The problem for me, as a long time NYC resident, is that there's no other place in America I want to live even with work from home as a possibility.
I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we generally get along in the city, across many cultures and backgrounds. I like it has some of the best food in the world.
I think a lot of people are like me. No, we don't want to live in Boston, Chicago, or Washington DC (similar cities with mass transit). Unfortunately demand will continue to outpace supply greatly.
The only alternative I have is moving further out in Brooklyn or Queens. Unfortunately the subway has decent coverage, but moves at a snail's pace, and I'm looking at 50+ minutes for 6 miles into the city.
> I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America.
Coming from New Hampshire: this is just fantastically untrue. NYC is about one hundred times more violent than where I live. It is so thoroughly not the same that I can usually tell when people come from cities simply based on how nervous they are. I think most people don't realize how badly it affects them, or how violent cities are versus "the rest of America".
edit: NYC has 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people, which is 45% more violent than the USA median (4.0). I have no idea how 45% more violent got a reputation as "safer than the rest of America" but it's not true.
The NYC crime rate varies wildly by neighborhood so I don't think its very useful to compare city-wide crime stats. For example, the felony assault rate is literally 10x higher in parts of the Bronx than on the UES. If you live and work in safer neighborhoods the city will appear to be very safe to you.
In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from (edit: downtown) Manhattan and you'd really have to go out of your way to get there. Anecdotally I lived in Chelsea and worked in Union Square for a few years and never witnessed any real crime, violent or otherwise. By comparison I also lived in SF where the bad parts are unavoidably located in the center of the city and I've witnessed multiple violent crimes over a similar time period. The neighborhoods in a city you pass through on a day to day basis really matter in terms of defining your experience.
> In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from Manhattan
East Harlem (part of Manhattan) is as dangerous as the Bronx and is very different from the Chelsea where you live. Manhattan is not a uniformly safe place. Also, NYC subway is filthy, disgusting and sometimes plain dangerous. Car traffic is worse than before COVID. There seem to be more cars on the streets, for people are avoiding subway and are using cars more often than before.
East Harlem is a relatively small neighborhood, the Bronx is an entire borough. There are parts of the Bronx that are both significantly more and less dangerous than East Harlem (Mott Haven and Riverdale come to mind, respectively).
None (or at least few) of the folks you’re gonna see on HN are going to be in the income bracket where they’re going to be living in East Harlem. It’s about half an hour from the places where things happen, at least, and might as well be an outer borough for most intents and purposes, given transit times, even if it’s technically within the stated geographical limits of Manhattan.
This might have been true 25 years ago, but all of South and East Harlem has been experiencing steady gentrification for the last decade. Most of that is coming from young families, from my experience living in South Harlem.
(There are lots of attractions to the neighborhood: old buildings, pretty side streets, good food, convenient access to museums, and one of the most reliable subway lines in the system.)
Former Harlem resident chiming in here as an additional, concurring datapoint.
I didn't fit the traditional Harlem demographic (ex-FAANG employee, startup founder, etc) but found the neighborhood to have solid access to the rest of Manhattan, an increasing number of amenities, proximity to Central Park, and an overall appealing character compared to the increasingly sterile areas of Manhattan
If/when I move back to NYC I would certainly consider living in Harlem again.
"Where things happen", aka Manhattan? Tbh, Manhattan kinda blows these days. It's more or less a sterile, disneyified, yuppy, consumerist grazing ground from 100th down, with the exception of alphabet city and Chinatown. But even Chinatown's changing, unfortunately. Feels like the old Chinatown Fair shutting down was a signal.
Idk Manhattan has a few solid areas that have held up over the years, but I personally try to avoid it unless my boys and I have a skate session or heading to a museum.
Also, the commute from the boroughs really isn't bad. If you really need to get to Manhattan you're probably looking at 45-50 min on average, which is whatever... unless you live in bumfuck nowhere where there's not a stop within a mile or two.
Point being? It's likely you got friends throughout the boroughs and not just Manhattan, unless you just came here for a job. 45 min one way, 1.5 hrs both ways, is nothing. Especially if it means seeing the people you love.
It's more or less 30 min minimum to get anywhere regardless of location and there are beautiful and interesting spots all over this city, not just Manhattan. Why not explore?
I’ve lived in nyc for 20+ years, moving from a country that is “hundreds of times safer”. I’ve never felt unsafe.
As others remarked correctly, aggregated numbers are useless and not representative for the avg person. If you truncate NYC’s crime numbers by stripping out high crime areas such as Brownsville or the South Bronx, crime here is shockingly low. Even more so if you correct for crime that would be er affect you unless you’re in some sort of drug gang (many of the violent crimes are gang on gang crimes).
Also saw folks here mention East Harlem — I assume that’s a joke?! That hasn’t been a “dangerous” neighborhood for 35+ years. It’s now a very sought after area esp. for families, and it’s got plenty of artisanal BS stores that come with gentrified areas. I can’t afford to rent there.
Brownsville is still dangerous? For some reason I thought they were calming down there and East New York was the dodgy place now in Brooklyn.
And Yeah Harlem seems to be on the up and up.
>"The NYC crime rate varies wildly by neighborhood so I don't think its very useful to compare city-wide crime stats. For example, the felony assault rate is literally 10x higher in parts of the Bronx than on the UES. If you live and work in safer neighborhoods the city will appear to be very safe to you."
This makes no sense. It's a mobile city. You can live on the UWS but have to go downtown to see a doctor, or work in midtown but commute in from the Bronx or Queens to go to work. The vast majority do not live and work in the same neighborhood let alone work and live in the same nice and safe neighborhood.
>"Anecdotally I lived in Chelsea and worked in Union Square for a few years and never witnessed any real crime, violent or otherwise."
Not only is that a walking commute but there is literally not a single bad block between anywhere in Chelsea and Union Square.
>"The neighborhoods in a city you pass through on a day to day basis really matter in terms of defining your experience."
Yes exactly, where do you think all of the service workers that are back bone of the city travel through on their commute, often at night? Hint, it's not Chelsea.
I think you and GP are on the same page. GP isn’t saying that life in the city is safe for everyone, the point is that it is safe for some, depending on where they frequent, how/where the commute, etc.
If I was thinking of moving to somewhere in NYC, I would want to know just that: could I live there safely? If someone answers that topic with “well, many people are exposed to crime, and it’s really unfortunate, and change is really desired”, that’s all true, but that doesn’t answer my question. If one were to tell me “yes, it can be fairly safe if you have the means to live here, and commute over there, and mostly hang around this place”, that doesn’t somehow minimize or deny the plight of those who are less fortunate. These are two separate topics that are both worth discussing.
Edit:
I now live in Dallas. I don’t know about crime stats at the moment, but if you’ll allow me to speak of how safe I feel in the city: I would say that there’s no way to live in Dallas (assuming you want an active social life that involves music, drinks, shows, etc) that feels safe. The usual hangout spots in Dallas (e.g. Deep Ellum) are right next to shady overpasses, sections of street with vacant buildings with busted out windows and broken street lights. So much of the city is in a state of disrepair. I feel like I’m gambling with my life if I go anywhere remotely interesting in Dallas.
When I lived in Carrol Gardens in Brooklyn, I could walk to the coffee shop, or go to dozens of great restaurants and shops, get late night tacos or pizza, and never feel like I was in a sketchy area. Granted, I was privileged to have the means to live where I did.
If someone then asks me where I would prefer to live on the basis of apparent safety, I would say Brooklyn. If I was then asked if everyone feels safe in Brooklyn, I would say “no” — if you live in a low income, high crime area, you’re not going to feel safe — and that’s an unfortunate reality for many people. Both things are simultaneously true.
Except crime is also random. The person that was shot on subway in May was an investment banker who lived in a nice area and had means. He was simply on his way to brunch on a Sunday morning:
That's gotta be similarly true for a lot of major cities though don't you think? Vancouver, BC is broadly quite safe, unless you drive, have a car centric cycling route, or walk down certain streets in the downtown Eastside during particular times of the week or day alone
But a city is the sum of all its residents. Saying that the well-off parts of the city are safe and ergo, the city is safe reeks of incredible privilege - that crime is okay as long as the people who suffer from it are the poor.
There is a massive difference between "an overall very safe city with a few small dangerous neighborhoods/areas" and "an overall dangerous city with a few small safe neighborhoods/areas".
I suppose that's true, but is it as true if there's literally only one area that most people should probably be much more cautious in for objectively more intense safety reasons or unpredictability?
Whats up with Manhattans South Precinct (the roughly square section south of Central Park? For just about all of the categories of crime on this map, it consistently ranks as the worst area in the whole city across all five boroughs. Seems weird for this to be happening in a core section of Manhattan itself.
That precinct has Times Square as well as multiple train and bus stations (Port Authority, Penn Station and Grand Central). So tons of people passing through daily, many of whom are easy crime targets like tourists.
My understanding is NY state prisons bus felons being let out at the NYC bus stops here as well. Many of them have no where to go other than homeless shelters and tend to cause crime again.
The implication there is that the areas with fewer tourists have higher true rates of crime than the official stats, which makes the overall case worse...
But other places also have underreported crime. In a place where police take 30 minutes to arrive it might not be worth it to call the police for some minor things.
100x is shocking, so I explored a bit. Over 2010-2020 Amherst PD reported ~5 violent crimes per year[1], in a town of ~10000, or about 50 per 100000. NYPD reported ~49k per year over the same period[ibid], on about 8.3m residents, or about about 590 per 100000. So about 11x difference in per-capita reported-to-local-PD crime.
I'll admit I'm surprised it's still an order of magnitude, I share GP's sensibility that the cities are generally much safer than perceived
NYC gets dozens of millions of visitors annually, in addition to people commuting in daily and people transiting through the city. So, while the number of crimes is high, the number of people actually in the city at any given time is multiple times the number of people who reside there. Probably the total number of people in the city anually is 10x the people who live there.
I'd also factor in the numbers are higher also because policing is very robust. I can't think of any other city where I saw a cop nearly as often as NYC, they're everywhere.
Anecdotally, I never felt unsafe there. Although where I grew up crime was rampant, common, and expected- so comparatively NYC seemed really safe, and it wasn't hard to avoid high risk places/situations. I do think people hype up the crime numbers, and forget to consider the variables present in a megalopolis which aren't present in smaller cities.
> I'd think the average number of people there each day is much closer to the relevant number.
Yes, and that "average number of people there each day" would include all the non-residents/tourists in the city. Which is a non-trivial number at all for NYC.
Yes, of course it would count them. But that number will be much much smaller. If the average visitor is there for a week, then a million yearly visitors only increase the daily population by 20k. You'd expect a crime increase equivalent to 20k residents or less.
So if there really is an 11x increase in crime, along with a 10x increase in yearly population, that's actually a huge increase in crime on a per-person per-day basis.
Too late to edit, but I should emphasize a comment down thread that this is a crude, worst-case estimate of the difference between OP's town and NYC. Don't take this as 'NYC is 10x more violent', take this as 'The difference is at least 10x _smaller_ than stated'
"Violent crime" is not a consistently defined or tracked category across cities, so it isn't comparable. The NYPD has a notoriously... loose definition of "violent crime", to the point where it counts things that no reasonable person would be thinking of when they hear that term.
For this reason, researchers typically use homocides to make comparisons, because that's consistently defined and tracked across jurisdictions, and because it's harder to manipulate those statistics when recording.
NYC - particularly Manhattan - has a much lower homocide rate than other places.
Very fair point, my comment should be read as a worst-case estimate of the comparison. In homicide terms, GP's town averages ~2 per 100k (although they haven't had one for the last few years) while NYC averages ~4 per 100k.
I am not surprised. NYC gave up on violent crime. It's Democrat's policy. Same as in Chicago, SF, Los Angeles, and many other Democrat-run cities.
One of the reasons I left NYC. I'm now in one of the safest neighborhoods, we have virtually no violent crime, except from the occasional visiting criminals.
Even according to this, murder and manslaughter is significantly up in the last 2 years.
But you're also ignoring the fact that in other parts of the country these crime rates are 1-10% of these numbers. NYC could be much safer, if the right policies were applied.
No doubt it could be safer but I'm asking you to explain how NYC gave up on crime. In 20 years the crime rate looks like it went down maybe ~45%?
I believe the south has the highest per capita murder rate which is mostly Republican led. It's states with lower education and higher poverty that have high murder rates. I think blaming Democrats or Republicans is misguided. We're a country pretty evenly split and there's no place that's a panacea.
For some reason no one wants to blame a lack of education, poverty or a lack of opportunity on crime (per your above statement). Everyone wants to get into these weird, esoteric arguments about what might have cause the crime rates that aren't germane to the actual, easily identifiable problems... most likely so no one has to try and solve those issues.
Isn't manslaughter up all across the US in the last 2 years... attempting to use a pandemic as a stat and then say it's a trend is on the border of unethical.
Crime is up after the lull that was the COVID lockdowns. Less crimes occurred when everyone was at home and the economy was essentially halted. Great argument.
People use these sorts of stats in Seattle to pretend that crime hasn’t gotten worse in the last few years.
The reality on the ground is much different, most people just don’t bother reporting crime, because it’s not worth the effort and the police probably won’t come anyway.
In what year did the stats become garbage then? If they were always garbage then crime has gone down. Do the stats become worse each year while crime goes up?
When the DAs in Democrat-run cities stopped charging criminals. I think there's a case in Seattle where one guy assaulted 23 people, one at a time, and they just let him go over and over again. No charges.
So the current Seattle district attorney is a current Republican and an ex-Democrat. So crime should get better then? Is she materially better at her job after switching parties a year ago? Do you see how weird the logic is to blame Democrats for all that goes wrong?
I know this sounds insulting but you seem like seem to have bought into a narrative of them versus us. There are ills on all sides, we are all humans who are mostly trying to make it through. Yes, there are people that are terrible at their jobs and cause harm. Yes, they are in both parties. If there was a third party they would be there too. Sure, vote and support people that align with your values but life is not a binary thing.
The current Seattle district attorney had been just 6 months at her job. Do you think it's reasonable to revert the effect of the previous 12 years in such a time frame?
You don't make your point then. The most notorious crime-enabling DAs are Democrats (Gascone, Boudin, Bragg, Schmidt etc) yet you pick a Republican DA who managed to upset an incumbent Democrat in one of the bluest cities because even there people got fed up with crime and point at her, saying that both parties enabled crime because in her 6 months she didn't clean up Seattle.
But you're sharing propaganda instead of crime stats. So all you've done is repeat a Republican party "talking point", which in the context of crime over time is nonsense.
Plenty of evidence of DAs in Democrat-run cities not prosecuting violent criminals.
In Portland mobs fully control the streets, drag people out of cars and beat them, they threaten people, while police is just standing and watching. This is on video, not propaganda.
So you follow-up propaganda with hyperbole, and pretend that extreme outliers are somehow a normal representation.
There's also plenty of evidence of Republican-run cities locking up innocent people, or conservatives attempting a violent coup during a transition of power. It's a silly game.
I’m confused. Your previous post said you pay attention to crime stats, but you reference a video before you pull a crime stat citation, and you also don’t link to said video.
Indeed. I come from a rural village where I could leave my bicycle unlocked over night at the center of the village and it wouldn't get stolen. When I moved to a city, one realization I made was that cycling is just a lot less convenient if you have to worry about your bicycle getting stolen. Also I can't leave my home door unlocked when I go somewhere (and thus have to remember to take the keys with me).
I think small stuff like this just adds to your total anxiety without you even realizing it. It's really sad how difficult it is to live in extremely safe, small villages like my childhood home nowadays.
I mean, Kryptonite literally has a 'NYC' line of bicycle locks.
When researching getting a lock for a personal scooter NYC always comes up as ground zero for problems with theft, to the point where much of the advice is to not even lock it up but bring it inside.
Yup. that's been true for decades. Literally, I lived in Manhattan for a while in the 1980s and never even considered leaving my bicycle outside, either at home or at work locations. It was ordinary to see stripped frames still locked to a post, some just appeared, some sitting for many weeks. Crime has risen and fallen significantly since I left, so I have no good relative comparison, other than that this is not new.
That’s not a “city” thing, it’s a “New Yorker” thing. People in Tokyo routinely leave things unattended in public, including valuable and easily carried things like laptops.
I'm not sure that's true. I think people are generally more honest that people assume. It's prudent to assume it will be stolen, but I suspect most of the time, accidentally leaving something somewhere for a short while would be just fine.
Sure but in how many cities would people be comfortable leaving a laptop unattended? I don’t think many. It’s pretty unrealistic to use that as the bar for NYC
Its an american city thing really. The same thing would happen when I live in big cities on the west coast and in smaller cities in the midwest too. In the midwest was where my friend got a window smashed for their micro usb cable that couldn't have been more than $2.
This is what I love about my tesla (I wonder if other makes do the same) -- when I get out and walk away, it rolls up the windows, locks the doors, and turns on security camera all automatically. I don't have to think about it. It does remove some background anxiety (did I click the lock button on my remote? did I leave the window down?)
A lot of this is simply a raw population effect. When I lived in Austin, I got in the habit of locking every door I went out of. Now that I live in rural Alabama, I frequently leave the house doors unlocked. I've forgotten to close the garage door for a day or so. My truck is frequently unlocked.
Statistically, where I live now is the same or significantly worse than Austin. But with the lower population, there are simply fewer incidents.
There are big city fixes for this. For example, most big cities offer bikeshares with docking stations all over the most popular places. So you can just use one of those bikes and not have to worry about theft.
In SF those aren't very cheap, and you also replace the anxiety of "will my bike be stolen" with "will there be any bikes left when I need one?" and "will there be any docking stations available near my destination?"
I use bike shares opportunistically, but they are not a reliable mode of transport.
CitiBikes in NYC are a bit different than in SF. Honestly, bike theft is an anecdotal thing and it’s def a problem in New York, but I definitely think it is worse in SF.
As a pure anecdote, my husband had his bike outside in Prospect Heights for 3 or 4 years literally not moved. It had a lock but he didn’t even use the bike. It got weathered and abused and after literal years, I think it was finally stolen. In Seattle, where his has been broken into multiple times in a locked garage in our luxury building, I have no doubt that an untouched bike would have lasted a few weeks at most.
But that’s all anecdotal. I can say that in the 5 years or so that I used the CitiBike system, I never had a problem either finding a bike and the pricing was also more than fair. I frequently would take a bike from near Union Square and ride across the Brooklyn Bridge home on nice afternoons. I never once had a problem getting a bike or returning it to its drop off place near my apartment.
And the app/locator lets you know the status of bikes at any time so you can know if there is a bike at a specific site or not.
This might have changed in the last few years, but if anything, the city had a hard time convincing people to use the bikes. The system is a lot more efficient than the Lime bike/scooter setup that a lot of other cities like Seattle have (people in Seattle also don’t know how to use bike lanes and use the fucking sidewalks like assholes, because Seattle).
In NY I’ve yet to see this happen. Rather it’s an issue of , is there anywhere to dock the bike. The outer boroughs are also experimenting with Electric Scooters.
This is not a fix. It's exactly the sort of extra thing I don't want to deal with when I'm cycling.
It really feels more careless to just ditch your bicycle on the side of the road and forget about it than lock it. I admit it's not a big thing, but as I tried to convey, small things like this add up.
At least in NYC, there are bike docks - you don't just leave them wherever. This was quite controversial because I think each bike dock(which supports about 20 bikes) takes up 1-2 street parking spaces, so drivers were up in arms that these bike docks would destroy street parking in NYC..
Yeah but they're somewhat less convenient, you never know the quality of the bikes or whether there will be one available, and over time it's usually far more expensive (I literally just did this calculation for myself in DC, took about 6m of daily commuting to be even and then after that you're saving money). Luckily I work in a neighborhood crawling with cops so there is very little risk when I lock my scooter outside, but I definitely don't take it to other neighborhoods and leave it outside (I've had some funny conversations checking it with the coatcheck at events after work).
NYC is generally safer than the rest of America. NH is typically the safest region in the entire country. But the truth is that there are high numbers of relatively rural areas that are substantially more dangerous than NYC. Also, I think that crimes/mile is fairly un-instructive because of how much the legal boundaries of a city shift/as well as the amount that a person will travel in a given location (I live in NYC, and probably live/work/eat within a 1.5-2 mile range).
> NYC is generally safer than the rest of America.
I don't think that's true: NYC is at 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000, and the national median sits at 4.0. That's 45% more violent than the median. That's not small! I feel like some PR firm must have implanted this idea in everyone's minds that NYC is somehow magically safer, but it's not showing up in the stats, and if the stats are skewed by reporting its almost certainly worse, not better.
I don’t know. I never felt generally unsafe in New York if I was out late at night (after midnight or 1am) and walking alone to the subway or whatever. Part of it I think is that the city “never sleeps” so you don’t get the feeling of being alone. There’s always other people around.
(My mom felt differently and would often force me to take a car home if I was leaving the office at 10pm in NYC — but my mom would feel that way about any city I lived in.)
In SF, I’ve felt *very* unsafe being out before midnight (I was once propositioned for prostitution 4 times in a 2 block walk). Same in Seattle, where my own neighborhood has felt downright unsafe after 7pm on certain nights. Same in parts of Atlanta. Same in parts of LA.
I can’t compare it to places like New Hampshire or the suburbs — but I’m a female who weighs between 105 and 110lbs and yes, I’m white so that might help me, and I haven’t been to every part of NYC late at night — I’m sure there are places I wouldn’t want to be alone — but I do think that it is generally safe.
I was shocked by how much more crime was in Seattle than where I lived in Brooklyn.
There is another part of New York which is just that people generally leave you alone. So you’re surrounded by people who you can call out for help to, but you’re also not usually badgered by randos on the street.
I can’t talk about statistics but I can talk about how safe I feel. And I feel safer in NYC than any other major US city I’ve lived in or visited.
I think this is where statistics fails me. You (and a couple sibling comments) are responding to my comment with your experiences to the contrary, and I—never having lived in NYC—just don't have access to that.
This passage[1] probably sums up the difference between aggregate crime stats and NYC residents' own assessments:
> Looking at NYPD crime reports for 2010, 2015, and 2020, we find that about 1% of streets in NYC produce about 25% of crime, and about 5% of streets produce about 50% of crime. This is consistent across the three years, showing that a very small proportion of streets in the city are responsible for a significant proportion of the crime problem.
I wonder if this phenomenon is different in different cities. Are the "shapes" of crime all "spiky" in New York, but more spread out in Seattle?
The "spikiness" of crime in NYC is extreme. I lived about two blocks away from a housing project which had a low but steady rate of assault, rape, and even the occasional murder. You wouldn't know it on my street and I never felt unsafe. I think the density of the city and relative lack of car mobility makes crime extremely non-uniformly distributed compared to most other cities (where everyone drives).
I grew up in Indianapolis, where the violent crime rate is 8.7 per 1000. Growing up, we had plenty of trips to Columbus, OH (16.6), Detroit, MI (21.8), Cincinnati, OH (8.9), and, yes, Chicago, IL (9.9).
Granted, sometimes we'd visit smaller, safer college towns, like Purdue's Lafayette Indiana University's Bloomington, or Ball State's Muncie, IN. Only Muncie had a lower crime rate than NYC. Then again, Notre Dame's South Bend (17.3) University of Evansville (10.1), and Rose-Hulman's Terre Haute (14.6) kind of dispelled the idea of college town safefy.
My current town is at 36 violent crime per 1000 residents, but the statistics are collected differently, so it may not be an exact comparison.
NYC isn't safer than the majority of the country. But, compared to where I've been, it's felt pretty safe every time I stopped by.
I’ve heard this stat before, but comparing to large cities.
NY is generally safer than Chicago, LA, Seattle, Boston, and Fort Worth; Wikipedia places it in 59th place for most violent crime per capita amongst the nation’s largest 100 cities.
The problem with any of these comparisons is that cities are very heterogeneous. In Boston, the Back Bay != Roxbury and in NYC, the West Village != the South Bronx. However, at least absent a doorman, I probably wouldn't leave a door unlocked or an accessible window ajar the way I routinely do in my (only) semi-rural home in New England. When I visit people in cities, I have to consciously remember that they'll be unhappy if I am casual about such things like I am at home.
I mean…or it’s that some of us have lived in New York for decades and not experienced even a little bit of violent crime. Born and raised New Yorker here.
Now look at dangers in general and not just crime and the picture is very different[1]. Judging by the total number of deaths from external causes, NYC was the second safest metro area in the country behind only Boston.
Much of that is because NYC has drastically fewer transportation deaths than most of the US. The worst states have literally twenty times as many traffic deaths as NYC.
I think that overall crime rates can have severely skewed reporting. Homicide rate in NYC is 5.5 vs US average of 7.5, But manhattan's is even lower. The last time the city reported the borough by borough breakdown (2019), had a homicide rate of 3.2.
I've only ever heard the claim made in reference to other large cities, not suburban, rural, or exurban parts of the country.
Its trivially true that dense urban environments are going to have different baseline patterns of crime
It also seems pretty clear to me that this is the context OP was speaking in, given that almost everything else he described are features of big cities.
I don’t think the relative percent is a good way to compare 5.8 per 1000 vs 4.0 per 1000. It can easily be flipped to show that NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the national median.
>"NYC is generally safer than the rest of America."
What does that even mean - "generally" safer? Saying "generally" and "the rest of America" are nebulous to the point of being completely meaningless. If I were to compare hunting accidents, wild fires and car accidents in NYC compared to the "rest of the America" then yeah sure. Have a look at these NYPD crime stats from May and tell me that it's safer than the entire "rest of America."
And while this reminds me of XKCD: Heatmap[0], the density of crime also matters when it's where you live, and the actual proximity you are to frequent violent crimes.
Also in NH, and I would say my perception is the opposite of your facts.I've spent lots of time all over the city at different times of day/year across decades.
I would still say Manchester, Rochester, Nashua ETC are 10x trashier and more neglected than even the most run down alley in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens.
I think that would be stretching it, but yeah, everywhere has good and bad. I walked a lot of SF at night when visiting for work and went to some less than savory places that felt no riskier than the worst of Rochester, but that’s a low bar.
That said, I shared a Lyft to the airport pre-dawn one time and where we picked up the other rider was a little more exciting than I would ever want to be.
Presumably OP was just talking about Manhattan or something, maybe even Manhattan below 110th st, and not the less nice parts of the Bronx or Queens or Brooklyn that they never go to.
I had similar thoughts. I live on the west coast and feel so safe that I don't even lock the front door to my house, ever. I wonder if OP feels safe enough to always have their front door unlocked.
I wonder how much people think the typical flimsy locks on a residential door will actual stop someone who goes up to the door with the intention of entering. It would almost require someone to want to enter but iff the door was unlocked, which seems like a poor strategy for a burglar.
Locks won't stop somebody who wants to get inside no matter what. They will stop somebody who would not mind casing the house, waiting till it's empty, entering without attracting any attention and walking out with loot, which is a "safer" crime than knocking down the door or breaking a window. Breaking and entering is a crime by itself, carries minimum sentence in some jurisdictions. As I understand it's because it's hard to convict somebody who walked in, took stuff and sold it for anything other than trespassing. How do you prove they stole the missing items unless you catch them in the act or have video surveillance inside?
If people lock their doors all the time, burglars probably prefer to avoid the houses with unlocked doors (because they are more likely to be occupied houses).
> Whether or not you lock your door has more to do with cultural attitudes towards risk
> People in rural areas don’t lock their doors for the same reason they don’t wear seatbelts and drive drunk everywhere. They just don’t care.
Do you think the attitude towards risk is because they truly don't care about having their belongings stolen, or because they know there is less risk of that happening? Having lived in a rural area and in a few cities, my experience is the latter. No one wants to be robbed.
Also, people in rural areas driving drunk is mostly due to lack of transportation options. I'm certainly not condoning it, but Uber doesn't travel out into the sticks and there is no bus or train to hop on.
> Also, people in rural areas driving drunk is mostly due to lack of transportation options. I'm certainly not condoning it, but Uber doesn't travel out into the sticks and there is no bus or train to hop on.
I don’t think that refutes their point that they don’t care. Having come from a rural area myself, the decision was to drink at home or a friends I was staying over at rather than drive drunk. They don’t care about the consequences compared to doing what they want
> They don’t care about the consequences compared to doing what they want
I also come from a rural area and I think you're missing some detail in the individual calculus. The chance of negative consequences drop so precipitously in some areas that, coupled with poor transportation options, it becomes primarily an individual risk in their eyes. They don't see a big issue with being over the limit when it's a road they drive everyday and encountering even a single vehicle on the way back is rare. It's not a lack of caring, it's just a different calculation.
I've never drove drunk (or even buzzed) and I'm not defending the practice, just trying to explain their point of view.
They're suggesting caring less is the primary reason for rural people driving drunk. The primary reason is a lack of transportation options. Caring less is a byproduct of that, not the reason they do it in the first place.
I see how you can interpret his comment that way, but I view it differently with the inclusion of cultural attitudes. The fact that some people started doing it because of lack of transportation made it into a cultural value.
Being called a pussy for instance for not wanting to drive while smashed isn’t a result of a lack of transportation.
> Do you think the attitude towards risk is because they truly don't care about having their belongings stolen, or because they know there is less risk of that happening?
Neither, they just take fewer mitigations in response to the same level of risk because of cultural habits.
America in general (both rural and urban) has a very high crime rate by developed world standards. I grew up in <redacted> which has a lower crime rate than 99% of America, including the parts where people brag about how it's so safe that no one locks their doors, and everyone locks the doors to their houses and cars anyway, because that's just the cultural norm.
I’m in a rural area. I wear my seatbelt, along with everyone else I know. I don’t even drink. The only people I’ve ever known that have driven drunk were dumb teenagers. I lock my door, but I not only kept my high school car unlocked - I left the keys in it.
For two years I did that, and the only time it was “stolen” was when my friends skipped class, used it to drive to the bakery for some doughnuts, and deliberately parked it elsewhere as a prank. Do you really think that’s how it would have worked out in any major city?
