Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time • Hacker News Board

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

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Post by artemisyna » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

lr1970 wrote: post #659

derekdahmer wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYC crime rate varies wildly by neighborhood so I don't think its very useful to compare city-wide crime stats. For example, the felony assault rate is literally 10x higher in parts of the Bronx than on the UES. If you live and work in safer neighborhoods the city will appear to be very safe to you. In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from (edit: downtown) Manhattan and you'd really have to go out…

> In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from Manhattan East Harlem (part of Manhattan) is as dangerous as the Bronx and is very different from the Chelsea where you live. Manhattan is not a uniformly safe place. Also, NYC subway is filthy, disgusting and sometimes plain dangerous. Car traffic is worse than before COVID. There seem to be more cars on the streets, for people are avoiding subway and are usi…

None (or at least few) of the folks you’re gonna see on HN are going to be in the income bracket where they’re going to be living in East Harlem. It’s about half an hour from the places where things happen, at least, and might as well be an outer borough for most intents and purposes, given transit times, even if it’s technically within the stated geographical limits of Manhattan.

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

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Post by AlwaysRock » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #148

v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #110

Earlier 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.

My wife and I watched Chris Rock from the front row at the Comedy Cellar last summer. Total cost was like $75 with drinks. Absolutely incredible. I could watch every incredible stand up special available online and it wouldnt be anywhere close to that in person experience.

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

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Post by AlwaysRock » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:02 PM UTC

IceHegel wrote: post #528

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #19

I thought the median had to be significantly lower with those ultra luxurious rentals distorting the average, but I was wrong. The median is $4000 as of a few months ago: https://www.elliman.com/corporate-resources/market-reports

This is the per apartment rate, so anyone with roommates is paying a fraction of the listed rent.

Ah. The age old solution. Having 4 roommates in a two bedroom.

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

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Post by dml2135 » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:04 PM UTC

oogali wrote: post #115

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…

Half hour? That's been debatable for some time now. As an example, it takes 20-30 minutes to commute from the Upper East Side to Midtown West, barring any subway issues. There are very few grocery store clerk, delivery drivers, and coffee baristas who live in UES. They've already been pushed out to the edges of Manhattan and other boroughs. The 20-30 minute commutes have been snapped up by younger people who have bee…

The waitlist for NYCHA apartments in incredibly long, or units set aside for low-income tenants in new developments. But regular rent stabilized apartments don't have wait lists, those just go on the market to get scooped up like any other place.

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

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Post by runamok » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:05 PM UTC

suchow wrote: post #275

j0hnyl wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they can. The thing is the corporate landlords would rather have their high rises sit empty than rent the units at reasonable rates.

Do you know what would motivate this behavior? Naively, any rent is more than zero rent, so why let a unit sit empty?

On mobile so don't have a ready link. Iirc a lot of commercial real estate can get into a death spiral if the loan they have which is based on a certain amount of income starts having less income. If I can find the explanation I will add it later.

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

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Post by OliverGilan » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:05 PM UTC

patrickthebold wrote: post #234

huevosabio wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 article is about Manhattan. Do you have any idea if it has similar problems? In my mind, Manhattan is pretty dense.

I live in East Village right on the border with the LES. There's certainly development happening and new buildings coming up but when I walk around EV/LES it sometimes feels like I see more 2-3 story buildings than otherwise. There's literally no reason any of these buildings should be under 6 stories minimum. People think of Manhattan as being dense with a bunch of skyscrapers but I suspect in reality there's still a whole lot of units that could be added by simply building upwards.

I say 6 stories because you can reasonably have a 6-story walkup. Anything higher and you would need to add an elevator which could make things harder.

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

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Post by timr » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:05 PM UTC

coryrc wrote: post #308

Zxian wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New York City already has a significantly higher population density than Tokyo (~11,300/km2 vs ~6,300/km). It's easier to develop more housing when you have more land.

You need to include Newark, Yonkers, Long Island, etc if you want to compare those figures. Tokyo is 13400 sq km, NYC is 780 sq km. If I rounded Tokyo's land area to the same sig figs as I did for NYC, it would be lowered by half the total area that NYC takes up!

> You need to include Newark, Yonkers, Long Island, etc if you want to compare those figures.

That's just not an accurate comparison.

Live in NYC. Lived in Japan. The difference is transit. It is far easier to get to Saitama or Kawasaki or Yokohama or Chiba than it is to get to Long Island from NYC. You can do the former in an hour at rush hour. Try getting to downtown Manhattan from Bay Shore as a daily commute. You'll go mad.

Here's Tokyo and New York at the same zoom level:

Tokyo: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.736739,139.6246444,10z

NYC: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7983574,-73.948053,10z

The gray area of Tokyo on that map is pretty much all considered an exurb of Tokyo, more-or-less feasible for daily commute by rail. Most of the NYC region is inaccessible from Manhattan, except by car. Look at the Seibu Shinjuku line, or the Chuo line on the Tokyo map -- both offer express trains that will take you from the distant western exurbs, right into the middle of downtown Tokyo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seibu_Shinjuku_Line

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Line_(Rapid)

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

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Post by ghaff » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #709

ghaff wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT is part of it but Massachusetts is also home to a large number of other research universities including BU, Northeastern, Harvard, the UMass system, etc. As you say, NYC (like Silicon Valley) has always been more concentrated in terms of technology focus.

I'd agree with this. Boston area has a lot of high quality post secondary educations that feed business and talent. I would argue bay area has some of the same dynamics (Stanford, UCB & UCSF amongst others). Silicon Valley has a high degree of tech but also a fair bit of climate tech which shouldn't be discounted.

Yeah, the Bay Area is probably the one other place in the US that has comparable higher-ed quantity and quality to the Boston area/Massachusetts. Other good institutions are scattered around of course but they're more diffuse.

I think that there's a tendency on the part of a lot of people to view "tech" through the lens of web-related tech but obviously there's a lot more interesting/important work going on than just that--whether in the Boston area, Silicon Valley, or somewhere else.

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

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Post by colinmhayes » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:08 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #647

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…

What % of available living space is not lived in, and further what % is owned by foreign nationals. I know that in MANY countries, one is precluded from owning any property if not a citizen. Obviously this leads to a bunch of corruption issues with bribing and marrying nationals for access to property, but the USA has literally zero control on property ownership. You know how much foreign money laundering is done thr…

My quick google says 4% of apartments are vacant in nyc. Got to believe the vast majority of that is structural vacancy while landlords clean units and look for new tenants. feels like a none issue to me.

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

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Post by efficax » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:09 PM UTC

mushufasa wrote: post #450

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…

Having grown up in DC and New York, I would say more strongly that there's no other city in the USA that has comparable mass transit. The way I would put it is -- in New York, it is more of a hassle to have a car than to go without. In all those other cities, while there is some mass transit, you will find yourself wanting a car.

eh, having lived in both chicago and nyc, chicago's transit system is pretty much on par with nyc to me. MTA is all built around going to and from manhattan and it can be a struggle if you have to do something else, like going from parts of queens to brooklyn. Chicago's hyperrational grid and busses make up pretty well for the gaps in the L. now the cabs in new york, nothing beats them (although these days more and more cabbies don't seem to actually know the city very well)