or dramatically as NYC has. The blight of urban decay is being pushed back, but that push isn't driven so much by the ultra-rich as it is by college kids and yuppies getting a tad more 'adventurous' in where they live. (I think the effect of universities and their students is most noticeably around Temple in north Philly, though I would still refuse to live there.)

The result is that you don't get articles like this one complaining about rich people (since they basically just aren't there, compared to NYC) but renewal is taking much longer as well. No rich people means that a student can afford to live anywhere in that city that they want, but they are more likely to be killed as well.

In other words, Philly is exactly what the author seems to want, but he doesn't really seem to understand what he is asking for.

I think you're a bit delusional about crime in Philadelphia. It's intolerably bad by all reasonable accounts.

It makes zero sense to put a business in Philadelphia as opposed to surrounding areas because of the tax and regulatory situation. The city of Philadelphia is a financial basket case, just like Chicago, LA, and Detroit. All these cities are getting closer and closer to the inevitable precipice. New York is not.

Chicago and LA perhaps, but there is no way in hell Philadelphia is in the same basket as Detroit. Philadelphia is improving (slowly), Detroit is rapidly decaying.

I'm not accusing Philadelphia of being clean or safe, I am asserting that it is (slowly) improving. I think you are delusional about just how bad crime in Philadelphia use to be.

(And to be clear, there are extremely livable portions of that city, but the presence of those areas are obscured in course metrics by north and west philly which, to be honest, do bear some resemblance to what you would expect of Detroit. However those boundaries are being pushed back every year, street by street.)

My wife and I just walked from 10th street to 38th street along mostly Walnut/Chestnut/Market yesterday. It's great except for the portion of Market after 37th street. It's a continuous strip of gentrification now, which wasn't the case 10 years ago.

That said, I think gentrification is happening faster in Chicago. I haven't seen a construction crane yet in months of living here (I rarely leave Center City/University City, to be fair), but I can see half a dozen at any given time in River North/Loop. But Chicago's economy is still largely finance driven (and derivative industries: insurance, consulting, accounting, law).

I guess my point is: you can either embrace the 1% and be New York or San Francisco, or reject the 1% and be Baltimore, Detroit, or any of the other American cities in decline.

I agree entirely, embracing the 1% is the way to go. Without them you can only see progress measured in decades, not years.

Both Chicago and Philadelphia will go bankrupt and all bets are off. They are heavily corrupt municipalities. The pension obligations will not be met. New condos here and there don't really enter into it.

What does that have to do with my point about gentrification? The finances of the local government are related to but not coextensive with the economic health of the surrounding region. At the end of the day, changes in the $500+ billion GDP of the Chicago metro area are going to have a much bigger impact on gentrification in Chicago than the deficits in the $3 billion Chicago city budget.

The danger is, of course, that pension obligations cause a rise in taxes that push out wealthy people and businesses, hitting GDP. That's a concern, but I think at least Chicago will fight to reneg on pension obligations before raising taxes. Rahm may be corrupt, but he's corrupt in the right direction. He sounds like a republican these days. Controlled bankruptcies may be the smartest course of action for cities like Chicago, allowing them to avoid the choice between raising taxes and cutting crucial services. The key thing to watch is whether Detroit's bankruptcy results in significantly reduced pension liabilities.

Which circles back to my point about embracing the 1%. The way to see continued improvement in your city is to keep your 1% where they are, and ideally attract new 1%. Those few condos here and there are upper middle class/rich people moving into Chicago and spending money and paying taxes. Since major U.S. cities have a dearth of middle class people (who mostly live in the suburbs), and poor people don't really pay much taxes, it's these folks that keep the show going. You can't afford to let writers like the OP push for policies that encourage these people to move out.

But why wouldn't Manhattan and Brooklyn landlords prefer rental incomes from financiers moving in from Long Island to the much smaller rental incomes from the struggling artists they replace? Who's paying for the artists to stay? And what about the vast majority of urban emigres that aren't artists and work far too many hours earning far too little disposable income to be active participants in art scenes. Do they deserve the same chance to stay? For that matter what about those people being displaced who actually are responsible for much of the crime; let's not forget that urban migration patterns affect crime rates as well as vice versa?

It's not exactly like members of the 1% don't cough up large chunks of change to support their preferred forms of art anyway (whether you consider that art to be less interesting, authentic or edgy than what it displaces or not). In that vein, I can literally watch the gentrification on my London street, and it'll look even more vibrant and arty once the boutiques and street cafes have fully replaced the betting shops, by which time I won't be able to afford the rent.

>I don't believe that crime, danger and poverty make for good art. That's bullshit.

First of all, it's not. Second of all, "crime, danger and poverty" are not the opposite of high rents. Low rents are. Low rents make for good art. High rents make for good stockbrokers and bankers.