I remember it being major news when a few houses were burgled when I was a kid.
Now, the biggest town in the county? Crime happens there all the time. It’s only 20,000 people but a lot of them are…lower rung.
I think that’s the real difference. When I walk in a major city or even that town, crime might happen to me. In the 20 mile radius around my house it’s very unlikely, and I very rarely see a cop unlike in NYC.
You are less likely to be murdered in NYC than the average rural area. I don't know where you live and it's possible that your rural area is safer than average, but in general the myth that so many smug rural Americans subscribe to that the typical rural area is safer than big bad New York City is just totally, completely wrong.
Right, but that was when I was a kid. I'm 34 now and I don't recall hearing of any other burglaries in that area. Just as one neighborhood in NYC can't be compared to another, you can't mix all rural areas in to one "typical" zone.
>for the same reason they don’t wear seatbelts and drive drunk everywhere. They just don’t care.
This doesn't match my experience living in a rural area. Most of the people I knew either avoided drinking (your WASP) or drank with their neighbors (your redneck.)
I can't find similar numbers to yours for any definition of 'violent crime' I found numbers for, but assuming they're true, it's still missing the point. Amherst is a wealthy community in a wealthy, low crime state. It'd be like pointing to a border town to make the opposite argument.
NYC has a lower homicide rate than America, and that is the only category of crime that is mostly consistently reported across jurisdictions. Every other category of crime basically varies by an order of magnitude from place to place depending on accuracy of reporting.
What about Manhattan? What about lower Manhattan? The reality is that NYC is large and there's bodies of water separating huge parts of the city. Talking about crime in NYC seems really silly because you're going to be talking about tons of neighborhoods that you're just never, ever going to end up even close to.
We are already talking about Manhattan (New York, NY), it is where these numbers are from, and what the OP article is about.
Obviously in The Bronx the numbers are much worse (9.28), and in Brooklyn they're a tiny bit better (5.43) but still well over USA median. Queens (3.25) is safer than median, though.
New York county(or borough) is Manhattan(for the most part), but that is talking about the city of New York, which includes Manhattan, Queens, Kings(~Brooklyn), Bronx, and Richmond(~Staten Island).
I wonder how many people think New York City is only Manhattan and not the 5 Boroughs together. For anyone who see this, yes it includes the “suburbs” that exists within all of the outer boroughs (even the Bronx!)
Funny...one of my favorite pastimes as a new yorker was collecting New York esoterica...a fun related one(relevant to my "for the most part" parenthetical in my original post) is the fact that Manhattan is an island and a borough, but part of the island is actually connected to the mainland in the Bronx.
Marble hill was once fully a part of the northernmost point of Manhattan island, but a canal was cut south of it which turned Marble hill into an actual island all by itself. Later, the waterway to the north of Marble hill was diverted into the canal, so Marble Hill became connected by land to the Bronx and separated by water from the island of Manhattan, but it is still considered a part of Manhattan borough...
Yes, but using the same data, NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the national median. We are venturing deeply into "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics" territory.
Actually, how trustworthy are those stats as a measure of actual crime or safety? I think this effect might actually push the difference to be a bit more extreme; at least several years ago I know the NYPD had a scandal about systemically under-reporting or downgrading crimes. Has this _actually_ improved since then, or did they just "discipline" a handful of people? Do other law enforcement agencies have similar problems?
However, I do also think an important question is "safe for whom?"
Depending on your race, sexual orientation, gender presentation, etc, rural American communities can foster their own distinct unease. Those are the places where you keep your head down, self-censor, try not to draw attention. When is the absence of reported crimes in a state which is 92.8% white "safety" and when is it something else?
Where did these numbers come from? You linked to a screenshot of a spreadsheet, but not its source.
From a random search, I got 2.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people citywide, which means all 5 boroughs. For just New York county (Manhattan), the most official statistic I could find is 4.57 in 2019[2].
> It is so thoroughly not the same that I can usually tell when people come from cities simply based on how nervous they are.
I think, at least in today's culturally polarized environment, there are a lot of people who would be understandably nervous and on guard traveling to rural America, and it has nothing to do with what crime looks like in their home city.
It's also worth noting that Manchester, NH, which is where an Amherst resident is likely to spend a non negligible amount of time (nearest shopping mall, hospital, etc), has a comparable (slightly higher violent, much higher property) crime rate than NYC.
I don’t think the relative percent is a good way to compare 5.8 per 1000 vs 4.0 per 1000. It can easily be flipped to show that NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the national median.
One thing this thread has reminded me of is that for all the lip service conservatives pay to toughness and manly traditional gender roles, they certainly seem to live in abject terror of being the victim of a crime.
Someone's feeling of safety/nervousness has more to do with a variety of different variables that are unique to them, the place in question, and the situation they're in.
Personally, I'd rather be alone on foot in NYC than alone on foot in some small town where I'd stand out. Maybe because I grew up in a city and have traveled to many places, maybe because of my characteristics that make me feel vulnerable when I'm the outsider in a less diverse area, or maybe because I've lived in a city far more violent than NYC- so for me the things I visit for are worth the possible risk of crime.
NYC isn't even on the top 50 most violent cities in the world, which is quite a feat when you consider how things used to be there in the 80s/90s.
Maybe your very specific neck of the woods is very rich and safe but I don’t know why you felt the need to butt in and make the conversation about you, OP never claimed that NYC was the absolute number 1 safest place in the country.
Just to provide a 3rd party reaction here: it sounds like you've circularly reasoned yourself into a trap of your own making. You don't want to live anywhere else because you like NYC. Because no other city is exactly like NYC, you aren't interested in living anywhere else. The reason it's "circular" is because there are cities with good transit, good arts, great food, have a tech scene, and even have financial districts and you'd be surprised to find out how well diverse cultures get along in a log of smaller towns across the US (far fewer racial/cultural over/under-tones) and how safe they are (safer than NYC). Yeah, no other place is the center for any of these things save SF being the tech nexus and maybe having better renditions of some types of cuisine. So if you have to be in the center of the world, then yeah, you're not going to find other centers of the world.
For me, personally, I'm disappointed by how few world cities the US has. NYC and Chicago are really it. My silly benchmark for what makes a city a world city is that it operates 24hrs a day (at least parts of it). Chicago barely does but I think it counts. Everywhere else in the US just dies past 10pm and especially past 2am.
It's a weird metric to say that late night nightlife is critical for being a global city, instead of say, huge percentages of the population coming from foreign countries. Airport access for direct flights, ect.
Miami also meets every single one of these metrics and has later night life than NYC. New Orleans has 24 hr night life. Vegas too.
Los Angeles has a higher foreign born population than NYC.
That seems like a silly criteria. How many people really care about doing things at 3:00 AM? We're talking about a small niche of shift workers and childless young people.
Las Vegas operates 24 hours a day if that's what you want.
Have you lived in or visited a world city? The feel and vibe is very different. It's why New York is called the city that never sleeps. When you get dense enough, there's always something to do and people out wanting to do it or at least wanting to serve it to you.
Not sure if you've heard the term before but it's a real thing and it doesn't just mean "party zone": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city. More or less the effect of being a world city that's an economic/financial hub is that you have an emergent 24/7 network of services operational to support it.
> except in a few specific areas
Yeah that's what I meant. I don't mean "the whole city is awake". I mean that there are amenities available in certain areas more or less 24/7, because of the density, there is a critical mass of 2nd and 3rd shift workers, and other "off-hours" workers who have different schedules and make use of it.
London is #2 in your list, and barely any of it qualifies by your definition. You won't find 24 hour services in most parts of London. You will find a downtown with a 24 hour pharmacy and a couple 24 hour drive thrus in my small town outside Seattle (and no 24 hour drive thrus or delivery within city limits).
You've got a very cosmopolitan view of what the world is. You should consider changing that.
Why do you sound so angry? You've totally missed my point and really sounds like you just want to argue for the hell of it zzz. It's fine if you don't understand what I'm saying but why the grief? I literally live in the middle of nowhere, incredibly cosmopolitan I know, and also have access to 24 hour gas stations and a few fast food joints. I have lived in an Alpha- city (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_World_Cities...) and visited multiple Alpha and Alpha+ cities, and New York and London, though. And what I'm describing is not a "cosmopolitan view of the world", it's an observation that there are some cities which achieve a density whereby there is a sort of nighttime undertone of life that you can't really feel in less dense places. It's much more than "just a pharmacy and McDonalds" open 24 hours. If you've never felt it then I'm sorry, you probably can't relate. It doesn't mean my entire anecdotal experience and worldview needs changing... I don't even know how to do that because I'm simply relaying my experience not making any assertions about validity or worth of other places in the world. I'm fully aware most people in the world, including me, are quite happy not living in a world city. Sheesh...
I was in London recently - December 2019 right before Covid hit. Stayed at the W Leicester Square hotel, and was disappointed to see how many restaurants were closed early.
On NYC, it has the best subway system in the US, but by global standards, it is filthy, disgusting, and unreliable. Any criticism leveled at the NYC subway is countered by Newyorkers saying "but we have 24/7 service while city XYZ does not!" However that same 24/7 service is arguably a big contributing factor for the NYC subway's many ills.
Seoul, and perhaps Tokyo and Hong Kong and other cities, arguably have an even more hardcore workaholic and party culture than NYC, but get along just fine with subways that don't run 24/7 so basic maintenance and cleaning can take place.
It's not universally advantageous and I never said it was. I think you're missing my point. If someone is looking for a world city, there aren't very many in the US. I didn't say I am looking for them or that you should be looking for them. I am suggesting that the original commenter is looking for them and struggling to find them. My comment is simply that: a comment about how I'm surprised there aren't more world cities in the US.
You seem to care to the point of it trigging a defensive reaction on your part. I didn't know I was entering the hornets' nest. I had no idea this was a touchy topic for some people.
I think your last point is an interesting arbitrary distinction, if you're going to make one. While Vancouver is pretty well regarded as a NA city with pretty decent transit infrastructure and other nice qualities, it does basically close after 2am which isn't as nice as a night owl. Transit stops almost completely around that time too.
Edit: None of this comment was meant to detract, just a comparison in agreement to the city I'm nore familiar with. Maybe Toronto's different
I live in Brooklyn and feel the same way. Even if you discount all the empty luxury apartments held by foreigners who never show up, there are still tons of people who want to move here.
Why?, because when you have all these people crammed together - weird stuff happens and that's what makes NYC magical. We're constantly mixing together, in the subways, bars, restaurant, parks ,etc. You get to see firsthand all the humanity of this city. No other city in America has replicated that.
I won't argue/disagree with you as far as NYC's comparably higher degree of what you describe, but having lived in Philadelphia's core, there's plenty of the mixing magic happening in other cities, but it's definitely not "the same".
Philly is also probably the closest approximation to NYC in this way. Most other cities in the US are so segregated that wealthier neighborhoods feel like suburbs (looking at DC and Boston here).
I see Boston as the tech hub of the East more than NYC. New York obviously has a large number of tech jobs, but Boston and DC both have a higher concentration of tech; in NYC the big fish is obviously finance.
I discount DC a little because a lot of that is government and defense related (not a bad thing, just not my cup of tea).
Boston has a lot of diversity in tech, lots of health/pharma like Moderna, web companies like TripAdvisor and Wayfair, robotics like Boston Dynamics, tons of startups doing ai/ml, and it seems like every big company has a substantial presence here (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce…)
NYC has the second most number of people with software development jobs in the US outside of the bay area although the number is about the same as Seattle which is a much smaller region than NYC, and within NYC the majority of developers work at banks in back office roles.
Boston is definitely bigger for every other type of engineering though than NYC. Most non programming engineering jobs in NYC would either be for a niche startup or would have something to do with real estate.
I don't know how anyone who has spent considerable time around SV/SF, NYC and Boston could see Boston anywhere close to the others.
The Boston tech scene and culture (outside of physically being on the MIT campus) is awful. TripAdvisor and Wayfair, your examples, are two companies I would aggressively advise any friends from even talking to. While all the major players are there now it took them a long time to get there. Comp in Boston still lags NY and SF considerably, and in general Boston has always had a resistance to anything "new", it's politically liberal but otherwise a very conservative city. The biotech companies there have always been way more heavy on the bio than the tech. I've worked for Boston area tech companies multiple times , before and after the tech boom, and would never work for a Boston area tech company again.
NYC is on a whole other level. Not only do you have all the major players with much larger campuses there are far more startups and early IPO companies. There is the also entire world of HFT companies (Boston's finance scene is largely very old school investment management companies) which alone would be worthy of making NYC a techhub. I also disagree with your claims about the concentrate of tech companies. Tech related meetups and events in NYC are much larger, more active and have more exciting participants than in the Boston area.
As somebody with no dog in this fight (I live in the south east), I'd tend to agree with the Boston take.
Simply being in the orbit of MIT can have that effect, along with everything else you listed.
The issue with NYC from a perception as a hub of any one thing is that it's just so big with so many different things going on that tech just seems like one of many things going on there simply because of all the people.
MIT is part of it but Massachusetts is also home to a large number of other research universities including BU, Northeastern, Harvard, the UMass system, etc.
As you say, NYC (like Silicon Valley) has always been more concentrated in terms of technology focus.
I'd agree with this. Boston area has a lot of high quality post secondary educations that feed business and talent. I would argue bay area has some of the same dynamics (Stanford, UCB & UCSF amongst others).
Silicon Valley has a high degree of tech but also a fair bit of climate tech which shouldn't be discounted.
Yeah, the Bay Area is probably the one other place in the US that has comparable higher-ed quantity and quality to the Boston area/Massachusetts. Other good institutions are scattered around of course but they're more diffuse.
I think that there's a tendency on the part of a lot of people to view "tech" through the lens of web-related tech but obviously there's a lot more interesting/important work going on than just that--whether in the Boston area, Silicon Valley, or somewhere else.
The amount of top colleges in the Boston area is astounding. A school like Tufts (ranked #28 by US news) would be the crown jewel of almost every city in America, but it’s totally overshadowed in Boston.
Especially if you include Massachusetts as a whole it’s absurd:
Boston's interesting in that it feels more low-key than NYC or Silicon Valley. Most of the biotech companies feel a lot more secretive and I don't see as many public events.
The valley has a vibe in that everyone you meet is involved in tech work in some way and will talk about it to you or in public. It doesn't feel that way here, or you have to be a part of certain circles maybe. There are some small biotech meetup groups, but maybe they all do communication at the universities?
That vibe definitely exist, in Cambridge and Somerville, and maybe the Seaport, where the tech folks love to live. Everyone in Camberville seems to be in tech or tech adjacent.
A lot of computer-related tech (and defense sector) in the Boston area has historically been out in the suburbs, e.g. the "Route 128" companies. After Teradyne moved out, there was very little tech presence left in the actual city. That shifted with biotech/pharma and, more recently, with companies in the Seaport and Cambridge and the outposts of the big West Coast-HQd companies. But a lot of the tech industry is still well to the West and North of the city.
Indeed, the amount of VC dollars invested in Boston companies per years is 3x the per capita of New York's. So while NY may have slightly more total dollars invested, a much higher percentage of Boston metro area workers (something like 30%) work in tech. New York will never really be a tech hub in the same way as SF or Boston because tech plays second fiddle to other industries.
I feel you here. I'm a relatively new NYC resident and worried that I'll be "ruined" forever. I've otherwise lived in Toronto and Seattle.
It really comes down to fear of change I think. Humans are very adaptable, and the same one can thrive in car-centric suburbs as they would in shoulder-to-shoulder metropolises. Given no constraints, you prefer city. But throw in kids (requirement for more space/better schools), or a dream job (passion), or a dying parent (obligation), or a lover.. and suddenly you're building a life in a completely different place. And it works.
At least I think/hope.. because outside of a busy city I am irritable and sad. But it sure would be nice to slow down on the treadmill/rat race a bit..
I have lived in San Diego. I have spent time in Los Angeles. I have spent time in San Francisco. I am not a stranger to large cities.
I can say with certainty I will never live in one of these places. I won't even live in Pittsburgh, which is an order of magnitude smaller than any of these places. There's no escaping people. There's no escaping politics or bureaucracy. There's no way to escape petty crime, crazy people, and noise. You can't see the sky at night, there's never any "dark".
Everything is orders of magnitude more expensive in a city. $5000/month rent? And people think this is "reasonable"? I don't even pay a third of that on a mortgage on a 2400sq/ft house. With a nice yard, decent neighbors, a good school, low crime, low taxes, the works. Our night-time intruders are turkey, deer, the occasional black bear, raccoons, skunks, and screech owls.
Do I have to drive to get anywhere? Yes.
Do I get the highest-paying jobs? Do I have immediate access to cute little bodegas and trendy little shops and night life? No.
But I can let my kids go outside and play at night. I can leave my doors unlocked. Nobody breaks into my car and steals my stereo. I can leave my house with my garage door up and all my stuff inside, and my neighbors will call/text me to remind me.
Is this an adequate trade-off? For me, absolutely yes.
I get why people like living in big cities. I will never again live in one myself, though.
> I get why people like living in big cities. I will never again live in one myself, though.
I totally get your take as well. In fact.. sounds like a really nice life that I hope to live one day.
But perhaps it's your stage of life & social context that makes the difference (it does for me). If you were single, didn't have many friends/family (or they were all in the city), or were dedicated to a career/passion whose nexus is in a city.. suddenly you might be running towards those people and institutions ;)
It's not all about the cute bodegas. The sheer number of single women in my demographic nearby is worth inflated rent for the next few years. $5k for a single person is some maxima, I'm living alone in a big apartment in a nice/safe neighborhood for $3k, 2 blocks from the train. The salary possibility in NYC easily covers the delta to smaller cities/towns.
That’s definitely not a given. I know a bunch of people that given no constraints they would live at the edge of a lake with the nearest city being 100+ miles away. But they get forced into a city by the need for a job, or the same constraints you laid out.
> I feel you here. I'm a relatively new NYC resident and worried that I'll be "ruined" forever. I've otherwise lived in Toronto and Seattle.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think NYC has that Toronto or Seattle don't have? And what are you thoughts on Toronto vs. Seattle? Personally, I've lived in Toronto (which I loved), and visited Seattle for a few days (which I liked, but hard to say from a short visit), so curious to hear what others who have lived in all 3 think (especially since I'm planning to move to Seattle soon).
Recently moved to Seattle from NYC. I'm enjoying Seattle, but it's a joke of a city compared to NYC. Seattle's public transportation—while improving with light rail—pales in comparison. Seattle is, overall, pedestrian-hostile. There are neighborhoods that are themselves walkable, but sidewalks will disappear when walking between them, or you'll be forced into situations where you're uncomfortably close to high-speed traffic (e.g. the Ballard bridge).
Seattle has enough good food to keep me relatively happy (even pizza and bagels), but for any given cuisine, you might have one or two good options. Getting to them probably involves driving, and they're probably not open late or even open at all early in the week (maybe this is a pandemic artifact; I moved here in 2021). Seafood here is great, though. I think Seattle wins in that single category.
I think NYC's biggest win over Seattle (and every single other city in the US) is the combination of quantity, quality, and accessibility. You have some of the world's best food, shopping, culture, and jobs accessible to you at all hours of the day via a subway ride (or in many cases within walking distance). The city is your backyard: you don't need a huge apartment because there's a good chance you won't really be spending much time there.
That said, after 10 years there I grew tired of that lifestyle and wanted to spend more time outdoors and exploring the west coast. If you really enjoy the outdoors—hiking, skiing, mountain biking, climbing, etc.—then NYC is vastly inferior to Seattle. I may find myself back in NYC some day because I miss the things that it's the best at, but for now, I'm enjoying doing something different. I think it's very easy to fall into a hedonic routine in NYC.
> and they're probably not open late or even open at all early in the week (maybe this is a pandemic artifact; I moved here in 2021)
No, it's a Seattle thing. One of my major peeves with this city (and entire region) is how hard it is to find places that close later than 9pm, even in the summer when the days are really long.
I think the outdoors culture here is so strong that people don't really care about having things to do late at night in the city.
Eh, I think it's kind of an "everywhere-since-the-pandemic" thing after all.
Atlanta is the same way and we used to have a HOPPIN' late night scene with SO many good late night spots, now it's almost a struggle to get something even like fast food after 9/10pm. That may be slowly coming back though it seems like.
I grew up in NYC and currently live in Seattle. The appeal of Seattle over NYC is the outdoors, substantially cheaper housing (you can get a 4br detatched house in seattle that's a 20 minute bus ride to downtown for less than this median apartment price), and better weather but yeah the food doesn't really compare.
This said, I think LA wins over NYC in the food department outside of the very high end michilin type stuff and certain specific kinds of ethnic food like italian.
>> Recently moved to Seattle from NYC. I'm enjoying Seattle, but it's a joke of a city compared to NYC
Don't live in Seattle, but my friends who do live there joke that someday the people moving there from NYC and complaining about the city they just moved to will figure out that the airlines fly routes in both directions.
They're all great and have something that the other two don't/can't have. I could go on for hours about each. Also this is a very personal/subjective question, so take with a grain of salt:
Toronto: It's Canada. Culture is different than the US. My friends and family are here. Since it's where I formed my personality, I like the people here way more. It's the only place I experience uncontrollable laughter in reaction to what someone said. The inner city is very cool without feeling like some over-discovered instagram location. In NYC every half decent bar or restaurant is packed with a lineup and costs 2x.
Transit is okay, not great.
But I hate Canadian suburbs, so to me the GTA is not hospitable (for me) outside of the rectangle of Humber river to Don Valley, waterfront to Eglinton. And income to cost of living ratio is so much lower compared to tech in the US, it's like.. minimum 10+ years of working life lower.
Seattle: A true gem of a place. Not overcrowded (yet, despite what people there say). Great music, bars, restaurants etc. You can get from middle of "city" to middle of wilderness in 1.5-2h, and be literally in a national geographic photo. Insane income:cost of living ratio (only slightly lower income than Bay/NYC, but cost of living significantly less).
Transit okay, getting better, but not too useful inside the city.
But it's a very monocultural place. So unless you find your "people" here, it can be quite boring/exclusive. I fraternized widely, but ultimately was left wanting for more socially. Also far-left politics are central to social culture here, so it's quite literally not a "safe space" to be anything but. I'm more of an "east-cost person", if that makes any sense.
NYC: One of a kind place in North America. Feels like you truly live _in_ the city, not just in your house/apartment with necessary excursions. It can be overwhelming with how many people there are and how densely they live, but to me that's something special. Cost of living is insane, but it doesn't buy you nothing. Subway system can feel archaic and let's you down often, but it also enables a special way of life for North America (car-less existence, a fixed 30 or 50 min ride from almost anywhere you'd need to go). A lot of double edged swords. The diversity of people is eye-opening. Toronto can feel more ethnically diverse - which is interesting in it's own way - but NYC is diverse in every other way too.
I'm quite worried about having kids in NYC someday. From what I hear the school system is ruthless. I don't want my kids to undergo such stress. I think Toronto wins out huge for raising children.
Having grown up in DC and New York, I would say more strongly that there's no other city in the USA that has comparable mass transit.
The way I would put it is -- in New York, it is more of a hassle to have a car than to go without. In all those other cities, while there is some mass transit, you will find yourself wanting a car.
What's pretty much unique about NYC, especially Manhattan, in the US is that there's no cultural expectation that a well-paid professional will own a car. By comparison, people can get by without owning a car in Boston/Cambridge--I did as an undergrad--but get out of school and a lot of your friends probably live in the suburbs/exurbs, you need a car to head off to the mountains, etc. Sure, you can rent and Uber up to a point but most people find it 1.) gets old and 2.) As a practical matter means they mostly just stay in the city because doing otherwise is too much of a hassle.
DC is still easier to navigate by car than by metro and bus, at least when I last lived there in 2016. Red line from MD would regularly shut down or have delays, and you were looking at a 2+ hour commute into the district. If you could get a parking spot you could reliably beat metro by about 10 minutes with much less variance. And you cannot navigate a circumferential route in a reasonable time, the purple line is the first to really attempt this and is like a drop in the bucket. If you live and work in the city it’s doable, but cross a river or the beltway and it’s really not. I had friends in Baltimore that could not get by without a car either, and they made a really dedicated effort. Mass transit in the US - outside of NYC - is just not viable at scale.
I grew up in NYC and I think it has a lot of problems that have prevented me from moving back there since college, this said...
NYC has the largest train system in the entire world, especially when you combine the various nearby train systems that aren't a part of the main subway like LIRR, NJ transit, path and Metro north (in China which technically is longer they count long distance commuter rail). The subway alone has more stops than any train system in the world.
eh, having lived in both chicago and nyc, chicago's transit system is pretty much on par with nyc to me. MTA is all built around going to and from manhattan and it can be a struggle if you have to do something else, like going from parts of queens to brooklyn. Chicago's hyperrational grid and busses make up pretty well for the gaps in the L. now the cabs in new york, nothing beats them (although these days more and more cabbies don't seem to actually know the city very well)
If you really like mass transit and want to live without a car, America is probably not for you. USA got rid of most streetcar systems a long time ago and rebuilding them from scratch in current NIMBY climate is basically impossible. And subways, which are much more expensive than ground transit, only make economic sense in several metropolises.
Try some European city with reasonable rents like Warsaw. Even the skyscrapers will remind you of Manhattan.
I love Warsaw and think I would personally really enjoy living there, but if the GP isn't willing to move to Boston, they're not going to like living in Warsaw.
Much smaller then NY, much more homogeneous, not a major world center of arts or finance.
There are very few cities in the world that check all the boxes he listed for NY, and they're all extremely expensive as well.
There’s no fundamental reason “America is probably not for” people who want high-quality, dense urbanism. The rent in NYC is a clear sign that there’s demand for it.
Building new mass transport systems like light rail in existing cities from scratch requires a lot of political momentum, basically willingness to crush the pervasive NIMBY mentality and overcome the pull of bureaucratic inertia. Even in European cities that never dismantled their light rail systems, inhabitants often fight back against line extensions, citing noise concerns etc., and are able to delay the construction for years or decades.
Plus such systems aren't cheap and usually require new subsidies on top of existing subsidies. You will still have to maintain the existing road system and bridges, their usage won't drop to zero or even a quarter of current traffic. Some people won't voluntarily switch to public transit ever, for all kinds of reasons.
Maybe this isn't "fundamental", but IMHO the hurdles to overcome are really high and I am not sure if there is any city in the US willing to try this and having the means to do so.
That's not true, there's demand to live in a specific part of NYC. I really cannot stand that urbanists say this sort of thing. Demand isn't just for walkablity, it's for the complete new urbanist neighborhood that was first formalized by the likes of Jane Jacobs and friends. It's about the unique one of a kind shops, access to really unique amenities that only exist in the city and so on.
There are plenty of walkable parts of NYC like the South Bronx that have far lower demand to live there than the suburbs in nearby NJ or hell the not so walkable parts of NYC like Staten island, south Bronx or the outer parts of Queens.
What people want is access to amenities in under 10 minutes of travel time, and under 20 minutes of travel to special events they don't go to regularly, as well as a short job commute. This can easily be solved by getting rid of euclidean zoning in suburbs and building out all American suburbs in the style of cities like Portland originally had been.
There is definitely demand, but America won't build that demand because the "silent majority" (homeowners who still are fearful of minorities and poor people) won't let that happen.
As someone who grew up in NYC, the only lasting appeal to me is family and specific ethnic culture that is much less in every city in the US that isn't NYC.
The apartment I grew up in, in lower manhattan, today would cost more than 20-30 times what my parents paid for it in the 90s, and it wasn't a nice apartment. There was no laundry in the unit, it faced a dark courtyard, the tempurature of the apartment was never that comfortable, had yearly huge bug infestations, but it was in a great location and was about 5 rooms more or less.
I think people just romanticize a life different than the one they grew up with. I certainly miss some aspects of the city culturally, but life on the west coast, I've had considerably better living arrangements ever since I've graduated college than the one I grew up in, and my parents were both professionals with graduate degrees, it's even worse for a lot of other people.
I grew up in NYC, in an even worse apartment. Despite no longer having family there, I would return in a heartbeat. I loved it and wish I could raise my kid there (in a better apartment, mind you)
If I could have a better apartment there I would absolutely consider moving there. The issue is that I'd have to live somewhere that would be considerably worse, and me and my partner make many times more than my parents did when they bought their place when adjusted for inflation.
I have a fantasy where a Robert Moses-type figure builds out super fast trains that connect Long Island, NJ, upstate New York, and effectively urbanize the entire tri-state area. New York becomes this super city where you can go from White Plains to the tip of Long Island in an hour. Housing becomes cheaper as neighborhoods that were previously impractical become feasible for New Yorkers. Car ownership drops in the outer suburbs as people embrace public transportation. Gentrification stays an issue but because of more housing, it's less brutal.
Unfortunately this is pretty unlikely unless there happens to be another political genius like Moses who also happens to love public transportation. Maybe an Andy Byford-Robert Moses combo?
I’d love to see someone brave enough to marge north east jersey and lower Connecticut into NYC and connect them with proper transit, pretty much merge LIRR, Path and MTA under one NYC administered transit system, then add some high speed rail along the old train lines.
Then make all public transit free and turn half of the roads into bus, pedestrian and bike only paths.
>"I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America."
Is there any data to back this up? The latest NYPD crime statistics, show a city with increasing crime.
"Overall index crime in New York City increased by 27.8% in May 2022 compared with May 2021 (10,414 v. 8,149). Each of the seven major index crime categories saw increases, driven by a 42.1% increase in grand larceny (4,116 v. 2,897); a 28.3% rise in burglary (1,239 v. 966); and a 26.2% increase in robbery (1,506 v. 1,193)." See:
You are clearly not alone. Skyrocketing rents are a symptom of more people wanting a place to live than there are available spaces. It's not like NYC is bereft of skyscrapers either.
NPR was talking about the lack of housing across the US today. Their solution was to get involved with zoning meetings and work to change the zoning laws.
