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A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100 In NYC? broker's fee is $15K

gothamist.com

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Re: A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100 In NYC? broker's fee is $15K

#151

Rent control fundamentally cannot work, which is why it never works. Malicious noncompliance is a red herring.

There are way too many other variables involved to really make that generalisation. I've lived in a city with very strong rent control and one with none and essentially no tenants rights. Both cities currently have rental shortages, just the one without rental controls is about 3 times as expensive as the one with.

In practise, I've yet to see anything working that doesn't make rentals either scarce or prohibitively expensive.

Re: A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100 In NYC? broker's fee is $15K

#152
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is the hack for managing city growth

Why do you want successful cities to stop growing? Especially ones that have zero desire to stop attracting employers. Offices take up very little space so if you let developers build commercial real estate you will always have a mismatch between housing and jobs if you stop building residential real estate. This will displace lower income people in the end and lead to gentrification rather than a stop to growth.

Having a mechanism to reduce growth is actually great.

It's hard to increase transportation infrastructure in a built-up area. And when you do, everybody says it didn't work because traffic is still bad or trains are still overfull. But they never notice that population increased during construction. If you could stop growth, then your transportation needs stabilize.

Doesn't really feel fair to me though, because it's so hard to move into the closed city.

Personally, I'm a fan of limiting rent increases to a max of something like 5-10% per year. Not so much that it's a total hardship to deal with a max increase; not so little that landlords have to do max increases every year or get way off market; also not so little that a landlord can't catch up later if they purposefully lag on increases to keep a preferred tenant.

Re: A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100 In NYC? broker's fee is $15K

#153
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can and does work in many places. Whole cities like Stockholm mostly consist of rent-controlled apartments which have same rents paid since WWII era, which now amount to almost nothing. It creates awful social distortions and indirect costs, but it certainly does work.

I'm sure it works for the residents of Stockholm, but not so much for all sorts of people who would move to Stockholm but can't wait in line 10 years for an apartment.

…and why should the current residents of Stockholm give a toss about the people who aren't there but want to move in and drive up prices?

Re: A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100 In NYC? broker's fee is $15K

#154
post #131
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kinds of things are side-effects of "tenant's rights" laws. Some may consider it the end-goal, to be fair - as eventually you'd drive landlords completely out of business. The problem is that this is antithetical to higher density, because you need landlords of some form if you have anything denser than a duplex. You can have condos perhaps, but not everyone can afford to get into one, or even wants to. And if…

> you need landlords of some form if you have anything denser than a duplex Why? What value do they provide, other than having a bunch of money upfront? I’d argue there are many, many ways to fund building construction other than for-profit ownership

> What value do they provide, other than having a bunch of money upfront?

Providing capital is useful! You can't just ignore that.

Re: A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100 In NYC? broker's fee is $15K

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't answer how you got the apartment, which is invariably either luck, knowing someone, or having rich parents (in which case you can buy one of those income-controlled units that make zero sense for anyone except a nepo-baby -- e.g. need to earn I also had a time in a rent-stabilized apartment in NYC (East Village, probably not far from yours) and the answer of how I got it: luck. It happened to be availabl…

read the last paragraph ...

Ah, apologies! I got the "subleasing" directionality wrong. I thought you were describing how you kept the apartment (via subletting to someone else)

Re: A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100 In NYC? broker's fee is $15K

#156
post #149

New report dropped recently that vacancy rates there are like 2% or less. That is far, far below healthy levels. NYC needs more housing, as does much of the US in places where the jobs are.

1.4%. And yes, it is clearly unhealthy and indicates a lack of supply. https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vac...

Re: A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100 In NYC? broker's fee is $15K

#157
post #156
post #149

New report dropped recently that vacancy rates there are like 2% or less. That is far, far below healthy levels. NYC needs more housing, as does much of the US in places where the jobs are.

1.4%. And yes, it is clearly unhealthy and indicates a lack of supply. https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vac...

That is amazingly low. 5-8% is considered healthy, and the higher it is, the better for renters.

Re: A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100 In NYC? broker's fee is $15K

#160

What does one have to do to secure a $1100 a month apartment in NYC? I'm sure everyone else wants it. Get drawn from a rental lottery at random? Offer your first born child? Supplement your rent with sexual favors to the landlord?

In 2017 I was about to get a small 2 bedroom in Brooklyn with for $1550. I was one block from a subway station and 3 stops from Manhattan.

It was an older apartment with newly renovated kitchen and bathroom, albeit small. The brokers fee was something like $3000(thought this was ridiculous).

At the time I also found a similarly priced apartment but at last minute for some reason it was pulled the broker said.

I don't think any amount of searching can find such deals now.

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