It is a weird claim. Talking Heads, I believe, were squatting in the east village when they came to NYC. Many artists and musicians around that same time (mid '70s to mid '80s) did the same, in the East Village or over in the even more dangerous Alphabet City. (We're talking true post-apocalyptic decay and weirdness here.)

They could do this because no sane person would live there and pay rent if they could go elsewhere. Were it safe and clean there would have been considerable competition for living there, rents would go up, and the artists would be out.

Did you read the whole piece before commenting? The author specifically mentions the hardships you describe.

"...The idea of getting mugged in Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn seems so alien to me today..."

???

Do you live in the City?

Because I know at least 2 people who have been mugged. In Brooklyn.

[Edit]:These muggings occurred over the course of the last year.

I don't think he really proved his thesis. It seems like NYC is churning out artists at a faster rate than ever before. Most of our finest amenities and cultural institutions are thoroughly available to the 99%. I was at Brooklyn Bridge Park this weekend and it just felt like the pinnacle of urban society. The underpriveleged get cheap lacrosse lessons (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/nyregion/adding-diversity-...), Smorgasburg was grillin' up maple bacon, the hibachis in the picnic area were firing, kids were swinging on tires, there were soccer teams and amateur anglers pulling in East River bluefish. It was utterly spectacular.

The only way to fix the crazy housing market of NYC is to make more places like NYC. As long as NYC remains a completely unique singular jewel of successful urban living while the rest of the country embraces suburban sprawl and terrible transit, NYC will remain almost comedically expensive.

Causing a problem to spread to more areas so the original area's problem isn't as bad relatively isn't a solution.

That's madness.

When the problem is caused by a shortage of supply (prestigious NYC housing) compared to the crazy-high demand? Then yes, more supply is a solution.

Being a desirable place to live isn't a "problem" it is a feature.

Being the only desirable place to live might be problematic to some people who want to live in that desirable place cheaply, but the solution to that is not to tear down the desirable place to the same level as other cities, "Harrison Bergeron" style.

Being a desirable place to live for the boring rich, driving up the prices so that the interesting poor all leave, is a problem for both the rich and the poor.

Taking away money isn't the plot of Harrison Bergeron, taking away ability was. Ability is spread throughout the population, not just (or even mostly) the rich part. The rich tend to pay people with ability, rather than to be people with ability (other than the ability to figure out who to pay.)

> "boring rich"

This anti-rich "occupy" shit is getting real old. We get it, you don't like people who have more than you; give it a rest already.

> Taking away money isn't the plot of Harrison Bergeron, taking away ability was.

Harrison Bergeron is about equalization via crippling. If you want to make it just about muscles and brains, then fine, but you are only taking away a very limited message from it. Stripping NYC of it's primary asset over other cities like Philadelphia and Chicago is one way to make NYC resemble those cities in terms of 'housing for poor people', but it is absolutely the wrong approach to take. Don't smooth inequality by tearing people or cities down, smooth inequality by building people and cities up (figuratively and literally, in the case of cities).

Has there ever been a time without massive inequality in NYC? It's been a standard theme in TV and films for as long as I can remember that Manhattan is stunning wealth right next to Harlem's grinding poverty. Look at Eddie Murphy films from the 80s, Coming To America, Trading Places, etc. What's different now?

There's a vast difference between an NYC that has massive inequality and the NYC that's being created today -- one where gentrification that squeezes out not just "crime" but anyone below an upper class income status. That's the trend and future that Byrne describes:

> If we look at the city as it is now, then we would have to say that it looks a lot like the divided city that presumptive mayor Bill de Blasio has been harping about: most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich (which, full disclosure, includes me), and aside from those of us who managed years ago to find our niche and some means of income, there is no room for fresh creative types. Middle-class people can barely afford to live here anymore, so forget about emerging artists, musicians, actors, dancers, writers, journalists and small business people. Bit by bit, the resources that keep the city vibrant are being eliminated.

He goes on to describe a number of elements that contribute to these trends:

> The talent pool became a limited resource for any industry, except Wall Street. [...] any businesses that might have employed creative individuals were having difficulties surviving, and naturally, the arty types had a hard time finding employment, too.

Environment drives out creatives -> creative industries have hard time hiring (start moving elsewhere) -> Environment gets even worse for creatives.

Right, but gentrification is nothing new. Look at London. All the creatives (how I hate that term, as if everyone else isn't, but I digress) clustered around Old Street because it was cheap. They were edged out by hipsters with trust funds, like vampires sucking out the cultural blood. Earlier Islington was where the creatives lived, but they weren't edged out, they gentrified the place themselves, getting jobs in "the meeja"! But London is still a vibrant city. Now all the low-budget art is happening in formerly rough area Dalston.