My partner and I have been agonizing over this exact dilemma. We have an income number and an expenses number and when those cross a certain point, we've gotta go somewhere else. So there's a very good chance that we'll immigrate somewhere in a few years. But yeah, try as we might, we couldn't come up with another US city that either of us would want to live in.
To me, only other places that compare to NYC are Singapore and Sydney. Great food in Singapore, great weather (usually) in Sydney. The people can be a bit busy in Singapore though.
Certainly no NYC, but they ticked all my recreation, arts, food, people and transport boxes.
Unfortunately, they’re all so goddamn expensive to live in.
Singapore?? To New York????? Sorry what? Singapore is fine as far as a hot place with incredible food and good hotels to spend a few nights, but it’s also quite possibly the most boring major city I’ve been to outside of that and there doesn’t seem to be any cultural life beyond shopping - based on my own experience and that of friends who’ve lived there.
I could also take issue with comparing Sydney to NY, but I’ll let that one go ;)
In defense of sg, the only reason you said this is you never left orchard rd. You can experience worlds of culture just eating food at any given neighborhood coffee shop or going to a wet market in the morning. It just is a different culture, one that doesn't try to emulate America too much (hipster shit like live music or public art or things like that).
There is a certain kind of live music and public art that (honestly) tourists are looking for which the person I was referring to didn't see. There is "music" and "performance" that fit into the guise of culture but it isn't really for tourist consumption.
That said, there is live music and public art too, just since it isn't Singapore's culture but an import from the west, there's less of it (see my rant on western food).
EDIT removed "white" qualifier for tourist, my brain still thinks in US but really all tourists from wherever go to the malls and idk promenade but miss the kopitiams and markets because it's just not in the touristy areas.
Not American, live in London. Not to get into a pissing contest, but I can go to Ridley Rd for a wet market and still have any amount of cultural stuff to do. SG does have the food, but it’s a company town entirely driven around (conspicuous…) consumption. Less shit Dubai.
All that said, I like spending a few days there - again, the food! - but I’d rather be in Bangkok or KL for longer, e.g.
If you're comparing NYC food to Singapore I don't know how you could say sg food is great.
The staples (Chinese, Indian, Malay) are good and probably better, but western food is not great. A few are mediocre and some are great, but the great places lack variety and selection, that is you usually get only one good thing from a given stall or restaurant.
My girlfriend, the first time she went to the US was blown away by the food. She even swooned over freaking gas station pizza I picked up once. Now that I live in sg I understand what she meant by the food in the US having flavor, the staples are great but the western food is pretty mediocre and just is either off or just lacks the proper seasoning, or if it's good, it's easily twice the price (after conversion!) of similar quality food I ate in Ohio.
I seriously miss creole / cajun food for example, but the SG experience of the west is freaking British food which is the bottom of the barrel (fish and chips anyone?) seriously.
Another thing (sorry for the rant but it's fresh in my mind). Good luck getting any amount of vegetables in your meal.
This is pretty true throughout Asia. Bangkok’s probably best for western food. But nothing like NY.
SG has a few decent options once you get over the fact that you’re paying four times the price for a slice of pizza (or, god forbid, cote de boeuf). Ironically the best Cantonese food (IMHO) is in the American club.
Having lived in both New York and Singapore, I can’t say I’d recommend Singapore to anyone who loves NY for the aspects you mention (but there are other reasons to love SG!). I think the scale of opportunities for recreation, arts, and really just a diversity of experience is vastly different. In APAC, I’d suggest Hong Kong (where I’ve also lived) instead, though that is even more like London than NY.
Yeah, HK is (or was) way better than SG, and much more NY-like. Even more beautiful than NY, actually. HK's inevitable destruction by the CCP is a fucking tragedy. There are very few cities in the world like that.
Have you lived in Sydney? I spent a day there recently and I loved it, but I got the sense that things tend to wind down in the evening (at least around Surry Hills where I was staying). Curious if I got the wrong impression: my recollection of NYC is that there's something going on at pretty much any hour, day or night.
I lived in Sydney for five years! Great city. Lived there before I came here.
My partner and I are looking at Madrid. But yeah, there is no other city in the world that's going to be like NY. Maybe London but of course that has the same problems.
As a New Yorker who had to move to Seattle for a job five years ago and misses the city every single day, I totally agree with you.
I will say, depending on how close you are to a train station, Brooklyn isn’t bad. Yeah, it’s 45 minutes door to door, but you get to walk and listen to podcasts or whatever on the train. As commutes go, it’s definitely doable. But I totally agree with you that many people don’t want to live anywhere else and people who don’t love New York might not understand that, but New York is different from every other major city in the US.
I’m still carless in Seattle (I don’t drive and have no desire to drive) but it’s so much harder (my husband does have a car but I can’t rely on that for my own needs). And although Seattle is somewhat cheaper than Brooklyn (it’s really not but my luxury building in Capitol Hill definitely costs less than a luxury building in Williamsburg foot for foot — I pay about 70% more in Seattle than I did in Brooklyn, however), the things I’ve lost compared to New York are massive. I’ve definitely considered moving back now that I’m at a fully-remote company (that does have office space in NYC), but there are some practical realities about being in Seattle for my job that makes that hard. Maybe when my lease is up next year, I’ll reassess.
Part of the problem is that most people would rather move to an existing desirable city than try to improve their own to make it more desirable, myself included. In most major cities, less than 20% of people vote for mayor, let alone city council. Most of those who do vote in local elections are much old.
The goal posts keep moving tho. Even if your city becomes closer to NYC circa 2010, NYC is moving towards becoming a totally different beast of NYC circa 2030. There will always be a massive gap
I don't blame them. It can take decades for the kind of change that urbanists want to fully play out, and I bet they would rather experience good city life while they can enjoy it.
Exactly. The bike lane network plan in LA county has been on the books for 10 years now and its still a patchwork mess in the second largest city in this country where you could realistically bike to work every day of the year. There is no hope elsewhere for change. If you don't already have it you won't ever have it or you will be beating sand until you die fighting for a mile of bike lane or a single train line that waits at red lights.
That kind of proves my point though doesn't it? There is a definite demand for bike lanes. However, civic participation is abysmal for everyone but the elderly who tend to be NIMBYs. If more people pitched in, we wouldn't have to rely the efforts of a few hyper-dedicated individuals.
Have you been affected by the rent increase yet? Curious how much power the landlords have there. Can they raise your rent without warning, are they trying to force you out, etc.
Not personally. I know some of my friends have been who moved back well after the "Covid Discounts" were a thing, got a little bit of an inflated deal, and now are facing like at least 3k for 1 bedrooms in places like around Williamsburg & Lower Manhattan(west village, soho, etc.). That's one of the better case scenarios I've heard as well. Truly a shame :(
As someone who has also lived in both places (and lives in neither of them currently), I'd have to vehemently disagree. SF is not only comparably expensive, it's also incredibly far behind in transit, far more homogeneous in all sorts of ways, much less culturally interesting and significant, and- despite my agreeing that the headlines are blowing it out of proportion- pretty clearly headed in the wrong direction overall. It has some potential advantages (weather, proximity to nature, stronger tech job market), but I relate to the OP comment a lot, and for me SF just cannot even slightly compare to NY.
Obviously this is all just my opinion! I know tons of people love it there.
Sounds we should really build walkable city with convenient mass transit in the US and Europe. It's a shame that building anything infrastructure in the US is prohibitively expensive.
I went to NYC many many times when I lived in New England, my cousin went to school there and took the train down multiple times a week for years, her mother worked and lived there for decades, my father went there every week for work for many years. Anecdotally our experiences have been that the city is generally safe, none of us have any crime stories to tell.
My parents also used to go there a lot in the 90s and the city has come a long long way since then- for the better.
I'm confused what the "problem" is, is it that things you really like are expensive? I really like driving a Porsche, but it would seem a bit odd to lament a wild increase in new Porsche prices or my salary not keeping up with owning one as a "problem". I also really like that in Paris you can affordably get a glass of real champagne with every meal, but I hardly consider it a "problem" that in the US this isn't really reasonable.
Things are getting more expensive, for some people that means they can't eat steak as much as they like, for others it means they need to move in with their parents, for you it means you might not live in the heart of one of the most expensive and desirable cities in the world.
I've always found it a bit odd that in the tech community there is this assumption that people have the right to live wherever they want, and that somehow living in NYC or SF during it's prime isn't its own variety of luxury good. I enjoy champaign when I'm in Paris, and am glad that at least for today I can drive a Porsche. I've spent plenty of years in a beat-up old Ford and drinking yuengling, won't be terribly surprised if I spent plenty more doing the same in the future.
What % of available living space is not lived in, and further what % is owned by foreign nationals.
I know that in MANY countries, one is precluded from owning any property if not a citizen. Obviously this leads to a bunch of corruption issues with bribing and marrying nationals for access to property, but the USA has literally zero control on property ownership.
You know how much foreign money laundering is done through US property ownership?
MOST of it.
A vertical zoning law might be an option:
There are places like Singapore where you cant build a high-rise unless the subterranian aspects of the project dont include a connection to other sub services, like the walkway malls and such.
I say do a % split on a vertical level which must include subterranian levels as a course:
The building MUST include underground parking, a commerical section and a range of income level sections.
You cant just build a high-rise of $millions apartments.
Look at Millennial Tower in SF. What a disaster. I HUGE legal BS and not a single person with a net worth of south of 10 million was accommodated in that disaster - but it still cost the city (i.e. tax payers who are NOT worth >10 million -- millions of dollars.
My quick google says 4% of apartments are vacant in nyc. Got to believe the vast majority of that is structural vacancy while landlords clean units and look for new tenants. feels like a none issue to me.
Nit: 4% of "apartments" - means "apartments that are available from landlords seeking to rent to rentors and likely consitute the available inventory that is unable to churn, due to already being either overpriced, or shit-holes nobody wants to live in."
this is a different metric than:
What % of luxury "apartments" are uninhabited in extremely high cost situations where an average person isnt renting the "apartment" - but laundering money by owning such place and paying a tax placeholder fee...
And in addition CHURN
What % of apartments are experiencing churn and whilst during so, what is the rent increase on each new wave of tenants...
This would be a really intresting tower defence game.
You are the landlord/super/scumlease
You have apartments that will constantly dwindle in desireability
so you have upkeep.
You can accept the upkeep cost, or, for a lesser price, evict the current tenant and accept a new tenant at a fraction of the upkeep cost to keep revenues going into the future with % rates you like that keep you slum lord-ship going... or you kill them all, demolish and build a new building gentrify the neighborhood and blame it on rats, older policies etc...
We need a TRUMP LORD 2000 NYC SIM module.
Instead of installing new sewar, water, fire PREVENTION systems
You are needed to install new RAT, SUPER, COP-INTERFERENCE-BRIBERY schemes to keep your shit going...
Like the trump Water Heater Scandal. (this buildingz gunnaz needz a newz water heatahz...
My cousin tony iz dah only guyz who gunna do dis
Pay mah kidz what dez needz be paid, and you can stay)
How much of the rising rents are risk premia for future cases of "government says you dont have to pay rent and cant be evicted" that we experienced in 2020-present? I'm curious if there has been a Natural Experiment comparing rent increases in places which did vs didn't have eviction moratoriums during COVID.
> I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we generally get along in the city, across many cultures and backgrounds. I like it has some of the best food in the world.
Isn't most of that true for most large cities anywhere in the world?
Consider Amsterdam.
- Mass transit? Yes.
- Not owning a car? Sure.
- Safer than America.
- Tech hub, yes.
- Finance hub? uhh, does it really matter?
- Everybody gets along, across many cultures.
- Food? Depends on your taste, but all kinds of cuisine are available.
Or consider Singapore/London/Gothenburg/Paris/Toronto/so-many-others. Similar deal. Sometimes even a better deal, depending on your priorities.
Of course, I fully agree that NYC is a cool place :)
NYC is pretty much the only quasi-European larger city in the US, and in North America maybe only Mexico City and Montreal are comparable. Boston and DC are more influenced by cars but still have a large fraction of the city that's walkable. The effect of cars on urban fabric is very depressing elsewhere in the US.
You and everyone else buddy, that's why you're going to be priced out just like the people before you.
It's nice you enjoyed your ride from $2,000/month to $5,000/month. That range was absurd to the people that went through an earlier range, and so on and so forth.
Agree with everything except the last part. Brooklyn is a fantastic place to live, and takes 20 mins or so door to door to get to most parts of Manhattan.
I'm sorry, but... you might be able to get to FiDi from downtown BK in 20 minutes, door to door. If you live anywhere else in BK, from Greenpoint to Sheepshead Bay, you're looking at 30 minutes minimum to get into manhattan -- probably closer to an hour door-to-door.
Not trying to be rude here, but your statement does not seem to match my lived experience. Maybe you can get 20 minutes door-to-door on a citibike?
The rent in areas adjacent (downtown Brooklyn included) to Brooklyn Heights is nothing to sneeze at. You're looking at equal or higher prices to Manhattan.
Even areas further away, like Prospect Heights or Crown Heights, with decent access to transportation have seen quite the uptick in price and availability.
Eh. I spent a summer there once. Admittedly in the 80s and admittedly as a relatively poor student intern. I like visiting NYC for a few days every now and then but I couldn't wait to get out at the time.
This reads like a silly NY maximalist without really any context of the rest of the country. New York is cool and all but I’m not paying 60k in rent to live somewhere marginally better then a handful of major cities in the country. I moved to the PNW and the idea of living in a city now seems insane
Honestly don't get what is so special about NY... It's not bad, but on the flipside is pretensious, expensive, and difficult to travel to/from.... also all of the things you mention that are positive points are by no means unique to new york.
There are many, many places to live with crime rates far lower than NYC so I'm not sure I really understand this. Maybe you mean compared with most places you could see yourself living?
For example, I live in a nice town in CT and the crime rate is 3.99 per 1000 vs NYC which is currently about 13.3 per 1000, making NYC (as a whole — I understand your point about neighborhoods within the city) 3x higher in crime.
I understand the other things you appreciate about the city. It's great to able to walk outside and have amazing restaurants and other amenities a few feet away; there's a reason many people like the city.
For people wondering the drivers here: car crashes, drug overdoses, suicides. So the claim isn't really referring about the things people usually consider when it comes to "safety" (interpersonal attacks), although it's talking about things that we perhaps *should* think about more when it comes to safety.
If I'm being honest with myself, muggings in DC still scare me more than car crashes in Montana, despite the reality of these stats.
It's not listed as a particularly safe or unsafe place by the measure of the Bloomberg article.
When I lived in DC I was several times narrowly missed by people blowing red lights, robbed, and once had to wake a driver up at a red light because they and a passenger had both passed out while driving at 11am. It definitely didn't feel like a particularly safe place.
That Bloomberg article is a really interesting experiment in cherry-picking data: it focused specifically on deaths, and only on deaths due to specific causes that helped its case. Yes, New York has fewer homicides and car crash deaths than rural towns, but if you look at most other data, which is arguably more relevant, the opposite story shows up.
I'm not that worried about being murdered. Murders tend to happen between people with a relationship. There are very few random murders. In cities, gangs do the murdering, and outside of cities, it is generally crimes of passion. The NYPD is very, very aggressive about going after gangs and murders. This is at the cost of controlling other types of crime.
The car crashes are easy to explain: NYC is designed so that you drive very slowly, and there is a 25 mph speed limit everywhere a pedestrian might be. Crashes in NYC are almost always non-fatal. It's not that they don't happen. They are just non-fatal.
Personally, I am worried about being mugged or harassed, and that is extremely common in NYC compared to most places. It also happens to be something that happens between unrelated people. That is why I moved out of NYC after having been attacked once and witnessing 2 thefts in 4 years, and that is why the statistics cited in that op-ed are completely useless.
It's amusing that you bring up a mogul's "media narrative" and then cite a link from Bloomberg News. Michael Bloomberg is of course also a billionaire with his own empire and media company.
This piece you are citing is from the Opinion section of Bloomberg News. Bloomberg itself being a company whose headquarters are in NYC and whose founder is Mike Bloomberg a NYC resident himself as well as being a 3 term mayor of NYC. The author of this opinion piece, Justin Fox is also a NYC resident. It's worth noting too that Bloomberg LP company famously does not allow remote work and owns the Bloomberg Tower, a 55 story commercial and residential skyscraper that takes up an entire city block in Midtown.
Lastly Bloomberg himself is a polarizing figure since during his long tenure as Mayor he was widely seen as being in bed with big real estate development. His tenure as mayor was notable for the hyper development of luxury real estate. The types of "glass boxes" that are dark most of the year. For more background see:
As someone who currently lives in Philly… yeah, I feel this. I love being able to get around on foot and by transit, but Philly is still a pretty car-centric place compared to what I’ve seen of NYC, and I wish it weren’t.
That plus making it easier/safer to get around by bike/scooter/etc. That’s something even NYC doesn’t seem to do well; have to look at international peers to see good examples of that.
Before I start with my comment, I'll remind everyone that averages skew very high when there are outliers. NYC has a high quantity of extremely high rent tenants. I wish more news articles used medians and median per capita when discussing rents.
The main point I want to make: even with those high rents, we tend to forget how much our cars cost us, directly and indirectly.
Directly: AAA's average new car TCO is close to $10,000 a year. Multiply by two for a typical couple and that's $1600 a month you could dump into your NYC apartment's high rent. Unlimited MTA rides only cost $1500/year/person.
Indirectly: There's the obvious car crash issue, the top killer of children (well, guns just passed that, but luckily NYC is safer than the average American city in that regard), but the other main example is health. We're not supposed to sit all day. My doctor moved from a car suburb to the city and admitted they lost weight and walk a lot more. When walking is the easier option compared to attempting to drive to your daily errands, it's much better for you and extends your life, especially when considering your high-quality years of life.
Number one premature killer is heart disease, by far.
Even if you're just walking to the subway, that's a lot more activity than your commute to your garage.
NYC's obesity rate is half of the national rate. HALF! That's downright incredible.
In NYC I see very old people walking everywhere, stereotypically playing chess in the park, meanwhile I have suburban relatives struggling to walk across the Walmart parking lot and they haven't even hit 70 years old. They may live into their 80's but it will not be pleasant for them. The difference in alertness is noticeable. As a bonus, old people in NYC never had to drive so they never have a retired life feeling isolated to their home.
I think the best way to try and stabilize rent is to buy a condo. It's not a silver bullet due to property taxes and HOA fees that rise with inflation, but it's still a slower rise than renting, I think. You can definitely find 2 bedroom condos with monthly payments under $5000 in Manhattan.
If you're interested in what NYC apartments are really like and how far your money gets you (along with some general YouTube vlogging entertainment), a channel I recommend is Cash Jordan. I won't link it but I'm sure you can find it. Like any other real estate market, it's all about compromises. If you want to live in NYC and pay $1000/month/person, you can definitely do it. You can also pay $10,000/month if you want.
The big caveat to everything I'm saying is that the poor are unlikely to live in the most walkable areas, and a lot of them will perhaps have to own a car. This is definitely the case in Chicago, where the most walkable areas are also the most desirable and affluent (I wonder why that is? Maybe our whole country would be more desirable and affluent if it wasn't designed to be a cash funnel where we dump our income into constructing vehicles, maintaining the infrastructure and utilities utilities of nearly unused land, and burning oil?)
> AAA's average new car TCO is close to $10,000 a year. Multiply by two for a typical couple and that's $1600 a month you could dump into your NYC apartment's high rent.
First, you can get by just fine without a new car. My car was $26k new - 18 years ago. I’ve put another $10k over the years in maintenance (tires, oil, repairs). Insurance is $500/year. Gas is maybe $2k/year at $4/gal. Not even close to $10k/year.
That caveat you apply to averages for rent also applies to cars. Some people are obsessed with having a new car. That’s not the price of having a reliable car.
Second, if you’re a couple, you don’t need two cars. That’s another luxury that many people get by without.
Finally, the car takes me out of town monthly into the mountains. So you would need to factor in car rentals for leaving NYC in your equation if you wanted a fair comparison of what people actually get out of their cars.
> NYC's obesity rate is half of the national rate. HALF! That's downright incredible.
Cause or effect? A lot of people with mobility issues end up obese and having mobility issues is a fucking nightmare in NYC. You just forced the unhealthy people out of the city by design.
> As a bonus, old people in NYC never had to drive so they never have a retired life feeling isolated to their home.
+1. It’s a great place to live… if you don’t have health issues that make mobility a problem.
“Living on the top of Mt. Everest is so healthy! Look at all of the healthy people up here!”
Here are some numbers that are not focused on new cars specifically. If the $10k figured I gave you is high, you can still expect that Americans are still going to spend thousands per year on their car, maybe around $5,000 a year. [1]
Insurance $500 a year as you stated, and then you've got a typical driver driving somewhere around 15,000 miles a year if not more. [2] If you've got a 30MPG car [2.1] at $4.50 a gallon [2.2], you're paying $2,250 just to fuel it, before any expenses for maintenance, oil changes, tires, etc. If you've got a car payment like 35% of Americans, the average payment for a used car is around $500 [2.3], but since we're dealing with averages and vehicles whose lifespans exceed their loans, maybe we can just go ahead and cut that in half to $250/month.
Don't forget that the poorest Americans get the worst auto loan rates, so their payment may be pretty high for a car that has already depreciated significantly. They're losing money to interest that isn't even technically being put into the vehicle itself.
So our grand TCO for this hypothetical car is $5,750, which is really close to the averages that you see in my first reference. [1]
I think this is a really, really reasonable ballpark estimate.
How are you supposed to own only one car if you are a dual-income household in the suburbs and work two different jobs at different locations? Owning one car per person is not a "luxury" in this country, it is just about the norm (1.88 cars per person in the USA). [3]
If it was a "luxury," the entire freaking country wouldn't be doing it.
You really think NYC has a lower obesity rate as an effect rather than a cause, as in, all the people with obesity just say "well, I guess I can't live here anymore, I'll go move to the suburbs?" Do you have any information to back up that type of thinking?
New York (due to NYC) is the most physically active state according to FitBit, and you're gonna jump on here and claim that this completely disconnected obesity rates? [4]
It's not hard to figure out that higher levels activity help prevent obesity. Calories in calories out, walking and walking up and down stairs burns more calories than sitting. [4.1]
The 65+ commuters in NYC are actually the most active commuting segment of the population and over half walk 10 blocks or more per day. [5] I have a hunch they might still be alive and productive because they're so active!
NYC's subway system will be 95% accessible by 2055, [6] which is really quite soon on the scale of city planning and development. About 25% of stations are currently accessible, and really a subway system 25% the size of NYC's system is still a vast transit network. This also doesn't include New York's vast bus system, which is essentially 100% accessible. Tell me, how do you expect the vision impaired to get around in areas that require cars?
When it comes to your point about getting out to the mountains, it's important to note that NYC has plenty of transit-accessible outdoor spaces, including perhaps the best city park in the entire world, Central Park. NYC is extremely well-connected to regional rail and other methods of transit to all sorts of destinations, including outdoor spaces. [6.1] And, yes, New Yorkers can rent a car once in a while, it's a lot cheaper than owning one! They can even stop paying for their MTA fares while they're out of town, while car owners continue to pay for insurance even if they're spending time away from home. A lot of those car owners are even paying daily to park their car at the airport!
Last point: How hard is it really to live in a small apartment, when most people are drowning in clutter and wasteful purchases? [7] How much space in your house is dedicated to storing your vehicle? How much space in your home is dedicated to storing things you rarely or never use? Holiday decorations?
> If you've got a car payment like 35% of Americans, the average payment for a used car is around $500 [2.3], but since we're dealing with averages and vehicles whose lifespans exceed their loans, maybe we can just go ahead and cut that in half to $250/month.
Ask yourself why only 35% have payments. Also, half is pretty pessimistic since a car loan on the long end is 6 years.
> How are you supposed to own only one car if you are a dual-income household in the suburbs and work two different jobs at different locations? Owning one car per person is not a "luxury" in this country, it is just about the norm (1.88 cars per person in the USA). [3]
One person drops the other off. This isn’t a difficult problem and it’s how my parents did it for nearly 15 years way back in the 70s and 80s. Clearly car ownership is a foreign concept to you, but at least try to steelman it to get a decent argument.
> You really think NYC has a lower obesity rate as an effect rather than a cause, as in, all the people with obesity just say "well, I guess I can't live here anymore, I'll go move to the suburbs?" Do you have any information to back up that type of thinking?
Are you seriously asking for proof that obese and disabled people aren’t the biggest fans of having to walk everywhere?
>New York (due to NYC) is the most physically active state according to FitBit, and you're gonna jump on here and claim that this completely disconnected obesity rates
You’re getting confused again and assuming that the city is causing activity rather than just forcing the inactive people out by being an unfriendly environment to them.
> The 65+ commuters in NYC are actually the most active commuting segment of the population and over half walk 10 blocks or more per day. [5] I have a hunch they might still be alive and productive because they're so active!
The segment of the population who does X tends to do X! News at 10! This doesn’t say anything about the community that can’t walk.
> NYC's subway system will be 95% accessible by 2055, [6] which is really quite soon on the scale of city planning and development. About 25% of stations are currently accessible, and really a subway system 25% the size of NYC's system is still a vast transit network. This also doesn't include New York's vast bus system, which is essentially 100% accessible.
“Accessible” doesn’t mean convenient. The elevators are fucking shit in the stations that are accessible and getting to/from the stations is still shit. I took a wheelchair bound aunt to a play on broadway maybe 10 years ago, and it was awful even with me pushing her. Accessibility isn’t a checkbox.
>Tell me, how do you expect the vision impaired to get around in areas that require cars?
Non sequitur, I’m not talking about blind people. I’m talking about mobility impaired people.
> including perhaps the best city park in the entire world, Central Park
It’s an amazing park, but it’s just a park. The comparison to wilderness is laughable.
> Last point: How hard is it really to live in a small apartment
Depends on if you treat your apartment as a box to shit in and sleep in between spending all of your time elsewhere or as a place to actually live and spend huge parts of the daytime. There is a reason NYC was one of the worst places to be quarantined.
> I'm also being generous, the national average is 25MPG not 30MPG.
No you’re not, you quoted $4.50/gal for gas when that hasn’t been an average people have paid until the Ukrainian invasion.
I grew up in NYC and just completely disagree with your analysis here. There are a lot of hidden costs to live in NYC such as some of the highest income and sales taxes in the country, apartments where even if you own if a problem is found the forced maintenace costs can go up thousands a month and you get evicted for not being able to pay. Health driven by sin taxes on soda and tobacco, and much more along those lines than just people walking places.
It is true that older people in NYC are seemingly healthy, but they're definitely a very specific type of person.
Just to be clear, I am not saying NYC is literally cheaper than other places overall. I’m saying that this one major cost component of car ownership is not there, so the high sticker price of housing should be lessened by some amount.
Live in SF or LA and you’ll face similar costs and still need a car on top of it.
People that want to be conspicuous have to display their success where it's going to be seen. Living in a place that is "central" in so many ways is a competition to see who can hang in there. The only way to stay is to keep winning bigger.
What? Most people I know in Manhattan are just people with jobs who enjoy living in the city. There is no "displaying their success" or "keep winning bigger" mentality to be found in my sprawling NYC-based friend group. Sounds like something from TV or the movies.
> There is no "displaying their success" or "keep winning bigger" mentality to be found
They may not realize the game they're in. But as long as the cost of living keeps hitting new peaks, inevitably people need to bring in more money, or move farther out or elsewhere. Supply is limited, and it is a competition.
And the award for Most Condescending Comment goes to...
But in all seriousness, this has always been happening. NYC is NYC because the cost of living keeps hitting new peaks, over and over, generation after generation. The same with so many high-demand cities. That's how they got to be such massive, dense cities to begin with. We're all just riding the wave.
> And the award for Most Condescending Comment goes to...
I probably could have phrased that better. In any case I don't think what we're saying is incompatible. One has no choice but to keep up with the cost of living. My point is that the cost of living in a massively "central" city is defined by a lot of people driven to succeed and be seen succeeding, whether or not that's the mentality of one's group of friends.
Housing and land is a non-transable good, and therefore there should be heavy state intervention on it, preferably by doing the same as Vienna, which is holding >40% of the renting stock and charging according to income, and renting to a representative distribution of tenants so to prevent guettos.
Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy, and property owners provide almost no value, but to provide access to housing for people who has no capital for it, which is service that could be perfectly provided by a state entity.
The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas, hurting social mobility, which could be improved by the setup described above. Many attempts at public housing failed because they just tried to provide housing for low-income people in separated and/or undesirable areas, with a predictable outcome.
Housing =/= Land. But our policies which heavily kneecap our ability to build more [0] make it such that Housing starts behaving like Land.
The solution is to build more, and the success of Vienna does not come from public intervention but from the added supply. Tokyo is another city with famously cheap housing, and the secret is that they make it easy to build.
I personally think that achieving affordable housing prices via mainly government intervention is not a sustainable approach. You end up consuming both economic and political capital.
A more sustainable approach sets clear, transparent rules that specify under what conditions do you get to build by right. Then 90% gets satisfied by the market, the remaining 10% can be addressed by government investments, if needed.
The only sustainable way to get affordable housing is when the market price is affordable.
Land, on the other hand, is another story. There is strong economic evidence that many of the observations of Henry George [1] are spot on: Land rents tend to take a massive toll in the economy, cause inequality and misery, all without requiring their owners to provide any added value. The proposed solution, again with solid economic fundamentals, is to tax the unimproved value of land at 100%. Henry George further argues that the proceeds should be equally divided among citizens, a citizen dividend if you will.
[0] e.g. it takes 4 years on average to get a new building permit in SF, 90% of the city is zoned for single family housing, any neighbor etc.
I am obviously less informed on Manhattan shenanigans, but enough to know that there's plenty of obstacles to new construction in NYC and Manhattan proper.
I recall AOC lobbying for stopping an apartment complex in a formerly industrial area. And a articles on how certain areas of Manhattan don't allow towers. In fact, a quick look at the zoning map [0] has, eg, large areas zoned as "R8B contextual districts are designed to preserve the character and scale of taller rowhouse neighborhoods".
