This is average apartment rent. In the mid-2000s, that was our rent for a five bedroom house in Sugar Hill.
Funny seeing this! In 2010 I lived with a group in a five bedroom house in Sugar Hill on St Nicholas Pl for about $6000
Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
371–380 of 1001 posts
Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
#372Earlier 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?
Good for St. Louis, bad for NYC.
Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree. It is one of the perfect resources to extort people with. Unlike food the price of houses rarely drop to zero, and often go up. Like food, it is very essential to people. What you propose is a very socialist solution. I've read somewhere that in the USSR paying more than 4% of your income to housing was considered criminal (as they calculated that's what housing would cost using cost-based-pricing).
> I've read somewhere that in the USSR paying more than 4% of your income to housing was considered criminal Fortunately that was the only criminal activity in the shining beacon of freedom and prosperity that was the USSR.
If we're going to dismiss every quality and strategy of a country because of its moral crimes then everything about the US is worthless through the same path.
I don't think this is a useful way to approach any of these problems, and I'm sure neither do you, so why try to score cheap points this way.
Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
#374This is a price signal. Anyone who's calling for intervention needs to wake up. The proper response is for people to leave . If you drive across America, you'll find economically, depressed areas which have suffered from brain drain. Many aspire to attend an out of state college, go work in the Valley, join some VC-funded startup, megacorp, consulting firm, and strike it rich. In all likelihood, you will (1) not stri…
Maybe, but you are also advocating for climate arson. Every person who leaves NYC for any other American city other than Berkeley is raising their carbon footprint, dramatically in the case of most cities. So that isn't great. The other perspective that you need to consider is there are huge populations who simply will not consider living in the cities you mentioned. Women, for example, do not want to move to Ohio. H…
> People who are not white can rule out a happy existence in 90% of American cities
Why in the world would that be the case?
Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The top 5% in NYC is still close to a half-million people.
Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no NIMBY but places like NYC will never be able to build enough to outpace demand.
And yet it works in Tokyo, a city of almost double the population?
Greater Tokyo Area? Tokyo Metropolis? Previous Tokyo City limits? New York City metro area? New York City? Manhattan? These can be 2 orders of magnitude apart in scale but they've all been talked about like it was the same location A and location B.
At the small scale Tokyo's densest ward is ~22,700/km^2 and Manhattan is ~28,800/km^2 with Manhattan being ~4x-5x the land area of the former (i.e. the core is a lot more dense). At the large scale the Greater Tokyo Area is ~2,900/km^2 and the New York Metropolitan Area is ~2,053/km^2 (i.e. the urban area around Tokyo is a lot more dense).
"Tokyo" is a good example that you can get affordable housing by focusing on how to spread the population over a large urban area but it's not a good example building more housing downtown is a scalable approach.
Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
#377Earlier 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.
If they could get it online, they wouldn't be bothering to pay the premium to live in Manhattan.
Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
#378Housing 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…
Isn't the heavy state intervention already here in the form of zoning?
Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Have you checked the recent rent surges? I'm not sure if it's the summer, but any hotel room in the loop is $300+ per night. Airbnb is just a scam there.
Re: Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, but you are also advocating for climate arson. Every person who leaves NYC for any other American city other than Berkeley is raising their carbon footprint, dramatically in the case of most cities. So that isn't great. The other perspective that you need to consider is there are huge populations who simply will not consider living in the cities you mentioned. Women, for example, do not want to move to Ohio. H…
> People who are not white can rule out a happy existence in 90% of American cities Why in the world would that be the case?
Because America is built on, and much of it (and not only the historically obvious bits) is still drowning in, racism.