Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

861–870 of 1001 posts

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

#861

Post by randomhodler84 »

dionidium wrote: post #264
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…

> 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…

Maybe they realize that being a landlord is an economically and societally destructive measure that saps productive capital from working and middle class. It’s vampiric. And awful.

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

#862

Post by deet »

woodruffw wrote: post #787
artemisyna wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This might have been true 25 years ago, but all of South and East Harlem has been experiencing steady gentrification for the last decade. Most of that is coming from young families, from my experience living in South Harlem. (There are lots of attractions to the neighborhood: old buildings, pretty side streets, good food, convenient access to museums, and one of the most reliable subway lines in the system.)

Former Harlem resident chiming in here as an additional, concurring datapoint.

I didn't fit the traditional Harlem demographic (ex-FAANG employee, startup founder, etc) but found the neighborhood to have solid access to the rest of Manhattan, an increasing number of amenities, proximity to Central Park, and an overall appealing character compared to the increasingly sterile areas of Manhattan

If/when I move back to NYC I would certainly consider living in Harlem again.

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

#863

Post by thehappypm »

ghaff wrote: post #758
boringg wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The amount of top colleges in the Boston area is astounding. A school like Tufts (ranked #28 by US news) would be the crown jewel of almost every city in America, but it’s totally overshadowed in Boston.

Especially if you include Massachusetts as a whole it’s absurd:

MIT

Harvard

Tufts

Williams

Amherst

Brandeis

UMass Amherst

Boston University

Boston College

Northeastern

Wellesley

Olin

Babson

Smith

WPI

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

#864

Post by pgodzin »

m_ke wrote: post #286
runeks wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe that?

Because I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and saw what all of the new development did to the demand. The street that my grandmother used to rent an apartment for in the early 2000s for under $1k/month now only has units that go for $5K/month. Here's greenpoint as an example: https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/new-york-ny/greenpoint . Same goes for LIC.

Maybe because Greenpoint and LIC became a lot more in-demand in those 20 years and development followed the demand?

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

#865

Post by dcow »

nradov wrote: post #833
dcow wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to provide a 3rd party reaction here: it sounds like you've circularly reasoned yourself into a trap of your own making. You don't want to live anywhere else because you like NYC . Because no other city is exactly like NYC, you aren't interested in living anywhere else. The reason it's "circular" is because there are cities with good transit, good arts, great food, have a tech scene, and even have financial dist…

That seems like a silly criteria. How many people really care about doing things at 3:00 AM? We're talking about a small niche of shift workers and childless young people. Las Vegas operates 24 hours a day if that's what you want.

Have you lived in or visited a world city? The feel and vibe is very different. It's why New York is called the city that never sleeps. When you get dense enough, there's always something to do and people out wanting to do it or at least wanting to serve it to you.

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

#866

Post by nickles »

Baloo wrote: post #856
nickles wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in the UK our housing is in major crisis because people simply cannot afford the insane price increases. Pretty much everyone I know shares their living situation, on their own they would not be able to afford basic amenities. The housing in UK is in crisis because there have not been enough homes built. My rent has gone up too, but it's not because my landlord is greedy. The cost of maintaining the building h…

>The housing in UK is in crisis because there have not been enough homes built. >So is it a problem that they aren't building more or not? If we agree that more housing needs to be built, then the proper incentives must be in place. And a proper incentive may actually be as simple as eliminating a disincentive (e.g. 4 years of environmental review prior to the project's approval). And this is a part of why it should…

> And this is a part of why it should be administered by governments and not just let loose to market forces... There's no real financial incentive to build 100,000 houses in the middle of nowhere

That's exactly what the Chinese government did, only at a larger scale. It hasn't worked out well.

> They actually suggested recently to offer multi-generational mortgages... That's how crazy the market is getting.

I saw that, it's absolutely wild.

> Those are risks your landlord should have insurance for. In a world where property isn't such a commodity, those risks don't really have the same meaning or value.

There are risks that can't be insured against. Suppose my employer relocates to another region, and I have the choice of following or finding a new job. If I own a house, I now have to sell it (incurring a 3-6% transaction cost and lots of headache). I can only sell it if there's a willing buyer, and there's no guarantee there will be any.

My rent is covering the building's mortgage, taxes, and maintenance, which I would be paying if I owned the property. It may be marginally higher than the cost of ownership, but I have a strong preference for flexibility. That flexibility is worth the liquidity premium to me.

> What happens to people that are 'undesirable' to landlords

In the US, there’s legislation that prohibits discrimination across a variety of protected classes (race, religion, sex, etc.) Does the UK have similar legislation? Putting aside ethics for a moment — discrimination is inefficient. It’s in everyone’s best interest to eliminate such behavior, whether through market forces or legislation.

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

#867

Post by m_ke »

pgodzin wrote: post #864
m_ke wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and saw what all of the new development did to the demand. The street that my grandmother used to rent an apartment for in the early 2000s for under $1k/month now only has units that go for $5K/month. Here's greenpoint as an example: https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/new-york-ny/greenpoint . Same goes for LIC.

Maybe because Greenpoint and LIC became a lot more in-demand in those 20 years and development followed the demand?

You have that backwards. Bloomberg rezoned the queens and brooklyn waterfront for his real estate investor buddies, which gentrified the shit out of these neighborhoods and brought in a ton of people that would have never dared to cross the east river.

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

#869

Post by hailwren »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #818
hailwren wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely it has a relation to its price. A domicile's value in any setting is determined by it's speculative value + a discounted income model. This model wildly decreases the discounted income value without addressing the speculative value.

As far as I'm aware there are more housing units than people in the US. We do have an incentive structure that puts property owners' needs at odds w/ society's needs on multiple factors, and some of them (i.e. NIMBYism) can be addressed orthogonally to the intractability of housing as investment vs housing as housing.

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

#870

Post by GauntletWizard »

dcow wrote: post #865
nradov wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a silly criteria. How many people really care about doing things at 3:00 AM? We're talking about a small niche of shift workers and childless young people. Las Vegas operates 24 hours a day if that's what you want.

Have you lived in or visited a world city? The feel and vibe is very different. It's why New York is called the city that never sleeps. When you get dense enough, there's always something to do and people out wanting to do it or at least wanting to serve it to you.

What else do you qualify as a world city? London is dead at 2AM except in a few specific areas, the tube shuts down. Paris as well.

I think what you mean by "World City" is actually just "Party Zone".

Post reply on HN