SF is the worst offender, but NYC is still pretty bad.
It can be doing so much better. I get a tad excited reading about 1,000ft supertall's being built, only to sigh when I see it will have a whopping 80 units. I've seen even more ridiculous stuff like a 10 story building with 4 units. There's been a ton of construction in NYC over the last 5 years alone but it seems to be mostly luxury and medium/low density. There are plenty of older buildings from the 20th century that are much denser but it seems that no one wants to build these anymore. (Or they can't, I'm not sure which).
More than 40% of the building square footage in Manhattan would be literally illegal to build today.[1] Developers would absolutely love to build huge skyscrapers housing thousands. However the city has zoning rules with onerous setbacks, height and density restrictions. The focus on ultra luxury development is a byproduct of heavy handed government regulation.
Exactly. Libertarians in here love to say it's a lack of supply and it's simple supply and demand and you look at what's being built and it's 1000ft tall buildings with a tiny number of luxury units.
In the 1990s, the US restricted the number of car imports from Japan. As a result, Toyota and Nissan had car quotas. They had luxury cars and mass-market cars. Which do you think they filled their quota with first? Obviously the higher-margin luxury cars. Clearly the problem is not a simple lack of supply, right? Toyota and Nissan just need to make more affordable cars? Or is it obvious that when you restrict supply in a market, only the highest-margin (luxury) goods get produced, until demand for them is met and manufacturers are forced to produce and sell lower-margin mass-market (more affordable) goods?
It's more dense than other cities, but there's still a few problems. There was a huge controversy when the city tried to upzone SoHo/NoHo.
Additionally, the other boroughs aren't super dense. For example, much of the land next to LIRR is pretty low density, and even SFH [0]. Some people in Manhattan would be okay living there, so that does lead to higher rents in Manhattan.
Manhattan is 25% less dense than it was in 1910. The densest census tract in Manhattan is four times denser than borough average. We could easily double the population of the island, even without getting into ultra tall skyscrapers or reclaiming more land.
I live in East Village right on the border with the LES. There's certainly development happening and new buildings coming up but when I walk around EV/LES it sometimes feels like I see more 2-3 story buildings than otherwise. There's literally no reason any of these buildings should be under 6 stories minimum. People think of Manhattan as being dense with a bunch of skyscrapers but I suspect in reality there's still a whole lot of units that could be added by simply building upwards.
I say 6 stories because you can reasonably have a 6-story walkup. Anything higher and you would need to add an elevator which could make things harder.
In my mind it is the same problem everywhere. Supply is too low and is kept low for many reasons. There is insane demand from around the world to live in Manhattan.
The solution of course is to build more, but it just happens that the private initiative always build under demand because it is inelastic and it's in their interest to keep the market as so.
Of course the Vienna success came from public intervention because otherwhise you'd have exactly the same situation of hundreds of other cities where rent is always a hefty amount of modal income and no matter how easy and cheap is to build it just happens those with access to capital never meet demand.
You need to build more, in many cite MUCH more, and you need vacant housing so floating population can come and go easily.
> The solution is to build more, and the success of Vienna does not come from public intervention but from the added supply. Tokyo is another city with famously cheap housing, and the secret is that they make it easy to build.
The other two secrets are tiny apartments (200-400 sqft), and an incredibly reliable public transportation system. Tokyo has a massive sprawl -- people can and do live far from their work. The average one-way commute time in the Tokyo metro area is almost an hour.
400sqft is about 37m2
That’s pretty much the smallest apartment you’ll find in Vienna, and only for individuals living alone. But yes they are smaller than houses but mostly bigger than Manhattan family apartments :)
Every family I know lives in about 80m2 to 120m2 and pays around 1000-2000 euros/month rent. Depending heavily on location and quality of course.
I think, fundamentally, the problem is that there is a highly speculative market (real-estate) attached to a basic needs market (housing).
I think of myself as right-of-center, but think George was more or less spot on w.r.t. land.
I wonder if there is a solution in banning rent itself? i.e. force owners to transfer a % of ownership equal to rental fees received from tenants and allow them to discount improvements against that.
Whether housing is rented or owned has no relation to its price. Making it illegal to speculate/profit from housing doesn't solve the underlying issue that is a massive (xx,000,000) unit shortage of housing in the United States.
Absolutely it has a relation to its price. A domicile's value in any setting is determined by it's speculative value + a discounted income model. This model wildly decreases the discounted income value without addressing the speculative value.
As far as I'm aware there are more housing units than people in the US. We do have an incentive structure that puts property owners' needs at odds w/ society's needs on multiple factors, and some of them (i.e. NIMBYism) can be addressed orthogonally to the intractability of housing as investment vs housing as housing.
> The only sustainable way to get affordable housing is when the market price is affordable.
And the only way to reduce the market price to affordable rates is to crack down on the demand - there is no reasonable way to expand the offer side in many cities any more since they don't have the space. And most demand is driven by the fact that rural areas have been left in a decrepit state for decades: highways, bridges and other infrastructure is crumbling, there is no public transport worth the name, forget about fast internet (or fast internet offered by a crap monopolist), employers have closed down or moved to urban areas, schools and medical services are constantly closing or underfunded...
To fix the urban rent explosion problem, we need to fix rural areas and make them livable again.
The problem is that Manhattan is the only truly dense area with good transit in a country of 330 million. Tokyo is much larger than Manhattan and is dense throughout. Other Japanese cities are dense too, so people have options when prices out.
Greater Tokyo Area? Tokyo Metropolis? Previous Tokyo City limits? New York City metro area? New York City? Manhattan? These can be 2 orders of magnitude apart in scale but they've all been talked about like it was the same location A and location B.
At the small scale Tokyo's densest ward is ~22,700/km^2 and Manhattan is ~28,800/km^2 with Manhattan being ~4x-5x the land area of the former (i.e. the core is a lot more dense). At the large scale the Greater Tokyo Area is ~2,900/km^2 and the New York Metropolitan Area is ~2,053/km^2 (i.e. the urban area around Tokyo is a lot more dense).
"Tokyo" is a good example that you can get affordable housing by focusing on how to spread the population over a large urban area but it's not a good example building more housing downtown is a scalable approach.
I'm not sure why you think Tokyo works, it wasn't long ago that it was multiple times the price of NYC. It might be affordable now but only because of a economic slump and Japan's falling population.
New York City already has a significantly higher population density than Tokyo (~11,300/km2 vs ~6,300/km). It's easier to develop more housing when you have more land.
You need to include Newark, Yonkers, Long Island, etc if you want to compare those figures.
Tokyo is 13400 sq km, NYC is 780 sq km. If I rounded Tokyo's land area to the same sig figs as I did for NYC, it would be lowered by half the total area that NYC takes up!
> You need to include Newark, Yonkers, Long Island, etc if you want to compare those figures.
That's just not an accurate comparison.
Live in NYC. Lived in Japan. The difference is transit. It is far easier to get to Saitama or Kawasaki or Yokohama or Chiba than it is to get to Long Island from NYC. You can do the former in an hour at rush hour. Try getting to downtown Manhattan from Bay Shore as a daily commute. You'll go mad.
The gray area of Tokyo on that map is pretty much all considered an exurb of Tokyo, more-or-less feasible for daily commute by rail. Most of the NYC region is inaccessible from Manhattan, except by car. Look at the Seibu Shinjuku line, or the Chuo line on the Tokyo map -- both offer express trains that will take you from the distant western exurbs, right into the middle of downtown Tokyo:
I understand, but that doesn't change my assertion that comparing Tokyo density to only-NYC density makes no sense, especially as an argument that there is no room for to build more. Hogwash! Half your NYC map is pure green, but even leaving that, most of the land area on that map that is housing is SFH.
There's plenty of room to grow up. Just because the reason we don't is shitty government organization and FPTP voting doesn't mean we can just ignore the vast swaths of low-density just outside Manhattan 's borders.
NYC rental vacancy is only a bit over 4% city wide. The national average is closer to 6%. It is very expensive to build in New York, and projects can be scuttled at any time due to angry neighbors or intervention by city council. The EIS process adds a ton of cost to new construction. As a result of this risk banks require high returns in NYC than in most places in order to secure loans. If you take a development loan the rental price for the units is written into the loan.
I think this a feature of accounting practices. Mark down rent means you mark down the asset value of the building on your balance sheet. This reduces the value of your business which means loans secured against the business are in jeopardy and it limits the potential to borrow more money. This is why commercial rents going down is a rare event. Fwiw i am not an accountant and could well be wrong.
IIRC Sometimes some of these units are tied to a mortgage. Renting it at a reasonable price could make the price of the unit to drop making the money lender wanting to renegotiate the mortgage contract.
There's a large (20,000+) volume of empty rent-stabilized units - in those cases, landlords say that a recent tenant protection law (HSTPA, 2019) makes it uneconomic for them to rent due to the expected difficulty of evicting non-paying tenants and the strict limitations on how much repair and investment work can be recouped from increasing rent.
My gut feeling is this doesn't entirely explain it, but any tenant is also more work than no tenant, so they may not want to do the work of signing a new lease and dealing with the work it will trigger for less than you're making per-head on your current tenants.
There's probably also a fear that if you let a new tenant in for lower rent, this might lower the rent other people expect and the problem starts snowballing.
Surely this works in a short timeframe where a landlord can make a tactical decision to let the property sit empty rather than rent it out for less than a threshold. Landlords can even collude on a minimal rent below which they will not rent. (Basically "hold the line"). But how is this sustainable in the long run? The money for the original mortgage has to come from some place. Not all landlords have an infinite supply of money to keep this practice going on for a few years. (There is no VC funding available for them).
With commercial units (eg - downtown San Francisco) it is even harder because with remote work, the jobs are never coming back to the city.
On mobile so don't have a ready link. Iirc a lot of commercial real estate can get into a death spiral if the loan they have which is based on a certain amount of income starts having less income. If I can find the explanation I will add it later.
> Naively, any rent is more than zero rent, so why let a unit sit empty?
There's a substantial cost in having a renter living there, both in dollars and risk. So if the rent isn't enough to cover those, it's cheaper to let it sit unused.
That does not make sense from a game-theoretic standpoint. You would be helping other landlords at your own expense. It would be better to let other landlords make that sacrifice and rent our your own properties for as much as you can get.
that's the thing. They are okay with helping other landlords because they themselves hold other multiple properties. There is more benefits by having the rates high than losing money on a few units.
It totally makes sense for the rental property owners.
Cannot speak for the poster, but the big current issue is that the value of residential units has gone from being strongly linked to wages to residences being an extremely valuable chip for playing financial games. Residences, especially inherently valuable ones like NYC apartments, have sufficient demand from financial game players that wage earners are barely able to keep up. Exactly how things break down is not clear, but there is this idea that demand for residences for financial purposes is competing aggressively with people who want homes.
This is a well studied idea, the percentage of units sitting empty is a round error in the total supply of housing. At the start of the pandemic there were a paltry 4000 vacant condos. For reference there are 2.3 million apartments in the city.
The vacancy rate of apartments is just at or under 4.5% which is considered a very tight rental market. I don't have the total condo numbers readily at hand.
Because I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and saw what all of the new development did to the demand. The street that my grandmother used to rent an apartment for in the early 2000s for under $1k/month now only has units that go for $5K/month.
As a Californian, if the demand is there, it will eventually bid up trash fire apartments to 2k a month, even if they're still colocated with violence and bad schools, you don't need to induce any demand with development.
You have that backwards. Bloomberg rezoned the queens and brooklyn waterfront for his real estate investor buddies, which gentrified the shit out of these neighborhoods and brought in a ton of people that would have never dared to cross the east river.
Flashback to late 1970s driving through the Bronx with my family - an annual ritual as most of the extended family was still in the NYC area while we had moved to Rochester. We would pass blocks of empty high-rise apartments in the South Bronx.
As a middle-middle-class suburban kid, I just couldn't conceive of how the wealthiest city on earth could have sections that looked like a bombed-out and evacuated European city following World War II.
I asked my father what had happened here. He answer was "rent control".
Too bad there are "investment luxury hi-rises" popping up all over the skyline that are largely unpopulated. If that's what people want to build to park their billions, we have other problems to tend to first.
Seven buildings. That's not representative of...anything. It's not even worth talking about. And the effects are largely positive for the city, anyway. You've got a few big, empty buildings concentrated on one street where billionaires park their money, pay a bunch of property taxes, and use zero city services. That's an unqualified win.
No idea why you're being downvoted. This meme (rich people buying luxury condos, letting them sit vacant, and then profiting somehow) doesn't make any sense, and that article posted as evidence for it undermines it by depicting those units as being un-rentable due to oversupply in the market.
And in the meantime, they choose not to rent it why? The intuitive answer is: they're hard to rent, because there's way more luxury condos available to be rented than people who want to rent them, and it was a bad investment that the rich person will probably lose money on (if not in absolute dollars, then in comparison to some other property that is desirable to rent). But a lot of people in this thread seem to think it's intentional and rich people have some devious way of making more from a vacant condo than a rented one.
If I were faced with a situation where the taxes were sub-optimally low, then I would simply raise the taxes, instead of trying to remake the entire concept of private property.
There are insane tax breaks these luxury apartments get, too, on the order of a 90% discount. It's not like these properties are generating huge windfalls for city or state government.
Sure, but they don't cost the city anything, either. They sit empty and the city collects money. Meanwhile, the owners aren't even there and use zero city services. Should those taxes be higher? Fine with me! But these apartments are a low-salience/high-visibility distraction. They have hardly anything to do with the issues in the broader housing market.
"But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times."
Sorry, but I trust the Atlantic over you unless you got some facts.
Here's the quote from the NY Times article [0] your Atlantic article references:
> Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015, or 3,695 of 7,727 apartments, remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts by Nancy Packes Data Services, a real estate consultancy and database provider.
So we're talking about 3,695 unsold apartments. There are 3.5 million housing units in New York City. So that's about a tenth of one percent .
The problem here isn't that the statistic is wrong; it's that anybody thinks 7k new units over a 5 year period in a metro area of 20 million people is anything more than a curiosity.
The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that it offers a sensational explanation -- usually some foreign, outside force -- for a complex problem, absolves the believer of any culpability, and provides an easy, unsympathetic target on which to dump all their rage. "Foreign oligarchs are buying up all the real estate and locking the rest of us out and that's what's wrong with the housing market" is exactly that kind of theory. And 3500 unsold units over 5 years is emphatically not evidence of its veracity.
4% of apartments in nyc are vacant. You can claim that luxury units are more expensive because a block on the southern border is made up of half empty units owned by billionaires, but the rest of the city does not experience that phenomenon at all.
My two cents : I believe that if you increase supply and allow more affordable housing in a city, it will only marginally decrease prices but will mainly attract more people to this city.
I think the solution to housing cost is to make smaller cities, towns and the countryside more attractive by having higher local tax rates in cities. This source of income could be used to build better infrastructure in the rest of the country.
> I believe that if you increase supply and allow more affordable housing in a city, it will only marginally decrease prices but will mainly attract more people to this city.
I believe that allowing more units will lower prices, but what if it didn't? What if all that happened is that a whole bunch more people got to live where they want to live, productivity increased, and the largest cities got more dynamic and interesting? What if that's all that happened?
Prices are set at the margin, and demand is largely driven by employment.
> by having higher local tax rates in cities
You already pay taxes on par with Denmark if you live in NYC and have sufficient income to afford to live there without subsidized housing. Tax policy is an insane way to prop up little towns. Cities offer a lot of economic and environmental benefits, and are generally already generating more tax revenue than they receive in benefits.
Having higher local taxes in major cities would just expand the problem. The poor and middle class will get further pushed out, and the rich who can afford the tax and prefer living in the city will stay, in which case you just get SF all over again.
NYC has substantially higher taxes than most of its suburbs. It also has a much higher draw due to its dense population supporting fancy bars, arts, and other world class amenities. The network effects of living close to other interesting, cosmopolitan, or just niche social group people are also valuable.
At some point you run out of people that can move into the city... which might make the city huge, but eventually supply will outstrip demand.
Also no thanks to wealth redistribution. The rest of the country sucks outside the coasts sucks and its mostly because they have regressive politics. It's their own damn fault nobody wants to live there.
> All policies that attempt to address housing costs that don't increase supply are treating a symptom and not the underlying cause.
So are the ones that do increase supply, so long as they are not doing it in a way which deliberately undercuts the fact that there are positive feedback loops at work (and cutting those positive feedback loops means reducing quality of life and economic opportunity in ways no one wants.)
Among the thing that drives demand for housing is available work (demand for labor). Increasing housing supply so more of that demand is met increases demand for local services, and thereby available work, increasing demand for housing. That's not the only positive feedback loop involved, but it's one of them.
Increasing the supply alone does not counter the gentrification / ghetto effects the parent comment talked about, in fact it might amplify them.
A gross oversimplification, but if you somehow make ten thousand new apartments available in Manhattan at $1k/month, they will eventually fill up with low-income tenants, which will make them undesirable. Pressure on all the existing $5K properties will remain the same.
Are you suggesting that people paying $5k are doing that because of some inherent property of a $5k rental, and that they would not prefer to pay the year 2000 rent on the same unit, say $3000?
If people paying $5k would prefer to pay $3k for their units, why would this logic not also apply to people who are currently paying $3k?
If lower rents would make the city become undesirable, why did people want to move there in the year 2000, when rents were much lower?
The inherent property of a 5k rental he's referring to is that it costs 5k. Most people paying 5k for a studio just _don't want people around their houses_ specially if they are poorer than them. Otherwise they would be paying less than 3k for a room with a shared kitchen and bathroom or renting a bigger place with roommates.
Pressure would remain the same just as eating a single grape would not abate a person's hunger: NYC has millions of existing housing units. To make a significant dent in the rent would require building hundreds of thousands of new apartments.
Because low income anywhere (rental area or even just low income suburban areas) typically has a population that is less able to invest into their area (in time or money), and historically has shown that they seek an extractive relationship with their environment rather than invest in it.
Are you joking? Poor people are the exploitative ones? That's just entirely false
The entire basis of capitalism in the US is that the work of the poor is exploited by those with the capital to build factories and businesses which extract labor and resources from the poor people
That's why they can't invest. You have it entirely backwards
$1k/month rent isn't exactly low income material. As a high income SWE, I definitely feel like I'm sucking the city dry in a way. I'm not making $8 chopped cheeses. I'm not building parks. I'm not creating art. I'm just a consumer.
Having said that, what's even worse than me is "low income" consumers. A lot of affordable housing, especially HDFC apartments, end up in the hands of the children of the rich. Not only are they not producing anything of value, they're also costing us tax dollars.
High rent reduces demand and reflects an equilibrium between supply and demand. That, and people in Manhattan simply can afford to pay more, so are able to bid up the prices higher than tenants in other places.
So you're telling me that the government should build millions of new units in NYC, until they control 40% of the market? Am I understanding that correctly?
Seize the less developed parts, and build high-density affordable housing there. Yes, that’s the only action that’d have a chance at solving this issue.
Because the private market can't do it. When most cities in the US have 80%+ of its land zoned for single-family units, developers can not build anything other than expensive McMansions.
Don't forget parking minimums, rent control, environmental studies in excess of what is needed, and the endless town-halls full of people trying to veto change. All this just to build an apartment complex. You have to retain half the state bar to build anything around me and consequences are evident in the rent prices.
80% of Seattle is zoned for single family units. It's not exactly a suburban desert, but it could be much better. Unfortunately, even very limited legislation (HB 1782) allowing upzoning to duplexes/quadplexes ("missing middle" housing) within walking distance of public transit hubs failed earlier this year. NIMBYism abounds.
Ah, from your original comment, I thought you were advocating for seizure + rent control.
If you are instead suggesting some form of eminent domain of low density housing, and then building higher density housing in its stead, with a target of 40% of housing controlled by the state, I'm more inclined to think that would work.
To my mind though, I think targeting meeting current demand + demand growth (or some margin therein) would be the target, rather than what feels to me the arbitrary target of 40% (unless you have figures that show that's where demand+growth meets.)
Sure that’s the capitalist narrative explanation. The actual, human, explanation is that landlords see that they can get away with charging absurd rates because consumers are willing to make dumb decisions to get what they want, so they do it.
I’m sick of these economic abstractions that constantly try to explain away our problems, and take away the responsibility from the human actors that cause these effects. It’s not some abstract “supply and demand” that we should focus on—it is the landlords and renters and their decisions that are to blame. We need to introduce some agency and accountability back into our discussions of economics otherwise capitalism will continue to be an abstract machine in which horribly unethical actions are justified by removing human actors and human culpability from the equation. Belief in “the market” is not dissimilar to religious belief. Furthermore, analyses in capitalist terms often lead us to more problems. If the problem is “supply”, people will say “ok build more homes”, but that first of all never seems to actually work and secondly has a large number of additional negative effects such as increasing overcrowding and climate problems.This ridiculous tendency to not actually blame the people responsible for these negative conditions is ridiculous. It’s a large part of the reason we’re in this mess.
I mean sure, if you want to address it from the demand end of things that would work if there were a viable solution.
The hard fact is that people want to live in large cities.
Even if you were to legislate that all landlords had to provide housing at cost + 5%, there would still be a demand for more housing as people desperately bid to enter those areas. Further more, you'd see people never give up those rentals because there would be a mile long waiting list for every property that is under rent control.
I have a lot of sympathy for people disgusted by the greed landlords display, but at the end of the day, the issue here is that more people want to live in these places than there are homes for them. So the wealthy bid their way in and everyone else be damned or destitute in order to compete.
If you want radical policy, eminent domain low density housing in city limits and build apartment rises on them.
That’s fair, but I don’t see how it would prevent similar effects from eventually spidering out to those city limit properties once the demands propagate to those areas.
I think the solution will require a mix of infrastructure solutions (building more homes) and regulatory solutions. I’m not saying landlords can’t make money, but there should definitely be greater restrictions around how much they can raise rates (which did exist, but which NYC is steadily removing) and renters need to be afforded more rights and protections too.
First off, city limit property is already seeing this effect.
Tenant protections in the USA suck. Big Time.
However landlords raising rates are a great signal that your infrastructure is failing somewhere. This is useful because it means you can look for and address the problem.
Some locations are going to be incredibly desireable and thus expensive, and that's okay, as long as there are options available for everyone else who can't afford them.
And as far as regulation solutions, removing mixed zoning restrictions would be a massive step forward in allowing development of construction that could address some of these issues. Being able to live within a minutes walk of groceries, restaurants etc. is such a freeing experience that is taken from too many due to zoning restrictions. Regulatory reform could fix that.
There is no system that can work in large scale and depend on the good will of all (or the majority of) participants.
If your system only works when everyone cooperates, you don't need the system in the first place. Believing that we can all live in this utopian ideal is more religious than "believing in the market"
I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s quite possible to introduce regulations into the existing system that force certain actors to behave. I’m not expecting anyone to behave without such restrictions, in fact this article is precisely the evidence that people will exploit others and the system when no such restrictions exist.
Many of these landlords are up charging on properties that have not been materially improved at all, because, as I said, people are making dumb decisions to live where they want to, so they can arbitrarily increase the price up to the limit of what someone will pay. This is great for landlords since they can double their money without doing any work.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m really frustrated by these incoming renters too. A lot of these people fled and abandoned the city like complete cowards when the pandemic hit and suddenly they want to return while they left the responsibility of keeping the city going on all the rest of us that are actual residents that stayed. These semi-nomadic people are just as bad as the landlords and want to live somewhere only so long as it benefits them—they have no allegiance to a community. This, in conjunction with land owners behavior creates disastrous effects for actual long-term residents who invest in the local communities and don’t run away the second things get hard.
>I’m saying it’s quite possible to introduce regulations into the existing system that force certain actors to behave.
Tell me how you want to reinvent taxes and rent control, without knowing that you want to reinvent taxes and rent control.
> I’m really frustrated by these incoming renters too.
You are passing judgment to all these different groups of people, without any shred of fundamental principle to justify why they need to act the way you want.
They don't owe anything to you or the city. Stop complaining like a spoiled child.
Of course not. And I don’t owe them anything either. By the same terms of your argument there’s no reason I should be satisfied with just letting them do what they want when it affects me directly since you’re stating that I should not try to do anything that affects them directly. I have my desires, which requires placing demands on their behavior since they are ignorant of the conditions of other human beings, act entirely selfishly and in a vacuum, and ruin things for the rest of us.
The fundamental principle is that people that are short-term renters disrupt communities in negative ways by having economic effects that harm long-term residents and ultimately break the existing community. I’m passing judgement on them because I witnessed the mass exodus that happened in 2020 and I witnessed all the struggle those who stayed had to endure and I witnessed the mass return of people that fled to “safer” spaces come back as though nothing happened and absolutely screw over everyone that stayed.
You must not have ever been subject to gentrification. You’ve got a real empathetic heart. I’m not “complaining” I’m trying to speak to the problem and suggest that existing solutions clearly are not enough. If anything is childish it’s your post, which tries to effectively say “we tried everything, there’s no possible other solution” and “in spite of the insane number of problems currently evident in our economics capitalism is fine and people should be able to manipulate the market without bound”. Your post has effectively no intellectual content. Being upset about something, evoking an opinion, and trying to advocate that we need a solution that will not only benefit myself but also the thousands of others affected by insane rent costs is not “acting like a spoiled child”, in my opinion. Do I have that solution? No, of course not. I’m not qualified. But if we restricted commentary on hacker news to professionally qualified individuals this thread would have close to 0 comments.
> just letting them do what they want when it affects me directly
Unless someone straight up breached their contract to evict and give "your" apartment to someone else, you were not affected "directly" by anything.
> I have my desires, which requires placing demands on their behavior
Desires? Is this really the word that you want to use? The more you write, the more you are displaying your sense of entitlement.
> (your post) which tries to effectively say “we tried everything, there’s no possible other solution”
There is absolutely no point where I said anything like that. Please stop assuming things. If you want to restart the conversation around that, by all means let's do it. But if you want to argue by baseless statements, I'm not your person.
EDIT: Ok, after the parent edit I am convinced you’re a little bit more reasonable, however, I can tell you’ve already made up your mind and are more interested in defending your position (which you haven’t actually ever elaborated) and making reductive claims about the character of your opponents (that they are just “complaining” or “entitled”) than actually having a discussion. You seem to want your interlocutor to follow all the polite rules of discussion while abandoning them all yourself.
My rent increased significantly for no reason other than a shift in market rates. I struggle to see how this does not count as being directly effected.
Yes. Desires. People have them. Usually they dictate behaviors. It’s why people move to New York. It’s why you’re quoting my comments and writing replies—you want to show me that you’re “smarter” and that my dissatisfactions are illegitimate and you think a great way to do so is to write targeted quips that take one or two lines of text out of context, but unfortunately you’re not succeeding. It’s clear you have no interest in actual persuasion or discussion—if you do, I highly recommend taking a few writing or debate classes, maybe brushing up on what it means to empathize, learn about logos/ethos/pathos, read some philosophy, things like that.
When this is your first statement following your attempted "apology", how can anyone be interested in continuing with the conversation?
> You seem to want your interlocutor to follow all the polite rules of discussion while abandoning them all yourself.
It's not about "politeness". It's about honesty. I'd rather have a honest-but-dry conversation than a pleasantly-dishonest one.
> your position (which you haven’t actually ever elaborated)
My position (if it couldn't even be called that) is that NYC is a victim of its own (relative) success compared to all the other cities in the US. The best way to get NYC to become more affordable would be to rescue other cities. There are just too many people with too much money chasing not enough houses in urban areas that are desirable, so of course the prices will go up in the places that are.
Rent control is not going to solve this. It's only going to create a privileged class that is going to cling on to their old leases. Landlords will have zero incentive to invest. Developers will have less incentive to build, and then only the existing stock will continue to be around.
It's supply that needs to be fixed. Also, it may seem counter-intuitive at first, but to fix cities in North America you need to get rid of suburbia.
Ok, we’ll now I feel that I was mistaken earlier, and want to offer an actual apology. I think our discussion got off on the wrong foot and some of the ad hominem involved annoyed me. I think this post (that I’m replying to) shows that I was wrong in my judgements, and I think your idea to rescues other cities is a good one.
I think NYC’s location is one of the difficulties involved with such a plan. NYC is partly desirable because its locality makes it an easy hub for travel to and from Europe. You can make other cities attractive by other means, but it will be hard to beat this and the entrenchment of current residents and businesses.
The idea of eliminating suburbs to fix supply is interesting. I do think that could be beneficial, but at the same time, that also would require regulations or policies that push development away from suburbs and into cities. Either way you’ll need some kind of regulatory intervention.
The question is whether or not supply increase is sufficient to alter the market, I’m skeptical of such a claim because new residential developments crop up in NYC all the time but it doesn’t seem to help drive down rates at all. Furthermore, NYC’s population for the decade had its peak in 2016, yet prices then were more affordable[1]. Maybe there’s data that shows there’s an extreme influx of individuals now and the population in NYC surpassed this number in 2022, but I’d be surprised if that were the case esp. when you factor in new building developments that occurred in the meantime. I don’t think it boils down to a simple supply problem. It may be due to the fact that brokerages are snatching up properties and charging more than individual landlords, it may be a side effect of inflation, it may be predatory profit seeking after the pandemic. I don’t know, but I don’t think merely throwing up a bunch of new buildings will necessarily fix things, and as I mentioned before, we need to consider the other negative consequences of such a plan (density, the consequent environmental impacts etc.)
> regulations or policies that push development away from suburbs and into cities.
I misspoke. By "getting rid of suburbia", I mean getting rid of American-style, car-centric suburban development. You'll absolutely want to have development in the suburbs.
