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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

#341
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they can. The thing is the corporate landlords would rather have their high rises sit empty than rent the units at reasonable rates.

do you have evidence for this? Vacancy rates are well low at the moment.

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.

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative for many is worse - many roommates, incredibly long commute, or homelessness. Remember that Googler who lived in his car? ( https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-tru... )

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.

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.

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

#343
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.

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.

$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.

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

#344
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be fun spending the whole day looking for technicalities to address.

No, I just understand how to make valid criticisms. First step before you can criticize is to understand what you're criticizing

Apparently not because you didn't even understand what the GP was calling a bold claim (it wasn’t land being nontransable).

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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

#346

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…

>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.

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

#347

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.

there is a demographic issue for sure, one which is global, and driven by huge wealth inequality.

i see remote working as the default option being a step in the right direction.

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

#348

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.

That actually blows my mind when I think about the lifestyles I see walking around the West Village every day.

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

#349

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.

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.

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

#350

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 differen…

> 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.

Typo, of course I meant there IS freedom of movement within the US but not across borders.
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