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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

#331

Post by [deleted] »

knowledge-clay wrote: post #299
jononomo wrote: post #68

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!

The median individual income in NYC is $34k. In Manhattan, it's $52k. Making 200k puts you in the top 5% of earners in New York City.

[deleted]

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

#332

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

peanuty1 wrote: post #251
danjac wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Might as well be in Chicago, which has probably the most reasonable CoL for any big city in the US.

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

#333

Post by nickles »

Ryder123 wrote: post #258
nickles wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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."

[0] https://www.redfin.com/city/5665/MI/Detroit/housing-market

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

#334

Post by dwater »

DeathArrow wrote: post #298
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…

>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 w…

> 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.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-03/why-segre...

> 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.

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

#335

Post by BlargMcLarg »

cataphract wrote: post #190
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Meanwh…

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.

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

#336

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

abduhl wrote: post #305
feet wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry, but this is a non-transable comment, and I only reply to transable comments.

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

#337

Post by eej71 »

kriops wrote: post #297
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…

> (...) 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 ha…

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.

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

#338

Post by rglullis »

voidhorse wrote: post #291
rglullis wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

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

#339

Post by danans »

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…

> 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.

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

#340

Post by ponow »

nickles wrote: post #136
oezi wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consid…

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.

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