And to do that, you don't need a lot of changes in regulations. Surely, you'll have to fight with NIMBYs, but these changes do not require massive regulations:
- Upzoning all R1 zones, and abolish Euclidian Zone. Just by getting rid of exclusive single-family zones that are so prevalent in the US, and start allowing multi-family townhouses, mixed-use areas, you could recover basically every city that is not part of coastal metro area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
Let them charge what they want if it's theirs. Otherwise, your demands on what they charge amount to asserting that what is theirs isn't really. And, to put responsibility on the actor in question, you're asking that the lost potential value be stolen from the owner, for the benefit of non-owners. Can people own stuff, or not?
If you’re renting out basic needs like housing I’d argue the terms of ownership should change.
We all have dependencies on one another to get access to our basic needs. If your ISP, gas or whatever provider decided to suddenly charge you double for no apparent upgrades you would not be happy. You might have to option to go to another provider. If you didn’t, you’d have to move somewhere that has cheaper services. Moving is not zero cost. It both financially and emotionally affects people depending on how tied they are to their communities. The problem with rentals is that this is happening to long term residents that have no other option because the overall market price for the area is crazy. People are being removed from their communicates because there are no restrictions on landlords that make money will producing nothing the vast majority of the time. Capitalism is supposed to reward production, products. In most cases renting is a parasitic form of raising capital that doesn’t contribute to any material improvements, it just uses existing scarcity of resources of basic needs and exploits the fact to make capital without producing anything.
> (...) there should be heavy state intervention (...)
This has been tried so many times throughout different cultures and time periods, and by different means. It will not benefit whoever is actually living on the properties, but will detract from their situation.
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt has several concrete examples of attempted interventions, and is written to give a basic intuition on why this happens (Spoiler: Opportunity costs).
The only permanent solution is just to build more buildings, or at a political level simply making it easier to build new buildings, which directly increases supply and thus causes the lowering of prices. This makes perfect sense when you think about it: There are not enough buildings, so we need to have more buildings.
It continues to be disappointing to see so many people turn to state power as a solution to the problem of scarcity. Scarcity is solved through production not political power.
Land Value Tax would decrease the cost of land as it makes land speculation less attractive. People won't be willing to bet on much on real estate if increased prices come with a tax penalty.
It's not without its flaws, but Singapore has an extremely effective public housing program run by the government's Housing & Development Board (HDB) where 89.9% of Singaporeans are homeowners.
The "just build more" supply argument doesn't hold water when you have an unlimited source of demand from institutional investors and speculators that use housing as a place to park their money.
It sounds like incentives in Manhattan are stacked in a way that 1000ft tall buildings with only 40 uber-luxury units are the only kind of buildings that can be profitably built.
Vienna was only able to pull that off after a devasting war left nearly everyone poor. It's not clear that the US could seize 40% of rentals in Manhattan without starting a revolution.
To your other points yes. Land Value Tax now! There's simply no good reason for why we're all taxed so heavily on our labor while land speculators get away for pennies.
have 2.25 million population before WW1 and then decline in population for almost 100 years? They still haven't recovered (1.89m). It may be an enormous mistake to read into their allocation policy because they've simply had a very easy time allocating so far.
St Louis population has declined for 70 years. It is very affordable. It's just not hard to accomplish affordability like that.
Vienna suffered and suffers housing price inflation like any other european city. In world wars not only people dies, but housing units are destroyed too.
Also, the point of the social housing in vienna is not only the dimension of it, but how they do it. The design, the demographics, etc.
There's a clear distinction between their program and the myriad of commieblocks in other countries that become low-income guettos to sink public money.
Public housing done right is more than just building dense, putting poor people in it and be done with it. That's a recipe for disaster.
> should be heavy state intervention on it, preferably by doing the same as Vienna, which is holding >40% of the renting stock and charging according to income
This is great policy if you want to make housing unaffordable. When supply is less than demand, prices go up. Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices). Capping prices prevents the price mechanism from working, leaving a shortage of housing.
> Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy
I’m happy (perhaps not quite the right word…) to pay rent. I don’t want to own property. It’s a large, illiquid investment with high transaction fees, carry costs, and concentration risk. My landlord takes all the risk of owning the property (prices don’t always go up after all).
>Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices).
This is not reality though. Here in the UK our housing is in major crisis because people simply cannot afford the insane price increases. Pretty much everyone I know shares their living situation, on their own they would not be able to afford basic amenities.
The guardian today published an article showing:
>Average monthly rental payments were now 40% higher than they were 10 years ago, while typical mortgage payments for the same properties were up 13%.
Landlords and property owners are hiking the prices way beyond reasonable value, in some parts of the country rent is up by over 20% in the last year alone. By your logic there should be an incentive for builders to increase the housing stock, but private enterprise aren't building anymore homes now than they were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.
We do however have a situation where the average mortgage is about £900 per month, whereas the average rent has skyrocketed to £1600 per month (£1100 outside of London, £2200 in London). Available rental stock is down 25%, with demand up 5%. It's great for property speculators, buy-to-let landlords and property developers, people are offering above asking prices simply to secure a home.
>My landlord takes all the risk of owning the property (prices don’t always go up after all).
Sure there is risk, but when you charge 30% more than you repay for the mortgage, while at the same time property prices rise 75% in 10 years, it's safe to say that the cash cow is being thoroughly milked for every last drop and as a result many people are suffering.
Ultimately there shouldn't be 'risk', this mindset is a big problem. Homes are a fundamental, basic human need. Using them as an investment method, business model or means to hedge against inflation, is causing rampant speculation and quite honestly extorting people that have no other choice, exploiting vulnerable families that need a home. It should be an extremely tightly controlled market, with sufficient funding to ensure that quality & affordable housing is available for everyone.
> Here in the UK our housing is in major crisis because people simply cannot afford the insane price increases. Pretty much everyone I know shares their living situation, on their own they would not be able to afford basic amenities.
The housing in UK is in crisis because there have not been enough homes built. My rent has gone up too, but it's not because my landlord is greedy. The cost of maintaining the building has gone up thanks to inflation (plumbers/electricians/superintendent/etc.) all have to be paid higher wages. Replacing broken fixtures is more expensive. If the landlord has a floating rate mortgage, the cost of paying the mortgage went up. For commercial apartment rentals, those companies have debt that now needs to be rolled over at higher rates.
> By your logic there should be an incentive for builders to increase the housing stock, but private enterprise aren't building anymore homes now than they were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.
So is it a problem that they aren't building more or not? If we agree that more housing needs to be built, then the proper incentives must be in place. And a proper incentive may actually be as simple as eliminating a disincentive (e.g. 4 years of environmental review prior to the project's approval).
> Available rental stock is down 25%, with demand up 5%. It's great for property speculators, buy-to-let landlords and property developers, people are offering above asking prices simply to secure a home.
It's great until it isn't. Interest rates are rising, and mortgages in the UK are much shorter term than in the US. That means the impact of rate hikes is more immediate on housing prices. And if available stock being down is a problem (which it is), the obvious solution is to produce more. Alternatively, I have a modest proposal [0] that would also solve the problem.
> Ultimately there shouldn't be 'risk', this mindset is a big problem.
Risk is omnipresent. If I purchase property, I have all sorts of risk. My building may burn down. My neighborhood may become undesirable to live in. I might not be able to take a job in a new location. I tried to pick examples that aren't about investment. These are risks that the landlord assumes for me.
>The housing in UK is in crisis because there have not been enough homes built.
>So is it a problem that they aren't building more or not? If we agree that more housing needs to be built, then the proper incentives must be in place. And a proper incentive may actually be as simple as eliminating a disincentive (e.g. 4 years of environmental review prior to the project's approval).
And this is a part of why it should be administered by governments and not just let loose to market forces. Homes can't just be built wherever, whenever. It should be meticulously planned and integrated with various public services. There's no real financial incentive to build 100,000 houses in the middle of nowhere, it needs to have schools, hospitals, infrastructure etc. A property developer would rather squash a bunch of apartments or buy some old stock, refit everything and charge a premium.
>It's great until it isn't. Interest rates are rising, and mortgages in the UK are much shorter term than in the US.
They actually suggested recently to offer multi-generational mortgages... That's how crazy the market is getting.
>These are risks that the landlord assumes for me.
Those are risks your landlord should have insurance for. In a world where property isn't such a commodity, those risks don't really have the same meaning or value.
We've largely left house building to the 'market forces' and it is failing us, that is the reality. What happened to the second largest construction firm in the UK? "The largest ever trading liquidation in the UK – which began in January 2018" - Carillion collapsed with £7 billion in liabilities.
"One of the UK's biggest landlords, owns over 1,000 properties, tried to ban 'coloured' people from renting because of the curry smell" - What happens to people that are 'undesirable' to landlords, they need a home too or should they simply be destitute or constantly bounced around the lowest standard of housing stock available?
Rent caps are probably not effective or radical enough to actually solve this crisis. I think if we really want to do something, it's going to hurt a lot of peoples 'net worth'.
> And this is a part of why it should be administered by governments and not just let loose to market forces... There's no real financial incentive to build 100,000 houses in the middle of nowhere
That's exactly what the Chinese government did, only at a larger scale. It hasn't worked out well.
> They actually suggested recently to offer multi-generational mortgages... That's how crazy the market is getting.
I saw that, it's absolutely wild.
> Those are risks your landlord should have insurance for. In a world where property isn't such a commodity, those risks don't really have the same meaning or value.
There are risks that can't be insured against. Suppose my employer relocates to another region, and I have the choice of following or finding a new job. If I own a house, I now have to sell it (incurring a 3-6% transaction cost and lots of headache). I can only sell it if there's a willing buyer, and there's no guarantee there will be any.
My rent is covering the building's mortgage, taxes, and maintenance, which I would be paying if I owned the property. It may be marginally higher than the cost of ownership, but I have a strong preference for flexibility. That flexibility is worth the liquidity premium to me.
> What happens to people that are 'undesirable' to landlords
In the US, there’s legislation that prohibits discrimination across a variety of protected classes (race, religion, sex, etc.) Does the UK have similar legislation? Putting aside ethics for a moment — discrimination is inefficient. It’s in everyone’s best interest to eliminate such behavior, whether through market forces or legislation.
You should have that flexibility. There should be enough housing stock that you can move to another city and not have to worry about struggling to find a place, arranging visits for them to be cancelled or leased before you can even view it. There are parts of the world where government rental housing schemes are extremely successful, it also typically caters for those that would be left with nothing if we didn't intervene with the market. Yes there are laws against discrimination, that landlord was overruled in high court. That does not stop it from happening, in many different forms - there is never ending prejudice and difficulty simply getting a home for young people, disabled, minority backgrounds, immigrants, welfare recipients. The landlords have all the power when it comes to deciding who they allow to rent, they do not have any obligation to tell you why you were refused. Even though the court says it's illegal for him not to rent to certain races, what is stopping him?
We live in a world where it is entirely feasible for every person to have good quality shelter, clean water, food and energy. For the most part, we allow market forces to control the access to goods and services. Wealth is being concentrated, property along with other vital services, are just another asset in the portfolio. It's missing humanity. We need homes, healthcare, water, food.. I think it's about time we prioritise this vs high profit, monetary gain, corporate excess and 'free markets' (they're never really free, always tipped in favour of the owners of capital).
It takes two parties to increase the price of a housing unit. If rents are up 20% that means people are willing to pay 20% more.
I don't know about the UK, but here in California, prices have skyrocketed, but so has the price of construction.
There are two reasons that has happened:
1) Shortage of construction workers. The ones that are here are either (well paid) first generation immigrants, make more than Silicon Valley windfall money because they speak fluent English and are competent, or are completely incompetent. We don't have enough of the first group, so be prepared to pay 2-3x the cost of materials to get anything done (with the second group acting as middle men, and the third group taking your money, only to have you pay someone else to fix it later).
2) Policies that discourage the building of new rental units:
2a) We have a vacant house on our property. A non-structural remodel for it would cost > $50K to get through permitting, and we're looking at >> $300 sq/ft for the actual remodel. If we did all that, we could either pay a special tax on vacation homes owned by individuals in unincorporated areas that the townies just passed (to help the housing crisis by somehow freeing up housing units in town, where the tax does not apply), or we could rent it out. If we rented it out to a problem tenant, we could literally never get rid of them (unless they decided to not pay rent, but even then, it's 5+ years of court battles). So the house stays vacant.
2b) We just built a house. It took almost a year to clear permitting, and $100K's of wasted nonsense work. Many developable plots in this area are purchased, planning bankrupts the new owners, and then they're sold to the next saps. According to the neighbors, getting permits to build a house around here in under 3 years is unheard of. The result? We have a house, but we are way, way, under water in terms of money put in vs. current valuation. At the lower valuations, the houses around here are not "affordable" by any means. However, if you look at what it would have cost us to develop this land anywhere else in the country, we would have paid way under market value.
Problem (1) could be fixed by encouraging contractors from out of the state to fly in to work here. Apparently, the state has erected licensing barriers to make this hard. I think a lot of money ($1B) is waiting to be taken off the table via arbitrage.
Problem (2) is consistently worsened by voters that think that capping housing costs, "protecting tenants" and other things that further constrict housing supply will somehow lower prices.
The easiest way out of this problem is (1) allow out-of-state firms to build housing and (2) fast-track all new housing permits, including financial liability if the planning commission creates unnecessary delays, unnecessary work, or approves / passes inspection on substandard work.
They should also replace the state wide mandate to reduce commuter miles (which is basically a mandate to increase congestion by tearing out roads) with a mandate to reduce the total carbon emissions per capita spent on transit (which would be a mandate to invest in public transit, bike lanes, and in reducing congestion).
None of those things are politically tenable, so I guess the millennials will just live in RVs or 4-to-a-bedroom until the voting population turns over.
There's good and bad regulation. Bureaucracy in the wrong place is a pain, but without crucial regulations I feel that private capital would be even more ruthless and we'd be left with badly built homes, in badly planned communities, lacking services and infrastructure, without much care for the environmental impact..
It's really hard to see a way out of this for me without extreme interference by government..
In practice badly built, badly planned, lacking infrastructure, etc. are just code phrases for being different from status quo and accommodating too many people. And it's nonsense that an urban apartment building could have an "environmental impact" offsetting the sprawl and vehicle-mileage costs of not building in cities.
Yet it isn't working in most european cities. Price increases and capital holders always build behind the offer/demand curve so they get a better yield from it. Also, rent is always high enough to milk as much as possible from modal income, as demand is pretty inelastic.
Also, read carefully, I don't want price control directly onto the private sector but the adminsitration controlling a big chunk of the offer.
It doesn't work like that, because not all property nor customer is even. A luxury apartment is not competing with a 2 bedroom public housing apartment. And there will be floating population, there will people moving in, there will be people with special needs that public housing doesn't cover, etc etc
Maybe such situation would actually push investors to be innovative with housing for once. If regulations allow that, of course, which is important too.
Question though... why, exactly does that have to be the case? Especially with something like housing where say there is mostly a fixed supply at any point and you can't just turn a machine on/off to produce more.
The only reason the prices go up is because of greed basically- because people say "hey I can just charge more and people will pay more!". And there in lies the bullshit of the free market once again. It always benefits the people with money, who can afford to pay that amount more "just to get what they want".
The last few years in particular have made me so tired of hearing about people talk about supply & demand like it is some unarguable hard scientific fact. It's not even close to that. It just represents how much people like to price gouge because "they can"
>Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices). Capping prices prevents the price mechanism from working, leaving a shortage of housing.
And the following part of this is also just more bullshit. I'm not saying you are "wrong", but you say it as if that is how things have to work and there is no other alternative.
Every word of what you said is based on greed and squeezing the most you possibly can from people. Please realize that.
I largely agree, but if there is a scarce good (where there is less of it available than people want -- i.e. supply is less than demand) then we have to ration it /somehow/. The American way is by bidding up the price, so whoever is willing to pay the most money gets it. The Soviet way was by queuing, so whoever gets in line first gets it. We could also do it by lottery. We can come up with any number of schemes and most of them are "fairer" than market pricing, but they do all involve the "price" going up in some sense. Either you pay more in money, or in time, or in luck, but the price has increased because there are more people chasing the stuff than there is stuff to chase.
> Question though... why, exactly does that have to be the case? Especially with something like housing where say there is mostly a fixed supply at any point and you can't just turn a machine on/off to produce more.
Supply/demand is a basic tenet of economics. You can visualize the model with supply/demand graphs [0], which help make the model more intuitive.
The issue of the fixed supply is known as 'stickiness'. Most things in the economy lag policy, and data that we use to observe the economy also tends to lag. This is why it's really bad to have poorly designed policy; course correction is difficult, and people are hurt in the meantime.
> Every word of what you said is based on greed and squeezing the most you possibly can from people. Please realize that.
It could be fun to channel Gordon Gecko, but I disagree that this is about greed. I care about well designed economic policy because I care about people's well-being.
Well demand rising is an abstraction for relative balance between buyers and sellers of a good.
Say there’s one free apartment in NYC and two marginal buyers submit bids: Alice and Bob. If Alice offers $1000/month and Bob offers $1200/month, then Bob gets the lease. The marginal rent is $1200.
If another apartment is built then Alice leases it and the marginal rent is $1000. Similarly, if a new buyer Charlie enters the market and bids $1500 then $1500 is the marginal rent.
The number of people with apartments depends only on the number of apartments built. Which buyers get apartments depends on their relative ability to pay. The price depends on what the marginal apartment-buyer will pay. That is the lowest amount offered that still gets an apartment.
Scarcity really exists. Markets are one way of contending with scarcity; you could also use a lottery or a queue. But people who lose the lottery or get stuck in the queue are just as deprived as people who can't pay the market price. And there are exactly as many of them. Probably more, since there is no mechanism to bring more supply online when the queue is deep, while the market mechanism works to some extent, choked off as it is by government limits.
Fundamentally, the only way that more people can be satisfied with the housing they have access to is to produce more of the housing people want.
There is a machine... Of thousands of workers. If those people can't make more money, they have less incentive to recruit more and build more housing stock faster...
Such price signals are a basic element of the efficiency of the free market.
Activity guided by rational self-interest causes rapid improvement to the things that people value (_exchange_ value, not some other value for which people don't trade scarce things).
> Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the housing stock
Ahh yes, walking around in NY seeing building projects to increase the supply of housing in the 4th dimension where land is plentiful and the rivers are clean /s
There was just a pretty huge rezoning (with much NIMBY protest) of the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, close to Manhattan, which is currently mostly composed of empty lots and single-story warehouses/light manufacturing around the corner from desirable neighborhoods of $4m brownstones. Now developers will be allowed to build residential buildings up to 30 stories there. I live nearby and walking around in just the last few months the number of new projects starting has been kind of extraordinary. https://www.curbed.com/2021/11/brooklyn-gowanus-rezoning-dev...
> Ahh yes, walking around in NY seeing building projects to increase the supply of housing in the 4th dimension where land is plentiful and the rivers are clean /s
Have you tried obtaining building permits in NYC? My understanding is that it’s not easy. If you don’t allow builders to construct new housing then you won’t get new housing, regardless of price level.
Free market advocates always find the next culprit why the market can't deliver.
I can only speak of Berlin where land prices and construction prices have increased by demand so much, that new construction is coming in at 4x than 10 years ago (from 2k per sqm to 8k). I don't see how the market is really solving anything here.
> Free market advocates always find the next culprit why the market can't deliver.
I advocate for the free market because it's been the most reliable way of elevating humans from subsistence levels of consumption and improving their quality of life. It's been the driving force in elevating billions of people from poverty over recent decades. I'd wager that most people, free market advocates or otherwise, would consider that a good thing.
To be clear, there are cases where markets fail. In those cases, government intervention can actually produce more efficient outcomes. Consider the case of basic research. Private enterprises would have be foolish to pay for glowing worms and shrimp treadmills; there's just no clear payoff. But this seemingly silly research is critical to progress. For example, the research on glowing worms (GFP added to C. Elegans) ended up winning the Nobel Prize and is crucial for observing biological processes in living organisms.
> new construction is coming in at 4x than 10 years ago... I don't see how the market is really solving anything here.
It sounds like high prices incentivized builders to increase construction by 400% over 10 years? That seems like the price mechanism is driving an increase in housing supply, exactly as one would want when there's a shortage of housing.
As someone who once did basic research, I don't buy the government-funded basic research argument anymore. If we had negligible taxes, the hyper-rich would fund some basic research, and there would be some private research as well. It would not go away completely. People can cooperate without government. Why would anyone fund a church tithe voluntarily, since the market wouldn't predict such a thing? Yet people freely pay.
More importantly, try arguing that it is morally correct that a hard-working laborer ought to fund a Webb telescope by non-optional taxes, when he sees no direct value in it. Why even 1 penny? Because his betters in a grant agency know better what to do with the fruits of his labor than he does?
It was disgusting to witness Biden take a victory lap for the Webb telescope. It wasn't his money nor engineering and scientific effort, that's for certain.
Please, no utilitarian defenses of funding basic research by taxes. We need a moral defense. I don't see it at all. You can only defend it if you think people are too stupid to know their own interests.
> More importantly, try arguing that it is morally correct that a hard-working laborer ought to fund a Webb telescope by non-optional taxes, when he sees no direct value in it. Why even 1 penny? Because his betters in a grant agency know better what to do with the fruits of his labor than he does?
There is an optimal level of spending on basic research for society, and it's not 0. Was it a bad idea to launch unproven satellites into space in the 1970s? Your laborer didn't see the immediate benefit, but now that worker has GPS, which almost certainly improved the worker's life. In fact, the technologies enabled by GPS were unimaginable at the onset of the project. Should the project have been scrapped entirely?
It's impossible to say whether research will produce valuable results a priori. But it's not true that your laborer doesn't see benefit. The price we pay to live in organized society is taxation. Should that same laborer argue that he shouldn't pay taxes for highways built 400 miles away? Is it possible that this laborer may not know what's best 100% of the time?
It's obvious that in the absence of state funding there would be non-state funding. It won't be the same and it won't be zero. Why does the committee's judgement take precedent?
Also, some poorer people would pay to fund research in the absence of gov't funding. They actually already do, for disease research.
You can use utilitarian arguments to force people to do things that they otherwise would refuse. Isn't that a kissing cousin to indentured servitude?
Also, do you knot think I understand the riskiness of research? As if I haven't endured a few decades of poverty as a result?
> It's obvious that in the absence of state funding there would be non-state funding. It won't be the same and it won't be zero.
From an economic perspective, it's likely the level of funding would be less than the optimal level of funding. If the goal is to maximize public welfare, government funding is necessary.
> Why does the committee's judgement take precedent?
Ultimately someone needs to make decisions on resource allocation. Is a committee necessarily the best way? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not qualified to tell NIH how to operate.
> You can use utilitarian arguments to force people to do things that they otherwise would refuse
Agreed entirely, it's a very difficult issue to grapple with.
I'm a HUGE believer in reducing barriers to competition. I agree that high prices should lead to entrepreneurial increase of supply. However, I think it's massively, massively important to realize the successes of some planned economies. I'm not trying to use empty rhetoric in the following paragraph, I'm trying to identify the "free market"-iness of many of the most impactful "ways of elevating humans" in the past 500 years:
The "free market" did not establish the US interstate highway system and power grid, or lift 1.4 billion people in China out of poverty in a single generation. The free market did not establish railroads in the US (monopolistic robber-baron markets are not free markets). Free markets did not elevate Europeans from 1500-1950 (colonial slavery). Free markets did not sustain American agriculture for one hundred years after slavery was abolished (prison labor).
--------
The real point of this is: Maybe it's okay if we have a China-style or 1930-1950's USA-style planned economy to spark a domestic renaissance via:
- Massive housing initiative, starting with the base (bringing more people into trades, greatly expanding domestic material supply, and a fierce fight against NIMBY-ism). This will have to first cause a glut of material and labor, while keeping the excess labor happy (paid) and future material supply expanding (subsidies). Free market isn't great at pushing through local optimums...but cheaper supply should lead to increased utilization eventually!
- All new housing should be luxury. High efficiency, high comfort -- these will be what everyone is living in 20 years from now. It doesn't cost that much more to build but it makes a massive difference in QoL. Personally I dream of mid-rises and high-rises where people can practice tuba/piano/drums without bothering the surrounding units, or lift weights, or run a small woodshop. Have access to spaces where larger projects can be undertaken: DIY car repair, for example. This should greatly improve entrepreneurialism.
- Import/export/sales tax reform (regulatory compliance is incredibly hard and expensive, sales tax is super regressive and anti-entrepreneurial because it encourages vertical integration to avoid "sales" being taxed, VAT would be much more friendly to a true free market for niche value-adds to gain foothold).
- Massive education reform (pay teachers enough ($120k+) to have a surplus of expert labor migrate in from engineering / management / trades / science careers.
- Migrate manufacturing out of China and into disparate continents (South America, Africa, greater Asia). Domestic manufacturing would obviously be amazing but I think USA is too economically fragile to handle the increased costs of safety and environmental controls which the US people would rightly demand.
People are worried that if the housing market experiences a glut that people who saved all their money into their home as an investment will lose their retirement. However, I believe that as additional high-density units are built, the land those homeowners can sell will increase greatly in value -- because the house can be torn down and a mid-rise or skyscraper can be placed there instead, turning it from an unaffordable single-family "value" to a very affordable 10-50 family "value". That land would be worth way more if a midrise or highrise could be built on it.
The free market of WW2 paid for the interstate highway system? Every heavy industry was commandeered by the US government and strict salary controls were implemented by the government. Households had strict quotas for what they were allowed to purchase.
Or before that? When the civilian conservation corps employed huge amounts of Americans to build Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam?
The decades immediately leading up to the construction of the interstate highway USA was one of the least free our market has ever been.
That was a free market where the US was the last industrial power producing goods to be consumed by a completely destroyed world. If those are the circumstances you can provide as evidence the free market works as intended you may need something else
even in a "free" speech country like the USA. you would've been arrested for WrongThink / ThoughtCrime for putting out thoughts like this if this was 70 years ago.
Industrialization, constitutional democracy, science, regulation, and unions have raised standards of living for the majority of people. You forget history if you don't remember things like the Battle of Blair Mountain (first aerial bombardment on US soil) or the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, not to mention the incredible death and misery inflicted by that first capitalistic country Britain. The free market does not feel very free to the vast majority of people who have to deal with incredibly oppressive companies and plutocrats, and when laws and police are geared to oppressing the poor and the jobless.
Do not take me to advocate for centralized planning, but we do have to have democratic governmental intervention to prevent the free market from chewing us all up and spitting us out.
There’s plenty of land in nyc. There are areas of Manhattan that are entirely sub-5 story buildings. There are areas of queens that are mostly low density warehouses. Long Island City, which is more or less 2 stops on the train out of Manhattan, is extremely sparse.
Been this way in Vienna for many many decades and still it’s a very affordable city. So I dunno, I do believe this can go wrong if implemented incorrectly and has done in some cities, but it hasn’t here yet and looks fairly stable for the foreseeable too.
I think that’s more due to the relative attractiveness of the cities. London, NYC, Paris etc have become extremely expensive because they’re world cities, attracting huge amounts of people and jobs. That’s not really the case for Vienna, or Glasgow, or Riga etc
100 years ago there were 4 families in the now single apartment I live in. There was an extreme housing crisis and the current system started then as a direct response to that extreme overcrowding.
Bay Area could learn a lot from Vienna. Especially about building up.
Not sure exactly but the population has grown from 1.5 million in 2001 to 1.9 million in 2021
Some of that growth fit into existing stock but since the late 90s there has been a lot of new neighbourhoods built.
The city generally plans ahead, even building public transport like metro out before it is completely needed.
> Of course this does not work if building new housing is illegal, in which case you might as well have the rent control.
Or make it possible to build new housing. Rent control is a subsidy to existing residents to the detriment of people who would otherwise move to the area.
Why would housing become unaffordable if the state intervenes? The purpose is precisely to control affordability. Prices are controlled for social housing, and flexing supply allows you to influence the free market prices.
Supply is always less than demand in dense cities/countries, leaving it for the 'invisible hand' only ensures that the whole market is unaffordable and/or gentrified. Like what we are seeing in this news piece.
I don't know exactly how it works here in the Netherlands, but as far as I understand the government leases land to the constructors at its own pace, with strict quotas on social housing, to let vs to buy ratio, and free-market properties. It isn't perfect (massive bubble on the free market right now) but seems to work well enough.
>It isn't perfect (massive bubble on the free market right now) but seems to work well enough.
No it doesn't. We have massive wait lists for social housing, and being middle class arguably leaves you in a worse state due to social housing eligibility only applying to very low incomes, and anyone with an office job close to the city will easily earn too much for social housing, but not enough for private norms. Meanwhile those with social housing are incentivized to stay as the costs are far lower than private, and the repercussions are lacking.
The problem has been obvious for decades, yet the government felt zero incentive to do anything when it was possible. To top it off, there's a general reluctance to build due to emission limits. And our government is actively bending over to the farmers making things even worse.
The Netherlands is the perfect example of what not to do when trying to intervene.
This is what I remember when I lived in Utrecht a decade ago. It would only work for a subset of people. People who would get on the list for public housing once they moved there for college. And in some cases delay getting married so that their combined income wouldn't go over the threshold...
Utrecht is probably the worst offender of all. Huge demand, but most notably huge demand from people willing to work for low wages. I've noticed employers in Utrecht being extreme cheapskates despite the way higher CoL compared to even its immediate surroundings, and being a hub city in the heart of the country, far more pushing for hybrid.
I don't expect it to change either. Too many students still under the impression earning 2.5k-3.5k gross out of college is "great", despite that exact salary putting them in the uncanny valley of renting (no social housing, not enough too entice landlords). Unless you left your student time with a partner to share, which has become increasingly more rare.
> Supply is always less than demand in dense cities/countries, leaving it for the 'invisible hand' only ensures that the whole market is unaffordable and/or gentrified
Is that the case in Detroit? I’d wager there’s substantially more supply than demand.
> It isn't perfect (massive bubble right now) but seems to work well enough.
If there’s a massive bubble then it seems like that system didn’t control prices.
> If there’s a massive bubble then it seems like that system didn’t control prices.
The bubble mostly affects new home buyers, which are the ones who need the least protection.