Trading Places was set in Philadelphia for some strange reason.

Those movies were addressing a contemporary phenomenon when inequality took off again after being relatively dormant since the 1920's. A combination of deregulation, a reduction in top tax rate, and demand for all kinds of debt caused an explosion of wealth on Wall Street. Meanwhile the rest of city was still recovering from being bankrupt in the 70s.

What's he want, more rent control? To put "the 1%" 'up against a wall'?

What is this article other than a whiny complaint, pandering to the envious masses?

Rent control is <40,000 units citywide. Rent control is not the problem. Floor-Area Ratio zoning and parking requirements are. Both are keeping more dense housing from being built which is keeping rents up.

Who do you expect to do for service workers? Honestly. Do you expect those people to live in squalid conditions 20 to a room like we did 100 years ago?

Are you aware that that rents even within a 2hr commute distance do not decline enough to be affordable (except in a declining number of bad neighborhoods)? You can live on the Metro North/Amtrak routes as far up as Poughkeepsie and still pay $1200-$1600/mo for a studio/1br. Commuting is also expensive on its own with monthly passes often costing ~$400/mo. Plus having to have a car and car insurance in those areas on top of that.

Where do want to put people who do low-wage jobs that can't be automated? What's your plan?

This is exactly what Toronto is trying to do by subsidizing housing in metropolitan area.

People maybe inclined to argue against subsidizing more expensive housing in downtown areas, but the cost of commuting from lower income outer areas actually increases pollution, and traffic costs. It also breaks the poverty cycle by preventing geographic and possibly cultural segregation of the lower income families.

Toronto has a really interesting problem to solve. 1/6 of the entire population of Canada lives in the GTA. That's simply stunning to me, especially since having spent a great deal of time up there, it doesn't feel that dense to me.

Honestly though, Toronto needs housing in the downtown areas. I haven't been there in 7-8 years but other than tourists and shopping, the streets around the business districts felt pretty dead/lifeless. It made the area very boring after 4pm. Having some residents in those areas would really improve the city quite a bit.

I agree. I spent 6 months living in Toronto and trying to find an affordable place to live downtown was difficult (I ended up about 30mins north of downtown).

The problem is that the GTA sports some of the worst urban planning on the continent. The simple fact is that while Downtown Toronto is wonderful, there just isn't enough Downtown Toronto to go around and you quickly get into inefficient sprawl. And then it's an ocean of Mississaugaism for 50km in every direction.

It's gotten bad enough that poor artsy Torontonians have started moving here to Hamilton. They're so desperate for dense vibrant city living they can actually afford that they come here.

I like Hamilton, despite the industrial smells. Heh. I spent quite a lot of time around there and Burlington and I much prefer that side of the GTA to the eastern side.

The GO train commute isn't that bad...90 minutes at the most and it's pretty direct.

It's a 45 minute drive from Hamilton to Toronto if the traffic is perfect (like 3am). Over an hour on a train that only runs to the Hunter St terminal a couple of times per day is absurd. Most of the time the train ends at Aldershot instead of Hamilton anyways, a suburb of Burlington that only exists to let the GO Transit flip Hamiltonians the bird. The combined traffic and transit woes of the GTA are thoroughly ridiculous.

Hamilton is Ontario's leading producer of unrealized potential, an honor I expect to keep for many, many years. I love this city, but it's not an easy city to love.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I've always felt like Burlington's wealth came from being a suburb of Hamilton rather than of being a suburb of Toronto.

All of the super wealthy trust fund kids I knew there had parents who ran companies in Hamilton and NOT in T.O.

I'd be interested in articles on ideas for dense and affordable urban housing which side steps the blight/crime aspects. Does anyone know if there is work going on in that space like the MIT small house[1] competitions?

[1] http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/1k-house-prototype-0915.h...

I think mixing density and low-income people is by itself a recipe for disaster. It makes more sense to have good commuter rail into the surrounding suburbs.

That is the interesting test is it not? Why is it that 'high income' people can live in a high rise apartment building but 'low income' people cannot? I am aware of the various 'projects' where we've seen violence, drug use, and property destruction. I am wondering is if it is even possible to create such a facility?

Could you, for example, create an elevator system that took you from ground floor to your apartment, and only if you keyed in the right code? And would that be sufficient to allow people to live without being negatively harmed by their neighbours?

Curious and I don't know if anyone has looked into this in a controlled way, hence the question.

Such an elevator system might allow the formation of tight-knit safe and trusting communities on each floor, but I suspect that the common areas (lobby, and the elevator itself) would rapidly become as trashed as your stereotypical subway station.

