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)?
The vacancy rate of apartments is just at or under 4.5% which is considered a very tight rental market. I don't have the total condo numbers readily at hand.
Free market advocates always find the next culprit why the market can't deliver. I can only speak of Berlin where land prices and construction prices have increased by demand so much, that new construction is coming in at 4x than 10 years ago (from 2k per sqm to 8k). I don't see how the market is really solving anything here.
> 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…
> the Nobel Prize
Another product of the free market, if you will ;-)
> and property owners provide almost no value, but to provide access to housing for people who has no capital for it, which is service that could be perfectly provided by a state entity. Property of course requires maintenance and management, so the sleight of hand here is to define away all those aspects of ownership so that by definition all that's meant by "landlord" is "old guy who cashes checks." But somebody ha…
I've repeatedly been told by people who've done it (including my parents) never to become a landlord, because it's absolute hell and you'll end up making under minimum wage and tenants will fuck you over until you're even in the red and it's impossible & expensive to evict anyone even when they're not paying and causing more and more damage to the house with each passing day. Then again, I've had others tell me it's…
Yes, because one thing a landlord does is assume the risk of bad tenants and high-turnover. Good, stable, long-term tenants hate this -- "Why am I paying so much for rent, when my landlord doesn't seem to do anything?" -- but as long as you're a renter you're going to pay for this risk one way or another. And it's not at all clear that you can socialize this risk and still end up with units anybody in their right mind wants to live in. Yes, I know about Vienna. This ain't Vienna. There's very little evidence the U.S. is capable of doing it. Public housing here is inevitably a race to the bottom.
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.
Then they're on the rental market and don't contribute to a shortage in supply.
> 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…
Safety in crowds, this is a big generalization. As someone who just moved in from Chicago, I feel exponentially safer in NYC.
Totally. I said this in another comment too. Being around so many other people does have a sense of safety to it. Especially late at night.
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 be…
Using lattes as an example of burning money in your pocket is just laughable and really shows how much you understand how the local economics of the bay area. I don't think there are many owners of RV/campers/Boat owners who live in SF but spot on reference. Throw on hatred of Tesla et voila:
Ok Mr. Old Republican Avocado Toast hating throwaway troll account - wish you the best of luck in your distorted world. Your worldview is a sad deeply inaccurate take and I hope you realize that before its too late.
I decided about four years ago that it just doesn’t make sense to live in NYC if you’re not making $200k/year consistently. Also, I was surprised at how many people without an original thought in their head earn $200k/year in NYC —- the city rewards a sort of dull ambition. Do you want to hang out with people who are intelligent and ambitious yet somehow fail to be interesting? If so, then NYC is for you!
Hey now, we can't all be entrepreneurs working on the cutting edge stuff. Lots and lots of boring work needs to be done, and that's why you pay bankers, lawyers, consultants, etc. hefty sums.
You don't need to be original to do that kind of work, but it still needs to be done.
I had similar thoughts. I live on the west coast and feel so safe that I don't even lock the front door to my house, ever. I wonder if OP feels safe enough to always have their front door unlocked.
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>for the same reason they don’t wear seatbelts and drive drunk everywhere. They just don’t care.
This doesn't match my experience living in a rural area. Most of the people I knew either avoided drinking (your WASP) or drank with their neighbors (your redneck.)
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 .
NYC has super low property tax. It's a win for no one
If I were faced with a situation where the taxes were sub-optimally low, then I would simply raise the taxes, instead of trying to remake the entire concept of private property.
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.
> If we're going to dismiss every quality and strategy of a country because of its moral crimes My primary intention wasn't to refer directly to the morality of the USSR. Economically speaking, the USSR was a disaster, so I'm skeptical that we should implement the policies that quite literally destroyed a nation. But yes, the USSR was a murderous state led by men who were happy to kill tens of millions of people for…
There’s a difference between being skeptical and being dismissive. You can be skeptical, but evaluate an idea by its merit Maybe it’s something that could be a good idea under the US economic conditions, maybe not.