Rent is inflation-adjusted and can't be raised at will, so there is a very long delay between market prices increasing and most tenants actually bearing the cost. Everyone living in social housing still has a home, and won't be evicted so that another person can come in to pay 2x the rent. Seems pretty good to me.
I don't know much about Detroit but it seems to demonstrate that the simple supply-demand model does not reflect reality. Prices should have dropped significantly, but instead it followed the same curve as the rest of the USA, with those $500 properties being a localized phenomenon.
> The bubble mostly affects new home buyers, which are the ones who need the least protection.
So now you (or more generally the government) get to decide who is more deserving of appropriately priced housing? Why do new home buyers need less protection?
> Rent is inflation-adjusted and can't be raised at will, so there is a very long delay between market prices increasing and most tenants actually bearing the cost.
This is precisely the problem with this policy. When price doesn’t feed through to the market, the market can’t adjust. People simultaneously argue that the free market doesn’t work while endorsing policies that prevent the market from working.
> it seems to demonstrate that the simple supply-demand model does not reflect reality
The population dropped from its peak by 1.2mm people. Prices subsequently fell so much that it was possible to buy houses for $500. That’s exactly what the supply/demand model would predict.
Those $500 homes are not inhabitable. As someone who was in Detroit less than 24 hours ago, I can tell you I was surprised at how expensive the housing was. Not that it was close to Bay Area prices, but I was expecting to see places I liked for 300-400k. The reality is more like 600k for less than 2,000 square feet.
> The reality is more like 600k for less than 2,000 square feet.
"In June 2022, Detroit home prices were up 32.3% compared to last year, selling for a median price of $99K. On average, homes in Detroit sell after 27 days on the market compared to 23 days last year. There were 463 homes sold in June this year, down from 512 last year."
You absolutely can get houses for 300-400K in Detroit. Where exactly were you looking at? Houses that you're describing are definitely possible in hot areas like Downtown and Downtown adjacent areas like Corktown, Indian Woods, and Midtown.
Agreed that you can find $300k houses (and cheaper). I was just surprised that the nicer areas were still pricy. I mean Indian Village, and the neighborhoods you mentioned, have some nice homes, but those neighborhoods feel like an oasis surrounded by areas that are dealing with very tough economic situations.
Again, I was just surprised at the price for places I liked. If I wanted to take a chance on a neighborhood that might turn around in the next few years I could find some deals (although a lot of those homes need a lot of work).
We're all very aware of how the economics should play out, but look around you, it's not working that way in a bunch of places. That's because houses are being used as investment vehicles, with rentals being thoroughly flogged because they know people have no choice but to pay. No amount of building will help if the value of the property is not intrinsically linked to the supply and demand of places to live for people who want to live there, but is instead linked or at least heavily influenced by what investors with increased buying capacity are willing to pay.
> No amount of building will help if the value of the property is not intrinsically linked to the supply and demand
Building new houses is intrinsically linked to supply. When you build a house, that increases the supply of housing. NIMBYs oppose new construction precisely to prevent the value of their properties from decreasing.
Sorry, of course that's correct. I was trying to articulate that the supply and demand, as a whole, is not currently a marketplace for people with housing to sell to those who want to be housed (in many places). It's a marketplace dominated by investors and landlords, and people who want to be housed are having to stretch their funds as far as they possibly can to keep up with the market currently being made by investors and landlords.
> people who want to be housed are having to stretch their funds as far as they possibly can to keep up with the market currently being made by investors and landlords.
I'm sympathetic to the difficulties people are facing right now, and I've seen the stories about housing being purchased by investors. The issue is that the data doesn't seem to indicate a structural change in ownership [0]. Home ownership appears to have peaked at 69.4% in 2004 and now sits at 65.4%, the same level as in 1980.
Unless of course your builders wise up and work together to produce the bare minimum of housing stock required in order to keep prices rising, as they don’t want to flood with stock and reduce demand.
Is housing unaffordable in Vienna? If so, your mechanism might explain it. If housing is not unaffordable in Vienna, your explanation seems likely to be missing something.
Housing is becoming unnafordable in Vienna again... because they didn't keep up with their program and now public offer is way behind of what should be.
Rents are already through the roof. If that hasn't incentivized builders to build enough housing to lower rents in places people want to live, why not go for the centralized solution?
CMV
The "let the free market take care of it; government intervention can only make it unaffordable" view is standing on extremely shaky legs today.
> The "let the free market take care of it; government intervention can only make it unaffordable" view is standing on extremely shaky legs today.
The term “NIMBY” is commonly used to describe people who prevent new construction of housing. They typically use legal maneuvers (like requiring years of environmental review) to do this. By allowing this to continue, government intervention supports unaffordable housing.
Yet somehow this doesn't seem to materialize in any meaningful way, the price of housing has only been going up exponentially and I'm sure builders are doing their best to build more but it's not getting any cheaper.
> Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices). Capping prices prevents the price mechanism from working, leaving a shortage of housing.
The issue, empirically, is that (a) we don't see the right housing being built, and (b) we don't see quality housing being built. We see a lot of high-end luxury units being built, but what we need are more 1- and 2-bedroom units within 20 minutes (preferably, by affordable public transit) of where people work. We also see a lot of large (and therefore expensive) but cheaply built McMansions that'll be falling down in 20-40 years, so the long-term picture of the housing stock is not improved.
What we need is for the government to step in and build affordable housing as a floor at a controlled price ("commie blocks"). No one will be forced to live in one, of course, but they'll be an option; the rich can still buy property on the market if they're so inclined.
> My landlord takes all the risk of owning the property (prices don’t always go up after all).
If you own your house and control your geography (i.e., you'll never be forced to move due to economic inopportunity) then you have the truly risk-free position. Renters are at much higher risk (log transform, Kelly Criterion) than landlords, because real estate costs are such a high percentage of their
budgets.
The problem, of course, is that owning a house, while it gives you a zero beta to the housing market in theory, still does have the risks you described. For one thing, other people can do things that damage your house's value--both its subjective value as a place to live, and its objective market price--such as building highways and obstructing sun/view. The other issue is that, in today's hypercompetitive world where in decent employment every job search is national (and possibly international) it's impossible to control your geography... you could be laid off and forced to relocate to get your next position.
So, you're not wrong in general. I think it's a wise financial decision for a young person to keep renting one's place--as opposed to renting money to buy a place--but I also think it's inaccurate to imply that landlords are taking more risks than they really are. It really gets on my nerves when rich people and employers talk about how they're "taking all the risk" and therefore deserve more, when the truth is that the poor (involuntarily) take all the risk, because each $100 means so much more to them.
> and property owners provide almost no value, but to provide access to housing for people who has no capital for it, which is service that could be perfectly provided by a state entity.
Property of course requires maintenance and management, so the sleight of hand here is to define away all those aspects of ownership so that by definition all that's meant by "landlord" is "old guy who cashes checks."
But somebody has to maintain the property, somebody has to prioritize upgrades and improvements, somebody has to cut the grass, somebody has to pay the taxes, somebody has to -- yes -- collect and cash the checks. Somebody has to respond to tenant requests and emergencies. Somebody has to advertise the property when it's vacant. Someone conducts showings and screens tenants. And, maybe most important, somebody assumes the risk of a bad tenant or a down market or a declining neighborhood. And so on and so on.
Whether all this is done by the owner personally or hired out is irrelevant. There's no reason to believe government can perform these functions better than private owners in a market.
A simple proof that landlording is not free/easy money is to realize that millions of middle- and upper-middle class Americans who -- if not today, certainly 5 years ago before this most recent run-up in prices -- could, if they wanted to, afford to buy property and become landlords, but they mostly do not do it. And since nobody turns down free/easy money, landlording simply cannot be free/easy money. QED.
I've repeatedly been told by people who've done it (including my parents) never to become a landlord, because it's absolute hell and you'll end up making under minimum wage and tenants will fuck you over until you're even in the red and it's impossible & expensive to evict anyone even when they're not paying and causing more and more damage to the house with each passing day.
Then again, I've had others tell me it's awesome, you just have to pick your location carefully (one exclusively bought very close to nursing schools, which seemed to select for tenants who'd stick around at least a couple years and who'd pay their rent and not run a meth lab or smear shit on the walls or anything like that).
Yes, because one thing a landlord does is assume the risk of bad tenants and high-turnover. Good, stable, long-term tenants hate this -- "Why am I paying so much for rent, when my landlord doesn't seem to do anything?" -- but as long as you're a renter you're going to pay for this risk one way or another. And it's not at all clear that you can socialize this risk and still end up with units anybody in their right mind wants to live in. Yes, I know about Vienna. This ain't Vienna. There's very little evidence the U.S. is capable of doing it. Public housing here is inevitably a race to the bottom.
FWIW, I'm with you, I think rental income ("landlording") and airbnb-ing are both legitimate demand, and the system would work fairly if we didn't have artificial constraints on supply.
Insofar as landlords actively work to constraint supply to artificial inflate rents, it is immoral behavior (but 'muh' neighborhood) and we should not allow it.
Technically true. I owner-occupy a duplex, so I maintain exactly one rental unit. Unfortunately for me, I'm too high in conscientiousness to be a cutthroat landlord and I keep dumping money into improvements without raising rents, even though I could easily do nothing and raise my tenant's rent hundreds of dollar per month in this market. What I would like is for my work on this property to mean something and for all my competition to lose their shirts in a market that wasn't artificially supply-constrained.
Now that I've said some nice things about landlords, I'll say something less flattering: bad landlords find convenient cover in supply-constrained markets. Which, of course, is what we have. If you want to stick it to lazy, cheap, do-nothing landlords, then let somebody build a brand-new apt complex right next door to their crappy units and see how long they can get away with their insouciance in that kind of market.
If a landlord does not maintain the property, over the long run they will not be able to charge the same rent versus a similar, maintained unit.
I've used this to my advantage before. I moved into a building that needed a fresh coat of paint and had poor reviews of their maintenance and saved ~10-15% from market rent because I didn't care about appearances and am handy enough to fix a leaky faucet, etc. myself.
Sure they’ll lose relative to the place next door, but they’ll win relative to their same unit 10 years ago because the land underneath their building (and the amenities around it) have increased in value so dramatically.
Right, but who cares? Are we trying to soak rich people or are we trying to make sure there's an abundance of housing? Are we trying to help the poor? Or are we mostly concerned with knocking the rich down a peg?
Uhhh, I care that we create incentives that yield desired behavior: building high quality housing that supports growth and mitigates urban squalor.
The current state is the actual opposite of that incentive. You can just buy up a parking lot in downtown Manhattan, pay ~$0 taxes on it, and keep it off the market while people continue to struggle to find housing and prices continue to climb. Then when the land has appreciated (through no actions of your own, in fact in spite of your own actions) you can sell for millions of dollars of upside.
Maybe I don't do it because I find it morally questionable, not because I don't think it's free and easy money. I'll absolutely turn down free and easy money for something I think is wrong.
Maybe they realize that being a landlord is an economically and societally destructive measure that saps productive capital from working and middle class. It’s vampiric. And awful.
>Many attempts at public housing failed because they just tried to provide housing for low-income people in separated and/or undesirable areas, with a predictable outcome.
So the taxpayers should pay so the people with low income or no income can live iny Manhattan? Why not also provide them with expensive cars and exotic vacations?
> So the taxpayers should pay so the people with low income or no income can live iny Manhattan?
Yes. It's a city not a luxury resort. If people are to work all kinds of jobs at all levels of income there, then people at all income levels should be able to live there as well. This mechanism accounts for that.
> Why not also provide them with expensive cars and exotic vacations?
Maybe they should idk. Seems completely unrelated though and no one is arguing for that here so I don't know why you want to or why I should.
I know what manhattan is and I'm against it becoming a luxury development for only the rich, while the people who work to service them are bused in from far suburbs at tremendous personal cost.
So who should get to live there, ultimately? There's plenty of land in general, but land in Manhattan is sharply limited, so how do we decide who gets in, if it isn't going to be based on ability to pay?
Welcome to Galt’s Gulch, where only millionaires can afford to live! Every minimum-wage is being filled by someone who’s constantly exhausted from their four-hour commute from Poortown.
Can you help me with the definition, then? I can't find that word in any of my dictionaries and search engines are suggesting I mean "non-transferable" which is not a property of land in NYC.
Unless there's a definition, saying that this property calls for heavy state intervention is indeed a bold claim.
Non transable is not a term that anyone uses and therefore is not one that has a definition outside of this thread. Which is why GP asked what it is, smart ass.
And the person I'm replying to, in the order of their statements and questions, first assumes that it is a bold claim and after that decides they don't understand the statement they're replying to. It's backwards
It's not backwards. Calling housing and land an X and saying that this means it should have heavy state intervention IS a bold claim regardless of what X is because it's calling for heavy state intervention.
Compare: "Abortion is a non-transable good and therefore there should be heavy state intervention in it." "Video games are non-transable goods and so there should be heavy state intervention in it." "Cryptography is a non-transable good and therefore should heavily be regulated by the government."
All of these are BOLD claims regardless of what non-transable means, and it's appropriate to ask what non-transable means in order to understand why the bold claim stands.
- How does the system decide which applicants out of multiple get the unit? Lottery? How does the system decide which units get rented first (so the owners get income) e.g. 3 identical units on the same floor, in the same building?
- With a sliding scale on price base on income, is there a price floor for the owner? E.g. low income tenant pays 500 euros, but the system guarantees 1000 euros to the owner so the system pays the difference?
- Has supply increased with this system in Vienna? Why would say an invesntor take the risk of putting capital into apartments or condos construction with this system in place?
> How does the system decide which applicants out of multiple get the unit? Lottery? How does the system decide which units get rented first (so the owners get income) e.g. 3 identical units on the same floor, in the same building?
I don't know if I understand your question. We're talking about public housing, the owner is a public entity. For every building there are slots by income and they're filled by a FIFO system if you will.
I know in the US this is more difficult but in most euro countries the administration can check what you earn yearly. It's semi-automated already.
> With a sliding scale on price base on income, is there a price floor for the owner? E.g. low income tenant pays 500 euros, but the system guarantees 1000 euros to the owner so the system pays the difference?
The owner is the public housing company. No guarantee for anyone. There are different proposals, for me 20% for annualized income is simple & good enough, I wouldn't want to make it very complicated, but I'm sure it can be.
> Has supply increased with this system in Vienna? Why would say an invesntor take the risk of putting capital into apartments or condos construction with this system in place?
Overall supply did, but due to political factors the public housing system didn't expand at enough rate to keep up with demand.
I misunderstood and assumed all rentals in Vienna were under this system vs. only public ones. I do wonder if the city continues to provide supply, what the downward pressure on price will be for private units and if that eventually harms overall supply. I'm sure there's data on this somewhere, and I'll dig later today.
I agree 100% - on top of all that, the current housing strategy reduces the mobility of the workforce, so it becomes more difficult to move skilled workers from one region to another. On top of that, being generally considered as a persons most valuable asset, almost no-one wants "affordable housing" in there area, as it would bring down the value of their most valuable asset. We need to start considering people as the valuable asset, and not the house they live in.
>The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas, hurting social mobility,
Maybe some groups of people don't want to live together with other groups of people? Different people living in different parts of the city is just natural evolution.
Why should the state force them to live together?
And why should the state tell you where to live? Why should the state be involved in your private life at all?
> Different people living in different parts of the city is just natural evolution.
A claim like that needs supporting evidence. I see no reason why segregation among different members of a single community is natural.
> Why should the state force them to live together?
Because segregation breaks down the social bonds in a community, which is bad for the social fabric, which is bad for the community's ability to live and work together, which results in the breakdown of that community.
> And why should the state tell you where to live? Why should the state be involved in your private life at all?
The state does not exist in Libertarian theory. The state already has numerous rules about your private life. You could make the same arguments against zoning and building codes.
>A claim like that needs supporting evidence. I see no reason why segregation among different members of a single community is natural.
Considering that in-group-out-group psychology has been humanity's evolutionary default for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, I'd say the burden of evidence is on anyone claiming the contrary.
Housing/rent is a part of your disposable income. Some people live in expensive places because they want too, but no one is required to live in an expensive place because they have too. I agree in the idea of affordable housing but I don’t think it’s fair to promote sweeping changes because people decide to live in expensive cities like NYC.
A lot of people are born in nyc you realize? And in other expensive places?
Also if you evict all the poor people from the expensive cities, who do you think is going to work the jobs that make it possible and desirable for the rich people to live there?
By what mechanism could this possibly work other than exploitation and coercion. I realize that's the current status quo, but do you? Do you understand that's what you're endorsing here with this argument of "poors gtfo?"
I think you have no idea how much things break and need fixing. I have a friend that owns a few houses that he rents out, and it's a part time job just keeping up with fixing things. Between them, there's a few thousand items that can and do break and need maintenance. He would not be profitable if he hired out to fix things. Outside Labour can easily be $100/hour and if you need something even a little bit more serious its easily $1000/day.
This is the hidden cost of manufacturers making things as cheaply as possible, and often out of plastic. Property taxes and utility bills and problem with tenants. Navigating disputes, noise complaints, missed rent, move outs and move ins, signing new lease agreements, landscaping, leaky plumbing, damaged flooring, overgrown trees, it's endless. It's a part time job.
IMO the heavy state intervention should be massive capital investment into FAST public transportation infrastructure. Make areas further away from city centers viable for commuting and the problem gets largely addressed.
Ironically, this was what NYC (technically, pre-NYC) did over 100 years ago -- there was a thriving network of streetcars in Brooklyn[1], which overlap almost exactly with neighborhood density. We then tore them up, leaving just the subway lines and a bus system that traces the vestiges of the old streetcar lines.
Streetcar suburbs[2] not only work, but are imminently sustainable compared to other forms of urban/suburban extension.
Government intervention reflects popular will, and The People will themselves a housing crisis. They don't like change, they don't like neighbors, and they certainly don't like neighbors from different income levels than their own. The New York and San Francisco housing markets might be better governed by the Viennese electorate, but that's not on the table. They are governed by their own electorates, badly, and these are the results. Increasing the intensity of that governance will only amplify their already-revealed and already-governing preference that their cities be exclusionary museum pieces.
Put another way, if you accept that housing scarcity is bad, going to the public and saying "How do you want housing in your city to be?" is only going to make it worse.
> Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy, and property owners provide almost no value,
Have you considered that housing might actually be valuable? If it didn’t provide value, why do you think that Vienna seized so much of it to give out to its citizens? Maybe try to find a different way to phrase whatever you’re trying to say.
Assuming you’re referring to property owners getting by doing nothing. That’s false unless they are a slumlord.
Let me ask you another question. What do people do who are not happy with the housing provided by the govt in Vienna?
> The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas
This is not how it works in the US for the last 50 years or so. Most places force every new building to include low income units.
> Let me ask you another question. What do people do who are not happy with the housing provided by the govt in Vienna?
Rent from another landlord mostly. Vienna has close to two million people (give or take some), however only around 500.000 of those live in buildings owned by the city [0]. Those are 1800 buildings by the way, definitely a lot but not unbelievably massive.
Compared to some private companies, such as Vonovia the city of Vienna is just another big player, but by no means massive enough to actually be a monopoly or anything.
It is true that they of course hold a lot of the supply in Vienna itself, housing a quarter of the population, but that still leaves three quarters not living in any of those buildings. It's easy enough to not live in apartments owned by the city if you don't want to.
[0]: www.wienerwohnen.at/wiener-gemeindebau/wiener-gemeindebau-heute.html (Source in German)
You could argue that they are providing the same value as the city is (housing). It's not like this is some kind of either or situation.
The city is providing value, approximately 500.000 housing units worth of value. Private landlords provide value, the remaining one point something million units worth of housing.
You could of course replace either provider, it doesn't make a practical difference whether you are renting from the city or a private landlord, at least not if we are looking at this from a top down perspective with hundreds of thousands of units.
But the whole point of the city buying into the market was to create competition and ensure that the property market isn't used as an investment/doesn't pay as great as another investment. So with that in mind the current system is actually kind of what they were aiming for.
It is nothing. For public housing to make sense it has to be a considerable amount of the supply, and be universally available, not only for low-income people.
[1]> NYCHA has approximately 13,000 employees serving about 173,946 families and approximately 392,259 authorized residents. Based on the 2010 census, NYCHA's Public Housing represents 8.2% of the city's rental apartments and is home to 4.9% of the city's population. NYCHA residents and Section 8 voucher holders combined occupy 12.4% of the city's rental apartments.
1 out of 20 of the city's residents, 1 in 8 if you count voucher programs. That's far from nothing, but you're right, there's definitely room for improvement if you can cut through the red tape of nimbyism and corruption.
>and renting to a representative distribution of tenants so to prevent guettos
Sounds like a creative way of saying "make sure the poors have enough rich people near them that they feel compelled to stay in line and keep a low profile."
There are few things that make apartment living worse than having neighbors who think your standards of behavior are too low and who you have to avoid pissing off.
Property owners providing almost no value is just factually wrong. Their function is similar to insurance. You pay rent to live somewhere because you don't want to take the risk or can't get the loans to buy a property yourself. And it costs real money and time (i.e. real resources) to build those homes and maintain them.
In return property owners (or insurance runners) can get rich off your monthly payments as well as the inherent value of the property (/insurance company), but because of risk of ruin, opportunity cost for other investments and other related phenomena, it can mathematically be a total win-win for both sides.
What everyone complaining about property prices also always seems to forgoe are two things: First, people are clearly able to afford them or the prices wouldn't go higher. The myth that property investors buy homes on mass and don't rent them out which supposedly creates this pricing hike is idiotic. All of these big cities with insane rents have very low vacancy rates compared to the national average.
In almost all of these places where people complain about rent, we are talking about big popular places where everyone wants to go even though there are tons of realistic alternatives all around the country. The situations where it's economically totally necessary for you to move to an expensive place but at the same time you can't afford the rent is so rare as to be virtually non-existent.
Even the idea that people are displaced from their homes is an issue on a smaller scale than people make it out to be. That's because income in those expensive places is much higher than in cheaper places. There are people displaced from their homes, but that's because of poverty and other aspects of gentrification that are not necessarily tied to rent.
> it costs real money and time to build those homes and maintain them.
As a renter of a dangerously unmaintained property, whose owner has never worked because he inherited a bunch of apartments, I can only laugh hysterically at your ridiculously-over-the-top sarcasm.
This comes back to scarcity as the root cause. If there were an abundance of alternatives in the same price range, shitty landlords couldn't get away with letting their properties deteriorate to such a condition.
The deadbeat landlord problem would solve itself once we build ourselves out of scarcity.
It's easy to agree that property owners provide value, some more than others. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not seeing the big picture. On the other hand, you seem to be ignoring the realities of supply and demand, which can quite simply allow rental costs to increase well above the value that owners provide.
Obviously I don't know, but I suspect you might be seeing a king of survivorship bias. Many people I know were in fact displaced from the place they want to live, including careers and communities they were a part of, due to cost of living. Housing is a big part of that. Are you surrounded by people who can afford it, and perhaps unaware of the people who can't?
Rent has to match supply/demand. If demand goes up, prices go up, some existing tenants are priced out. The only sinister thing in US housing is communities making it difficult to build more. In my corner of NYC one could build housing for thousands of people.
One of the principal reasons Manhattan rent is so ridiculous is because of state intervention. More intervention, the worse it is going to get.
> Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy,
This is a silly statement. Rent is part of the economy. Paying rent doesn't damage the economy anymore then paying for food or paying your electrical bill.
> and property owners provide almost no value,
They provide and maintain their property.
> but to provide access to housing for people who has no capital for it,
And for a wide variety of other reasons. Not everybody wants or is a place in their life were massive permanent investment makes sense.
> which is service that could be perfectly provided by a state entity.
I think a lot of office workers would love that idea, except they were told in the past ~3 months its back to the NYC office or they're fired.
The limited supply (3 years worth of eviction backlog) + office mandates hitting this spring are exactly why prices went crazy seemingly overnight after a pretty calm 2021
You would be surprised at how much commercial real estate is vacant in NYC. If that could be converted to housing, it would alleviate a lot of problems.
Also, the way commercial buildings are mortgaged is crazy - major landlords often have 0% down payments (claiming that their ability to attract rental tenants will add 20% equity overnight), and keep the building vacant rather than lowering rents to maintain the "valuation" of the building. Empty units can have their cost tacked on to the end of the mortgage. At some point, the bill comes due, but it takes a long time.
Converting a commercial space into residential (assuming it’s zoned that way to begin with) isn’t trivial. We’re talking massive plumbing and HVAC system changes, for example. I do agree if empty commercial buildings can be gutted and renovated as residential it is one way to introduce more housing into the market; I don’t think it’ll be much faster or cheaper than building from scratch though.
I agree, but the way those mortgages are handled, they incentivize buildings to have a lot of long-term (5- and 10-year) vacancies, which means that it doesn't have to be particularly fast to convert them.
Totally agree. It is one of the perfect resources to extort people with. Unlike food the price of houses rarely drop to zero, and often go up. Like food, it is very essential to people.
What you propose is a very socialist solution. I've read somewhere that in the USSR paying more than 4% of your income to housing was considered criminal (as they calculated that's what housing would cost using cost-based-pricing).
IDK if it's a very socialist solution, provided that it aims to increase disposable income and savings, that will pour into consumption, people starting their own businesses, etc.
Think also that the program can avoid deficit by not having only low-income tenants, providing more opportunities for social mobility and allowing more consumption which means more VAT taxes, specially if you're smart enough to provide your tenants with supermarkets, bars, etc, which isn't difficult if you pack enough people and provide space for bussiness in the ground floors.
> IDK if it's a very socialist solution, provided that it aims to increase disposable income and savings
Socialism is a left-wing political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. [0]
Government ownership of housing, as opposed to private ownership, is unambiguously socialist policy, regardless of policy intentions.
> specially if you're smart enough to provide your tenants with supermarkets, bars, etc, which isn't difficult if you pack enough people and provide space for bussiness in the ground floors.
Here's the issue with central planning. How does the government know which services residents will find desirable? This difficulty is known as the local knowledge problem. I don't drink alcohol; why should I be forced to pay for a bar I don't use? And more importantly, why is the government encouraging an activity that causes the death of 140k Americans a year?
> Here's the issue with central planning. How does the government know which services residents will find desirable? I don't drink alcohol; why should my taxes pay for bars, which contribute to the death of >100k Americans a year? This difficulty is known as the local information problem.
I didn't say that government runs the bussiness. The public hoosuing buildings have space at ground level that is rented for businesses.
In many european contries you have supermarkets for the neighborhood in those spaces.
> I didn't say that government runs the bussiness. The public hoosuing buildings have space at ground level that is rented for businesses.
I misunderstood what you meant as to who would choose which services to provide. Completely agree with you about mixed zoning, it's really beneficial to have the businesses near residents.
If we're going to dismiss every quality and strategy of a country because of its moral crimes then everything about the US is worthless through the same path.
I don't think this is a useful way to approach any of these problems, and I'm sure neither do you, so why try to score cheap points this way.
> If we're going to dismiss every quality and strategy of a country because of its moral crimes
My primary intention wasn't to refer directly to the morality of the USSR. Economically speaking, the USSR was a disaster, so I'm skeptical that we should implement the policies that quite literally destroyed a nation.
But yes, the USSR was a murderous state led by men who were happy to kill tens of millions of people for personal gain. I find that morally reprehensible.
There’s a difference between being skeptical and being dismissive. You can be skeptical, but evaluate an idea by its merit Maybe it’s something that could be a good idea under the US economic conditions, maybe not.
Perhaps only as part of a way to ease those with low income. But this is no good in general. You are charging one person more than another for the same good simply because of higher income. This is price discrimination and is unjust. Usury can work in an analogous way, such as when someone raises prices to exploit increased need even though the cost of production of the good sold is the same.
> property owners provide almost no value
They provide shelter and must maintain that property. Problems occur when they begin to charge unjustly for services rendered. This calls for regulation, not state ownership. No need to go to extremes.
> The current setup creates guettos [sic] by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas, hurting social mobility
Social mobility isn't the only consideration and not the summum bonum and it exists precisely to allow people to sort themselves into social classes (otherwise, why have social mobility in the first place). People of a given social class tend to live closer to each other because they share class cultural similarities, concerns, and affinities. That doesn't mean there is no contact between people of different classes, but the solution isn't to mix everyone up into a uniform mass. There's a middle way between the hermetically sealed ghetto and uniform distribution, and it doesn't involve violating the principle of subsidiary.
Ultimately, it is poverty that is a problem, not having a lower or higher income as such.
You're telling me those buildings are own and run by the government? Those look like mandatory "affordable units" that by law must be built by private developers in new buildings.
The alternative is to literally just let developers build new properties. That's all you have to do. Upzone. Stop with the rent control. Stop with the mandatory parking minimums. Stop with the NIMBY bullshit.
Its hard to build over top of places that are already being lived in, and once you kick those people out, you have even more people that need a new place to live
That said, if you're going to kick poor people out of their homes for the sake of rich moving in, why not just have the rich people live in those homes and call it a day?
Oh man, careful what you wish for. Dropping reasonable parking spot minimums would likely result in fights and/or cars being parked at all the wrong places.
As a New Yorker myself I do wonder where this ends up. Me and my relatively well paid friends can afford to live here but we depend on a lot of lower paid folks for the city to function. Grocery store clerks, delivery drivers, coffee baristas, all that sort of thing. Maybe right now they have a half hour subway ride to work and that’s acceptable. But as they get pushed further and further out it’s going to break down somewhere, no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere.
Wages will need to go up, which means the costs of goods and services will need to go up, and the city will get even less affordable.
Moreover artist communities flourish in urban spaces with cheap rent, like New York in the 1970s, Paris in the 1920s, Berlin in the 1990s and so on. Without that you just end up with Dubai or Monaco with shittier weather.
Exactly. Wealthy residents should at some point realize that culture and entertainment venues/options are (often) created by lower income residents. If that disappears you get soulless places which are dramatically less fun to live in. Not to mention the service industry workers, who also need to come from somewhere.
