Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

>When supply is less than demand, prices go up

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.

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.

[1] https://www.gameofrent.com/

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

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

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.