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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

#531

Post by spaniard89277 »

bleuchase wrote: post #185
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 and land is a non-transable good, and therefore there should be heavy state intervention on it That's a bold claim. What led you to believe that's the case? And what is a "non-transable good"?

Hmm, im on mobile now but I believe it's called non-tradeable goods in english.

Basically you cant move supply around.

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

#532

Post by EricDeb »

ineptech wrote: post #451
dionidium wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seven buildings. That's not representative of...anything. It's not even worth talking about. And the effects are largely positive for the city, anyway. You've got a few big, empty buildings concentrated on one street where billionaires park their money, pay a bunch of property taxes, and use zero city services. That's an unqualified win .

No idea why you're being downvoted. This meme (rich people buying luxury condos, letting them sit vacant, and then profiting somehow) doesn't make any sense, and that article posted as evidence for it undermines it by depicting those units as being un-rentable due to oversupply in the market.

it makes total sense you park your money in an asset that will increase in value over time. you don't need to actively use it.

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

#533

Post by kristjansson »

simonsarris wrote: post #436
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…

> 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…

100x is shocking, so I explored a bit. Over 2010-2020 Amherst PD reported ~5 violent crimes per year[1], in a town of ~10000, or about 50 per 100000. NYPD reported ~49k per year over the same period[ibid], on about 8.3m residents, or about about 590 per 100000. So about 11x difference in per-capita reported-to-local-PD crime.

I'll admit I'm surprised it's still an order of magnitude, I share GP's sensibility that the cities are generally much safer than perceived

[1] https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...

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

#534

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

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 just need to gentrify Newark. The PATH is faster than the subway from Brooklyn/Queens.

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

#535

Post by rr888 »

jahnu wrote: post #192
namdnay wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s more due to the relative attractiveness of the cities. London, NYC, Paris etc have become extremely expensive because they’re world cities, attracting huge amounts of people and jobs. That’s not really the case for Vienna, or Glasgow, or Riga etc

In fact Vienna has had a huge population growth in the past 20 years

Fewer people than 100 years ago, compare that to Bay Area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna#Demographics

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

#536

Post by kriops »

rcpt wrote: post #471
eej71 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't produce more land. Best we can do is tax people for hoarding it

Best we can do is certainly not increase the cost of land, and thus increase the required price of rent/housing to break even.

Less regulatory obstacles to increase supply, i.e. build housing, is the correct answer.

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

#537

Post by m0llusk »

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.

That is not directly related. People and institutions holding residential units for investment purposes usually rent them out.

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

#538

Post by EricDeb »

kriops wrote: post #297
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…

> (...) 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…

but what if they just build more 1000ft tall buildings with only 40 uber-luxury units? how does that help?

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

#539

Post by kortilla »

dangus wrote: post #493
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…

Before I start with my comment, I'll remind everyone that averages skew very high when there are outliers. NYC has a high quantity of extremely high rent tenants. I wish more news articles used medians and median per capita when discussing rents. The main point I want to make: even with those high rents, we tend to forget how much our cars cost us, directly and indirectly. Directly: AAA's average new car TCO is close…

> AAA's average new car TCO is close to $10,000 a year. Multiply by two for a typical couple and that's $1600 a month you could dump into your NYC apartment's high rent.

First, you can get by just fine without a new car. My car was $26k new - 18 years ago. I’ve put another $10k over the years in maintenance (tires, oil, repairs). Insurance is $500/year. Gas is maybe $2k/year at $4/gal. Not even close to $10k/year.

That caveat you apply to averages for rent also applies to cars. Some people are obsessed with having a new car. That’s not the price of having a reliable car.

Second, if you’re a couple, you don’t need two cars. That’s another luxury that many people get by without.

Finally, the car takes me out of town monthly into the mountains. So you would need to factor in car rentals for leaving NYC in your equation if you wanted a fair comparison of what people actually get out of their cars.

> NYC's obesity rate is half of the national rate. HALF! That's downright incredible.

Cause or effect? A lot of people with mobility issues end up obese and having mobility issues is a fucking nightmare in NYC. You just forced the unhealthy people out of the city by design.

> As a bonus, old people in NYC never had to drive so they never have a retired life feeling isolated to their home.

+1. It’s a great place to live… if you don’t have health issues that make mobility a problem.

“Living on the top of Mt. Everest is so healthy! Look at all of the healthy people up here!”

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

#540

Post by lotsofpulp »

usrn wrote: post #457
hmillison wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The metro in DC is pretty underrated and you can live car free pretty far out into its suburbs even.

The problem with almost all public transit is that it converges on a center and branches out into legs that do not connect with each other.

This is the DC map:

https://www.wmata.com/schedules/maps/upload/2019-System-Map....

If two friends move to the outer edges of different legs of the system, then your travel time and inconvenience multiplies a lot.

It is the same reason Manhattan is so popular compared to the outer boroughs:

https://new.mta.info/map/5256

People in manhattan can go west, south, east, north anytime anyhow with few or no connections. People in the outer boroughs have to many times go via Manhattan to get where they are going.

Now take a look at a map of a good subway system:

https://www.tokyometro.jp/en/subwaymap/

Paris is another good one:

https://www.ratp.fr/en/plan-metro

You can get from anywhere to almost anywhere without having to go to the middle of Tokyo.

The Tube is okay, but still has the problem of the lines not connecting once you get out of a certain radius:

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/standard-tube-map.pdf

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