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Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

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Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

#251

Post by peanuty1 »

danjac wrote: post #54
afavour wrote: post #43

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…

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.

Would it be such a bad thing if those artists move to, say, St. Louis and create the next big thriving art hub there?

Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

#252

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

Ekaros wrote: post #148
v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can get all that online. So it might make sense to move these communities to somewhere very very cheap. Or even distribute them around.

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).

Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

#253

Post by lotsofpulp »

patrickthebold wrote: post #234
huevosabio wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

The article is about Manhattan. Do you have any idea if it has similar problems? In my mind, Manhattan is pretty dense.

The high prices in Manhattan are caused by the low supply of other Manhattan-like density and public transit capable cities in the US.

Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

#254

Post by rglullis »

voidhorse wrote: post #210
TOMDM wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CMV Rent is high because the demand in large cities majorly out strips supply. All policies that attempt to address housing costs that don't increase supply are treating a symptom and not the underlying cause.

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…

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"

Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

#255

Post by DoughnutHole »

golergka wrote: post #134
jerojero wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: No. 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…

> 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 job…

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.

Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

#256

Post by jefftk »

throwaway5959 wrote: post #184
missedthecue wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the private market won’t do it, why not?

Most of Manhattan is built out to the maximum allowed by zoning, but we could raise those limits

Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

#257

Post by dukeofdoom »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #36

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…

> property owners provide almost no value

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.

Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

#258

Post by Ryder123 »

nickles wrote: post #119
ricardobeat wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.…

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.

Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

#259

Post by TOMDM »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #81
TOMDM wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CMV Rent is high because the demand in large cities majorly out strips supply. All policies that attempt to address housing costs that don't increase supply are treating a symptom and not the underlying cause.

The policy I mention is precisely that, public housing being at least 40% of the supply. If demand increases, you increase supply.

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.)

Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

#260

Post by nemothekid »

chii wrote: post #109
slaw wrote: post #5

> 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.

> 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!

>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.

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