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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

#411

Post by hmillison »

_fat_santa wrote: post #383
ianbutler wrote: post #273

I went to view an apartment in Prospect Park SW recently and the line wrapped around the block. When I went to apply I was told most people had offered over the asking for rent and how much I'd like to offer over the amount. We're blind bidding on rent in NY now. I wish this was an isolated incident but most apartments I'm looking for the amount of people applying is in the 50s low 100s I decided to just stay put and…

Whenever I hear about the rental market in NYC I always ask myself: why do people want to live there? In a way it's a rhetorical question but in another way it's not. Sure some will move there for a job but I'm sure not everyone is there just for work. Why do people put up with all that? Is it just the dream of living in NYC.

NYC is one of the only cities in the US with quality transit and really the main one where it's easy to live car free in many areas of the city.

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

#412

Post by JustSomeNobody »

TameAntelope wrote: post #352
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 o…

That's an ... interesting take.

Another is these people are stuck. It takes money to pack up and leave. If the everything is costing more and more and more, their ability to save and leave goes down and down and down. Eventually they'll be forced to leave (somehow); the haves will see to it.

> "I suffer therefore I'm noble."

That's cruel.

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

#413

Post by kriops »

daenz wrote: post #378
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…

Isn't the heavy state intervention already here in the form of zoning?

Those are not even the only regulations, but you are absolutely right. Hence the prices.

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

#414

Post by hmillison »

bobbylcraig wrote: post #348
knowledge-clay wrote: post #299

Earlier 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.

a lot of people living those lifestyles are living off of credit cards or their trust fund

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

#415

Post by kaesar14 »

treeman79 wrote: post #173
runnerup wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a HUGE believer in reducing barriers to competition. I agree that high prices should lead to entrepreneurial increase of supply. However, I think it's massively, massively important to realize the successes of some planned economies. I'm not trying to use empty rhetoric in the following paragraph, I'm trying to identify the "free market"-iness of many of the most impactful "ways of elevating humans" in the past 5…

The free market did not create the highway system, but the enormous wealth created by the free market payed for it.

That was a free market where the US was the last industrial power producing goods to be consumed by a completely destroyed world. If those are the circumstances you can provide as evidence the free market works as intended you may need something else

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

#416

Post by charliea0 »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #202
nickles wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 This is great policy if you want to make housing unaffordable. When supply is less than demand, prices go up. Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices). Capping prices prevents the price mechani…

>When supply is less than demand, prices go up Question though... why, exactly does that have to be the case? Especially with something like housing where say there is mostly a fixed supply at any point and you can't just turn a machine on/off to produce more. The only reason the prices go up is because of greed basically- because people say "hey I can just charge more and people will pay more!". And there in lies th…

Well demand rising is an abstraction for relative balance between buyers and sellers of a good.

Say there’s one free apartment in NYC and two marginal buyers submit bids: Alice and Bob. If Alice offers $1000/month and Bob offers $1200/month, then Bob gets the lease. The marginal rent is $1200.

If another apartment is built then Alice leases it and the marginal rent is $1000. Similarly, if a new buyer Charlie enters the market and bids $1500 then $1500 is the marginal rent.

The number of people with apartments depends only on the number of apartments built. Which buyers get apartments depends on their relative ability to pay. The price depends on what the marginal apartment-buyer will pay. That is the lowest amount offered that still gets an apartment.

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

#417

Post by bombcar »

afavour wrote: post #140
danaris wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the costs of goods and services need to go up? Or do the places paying low wages now just need to accept a smaller profit margin or lower executive pay? It's unquestionably true that there are some places that pay low wages that cannot afford to pay better wages without increasing prices; however, we seem to have collectively decided that that's the only way wages can increase. But that ignores the fact that corpo…

Ehhhh. I don't disagree for a second that, say, Starbucks could take a hit, reduce profits and still be able to operate successfully in New York. But I'd argue a lot of what makes New York the city it is is things like small independent restaurants that already operate on very thin margins. They also have no fat cat executives pocketing the spoils. So, perhaps, yes, the city could survive without increasing wages but…

I’m surprised that Walmart et al haven’t started pushing for higher wages to kill competition- they must not care much about the smaller competitors.

McDonalds and Starbucks eat a wage increase in stride, small restaurants and businesses just go under.

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

#418

Post by TheDudeMan »

ctvo wrote: post #390

The problem for me, as a long time NYC resident, is that there's no other place in America I want to live even with work from home as a possibility. I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we generally get along…

The city is safer?

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

#419

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> The only sustainable way to get affordable housing is when the market price is affordable.

And the only way to reduce the market price to affordable rates is to crack down on the demand - there is no reasonable way to expand the offer side in many cities any more since they don't have the space. And most demand is driven by the fact that rural areas have been left in a decrepit state for decades: highways, bridges and other infrastructure is crumbling, there is no public transport worth the name, forget about fast internet (or fast internet offered by a crap monopolist), employers have closed down or moved to urban areas, schools and medical services are constantly closing or underfunded...

To fix the urban rent explosion problem, we need to fix rural areas and make them livable again.

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

#420

Post by throwk8s »

ctvo wrote: post #390

The problem for me, as a long time NYC resident, is that there's no other place in America I want to live even with work from home as a possibility. I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we generally get along…

People that want to be conspicuous have to display their success where it's going to be seen. Living in a place that is "central" in so many ways is a competition to see who can hang in there. The only way to stay is to keep winning bigger.
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