That's a pretty grim scenario to imagine. Art and artists 'moved' off somewhere, while the putatively rich consume their produce through screens. All so real estate prices can climb higher?
Tell me you haven’t attended an artist commune without telling me you haven’t attended an artist commune. There’s very little like seeing someone’s performance art in person, or walking through an art installation with other artsy friends, or attending a workshop (the fees paying local artists).
Not even so esoteric as communes and performance art! Even 'normal' galleries, theater, music, are inherently analogue, physical experiences that don't translate to digital reproduction.
My wife and I watched Chris Rock from the front row at the Comedy Cellar last summer. Total cost was like $75 with drinks. Absolutely incredible. I could watch every incredible stand up special available online and it wouldnt be anywhere close to that in person experience.
I'm not saying all low-rent regions will attract art, but it's possible to generate some pretty significant cultural shifts.
San Francisco / Berkeley becoming capitals of counterculture was not an entirely obvious outcome from the perspective of the 1930s, 40s, or 50s. A friend recalls the Haight-Ashbury when it was largely a Greek ethnic neighbourhood.
Why would an artist who wants an opportunity to live somewhere as exciting as NYC want to move to St. Louis? Even if St. Louis did manage to become an artistic hub, what would stop it from going through the usual gentrification cycle and becoming unaffordable to regular people the way Portland, Austin, Oakland (not to mention Bushwick, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy) have?
"I would put it this way: there are many ways to impose a Georgist land tax, fiscal insolvency being one of them. Very wealthy people and institutions know that if they relocate to Chicago, they will be required to ante up for the final bill. And so they stay away. For a city of its size and import, Chicago just doesn’t have that many billionaires, nor do I think a rational billionaire should consider moving there.
In other words, there is a pending wealth tax. Either directly or indirectly, this will place fiscal burdens on Chicago land, the immobile factor. And this keeps down rents in Chicago now."
Have you checked the recent rent surges? I'm not sure if it's the summer, but any hotel room in the loop is $300+ per night. Airbnb is just a scam there.
Half hour? That's been debatable for some time now. As an example, it takes 20-30 minutes to commute from the Upper East Side to Midtown West, barring any subway issues.
There are very few grocery store clerk, delivery drivers, and coffee baristas who live in UES. They've already been pushed out to the edges of Manhattan and other boroughs.
The 20-30 minute commutes have been snapped up by younger people who have been priced out of the 10-15 minute commutes. You currently see a lot more ads for rentals that seem to stretch the boundaries of neighborhoods (e.g. West 110th Street == "Upper West Side").
The wait lists for rent stabilized apartments are incredibly long, so the chances of a grocery store clerk, delivery driver, or coffee barista getting into more affordable housing closer to their place of work is pretty slim.
And good luck if you're an hourly employee with a long commute when the MTA lets you down in the form of a delayed train, or express-turned-local, etc. You're either penalized by your employer (or angry customers) for arriving late, or you penalize yourself by leaving the house 30-45 minutes earlier and sitting around unpaid until it's time for your shift to start (ignoring any cost of leaving the house earlier, e.g. cost of extra child care, or risk of being unreachable on the subway by a dependent).
> You currently see a lot more ads for rentals that seem to stretch the boundaries of neighborhoods (e.g. West 110th Street == "Upper West Side").
To be fair, they've been doing that particular editorialization for over 20 years. Bloomingdale was subsumed into the expanding morass of the UWS in the early 2000s; Morningside is next.
The waitlist for NYCHA apartments in incredibly long, or units set aside for low-income tenants in new developments. But regular rent stabilized apartments don't have wait lists, those just go on the market to get scooped up like any other place.
I'm a well paid software eng in nyc and I have a 30-45 minute commute to work, I think the people you're talking about are already commuting 60-90 minutes if they work in desirable Manhattan neighborhoods. But I agree with your message.
Hate to break it to you and your relatively high paid friends but that bodega cashier is spending an hour on the subway both ways from their current working class neighborhood. Furthermore, half of that persons salary is going to groceries due to inflation. There has to be a breaking point at where NYC will hit stagflation and hopefully all useless instagram coffee shops will be hit by "market conditions".
Also as a New Yorker, worth noting that many of the lowest paid workers are undocumented, and their flexibility to pursue higher paying work is limited. Sadly, this means that 60-90 minute commutes are not out of the ordinary.
Commuting 60+ mins on the subway is not terrible compared to some 3rd world countries. NYC is a full incentive driven place. It may seem inhumane to some, but that's just the way the world works. It's normal to have a super small apartment in HK or Tokyo, even if you're upper middle class. Just economic incentives at work.
> no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job
Perhaps not minimum wage, but if the Bay Area is any evidence, people will commute that much time for a low wage job.
They are often losing out longer term (i.e. not considering the accelerated depreciation of their car), but in the thick of day to day survival they might not see that slowly happening.
Or do the places paying low wages now just need to accept a smaller profit margin or lower executive pay?
It's unquestionably true that there are some places that pay low wages that cannot afford to pay better wages without increasing prices; however, we seem to have collectively decided that that's the only way wages can increase. But that ignores the fact that corporations in all (or at least many) sectors have been enjoying record profits recently, and executive-to-worker pay ratios are absurdly high.
Remember that next time you see someone claiming that raising wages necessarily means that prices will need to rise.
I don't disagree for a second that, say, Starbucks could take a hit, reduce profits and still be able to operate successfully in New York. But I'd argue a lot of what makes New York the city it is is things like small independent restaurants that already operate on very thin margins. They also have no fat cat executives pocketing the spoils.
So, perhaps, yes, the city could survive without increasing wages but I worry it would result in a very faceless city filled with nothing other than big corporate entities that are able to swallow the cost.
It's because any potential of increased profit from less competition would still be less that the amount of profit they make by fleecing their workers.
>no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere
A few things:
1. The premise there (when there are plenty of jobs elsewhere) is kinda flimsy -- its already easier to find jobs in larger cities (that's why people move there), and nothing guarantees this won't get worse
2. Yes, there is a breaking point where people can't afford (in terms of time and/or money) a long and/or expensive commute. Humans have a workaround for that. Its called slums.
As a Bay Area resident, I have been surprised by how far people will commute for minimum wage jobs. Just Monday, I think, our public radio station had their morning local topics show where the subject was the city of Stockton. There was a lengthy discussion about low-income commuters coming daily from Stockton to Palo Alto, to work in and around the tech campuses of SV. Personally, I have known people to come from Modesto and Merced, even one from the far side of Sacramento. Daily!
Given that, I'm just not sure where the breaking point is.
> But as they get pushed further and further out it’s going to break down somewhere
It seems that higher rent is more likely to reduce standard of living first. Low wage earners who really want to be in the city will find a way, which generally means having a roommate and then I guess having even more roommates. I do wish NYC would build more dense buildings though so that a barista doesn't need to have 6 roommates.
"Wages will need to go up, which means the costs of goods and services will need to go up, and the city will get even less affordable."
That is already what happened. It just never stopped happening. The end game is... it keeps happening. It's just more noticeable right now because of high inflation and the stark contrast from the pandemic years.
> no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere.
They absolutely will, this concern has never really made sense to me. Poverty is like a badge of honor for many folks, and the harder one works for the lower the pay ends up being a little game some folks like to engage in, almost as a self flagellation; "I suffer therefore I'm noble."
Just look at some of the most oppressive places in the world, and how people continue to opt into that abject horror because it's a path to marginally help themselves or others they care about. NYC is nowhere near approaching the levels of, say, Qatar, in how it treats its workers, and a 90 minute commute each way wouldn't do much to push NYC closer to Qatar on that particular front.
You think we're at the bottom? No, we can go so much lower. So very much lower...
Another is these people are stuck. It takes money to pack up and leave. If the everything is costing more and more and more, their ability to save and leave goes down and down and down. Eventually they'll be forced to leave (somehow); the haves will see to it.
It's as cruel as life. Pretending like there aren't any negative learned behaviors that cause vicious cycles from poverty is naive. When all you know is suffering, the human mind has to come up with some justification for it, some reason it's "worth" continuing on. Nobility is often that conjured reason.
Have you really never met anyone who's oddly proud of how hard they work, despite how little they earn? I grew up around these people, this view was more common than drug use, more common than gambling, almost consensus that the poor folks were the real heroes of the story.
"Stuck" is indeed the right word, but no they won't get "unstuck"; their lives will just get worse and worse. Like I said, there's just so much lower we can go here, people don't even realize where the bottom is.
I wonder how much of contemporary Democratic politics is driven by insane rents in NYC and SF. The party has seen an influx of core Reagan voters—everyone from Wall Street bankers to Silicon Valley engineers (Reagan won Santa Clara County by 17 points in 1984). These affluent, highly educated folks have adopted the narratives and politics of the working class, juxtaposed against a ever-more-narrowly-defined “elite.” And it’s not the Kennedy-esque “noblesse oblige” that’s been a historical pattern. These folks don’t just express concern for the working class, but identify with them and are angry about the economic system. And I have no idea how to explain that, except they’re paying $5,000 a month for a cramped little apartment in NYC or SF, and feel like victims of the economic system rather than the winners.
This comment nicely attempts to paint high earning (not necessarily wealthy) upper middle class professionals as the scapegoat for an issue they did not create. The reality is, the people who are actually wealthy (think deca millionaires on up through billionaires) and investment firms and corporations are the ones suppressing supply for individual home owners.
The vast vast majority of homes in the US are owned by single family homeowners. And even if that wasn't true it wouldn't make much of a difference. Investment firms don't purchase homes to let them sit there, they purchase homes to rent them out. To whatever degree they're competing against single family homeowners they're just causing a small percentage of housing to shift from owner occupied to rental housing which should actually lower the cost of rentals.
Especially in NYC and SF the cause is very simple: local government has made it illegal to build enough housing to keep pace with demand.
Who's more instrumental in driving housing policy?
Homeowners?
Mortagage generators & holders (that is, creditors)?
Developers?
What of markets with significant concentration of property ownership?
Or of commercial property owners, who can also skew zoning and construction / land-use patterns?
What of interest groups which can create red-tape nightmares even through good intentions by various mandates: setbacks, offsets, minimum clearances, ramp requirements, etc.
Podcats / video channels / blogs such as StrongTowns or Shane Philips (UCLA Lewsi Centre) are all great starting points for how a tangle of minimum requirements and/or prohibitions starts blocking any possible change from traditional urban-sprawl patterns. Most have observed that the highly-desireable dense development of older cities and towns (1870s -- 1950s, typically) simply isn't possible under current laws and regulations.
I'm generally a fan of regulation, but it's got to be good and effective, rather than simply piled on. As with software, code requires occasional refactoring.
My comment isn’t blaming anyone. I didn’t say these folks are the cause of housing prices going up. I’m just trying to understand the psychology of how they’re reacting to that phenomenon.
My suspicion, though, is that ballooning upper middle class salaries, combined with tax rates on the upper middle class lower than the Reagan era, really are a key driver of housing price inflation.
Investment firms, certainly, are a red herring: https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-blac... (“However, the idea that institutional investors are somehow largely to blame for the current housing market catastrophe is wrong and obscures the real problem. Housing prices have been skyrocketing due to historically low supply, low mortgage rates, and the largest generation in American history entering the market looking for starter homes.”).
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars ... is about a billion dollars.
The upper extremes of wealth are truly mind-boggling.
And for a family with a few million in nonliquid assets --- housing which they require to live, and investments earmarked for retirement --- a million-dollar cushion at the end of working life is not much.
(The fact that many people reach retirement with far less is not only a tragedy but a looming national catastrophe for the US.)
That’s an excellent post. One thing I hadn’t thought about is that communities are so stratified that if you fall even a little bit income wise, you lose your work community, might have to move, might need to change your kid’s school, etc.
Yup. Which goes back to the housing problem. Under building of housing country wide (and even more so in major cities) is IMHO one of the root causes of many many many of the problems we see in America today.
It's a really really weird space that didn't really exist in 1984. I would say that today's "engineers" below the 80% salary threshold for this space are today's "construction workers" and heavily democratic voters (There are also of course "construction workers" too, of course).
Maybe about 5 years ago I would have said that people making 200k are wealthy. Today I would say that they are a lot of people that have been duped into a lifestyle where they "think" they are wealthy but are not. They spend MOST of their salary on non-essential and non-asset building things. So in a sense they are people that should be rich, but are not. Instead they don't own property (renters) buy lattes, restaurant food (for every meal) and the rest of that income is just going to payments - the tesla, rv/campers/boats, storage facilities for the stuff that doesn't fit in the apartment.
Those people certainly could become winners of the economic system if they stopped paying everyone else - but they identify with wealthy people making 400k but have absolutely no appreciating assets (ok except for their self driving module that Elon duped them into - which it turns out isn't actually "sellable" to the next owner anyway!).
I don't think these people identify with working class - instead they are pushing a narrative for themselves as poor to feel less guilty about that large salary and how poorly it's being pissed away.
That's the closest I can "explain" that from my personal perspective at least.
$200k isn’t enough to buy anything in SF though. Also - I know a lot of people making $200k/yr and they spend relatively little.
Honestly - you sound really out of touch and like you know no one who makes $200k/yr in SF. Where would you put your boat if you even could afford one? Where would you put a camper? Do you think people at 200k in sf are renting houses often? Houses with space for boats and campers?!
Sounds a lot like someone who likes to bitch about avocado toast. I wish people like this didn’t even post on HN - because it’s clear they don’t live in SF and don’t have a clue.
Living in a high cost of living area is voluntary consumption as much as buying a new BMW every year or taking European vacations all the time. If you want to spend your wealth (and yes, 200k/yr is ridiculously high) on living in SF that’s your choice, but that doesn’t make you non wealthy.
You don’t have to live in SF to observe that living in SF is a choice. Many of my law school cohort has household incomes of $300k to $1 million. Many choose to live in MYC or SF or DC and pay nearly $2 million for a house. My wife and I instead chose to buy a sub-$500k house in an exurb. We eat at Maggianos instead of Per Se, but we can afford “rich people” luxuries like a house on the water, sending our kids to private school, etc. But those are choices. An ordinary American would consider us all “rich,” and rightfully so. They don’t care whether we spend our riches on boats versus exclusive neighborhoods versus the cultural amenities of a big city.
The choice is tightly bundled with economic opportunity, income, specific jobs, school quality, and other factors.
I'm interpreting "living in SF" to mean broadly within the SF Bay Area metro region, which would include much of the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Contra Costa. Arguably parts of Marin and Santa Cruz. For some of the longer commutes, Sonoma, Solano, Yolo, Sacramento, and San Joaquin.
Housing is scarce and expensive throughout the region. It's one of few economic hubs in the US let alone the state. And people have increasingly been priced out, or simply unable to find housing (including replacement after natural disasters).
"Choice" isn't a binary, or absent profound implications, opportunities, and/or consequences.
Using lattes as an example of burning money in your pocket is just laughable and really shows how much you understand how the local economics of the bay area. I don't think there are many owners of RV/campers/Boat owners who live in SF but spot on reference. Throw on hatred of Tesla et voila:
Ok Mr. Old Republican Avocado Toast hating throwaway troll account - wish you the best of luck in your distorted world. Your worldview is a sad deeply inaccurate take and I hope you realize that before its too late.
> The big picture: This points to a conundrum. The Fed is raising rates to cool inflation. But rate hikes are driving higher rents, which are fueling inflation.
Why everyone and their dog says Fed is raising rates, when Fed just barely raised rates.
Year over year inflation is 9.3% and Fed interest rate is only 1.5%, while it should be 2% points over inflation.
The implication is that because this rule is from 1992 (which I guess is considered ancient history), arguing that it should be implied here is essentially saying that central banking was solved in 1992. It's a bad argument.
But it’s a bad reply too. It just means the rule is from 1992. That gives us no way to gauge whether the rule was invalidated in the intervening times.
As I like to say, we launch spacecraft based on models of celestial mechanics from the 1680s. Doesn’t make them wrong or disaster-prone. If you replied to someone that “oh you think celestial mechanics was perfected in the 1680s?”, then a lay reader should be equally confused as to why they should doubt the person you replied to.
If you have a reason some rule is invalid, post it, FFS. Don’t just say it’s from $YEAR. And definitely don’t rely on ambiguity as a way to look smart and unquestionable.
But of course, he’s a longtime poster, so I guess he gets a free pass.
Then it's a poor use of the technique, since the parent of that comment never implied otherwise, and doesn't provide enough to extract what the argument actually is. However much or little we have or haven't "solved central banking", the comment I replied to was linking textbook knowledge that agreed with its parent. So any substantive disagreement there is unclear -- hence my comment.
Do you really think that rents in New York are because of cheap debt and not because a tiny island has been captured by billions and billions of corporate luxury development, while at the same time the supply of appartamenti is choked by there being more Airbnb places than places being rented.
Covid has been the greatest transfer of wealth upward in our lifetime, but sure it’s cheap personal debt.
I'm curious how viable permanent AirBnBs will be once interest rates rise. It's easy to make ends meet when the house rises at 20% per year, and 2 weekends pays for the mortgage. If the same house's mortgage costs 4x and doesn't sell for 6 months it's a less attractive deal.
>Year over year inflation is 9.3% and Fed interest rate is only 1.5%, while it should be 2% points over inflation.
This ignores the realities of the market. A much lower rate than 11.3% (e.g. a 4%) would lead to a deep recession due to a shrinking money supply, which in turn would "counteract" inflation.
Demand for a place to live is much more inelastic.
And rate hikes make it harder to purchase a home, by raising the cost of them. That forces out of the home-buying market those who would have bought a home at the pre-hike rate … and forces them back into the rental market. Seems to me like demand goes up.
(Certainly, it makes it harder for landlords to acquire new properties, but I think corporations are going to weather it better than people — i.e., people will be forced out of that market before corporations.)
The increased rates make home mortgages unaffordable. This pushes housing demand to rents because people need to live somewhere. Rental prices increase while home prices decrease - bad, bad stagflation.
> But rate hikes are driving higher rents, which are fueling inflation.
how is higher rents fueling inflation? People paying higher rents (but on the same income) will have to forego some spending, thus reducing demand for some goods/services. So you'd actually expect that higher rents would drive _down_ inflation!
if rents rise, and other CPI items also rise, then it's not true that this is "all else being equal". If other items also rise, it means that there's more money being spent, which implies that people have more money to spend, and thus, income must be rising.
If rent rises are offset by costs of other items going down, then CPI won't rise - and this would happen if the rent is consuming more proportion of income, and thus, less is left available for the other CPI items.
I dont know which situation we are currently in today. I suspect that income is rising, and thus, inflation is high. Increasing rates would push up rent, but not push up income, and thus the proportion of rent vs income grows higher and thus lower inflation (in the future).
>will have to forego some spending, thus reducing demand for some goods/services
Or they will increase costs; which is (1) people (labor) demanding higher wages or (2) business increasing the costs of good to cover rent costs. Given that rent is already the biggest cost and has been growing steadily, it may be the case the other spending areas have been dialed to a minimum already.
If you go to uni in california you are probably having 4 in a bedroom, so graduating to just 2 per bedroom is a big upgrade in standard of living. We've normalized tenements for the engineering class already for a lot of places.
If the median is higher than the mean that probably means the distribution is heavier on the positive side.
Cheap apartments are illegal and the legal ones don't get financed/constructed. There's a cutoff much higher than zero for housing costs everywhere in the US and I'd imagine it's pretty high in NYC.
I was wondering this too, I know plenty of people who live alone in Manhattan and don't pay anywhere near $5k. Some renewed recently even but I don't know who had stabilization and who didn't.
Where did you see the $4k number? This looks like condo and co-op numbers mostly?
It is highlighted in the reference I gave (which I found in a NY Times article). Look for “view report” after “The median rent in Manhattan reached the $4,000 threshold for the first time as lease signings continue to rise.”
I went to view an apartment in Prospect Park SW recently and the line wrapped around the block. When I went to apply I was told most people had offered over the asking for rent and how much I'd like to offer over the amount. We're blind bidding on rent in NY now. I wish this was an isolated incident but most apartments I'm looking for the amount of people applying is in the 50s low 100s I decided to just stay put and not look for bigger space. I'll either try again next year or leave the city.
No rent is really worth 5k/mo at that money you can buy a palace an hour or two out of the city.
Whenever I hear about the rental market in NYC I always ask myself: why do people want to live there?
In a way it's a rhetorical question but in another way it's not. Sure some will move there for a job but I'm sure not everyone is there just for work. Why do people put up with all that? Is it just the dream of living in NYC.
As someone who spent 21 to 29 there, it simply is the best place to live in the US for a particular part of life. Arts, food, nightlife - it makes it all worth it.
For me, I started to age out of it which made it less worth it. But it's more than a dream or "fomo" - it truly is the most enjoyable place to be in the US. I visit nowadays and it's just as magical as it used to be.
People in manhattan can go west, south, east, north anytime anyhow with few or no connections. People in the outer boroughs have to many times go via Manhattan to get where they are going.
The Paris example is somewhat skewed, though, because Paris proper is comparatively tiny – just 105 km² and 2.1 million inhabitants. Compared to London it's basically just Zone 1 and a few bits (definitively less than half) of Zone 2.
Having said that, yes, it could still well be (too lazy to figure it out properly) that inside this city core the Paris Metro is still more dense than the Underground in London – but on the other hand beyond that, where the vast majority of inhabitants of the whole urban agglomeration of Paris live, you have similar problems regarding radial travel as elsewhere:
Yes, it requires everyone to live in small houses or apartments adjacent to each other without large backyards and garages for cars. Hence it working well in Tokyo.
Tokyo can exist in Japan because of some properties intrinsic to Japan which I'll get flagged for pointing out. The reason I tried to emphasize "expensive" is because those cross links are probably where a lot of the crazy property tax in NYC is going.
It used to be the case that NYC was expensive, but most of the rest of the country was cheap. If you didn't want to pay the ridiculous rent in New York, you could always move to a "second tier" US city like Seattle, Austin, or Denver, and enjoy a cool urban environment at a comparatively very reasonable price.
That no longer seems to be the case. Yeah, it is expensive here, but when I talk to my friends living in those other cities, they aren't paying that much less! Their rent is cheaper or they get more for the money, but it isn't a whole different ball game like it used to be.
I’m paying $1600 for a 3 bed in one of chicagos hottest neighborhoods. The trick is density, Chicago is made up of 3/4 flats and apartment blocks with solid public transport, so supply meets demand at a reasonable price. Of course the shitty weather and corruption helps lower demand too, but I’d say $600 a month housing cost is worth it.
And you have a yard? A parking spot? A walkable food thing? A friend networks whereby you loan tools? Rent Tools? A network of people who will help you when down/sick/hurt/displaced?
You're paying for an accentuated CELL in urban hell.
Just because you have a "dope spot to show how urban your display is"
You dont have shit.
Cut off all your power, access to food stuffs, equipment, necessities (pwr, wtr, fd, transport)
I was paying $2k for a very nice apartment in a very nice DC suburb within walking distance to my office. I moved to an even cheaper house (in a very walkable neighborhood) just outside Richmond. No people are not paying anywhere near NYC rent for urban living elsewhere.
I decided about four years ago that it just doesn’t make sense to live in NYC if you’re not making $200k/year consistently. Also, I was surprised at how many people without an original thought in their head earn $200k/year in NYC —- the city rewards a sort of dull ambition. Do you want to hang out with people who are intelligent and ambitious yet somehow fail to be interesting? If so, then NYC is for you!
Ok, I'll revise my statement: it doesn't make sense to live in Manhattan if you're not making at least $200k/year consistently and you're over the age of 30.
It might make sense if you're 24 and you're happy living with roommates in a $3k/month studio that has been converted into a 3-bedroom (which I have actually seen).
And if you want to have a family with 3 kids, then you'd better be pulling down $800k annually.
A lot of people in New York get by with a lot less. $800k for a family of 5 is nearly six times the median income for that family size in NYC. If that's your idea of "getting by", your perspective is wildly distorted from the average New Yorker, much less the average American.
Hey now, we can't all be entrepreneurs working on the cutting edge stuff. Lots and lots of boring work needs to be done, and that's why you pay bankers, lawyers, consultants, etc. hefty sums.
You don't need to be original to do that kind of work, but it still needs to be done.
How much is the take-home pay if you make $200k a year? About 12K a month? A rent of 5k would take away almost half of that. A $4K rent would be at the limit of the 1/3 recommendation but not sure what you can find these days for a $4K rent. It's doable, but I don't think it's sustainable if you want to save money or live comfortably
You can get very nice (NYC level nice) 1bd in a good spot easily for $4k. So a 30 year old professional working at bigcorp as a senior _____, they can afford it. I wouldn't want to pay that though. It's just 4k a month being thrown away to do the NYC thing. Good for 1 year if you're single, but after that it's like been there done that.
i’d say there is a pretty big difference between Manhattan and the other boroughs in this regard though it’s still too expensive. i’ve found reason to go to Manhattan only a couple times in the past few years.
To meet the requirement of many landlords to earn in excess of 3x rent, one would have to earn 15k a month after tax, or 180k a year after tax. To earn 180k after tax in NY, you need to earn 300k pre tax.
Your Income Taxes Breakdown
Tax / Marginal Tax Rate / Effective Tax Rate / 2021 Taxes* /
The average annual household income in Manhattan is $143,680, while the median household income sits at $117,926 per year. Residents aged 25 to 44 earn $144,670, while those between 45 and 64 years old have a median wage of $126,981. In contrast, people younger than 25 and those older than 65 earn less, at $57,813 and $47,547, respectively: https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Manhattan-Dem...
Your yearly gross income (before any taxes, in aggregate, including other sources) must be greater than 40x the rent price. The example of 5k would require a gross income of 200k or higher, making it much easier to qualify for than what you're assuming. Is it a good idea to spend 5k on rent when you earn 200k is a different question.
> To meet the requirement of many landlords to earn in excess of 3x rent, one would have to earn 15k a month after tax, or 180k a year after tax. To earn 180k after tax in NY, you need to earn 300k pre tax.
The ratio is on pre-tax income. To pay $60K/yr in rent, you need 3x that in pre-tax income, or $180K/yr pre-tax. To earn $180K/yr pre-tax, you have to earn $180K/yr pre-tax, no calculator needed.
>To meet the requirement of many landlords to earn in excess of 3x rent, one would have to earn 15k a month after tax, or 180k a year after tax. To earn 180k after tax in NY, you need to earn 300k pre tax.
This is a common misconception also held by many Americans! The total tax burden paid by many Americans is very comparable to other industrialized nations.
(Yes, NYC has a higher burden than most places, but the cities where many Americans live tend to have higher tax burdens in general, regardless of the politics of the leadership.)
The major difference is that instead of comprehensive social services, our taxes buy us the world's most expensive military.
In Germany you hit the higher tax brackets much quicker. I just input the numbers into a calculator and at 150k in NYC you pay 34.5 and in Bayern 43.4% taxes.
This is a little excessive, you are not taking into account the standard deduction, and taxing the entire income at the highest bracket.
Edit: I take that back, I see you used an effective tax rate including the standard deduction for a single filer instead of the marginal rate. This would be slightly better if you’re married filing jointly or have other deductions.
I’ve had this thought floating around in my head for a while, and it seems wrong, but I’m not completely sure why. I’m hoping someone more knowledgeable might be able to set me straight.
Prices on the coasts — like 5k rent — are astronomically high compared to prices in, say, the midwest. This shocks many people.
You could easily make the same comparison between the midwest and some non-developed nation. The difference is, nobody is shocked about how prices are higher in the USA midwest compared to an arbitrary less-developed country. Why is that exactly?
I loathe these insane prices, but my question is: could it be reasonable to view these high prices as a /good/ thing, as a sign of development?
The problem with these insane prices isn't really that you have disparity within the same country, but that a significant amount of people in these places cannot afford to live in there. You can't have a restaurant because you need to hire waiters but you can't pay waiters enough for them to pay the rent. So your service industry is disrupted or alternatively: people need to commute 1 or 2 hours to get to these jobs.
The reason it is not shocking that people in the midwest pay more than people in developed countries is because in the midwest most people have a relatively better life than most people in those developing countries. Whereas, say, a waiter living in San Francisco is not going to live a very different life from a waiter living in the Midwest who will, in turn, be living a much better life than a waiter in a developing nation.
So I think people are shocked because they realise their quality of life is not so different but there is a huge disparity in prices. Same country, similar quality of life, hugely different prices? This is definitely an anomaly!
> The problem with these insane prices isn't really that you have disparity within the same country, but that a significant amount of people in these places cannot afford to live in there. You can't have a restaurant because you need to hire waiters but you can't pay waiters enough for them to pay the rent. So your service industry is disrupted or alternatively: people need to commute 1 or 2 hours to get to these jobs.
Haven't you described a problem that fixes itself through market forces? Restaurant waiters move to other cities, restaurants (and millions of other businesses) close, city becomes less desirable, rents go down.
Only if the housing market is functional and responsive, ie high rents are only driven by "desirability" and so demand can adjust quickly.
The reality is that trends in the rental market are very slow to reverse outside of the collapse of a bubble like in 2008. At the moment it is completely dysfunctional since nearly every city in the Anglophone world is experiencing both a housing shortage and massive speculation in the housing market.
Additionally peoples' housing decisions are much less fluid than their decisions on to say buy a particular product - the entire basis of their financial security is tied up in where they live. Just because rent is lower in a less desirable city that's no help if they can't find a decent job in the less desirable city, or if due to high costs where they already live they don't have the liquidity to finance a major move.
And that's not even getting into the social cost - uprooting yourself from your home can cost you resources that can't easily replaced, such as a social safety net in the form of family and close friends, potentially providing things like free childcare, help in emergencies, rides to work if you can't drive/can't afford a car, interest-free loans etc etc. Because of all this people will stick with unbearable rents until long after they stop being able to comfortably afford them.
