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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

#481

Post by jandrese »

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…

You are clearly not alone. Skyrocketing rents are a symptom of more people wanting a place to live than there are available spaces. It's not like NYC is bereft of skyscrapers either.

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

#482

Post by slaw »

SilasX wrote: post #470
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while it should be 2% points over inflation Do you really think we solved central banking in 1992 [1], and if only you were one of the central bank chiefs we would be fine? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_rule

I don’t follow. The link supports the claim that interest rates should be above inflation when the latter is above target.

I understood it as rhetorical question.

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

#483

Post by thfuran »

ch4s3 wrote: post #442
m0llusk wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cannot speak for the poster, but the big current issue is that the value of residential units has gone from being strongly linked to wages to residences being an extremely valuable chip for playing financial games. Residences, especially inherently valuable ones like NYC apartments, have sufficient demand from financial game players that wage earners are barely able to keep up. Exactly how things break down is not cl…

This is a well studied idea, the percentage of units sitting empty is a round error in the total supply of housing. At the start of the pandemic there were a paltry 4000 vacant condos. For reference there are 2.3 million apartments in the city.

But how many vacant apartments were there (or how many total condos)?

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

#484

Post by tmnvix »

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, which are fueling inflation

Rate hikes appear to be doing the opposite to rents here in NZ

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

#485

Post by nickles »

ehnto wrote: post #448
nickles wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No amount of building will help if the value of the property is not intrinsically linked to the supply and demand Building new houses is intrinsically linked to supply. When you build a house, that increases the supply of housing. NIMBYs oppose new construction precisely to prevent the value of their properties from decreasing.

Sorry, of course that's correct. I was trying to articulate that the supply and demand, as a whole, is not currently a marketplace for people with housing to sell to those who want to be housed (in many places). It's a marketplace dominated by investors and landlords, and people who want to be housed are having to stretch their funds as far as they possibly can to keep up with the market currently being made by inves…

> people who want to be housed are having to stretch their funds as far as they possibly can to keep up with the market currently being made by investors and landlords.

I'm sympathetic to the difficulties people are facing right now, and I've seen the stories about housing being purchased by investors. The issue is that the data doesn't seem to indicate a structural change in ownership [0]. Home ownership appears to have peaked at 69.4% in 2004 and now sits at 65.4%, the same level as in 1980.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S

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

#486

Post by throwaway23234 »

rayiner wrote: post #362

I wonder how much of contemporary Democratic politics is driven by insane rents in NYC and SF. The party has seen an influx of core Reagan voters—everyone from Wall Street bankers to Silicon Valley engineers (Reagan won Santa Clara County by 17 points in 1984). These affluent, highly educated folks have adopted the narratives and politics of the working class, juxtaposed against a ever-more-narrowly-defined “elite.”…

It's a really really weird space that didn't really exist in 1984. I would say that today's "engineers" below the 80% salary threshold for this space are today's "construction workers" and heavily democratic voters (There are also of course "construction workers" too, of course).

Maybe about 5 years ago I would have said that people making 200k are wealthy. Today I would say that they are a lot of people that have been duped into a lifestyle where they "think" they are wealthy but are not. They spend MOST of their salary on non-essential and non-asset building things. So in a sense they are people that should be rich, but are not. Instead they don't own property (renters) buy lattes, restaurant food (for every meal) and the rest of that income is just going to payments - the tesla, rv/campers/boats, storage facilities for the stuff that doesn't fit in the apartment.

Those people certainly could become winners of the economic system if they stopped paying everyone else - but they identify with wealthy people making 400k but have absolutely no appreciating assets (ok except for their self driving module that Elon duped them into - which it turns out isn't actually "sellable" to the next owner anyway!).

I don't think these people identify with working class - instead they are pushing a narrative for themselves as poor to feel less guilty about that large salary and how poorly it's being pissed away.

That's the closest I can "explain" that from my personal perspective at least.

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

#487

Post by rcpt »

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…

It can go a lot further before people revolt. We don't yet have Calcutta style slums or impoverished favelas like San Paulo.

Or course it'd be great if we weren't heading that direction but try convincing voting demographics that property values should be lower.

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

#488

Post by blabberwocky »

greggsy wrote: post #427
weeksie wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner and I have been agonizing over this exact dilemma. We have an income number and an expenses number and when those cross a certain point, we've gotta go somewhere else. So there's a very good chance that we'll immigrate somewhere in a few years. But yeah, try as we might, we couldn't come up with another US city that either of us would want to live in.

To me, only other places that compare to NYC are Singapore and Sydney. Great food in Singapore, great weather (usually) in Sydney. The people can be a bit busy in Singapore though. Certainly no NYC, but they ticked all my recreation, arts, food, people and transport boxes. Unfortunately, they’re all so goddamn expensive to live in.

Having lived in both New York and Singapore, I can’t say I’d recommend Singapore to anyone who loves NY for the aspects you mention (but there are other reasons to love SG!). I think the scale of opportunities for recreation, arts, and really just a diversity of experience is vastly different. In APAC, I’d suggest Hong Kong (where I’ve also lived) instead, though that is even more like London than NY.

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

#489

Post by simonsarris »

orange_joe wrote: post #475
simonsarris wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. Coming from New Hampshire: this is just fantastically untrue. NYC is about one hundred times more violent than where I live. It is so thoroughly not the same that I can usually tell when people come from cities simply based on how nervous they are. I think most people don't realize how badly it affects them, or how violent cities are versus "the rest…

NYC is generally safer than the rest of America. NH is typically the safest region in the entire country. But the truth is that there are high numbers of relatively rural areas that are substantially more dangerous than NYC. Also, I think that crimes/mile is fairly un-instructive because of how much the legal boundaries of a city shift/as well as the amount that a person will travel in a given location (I live in NYC…

> NYC is generally safer than the rest of America.

I don't think that's true: NYC is at 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000, and the national median sits at 4.0. That's 45% more violent than the median. That's not small! I feel like some PR firm must have implanted this idea in everyone's minds that NYC is somehow magically safer, but it's not showing up in the stats, and if the stats are skewed by reporting its almost certainly worse, not better.

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

#490

Post by tmaly »

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…

Train from White Plains is only like 30 min, but yeah it is a much different vibe.
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