My off-the-wall hypothesis is that poverty breeds crime, and crime breeds decay which itself breeds more crime (see: broken windows theory). Small tight-knit communities seem to, in some situations^ at least, put the brakes on this process. The tighter the community the more of a support net individuals have and the more obligation they feel towards their surroundings.

^ A counter-example that comes to mind are your stereotypical trailer parks and near-ghost-town mining towns across the rust-belt. A poor neighborhood that isn't dense isn't necessarily a wonderful place.

Uh, you can get perfectly nice 1 bedroom apartments in Mt. Vernon for $800/month, and that's a 30-minute metro north ride from midtown manhattan. I used to live in New Rochelle, which is a 35 minute ride from Midtown. The high-rises right next to the train station are pretty expensive ($1500 for a studio), but there is a ton of affordable housing within a 15 minute walk. It's a town of mostly working-class hispanic immigrants.

Do you own a car?

How difficult is it to live where you do without a car?

I was mostly speaking about the areas near the train station that you mentioned yeah. Those prices are pretty high for the commute time that you end up having. A 15 minute walk is okay but any longer than that might be very difficult for some people.

Barring handicaps, I think a 15-30 minute walk is reasonable for most people, particularly the sort of people who might be looking to live in a car-lite city. 30 minutes at a leisurely pace is only 2 miles, I do that twice a day and I live and work in the same city (I also have a car, but clogging the streets and the air with it every day just to go 2 miles seems practically criminal to me). For somebody living outside the city, that is pretty good.

Now granted, their commute is going to be longer since that 15-30 minutes is in addition to the rest of their commute, not the entirety of it, but you can't live outside the city you are working in and expect snappy commutes.

What if you're over 40? Lower income often means poor health. Let's try not to approach this problem from our typically young working healthy professional perspective. Most of us are making more money than the people we're really talking about here.

Also, can you really live in these areas and shop without a car? I find the answer to that question to rarely be yes.

People over 40 are perfectly capable of using their legs. If they used them more often, instead of hopping in the car every time they needed to go a mile or two, maybe they would remain healthy longer. Cities typically have transportation programs meant for the elderly and disabled, if other public transit is unable to service them.

I shop with my car maybe once a month, tops, and that is mostly just because I like to buy dozens of liters of seltzer water.

The apartments right by the train stations are artificially expensive. They're designed to take advantage of the fact that white commuters don't want to risk living in a building with low income minorities. The surrounding housing is half the price, and the area is quite safe.

Nearly all of the Westchester suburbs are extremely walkable. All of the essential stuff is on the train line. The wife and I would load up the baby and take the train to Portchester, where there was a Costco, Marshalls, etc. I did have a car, which I drove maybe once a month (the upscale mall in White Plains was nowhere near public transit).

A 35 minute commute is not bad at all. Lots of rich people all over the country have hour+ commutes from the suburbs. Heck, my commute from New Rochelle was a lot more enjoyable (straight shot into GCT) than my commute from the UWS (transfer at Times Square, ugh). You can't point to 35 minute commutes as a reason to make space for low-income housing in the city proper.

I haven't been back there recently enough to know if MN is 24 hours but I recall travel being limited to certain times and this is especially true on the LIRR. Especially late at night, the train is filled with annoying rowdy drunks. That's more than enough reason for me not to want to live out there. It's like being deprived of all of the social benefits of living in/around NYC.

I mean, I totally get what you're saying, but I didn't find much benefit to living out there. I don't have a family though.

Metro North is not 24 hours, but it's only closed for 3 hours between 2:30 am and 5:30 am. And trains from NR run every 15 minutes at rush hour. The Metro North has way fewer sketchy people on average than the Subway. Lots of bankers heading back to Greenwich.

In any case, you're arguing a different point now. Housing prices in many Westchester towns are very reasonable and commutes are too. No reason for rent control to allow low-income people to live in the city proper.

It definitely seems like the MN-lines have the nicer folks. late night LIRR rides are 10x worse than any subway line.

That 40k number is flat out wrong.

"But even in Manhattan, nearly half of all rental apartments are rent-stabilized."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/realestate/rent-stabilized...

Without getting in the middle of this, I'd just point out that you're both right -- roughly 38k rent controlled units, about one million rent stabilized units. Apparently there's a difference! http://www.housingnyc.com/html/resources/faq/rentstab.html#d...

We're talking about two different things here. I'm talking specifically about rent control.

I know what I'm talking about, I live(d) in a rent controlled apartment since birth.

But that's not what the OP was talking about. He was surely using the phrase "rent control" in its colloquial sense.

there are a shitload of rent stabilized apartments though ...

http://www.housingnyc.com/html/resources/faq/rentstab.html#d...

"Rents Stabilization FAQ