Housing responds to market forces, but since the supplier has a far more captive market than most industries the time horizon for changes is very slow. It doesn't really help people to claim that the market will sort itself out so just put up with this misery for 10-20 years - especially when in the past 10 years the market has only become if anything more dysfunctional.
On a long enough timeline, maybe. But societies can't wait the 5-10-20-30 years it might take the market to correct itself. That's one dimensional thinking. Political and social destabilization brought on by market inefficiencies can create dangerous situations that are deep and long-lasting.
People often want/need to live near their friends and family, which makes them irrational from the market's point of view. Treating location as fungible gives them cheaper housing, but isolation.
Wanting to live near friends and family is rational. It all gets fed into the utility function that tells people if something is worth paying for or not, and people are what the market is composed of.
The mere existence of a negative feedback mechanism does not imply a "fix". Rather depending on the magnitude, momentum, and damping, can result in many different system behaviors, including increasing oscillation. Meanwhile the current conditions cause actual damage to people's lives, even if they may converge in the future. So no, market fatalism is not very insightful here.
There's probably a lot of reasons building up to this. I suspect that a lot of this comes from the constant reinforcement of equality as broad concept. The idea that all people should have equal opportunities seems to have been perverted by some into the idea that all people should be the same. Then there's the idea of america as "one nation" instead of a massive collection of communities. Throw in the american need to spread out, and you start to get this culture that is far more homogenous than in the patchwork of cultures of europe and africa.
So with that backdrop, it seems the problem is people who think they're the same get shocked to find out they're not.
I think the comparison with other places makes no sense if you compare nominal prices. What I think you have to compare is (among other things) how much of your salary you spend on rent. Yeah, a non-developed nation you may get a 3 room apartment for 400 USD - but your salary may be not higher than 1k USD per month.
If the average salary in Manhattan would be 300k per year I think no one would care. But it is not.
Can you clarify what you mean by development? As far as the apartments themselves, they can range from newly developed, to newly renovated, to very old and needing renovations. I figured the apartments along the coasts, and in particular the Manhattan area are quite old.
I do think that development on a global scale has given people the ability to move to places like Manhattan, and so development outside, as well as within could create the demand for higher rent.
Affordable apartments may not be developing at high enough rate to keep up with demand - but in a place like Manhattan, surely it is difficult to develop affordable housing.
One of my favourite time-sucks is watching property/design videos on YouTube. I'm constantly amazed at how expensive it is for shitty accommodation in New York. London is expensive, but the quality is (at least in my experience) far better for the money, even at the cheaper end.
Yes and no. They are a sign of development, in that prices are high because there are enough people in the market with enough money to sustain these prices. Its a bad thing however because it means there isn't enough supply to keep prices reasonable for the actual real population versus just the top echelon that can afford these inflated rates on the shortened supply. The sticker shock doesn't matter as much as the relative buying power of hourly wages.
> You could easily make the same comparison between the midwest and some non-developed nation. The difference is, nobody is shocked about how prices are higher in the USA midwest compared to an arbitrary less-developed country. Why is that exactly?
Because there's no freedom of movement, legal or cultural, between the midwest and the large coastal US cities.
A lot of talk of supply side issues, economics 101, etc in these threads.
Greetings from New Zealand, where just like so many other anglosphere economies we've been playing the low interest property speculation game for decades now. We got really, really good at it. The last couple of years saw 50% increases in property prices. Madness.
A funny thing's been happening in just the last six months though. Interest rates have gone up. 2.5% to 6% roughly. In the capital the number of homes for sale doubled compared with the year before. Prices are down 20% since the November peak.
Here's the interesting thing. While this crash is happening the number of rentals available has almost almost doubled and rents are going down. This is after tenants experienced the tightest rental market in decades just a year ago.
Where did all those new rentals come from?
Hint: there are two sides to supply and demand (no one really looks at the demand side too closely but that's where the real policy failures are).
NZ doesn't do 30 year fixed mortgages like the USA does, so I presume this effects things a lot when interest rates go up? The bipartisan "medium density residential standard" legislation gave me a lot of hope for the future of NZs housing market, despite all the grumbling from some of my older relatives. Remains to be seen whether building supplies can keep up. Would be nice to have a land/capital gains tax though.
Many cities are experiencing asset price bubbles far beyond the rental price increases (driven by central banks). But NYC rental prices are actually rising rapidly. It’s quite a different situation
I put it down to the double whammy of banking deregulation and ripping into social housing. From the 90s on property speculation has been the name of the game.
It does seem like this year could bring a paradigm shift. We might have come to the end of the road with lowering interest rates and the social housing system appears to have totally fallen apart and been overwhelmed at the same time.
A decent property market correction will be good for everyone in the long run, but it's going to be difficult for a lot of people. It'll be interesting to see how middle New Zealand handles it when the crisis is at their door and not just 'out there' for more unfortunate people to worry about.
Id love to see a breakout of Airbnb rentals by number of bedrooms. 1 and 2 bedroom airbnbs are seemingly never economical anymore compared to hotels, at least in the places I visit.
I’d love for someone to do an analysis where they look at the number of AirBnB’s in a city, and model out what would happen to the rents in that city if those units were put back into the rental market.
Would be absolutely fascinating if there was a tight correlation
1. Rent an airbnb for a period of time.
2. Tenant reaches out to host and asks to stay longer (or vice versa)
3. They agree to a deal outside airbnb that works better for both of them.
they need to start implementing and enforcing extremely high fines on illegal listings and then actually go out and try to enforce it. That's the only way it ends imo.
Should people who come to the city for a couple of weeks not be able to find any accommodation? Why do you think that they should have less rights that people that live in the city full-time? They already have obvious market forces working against them (short-term rents are always more expensive than long-term).
Yes? People who live in the city have families, friends, jobs, and other community structures that they contribute toward. It's where they LIVE.
People who "come to the city for a couple of weeks" are at best visiting for work or family -- in which case, they can get work to subsidize the housing, or stay with the family they're visiting -- and are at worst tourists who are only visiting the city to have fun.
People's lives should be prioritized over fun affordability. Or work saving a buck when employees visit HQ in person. Or even the affordability of someone choosing to visit family.
The people who live in the city are the people who work there, bleed there, eat there, love there, etc. etc. etc. They are the city. The people who visit are just passing through. Livers should not subsidize visitors.
You act like hotels, inns, and short term stay apartment hotels will suddenly disappear if Airbnb is cracked down on but to answer your question yes, people who live in the city should be prioritized over people who want to come over for a quick stay.
Consider how laws are set. Politicians answer to their constituents. If the people who live in the city do not want certain things (short term Airbnb rentals here), you can expect them exert pressure on their representatives to make those things go away. That's exactly what has happened in NYC.
The question of "Why do you think that they should have less rights that people that live in the city full-time?" doesnt really matter. Because the reality is that they have no power/sway over the politicians who are responsible for governing the city.
That's an exaggeration. The alternative to airbnb is not no accommodation, it's better-regulated and therefore more expensive accommodation. Regulations force tourists to bear the costs of their trip (hotel taxes, etc.) and give the city some pricing power to control quantity of tourism.
Eh, I think the ability to internalize the costs and profits of an apartment building allows for a more efficient and incentive aligned situation than a bunch of condo owners with a condo board where there's a kind of tragedy of the commons to look after the building.
The primary driver of my view on real estate is that it should not be treated as an investment grade security. Attempts to leverage real estate as an investment grade security should be outlawed by the government.
Owners of rental units should be limited to a maximum number of units at any given time. For an individual I would say 5 to 10 units. For a corporation, I would want it limited to something like 50.
The goal being to enforce more competition and avoiding consolidation.
A terrible practice owners of rental units use is to keep available units off market in hopes of getting a better price in the short term future (typically 3-12 months). This practice should be made illegal. If you own rental units, you should be forced to list them when vacant.
Foreign ownership should also be seriously curtailed. Taxes should be extreme for units that aren't used except for 2 weeks a year. NYC should be for New Yorkers, Americans, immigrants, and people who choose to come to this city and create their life here, not for those who fly in on a private jet to stay 3 of the year. They can stay in a hotel.
I also don't believe owners of rental units should be able to own them indefinitely. Owners of rental units should be forced to sell to after they have recouped their investment and I'd say 3 times their investment cost. This creates enough upside (300% return) to incentivize purchasing of units to rent which thus incentivizes building.
After that point, the owner should be compelled to offer to renters the ability to buy their apartment or sell to another owner. Similar to how the velocity of money helps encourage economic activitiy, this is creating a velocity of housing.
I have no problem with individuals looking to create a passive income stream, and this should be allowed but up to a point. Similarly we need a system that will incentivize development of new buildings and construction, so there has to be enough upside opportunity down the stack from the owner to the builder to the banks financing it all. But it should be limited and real estate should not be treated as an investment grade security.
NYC apartment vacancy is at 4% compared to 6% nationally. The “vacant apartments and foreign owners are cashing rents to go up meme” is a straight up conspiracy theory.
We need to build more units. It’s really that simple. Any regulation that leads to less units should be heavily reconsidered. Limiting the number of units someone can own would be horrible for increasing supply.
You are confused about the economic dynamics behind high rents. There are already tens (hundreds?) of thousands of landlords around New York City and no single landlord controls more than a tiny fraction of the housing stock or has even the tiniest bit of price setting power. The problem
isn’t cartels keeping prices artificially high, it’s immense demand running up against zero new supply.
I visited Manhattan once, what I noticed was how run down metro (underground) was. I would compare it with Kiev metro around 2016, and that country was already at war. I have no idea how city hall can get away with doing so little!
Property is a tough nut to crack because there are a bunch of different issues creating this problem and some of them are local. NIMBYism is a big one obviously but so many are inveted in the value of their house that increasing property prices becomes a political goal. Worse, property becomes a tool for the ultra-rich to park money in a way that is hedged against inflation.
Rents tend to follow property prices but they lag.
Manhattan also has a big problem with the type of property that gets built, being ultra-luxury property (that sells for >$5k/sq ft). Part of the demand for this is parking money but there are other reasons. Insurance is a big one thanks to the infamous "scaffolding law".
But the main point I want to raise here is that politicians, regardless of party (in the US at least), have zero interest in fixing this problem. Why? Because they're all bought and paid for by the capital-owning class. NYC politics in particular serves property developers first, police unions second and whatever third is nobody cares.
A budget shortfall is built into your existence. This keeps you showing up to work and diminishes your ability to negotiate (since walking away isn't an option). This creates a compliant workforce that doesn't hurt profits by, say, wages going up even with just inflation.
If NYC politics serves property developers first, then it probably wouldn't be illegal for property developers to develop new property in the vast majority of the city.
It's so upsetting to hear my friend's stories on apartment hunting recently. I had someone raise their expectations by 1k in their budget where they would barely break even financially, and still couldn't find a 2 bedroom apartment in the Williamsburg area. I got very lucky getting a "Covid Deal" in the summer of 2020, because anyone who moved here/moved around since the fall of last year I've heard nothing but chaos :(
> The average price of a rental apartment in Manhattan surged above $5,000 in June for the first time, hitting $5,058,
Key word: average. Always a dangerous - and clickbait friendly - metric.
Keep in mind...
This does not mean the top went up. Let's not be naive, the further you move up the financial / wealth food chain the less price sensitive you are. An increase on the upper end has few consequences.
On the other hand, you can move the bottom up and the average will also increase as increase. This is typically not the first thing that comes to mind but it's a reasonable idea. Unlike the high-end, the low end of the market is very price sensitive. People "living paycheck to paycheck" are far less likely to brush off increases. What happens when they can't make rent? That is The Question.
As things get uglier, those with not much will have nothing to lose. If we don't see voters react this November, they'll be primed for future Novembers. They also might decide that voting isn't going to make a difference. The number of people in this situation is significant. The math is simple.
This is why I left Manhattan - especially in a new world where remote work is the new norm. I miss it, but I don't miss literally living in a box or the noise.
Fortunately, I got to live in an insanely nice luxury apt (30% under market rent) for a year in 2019 while construction was being finished on an adjacent high rise. Even though I had an incredible view of the Hudson from the 26th floor on W57th street tbh that kind of luxury is overrated in my opinion. Finance people are also generally pretty boring and / or degenerate. That said - I'll always miss pre-covid New York.
Granted, every single person I know in finance got a huge raise / bonus last year so this increase isn't exactly surprising. Looks like Louis Rossman was right with his prediction of New York becoming a city where "only rich finance and tech workers can afford to exist".
Yes. This was posted after I wrote mine. I am a bit surprised that the median is so high. I would have expected a bigger difference, i.e. a few high value outliers pulling the median up further up.
Actually, that's not true in a strange perverse way. Higher interest rates = higher mortgage rates = higher monthly costs to own = More people being stuck in the rental market = more demand in an already over-heated rental market.
Remember housing prices going down doesn't turn to a lower monthly cost (it keeps at pace typically). This is pure wealth loss (which is the point so we can cut inflation).
This is already happening in NYC (and this article is the outcome of that).
Interest rates up. House prices down (-20% in my city). Number of available rentals up (almost doubled in some markets). Rental prices down (looks like around -10%).
It looks like underutilised housing is being flushed out due to high servicing costs. The jig is up.
Interesting, where are those rentals coming from? Is it just an overall drop in demand for any housing?
Intuitively to me, if you make one thing harder to do (buy a house), unless people disappear or you suddenly build more rentals, they go in the other direction and create more strain there (renting).
Where are these people living if they can't buy but are renting less? Are both demands are dropping?
I think that it's a case of underutilised properties being flushed out.
No one really considers it, but in a booming market you might be more likely to have a higher percentage of underutilised properties. When the market turns, those properties that were making money just by virtue of existing now lose money. A second home or a holiday home is one example. A house being slowly renovated is another. Plain old land-banked properties, etc.
Put it this way. As the property market has boomed, the proportion of properties owned by investors has increased. Because only investors will underutilise a property (homeowners occupy it by definition), the proportion of underutilised properties increased. When the market turns, capital gains look less certain, and holding costs increase, investors try to get out. The underutilised properties get flushed out.
In major cities, renters often have roommates. When they exit the rental market to become homeowners, they often pick up more debt and higher monthly payments but stop having roommates.
Another perverse dynamic: higher rates mean less new developments. Supply stays the same while demand grows in places like NYC would also increase rents.
i think remote work goes a long way in resolving this problem.
governments are not interested in building new affordable property (at least in the UK).
so those of us who can afford to rent in these cities, but not buy, we should all leave these places...let the landlords default on their speculative house of cards.
Remote work is essentially what created a large housing cost increase in other cities. Also for cities like NYC, reducing demand will be difficult. NYC has always been a city where lots of people want to live(maybe not you or me, but it does attract a lot of attention). It is historically significant, vibrant, and many parts are beautiful. People will flock there, even as others are leaving.
I think the widespread option of remote work is a good step forward. The fact that it came about in such a quick fashion was not ideal for the re-shuffling of the real estate market, but hopefully it will even out in the coming years!
It's just diffusing the problem from urban centers to mid-sized cities elsewhere in the united states. Say for simplicity that the core result of the problem is that people not making astronomical tech/finance/etc. salaries can't live in NYC because people making those salaries are scooping up supply and driving up rent ($5,000/month and higher). Then say the solution is to let some amount of people move to smaller cities and work remotely, enough that NYC prices somehow magically drop 20%. Well, where are those jobs going to go / how much of a salary penalty are people going to take to move from NYC to STL, Austin, Nashville, Columbus, Denver, Ann Arbor, and Raleigh? Because they're not going to suddenly be making the same salaries that engineers already in those cities make, they're going to want more. And they're going to scoop up housing supply and put pressure on those housing markets. The same forces keeping NYC rent at $5,000 have caused places like Nashville to become unlivable for the lifers; your grocery store workers and baristas can't get by with $3,000/month rent there either.
It would be lovely if the solution for skyrocketing rents in the big 2-3 urban centers didn't simply shift the problem to every other city, but there's no indication at all that will happen.
This might turn out to be the saving grace of the distressed office market. Office landlords have a lot of empty or almost empty buildings in areas like downtown NYC. I'm thinking they can be profitably repurposed as apartments at these rental rates.
With rent prices like this it's impossible to save money for a down payment in the future and then you're trapped in a cycle of renting unless you can increase your income, which let's be honest, easier said than done!
One piece of the puzzle I'm struggling with in all of this is why if housing is so expensive and rents so high are more houses not being built? Surely the incentive is there, what's going wrong?
NIMBYism. The incentive is definitely there but the issue is that existing landowners don’t want any more buildings. After all - more supply while keeping demand fixed hurts their profitability.
You need eminent domain from the government to fix this. At this point - it’s complete class warfare and landowners are fucking over many generations.
There are plenty of landowners that want to build. The issue is that NIMBYs have largely captured the city government and zoning restrictions have made new building mostly illegal. We jut need a government that legalizes new construction.
The amount of homes being built in areas where people want them built aren't enough to offset demand. In areas where denser housing is required (coastal cities), zoning and NIMBYism prevents it.
Yes, the rent here in NYC is too damn high. No, these stupid media reports say nothing about a normal renter’s experience. Averages aren’t a good indicator if the underlying distribution is not normal. As construction in NYC disproportionally focuses on new luxury buildings for both owning and renting, averages are overly skewed.
I can see why this is happening. For a certain kind of person, New York City is the most desirable place in the world to live. With work from home becoming possible, all the people across the country with the desire and money to do so will want to move to NYC, where they might have been in Omaha or Cleveland or Dallas for work.
You could rent a 5,600 sq foot house with a 3 car garage and a full basement in a top 10 high school area for $5k down the street from me in Metro Atlanta.
The rent prices are atrocious and I'm paying through the nose to live walking-distance to my office. I don't understand why so many people are back living in the city when office occupancy rates are much lower than pre-pandemic.
As someone from California, I've always assumed that Manhattan was sort of comparable to something live Beverly Hills/Century City here in Los Angeles. Basically, you had to be fairly wealthy to live there.
It's more like Hollywood as a whole. You have wealthy areas where the landed gentry live, and you have extremely impoverished areas where multiple working class families share a bedroom in a run down apartment and can't save enough to leave and find better prospects.
"The big picture: This points to a conundrum. The Fed is raising rates to cool inflation. But rate hikes are driving higher rents, which are fueling inflation."
...and in return you have the privilege of stumbling over garbage on your way to wait inline for an $8 coffee like you're at an amusement park or something.
The desire to live in NYC is mostly for the hype and story you can tell yourself.
The reality is that the daily commute, expenses, and crowds is worse than other places. Your daily life matters much more than the few weeks of the year that you can take your visitors around the city.
The fuel that drives people to live in NYC is propaganda from TV, films, and books.
It might be fun to live for a few years, but imagine raising a family with multiple kids in a tiny apartment. There are better ways to live than that.
I live in central London and pay a lot of rent, but I disagree, I don't think it's possible to compare London rents to New York. Certainly, the average rent across the entirety of London might average out at similar levels because there's a large number of renters and the floor is higher but at the upper levels, our rent is cheaper: you can live in almost any building in London for £3k/month, it's almost impossible to find an apartment building here where the rental floor is >£3k/month, luxury in London is comparatively cheap.
Not that I want to get into an argument on this (both cities are fantastically expensive), but the first property on your link when I accessed it (so basically at random) - GBP 5590.00 pcm.
The cause is not mysterious. Residential rental property is the newest private equity scam. [0] When the capitalist who has inserted himself into your life wants more money, your life becomes more expensive. This is called "inflation". Fools and charlatans claim the Fed can control this.
How did that work for Berlin? Try moving there today and tell me how affordable it is for newcomers.
Rent control is basically subsidizing existing grandfathered tenants by fleecing those new wishing to move in, without fixing the underlying housing shortage in any way.
The solution is always, always, having (building) more supply than the demand, yet nobody seems to get it.
What does the 5000$ mark have to do with it? Just because rents in Berlin are not as high as downtown Manhattan, doesn't mean they're not overpriced for Berlin wages, especially since skilled and middle class wages in Berlin are nowhere near what they are in Manhattan, so this apples to oranges 5000$ mark is meaningless for your snarky attempt at an argument.
>It is easy to hand wave "more building supply", but that's a medium to long term solution.
YES! It's the long term solution which if it were implemented in a timely manner in the past, would have saved us today, but even though we are in a mess today, it's not being implemented even to this day due to bureaucracy, NIMBYism and various political issues which beat around the bush, instead of saying it straight: "Build more today so we can live easier tomorrow!"
>What do we do in the short term?
Also, build more. If you don't build in the short term, there will be no long term.
I don't think this applies to Berlin yet, it's not an island or locked by mountains. You can also build up.
Let's not kid ourselves, real estate prices there are insane due to monetary policies, bureaucracy and NIMBYism restricting building/supply for a million reasons, and not due to the lack of real estate in that area.
Indeed! What we need is a wealth transfer from new residents paying _even higher_ market prices to legacy tenants grandfathered in to apartments that landlords have no incentive to maintain.
Rent control only helps people who already have a home and want to stay there forever. Everyone else loses because there are few vacancies. This means less job mobility, more difficulty recovering after being evicted, and less development, which further exacerbates the rent problem.
> 100% of this price hike is going into landlord's pockets
This is true, and the solution to this is a land-value-tax and to use that to offset the city's sales tax, which disproportionately impacts the poor. Hell, it would probably be enough if the city just assessed property taxes more accurately. My TL was bragging about his home being assessed at $800k, when it's easily worth $2M.
This boils down to greed and selfishness, but people even on HN don't want to call spade a spade so they dance around it and give complex somersault answers because they are afraid/too socially conscious to speak the truth.
These numbers are wildly inflated. the official corporate rental sector in NYC s actually very small (most properties are condos/coops) owned by small scale landlords. That 5k number is the price that a (often foreign) company would pay to keep an executive for a temporary assignment in NYC. Then you have the students who are burning thier parents money anyways. Anecdotally the landlords are looking to recoup their COVID losses and a lot of these units are not renting.
But they aren't. I just did an apartment search after living in Manhattan for years and 5k was the number my partner and I wanted to be under. It was basically impossible and I'm now leaving my neighborhood.
This is a price signal. Anyone who's calling for intervention needs to wake up.
The proper response is for people to leave. If you drive across America, you'll find economically, depressed areas which have suffered from brain drain. Many aspire to attend an out of state college, go work in the Valley, join some VC-funded startup, megacorp, consulting firm, and strike it rich.
In all likelihood, you will (1) not strike it rich (2) have a worse quality of life on a cost adjusted basis (3) forgo developing a local community. Perhaps you'll enjoy more culture, but that might have been something that have developed in a smaller community had you not run off to a megacity.
Developing local communities is what America needs today. Just drive across this country and you'll find a tremendous amount of land coupled with tremendous economic depression. It's high time that price signals like rent drive people out of high cost of living areas into more depressed areas to promote broader-based growth.
Maybe, but you are also advocating for climate arson. Every person who leaves NYC for any other American city other than Berkeley is raising their carbon footprint, dramatically in the case of most cities. So that isn't great.
The other perspective that you need to consider is there are huge populations who simply will not consider living in the cities you mentioned. Women, for example, do not want to move to Ohio. Homosexuals would rather not live in Oklahoma. People who are not white can rule out a happy existence in 90% of American cities. It's true that a single, straight, white male with no children can pick up and move anywhere, but that's a relatively small fraction of the people.
Look, I'm as pro-urbanism as any online nerd. I don't own a car and I bike everywhere. But nobody has a fucking moral obligation to live in NYC and dump all their paycheque into their landlord's pocket, so they can "save the planet". That's just insane. Batshit crazy. You sound like Pol Pot in reverse.
It is not just the racism but also practical facts. There are American cities without a black barber. A given city may lack the food culture or language of some ethnic group. The incredible whiteness of some cities is self-perpetuating.
> Do you think that "whiteness" is a bad thing? What is wrong with white people?
“Whiteness“ is not the same thing as “white people”. There's nothing wrong with white people qua white people. (There's lots of things wrong with people as individuals, some of which are significantly more common among White people than other groups—e.g., sealioning about racial issues on internet fora—but that is a different issue.)
There's something in particular wrong with whiteness, which is grounded in identifying with, valorizing, and perpetuating shared experience as the oppressing class under the system of White supremacy.
Well I remember people used to say the same thing about other groups -- they'd say "oh it's not that I don't like Jews, I just don't like Jewishness", whatever that means. And then that Dave Chapelle routine about black people. I don't see how what you're doing is any different.
I hadn't heard of that "sealioning" term before, and honestly I'm just even more baffled having Googled it. I guess I'm like the sealion in the comic, and the sealion is meant to be ... obviously in the wrong? But ... he's not? People are mouthing off about him and he wants them to explain themselves. Why is he in the wrong? You're mouthing off about me and people like me, where I can hear you, and you think you're just entitled to do that and nobody can say a word? If you have a problem with people like me, why don't you be a man and say it plainly? Instead of trying to squirm out of it with these silly little clique terms.
And "oppressing class under white supremacy"? What is this gobbledegook? My family is working class, I come from a long line of iron-mongers, my great grandfather had rickets because the smog blotted out the sun. They peddled this same race-war nonsense back in Czarist Russia, all the Elders of Zion conspiring to keep everyone down, it's a siren call of hatred. Snap out of it.
It's possible for there to be no problem with white people, regardless of how "white" they are being, while there is still a big problem with structural barriers to others moving to areas that might otherwise be the best choice for themselves and their family. I think the parent intended the latter, pointing at overwhelming prevalence of white people (rather than - as you seem to have read it - overwhelming... intensity(?) of white people) as being an indicator of the persistence of such barriers.
There isn't anywhere near enough space in this box to answer the question "What is wrong with white people" and that isn't my purpose here. I'm trying to tell you why there are non-obvious reasons why people don't just immediately move to Lincoln, Nebraska, when the rents change in Manhattan. It's because there aren't any Persian restaurants, or whatever people view as an amenity.
But you do think there is something wrong with white people? You actually do think there's something wrong with me, on account of the colour of my skin?
You're not going to have any more luck reasoning with them than a black person would have trying to reason with a klan member. If you've decided you hate people because of the color of their skin, no online discourse is going to change your mind.
He's mistaking the invisible hand of individual incentives etc for some sort of coordinated "attack" on "non-privileged". It's funny because in NYC you see tons of people of all different types of backgrounds making it, and also not making it.
Doesn't really sound that complicated, people wanting to live in a place where barbers know how to style their hair and restaurants serve the food they enjoy eating.
Whenever someone wants to talk about what's wrong with group of people with skin color (X), you already you're talking to someone with the wrong priorities.
Sure, but this is totally antithetical to american culture which is extremely selfish, entirely oriented around acquiring money, and obsessed with pop culture which generally leads people to pursue positions that are high paying and locales that are “the place to be”.
When the only values that remain are the acquisition of capital, self-love, and fame, the majority of the population will elect to be in the places that present those possibilities to them, even if it requires making short-term decisions that harm them (absurd renting costs), because they believe they might make it work given time.
Is this an average for newly signed rent, or for the average one already paid now? If former, it looks incredibly low. I mean, this is what you pay for an above-average (but not posh) place in East Europe capitals, and for pretty much average ones in old European cities like Paris or Munich.
I really wish you took the time, after what appears to be a rather inflammatory comment, to reply to the folks who are very specifically questioning your argument.
"Paris" is only the small place within the old walls. It's population is under 2M, most of them owners, with ownership lasting since before WWI, who could never afford to buy (or rent) now. Rest are suburbs and don't have Paris on it's address. And sure, rents there are a lot lot cheaper.
You continue to reply to defend your position that 5k euros is below average rent per month for Eastern European capitals in their most attractive locations. Do you actually have data?
It's such an extraordinary claim people are using Paris (not an Eastern European capital) as a counter example, but let's not move the goal post.
Just for the record, i agree that i was wrong, i checked prices, indeed they are about 2x smaller than i assumed (not in Paris but in East Europe capitals). Looks like i need to get out of my social bubble more frequently.
That doesn't affect my initial claim though: indeed, the quoted Manhattan rents in the original article include existing contracts, including decades-old regulated rental contracts, and do not represent average prices of new rentals signed now.
What? $5k a month is absolutely not something you pay for an above average place in east European capitals, nor in old European cities. Check e.g. https://www.expats.cz/praguerealestate/apartments/for-rent for a pretty expensive central european capital - around 20k CZK for studios, or 800 euros/usd. There are only 16 out of 1042 properties at over 120k CZK (~5k eur/usd), and they're huge (around 200m^2 and central).
> Those prices would mea a software engineer in Europe would not even have money for rent after paying taxes, much less anything else.
Very much the story of lot of South European engineers. I used to pay 800 euros as rent when I was earning 1200 euros/month fresh out of university in Madrid.
> If those numbers seem low — after all there are headlines about 40% rent increases — it's because the CPI measure includes renewal rents, the price you pay when you renew your lease.
Maybe we have different definitions of posh, but 5k gets you very far in East Europe capitals. That’s a lot of money that can get you 6+ bedroom villas in downtown Bucharest.
Obviously. But because price change is so small over so many years, i am inclined to think it's average of existing contracts, not of newly signed ones, and vast majority are regulated rentals signed 30-50 years ago, that are super low maybe 1000-2000 per month, and drive down the average.
What ? Your numbers sound 2x above what I'm seeing casually browsing ads. Or you have super inflated expectations of what's "above average but not posh" - like penthouses with views and things.
One of his comments from 2016 says he spends all of his 100k/year living in Vilnius. I don't know what kind of mansion he is living in but this guy is clearly completely detached from reality. Most people in eastern Europe barely break 2k a month, in many countries less than half that. No chance average rent is anywhere close to 5k.
I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we generally get along in the city, across many cultures and backgrounds. I like it has some of the best food in the world.
I think a lot of people are like me. No, we don't want to live in Boston, Chicago, or Washington DC (similar cities with mass transit). Unfortunately demand will continue to outpace supply greatly.
The only alternative I have is moving further out in Brooklyn or Queens. Unfortunately the subway has decent coverage, but moves at a snail's pace, and I'm looking at 50+ minutes for 6 miles into the city.