Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by deathanatos » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #182

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 This doesn't make sense to me. Rate hikes decrease spending overall, so why would rent be any different?

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.)

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

#352

Post by TameAntelope » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

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 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...

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

#353

Post by dionidium » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

toto444 wrote: post #214

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.

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…

> 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?

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

#354

Post by sbf501 » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

huevosabio wrote: post #204

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…

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…

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.

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

#355

Post by xhrpost » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

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.

> In my mind, Manhattan is pretty dense.

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).

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

#356

Post by giraffe_lady » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

wowokay wrote: post #289

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…

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?"

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

#357

Post by dionidium » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

sbf501 wrote: post #354

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…

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.

This is a conspiracy-theory-level analysis that isn't supported by any available evidence.

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

#358

Post by standardUser » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

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…

"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.

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

#359

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

eej71 wrote: post #337

kriops wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (...) 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.

[deleted]

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

#360

Post by nickles » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

ponow wrote: post #340

nickles wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 freel…

> 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?