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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

#811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a “city” thing, it’s a “New Yorker” thing. People in Tokyo routinely leave things unattended in public, including valuable and easily carried things like laptops.

Or that’s a Tokyo thing. I can’t think of a single city in europe where you could leave a laptop unattended and expect to see it again.

I'm not sure that's true. I think people are generally more honest that people assume. It's prudent to assume it will be stolen, but I suspect most of the time, accidentally leaving something somewhere for a short while would be just fine.

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

#812
post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a “city” thing, it’s a “New Yorker” thing. People in Tokyo routinely leave things unattended in public, including valuable and easily carried things like laptops.

Its an american city thing really. The same thing would happen when I live in big cities on the west coast and in smaller cities in the midwest too. In the midwest was where my friend got a window smashed for their micro usb cable that couldn't have been more than $2.

The miswest city I live on sees lots of unlocked bikes outside the gym. I wouldn't do that in some areas, but where I live it seems safe

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

#813

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.

Manhattan is 25% less dense than it was in 1910. The densest census tract in Manhattan is four times denser than borough average. We could easily double the population of the island, even without getting into ultra tall skyscrapers or reclaiming more land.

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

#814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my mind, Manhattan is pretty dense. It can be doing so much better. I get a tad excited reading about 1,000ft supertall's being built, only to sigh when I see it will have a whopping 80 units. I've seen even more ridiculous stuff like a 10 story building with 4 units. There's been a ton of construction in NYC over the last 5 years alone but it seems to be mostly luxury and medium/low density. There are plenty of…

Exactly. Libertarians in here love to say it's a lack of supply and it's simple supply and demand and you look at what's being built and it's 1000ft tall buildings with a tiny number of luxury units.

In the 1990s, the US restricted the number of car imports from Japan. As a result, Toyota and Nissan had car quotas. They had luxury cars and mass-market cars. Which do you think they filled their quota with first? Obviously the higher-margin luxury cars. Clearly the problem is not a simple lack of supply, right? Toyota and Nissan just need to make more affordable cars? Or is it obvious that when you restrict supply in a market, only the highest-margin (luxury) goods get produced, until demand for them is met and manufacturers are forced to produce and sell lower-margin mass-market (more affordable) goods?

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

#815

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 solution is to build more

I wonder, because it is always stated that if only density was increased by building more, housing would become cheap.

But this article is about NYC, the densest city in the US, not being cheap at all.

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

#816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that’s a Tokyo thing. I can’t think of a single city in europe where you could leave a laptop unattended and expect to see it again.

I'm not sure that's true. I think people are generally more honest that people assume. It's prudent to assume it will be stolen, but I suspect most of the time, accidentally leaving something somewhere for a short while would be just fine.

Sure but in how many cities would people be comfortable leaving a laptop unattended? I don’t think many. It’s pretty unrealistic to use that as the bar for NYC

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

#817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> In my mind, Manhattan is pretty dense. It can be doing so much better. I get a tad excited reading about 1,000ft supertall's being built, only to sigh when I see it will have a whopping 80 units. I've seen even more ridiculous stuff like a 10 story building with 4 units. There's been a ton of construction in NYC over the last 5 years alone but it seems to be mostly luxury and medium/low density. There are plenty of…

More than 40% of the building square footage in Manhattan would be literally illegal to build today.[1] Developers would absolutely love to build huge skyscrapers housing thousands. However the city has zoning rules with onerous setbacks, height and density restrictions. The focus on ultra luxury development is a byproduct of heavy handed government regulation.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

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

#818

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…

I think, fundamentally, the problem is that there is a highly speculative market (real-estate) attached to a basic needs market (housing). I think of myself as right-of-center, but think George was more or less spot on w.r.t. land. I wonder if there is a solution in banning rent itself? i.e. force owners to transfer a % of ownership equal to rental fees received from tenants and allow them to discount improvements ag…

Whether housing is rented or owned has no relation to its price. Making it illegal to speculate/profit from housing doesn't solve the underlying issue that is a massive (xx,000,000) unit shortage of housing in the United States.

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

#819
post #520
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it works in Tokyo, a city of almost double the population?

I'm not sure why you think Tokyo works, it wasn't long ago that it was multiple times the price of NYC. It might be affordable now but only because of a economic slump and Japan's falling population.

Tokyo's population grew, actually.

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

#820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative for many is worse - many roommates, incredibly long commute, or homelessness. Remember that Googler who lived in his car? ( https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-tru... )

The alternative is to literally just let developers build new properties. That's all you have to do. Upzone. Stop with the rent control. Stop with the mandatory parking minimums. Stop with the NIMBY bullshit.

This alternative being "kick people to the curb"

Its hard to build over top of places that are already being lived in, and once you kick those people out, you have even more people that need a new place to live

That said, if you're going to kick poor people out of their homes for the sake of rich moving in, why not just have the rich people live in those homes and call it a day?

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