181–190 of 288 posts
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It seems like a place like Manhattan might benefit from first up-zoning the low slung sections that are currently 4-8 stories. My point here is that I'd start with trying to build enough housing before spending political capital on marginal things that neither unlock supply nor generate much revenue.
Is increasing housing the goal of the tax, or is it just raising revenues to balance the budget?
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Taxing second homes would halt construction? Plenty of people out there wish to own a first home, myself included.
This guy thinks a tax on second homes in fucking NYC is going to disproportionately harm the middle class. He is economically illiterate. Edit: scratch that, he also mentioned leaving a rent controlled apartment because of a crabs in a bucket mentality. I think he’s lying to push his own political agenda which appears to be that of the rich never paying taxes. I’ll lol if he’s some pleb like most of us and is just ru…
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> people tend to lose money on housing in NYC unless it's held for many years. I'd generally consider that a success metric? People making money flipping houses on short terms is a bad thing
What's a reasonable time horizon? What should happen when you find a mate and need more space than you did when you moved into your current unit? A friend moved out of his space after 7 years to start a family, and the appreciation didn't cover the closing costs.
One way to avoid the tax is to rent out the residence: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-pied-a-terre-tax-and... It's interesting that people choose to leave their properties vacant - They're effectively "taxing" themselves by foregoing rent (4+%/yr cap rate). Is vacant real estate even a good investment?
(In a well-functioning real estate market there are some units offline due to vacancy, turnover, and renovation, so we don't expect 0%. High vacancies of e.g. 10% suggest insufficient demand for the supply.)
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Seriously. Instead of using that land to build a $250 million penthouse Ken Griffin only spends 10 days a year in, they could probably build enough housing for 500+ middle class families.
Who will build those homes? Who will pay for them? If it were a lucrative business to build those homes I'd assume someone would be building them but that does not seem to be the case. Why is this?
California next please! If you aren’t in your home 9 months of the year you can stay in a hotel. Thanks! Edit: lol -4 nice! What are y’all upset about?
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Golly gee willikers, not the spooky potential for possible side effects! Wouldn't want any of those when we could have gigantic sucker-punch scarcity-amid-plenty instead!
my neighbors have so much they don't deserve, how can i steal their property!
We all understand the concept of commons. We all understand the concept of money pooling. Don't pretend it doesn't make sense or it's evil when most people pay for private insurance anyway or even fucking Claude Code subscription plans which follow the same concept.
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> Almost by definition you cannot out build the demand for housing. Would love to see some justification for this claim, which tacitly suggests that adding, say, 2M extra apartments over baseline would have zero effect on our housing market.
2 million new apartments is doubling the number of apartments in NYC. I call water safe, but you may say it's a tacit admission that you could drink 5 gallons in an hour an experience zero effects. I wouldn't call that an honest rebuttal
> I call water safe, but you may say it's a tacit admission that you could drink 5 gallons in an hour an experience zero effects. I wouldn't call that an honest rebuttal
I meant it as an honest rebuttal, and I largely disagree that your analogy applies.
Humans obviously die from hyponatremia if they drink massive amounts of water: in your example, 5 gallons of water, which is 5X-10X someone's daily consumption in a short period of time. OK, I agree.
I don't think the theoretical example of increasing the housing stock in NYC by 54% is likely to lead to serious negative effects, especially if it happens over a period of several years, because the city has astronomically high rents and even higher house prices [1]. I believe the culprit is primarily zoning and other restrictions on building, which I defended in another comment upthread.
I do think radically relaxing zoning laws and regulations could theoretically lead to such an increase in supply within a period of, say, ten years. It is politically infeasible and would require basically every voter to understand that supply and demand pricing works in the housing market, which they don't.
The reason I used that exact number—which was deliberately chosen to be large—is that I simply disagree with your claim, if I am understanding it correctly, and I felt a larger number would drive the point home more.
I interpreted your claim as: adding marginal units to the housing market in NYC will not change the price of housing, relative to the universe in which we do not add more units, because there is alway a marginal person waiting in the wings who would like to move to NYC but hasn't yet.
The thing is, what is actually preventing that marginal person from moving here? There is some vacancy here in NYC, even if it's low at 1.4%. Just adding one more unit with no change in price anywhere should not affect anything. In order for that person to actually go from "I am staying where I am" to "I am moving to NYC," the thing that has to change is the value of that apartment: it must breach the threshold at which point they'd move to NYC. I claim this predominantly happens through increased supply driving down price for a given unit compared to the universe where supply is held constant, which happens with basically any additional housing (via the filtering effect). If the increased supply held rents steady, there is no reason for that in-migration. This is the underlying mechanism by which all supply and demand works from my understanding; I don't see a reason why it should be different solely for housing in exactly one metropolitan area.
Obviously individual decision making for a given person is not this simplistic, but at a population level I think the desirability vs. price calculation holds and the increase in supply decreasing price holds, which is why metro areas that have built a lot (e.g. Tokyo, Austin, Nashville) have even seen falling housing prices, while NYC and SF see rising rents.
I picked a large number of units in my initial claim, but I basically do not think the logic changes for a small number of units either. Adding 100 units relative to baseline would nudge it down a smaller, but still meaningful amount.
[0] https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uplo...
[1] https://www.apartments.com/rent-market-trends/new-york-ny/#:...
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He pays income tax just like everyone else. But the majority of his money is in investments, which many Americans already do as well with 401k and personal brokerage accounts. The people who can't afford to invest like that already pay close to 0% income tax as 40%-60% of households, historically, have paid 0% income tax in the US.
> He pays income tax just like everyone else. He only paid income taxes on $80k while at Amazon. The wealthy often make their money as capital gains, which if they held for at least one year, are exempt from the income tax and taxed at no higher than 20% Billionaires literally have their own set of tax brackets in this country: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc409
Not even close. As your link shows, "the wealthy" pay taxes on long-term capital gains. The lowest rate (for "the wealthy") is 15% but they can owe 20% or even 28% in certain circumstances.