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Rent collections are down in New York

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Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#501

Post by vel0city »

registeredcorn wrote: post #365
epsteingpt wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout. There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story. Go look at some photos from like 2010-2014.

How was the work outsourced around that timeframe? Do they no longer have an auto-industry at all in Detroit, or is it just greatly reduced?

Detroit was pretty much the place where cars were designed and manufactured in the US at one point in time. The highest producing factories, the engineering, the management, most of it happened practically inside the city. Over time these auto manufacturers opened plants on lower cost of living places, spreading out across the Midwest while a lot of the engineering and management still took place in Detroit.

People often point to foreign competition for the downfall of urban Detroit but the writing was on the wall and decay starting well before foreign imports made a big splash. Between 1945 and 1957, GM, Ford, and Chrysler built 25 brand-new auto plants in the Detroit metro area. Not a single one was built inside the city limits. They weren't building these factories overseas (yet), they were building them in cheaper parts of the US. Detroit lost hundreds of thousands of well-paying factory jobs well before Volkswagen and Toyota started selling things in real numbers in the 1960s.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#502

Post by digitaltrees »

stahtops wrote: post #321
CalRobert wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, but it's easier to build quality mixed use development and walkable, bikable neighbourhoods when you don't have thousands of NIMBYs screaming down every proposal.

Pick your favorite place on the planet. Then tell me if 8 billion people can live there, and would it be the same place if they did? I know the answer to both of these questions, and so do you.

Go read about the history of paris. One government minister bulldozed most of the city to create what the world now loves. At the time many people wept for the loss of what paris had been (described as a that commercial street in Harry Potter a quaint, magical village that stretched on in any direction). Paris has now created business districts in the suburbs. But even they are are building single family housing instead of the low rise blocks everyone loves in paris core.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#503

Post by vel0city »

digitaltrees wrote: post #498
vel0city wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expecting 31,416 square miles of area with a median height of 5 stories would be wild. That's most of the entire Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale MSA (~37,000sqmi).

But yet people think the heart of Paris, Rome or even Hong Kong are wonderful. Build the neighborhoods correctly and beautifully and the city can continue indefinitely

The Paris metro area (Aire d'attraction des villes) is only ~7,300 square miles, with the city proper only being 41 square miles. They're talking 31,400 square miles of essentially Paris proper.

So imagine the city of Paris, but stretched about 766x. If you want to include the whole metro area, then ~4.3x

Hong Kong is ~431 square miles. So about 73 Hong Kongs. But not really, because only ~25% of that area is actually urban. So more like 291x the urban area of HK.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#504

Post by inigyou »

bizzletk wrote: post #211
inigyou wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any morally valid reason to evict a tenant other than nonpayment of rent? For bad behavior that should be between them and the police, not you.

Not all bad behavior meets the threshold of police intervention. Here's a nearly-strawman-but-definitionally-valid example: a landlord may want to remove a tenant who's being unusually hard on the place and accelerating the wear-and-tear. Could be serious enough that paying the tenant to go away would be cheaper than the cost to remediate the damage accrued over the length of the contract.

That's bad. Now everyone who lives in a home (which is everyone) is required to guess what the average amount of wear and tear is, instead of abiding by the contract.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#505

Post by digitaltrees »

ponector wrote: post #390
digitaltrees wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inven…

Detroit had tons of extra housing. Why have people people fled to other cities? There is no easy fast solution to this. Just build more housing will not solve complex issues. Not saying there should not be more construction, though.

Because outsourcing and globalization decimated the economy. Now people are going back and doing amazing things. Same think happened in most cities in the Midwest and north Carolina (when textiles and furniture manufacturers left)

But the same thing happened in every downtown core when the federal highway system carved up neighborhoods and companies like IBM moved their headquarters out of new York and into suburban office parks.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#506

Post by digitaltrees »

kdheiwns wrote: post #392
ponector wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detroit had tons of extra housing. Why have people people fled to other cities? There is no easy fast solution to this. Just build more housing will not solve complex issues. Not saying there should not be more construction, though.

Some cities are desirable. Some are not. New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in. Detroit is the opposite.

New York wasn't in the 70s and 80s for the same reason Detroit is now.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#507

Post by wk_end »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #450
postflopclarity wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC is certainly the best city in the US.

This is a very bold and subjective statement. I don't disagree it is the best city in US for some people, but the objective best - I doubt it.

We shouldn't talk about "objective best" without pinning down what that means. I can only really imagine it in a sort of Aristotelian sense - a city could be the best city because it most fully embodies the notion of what it means to be city (as opposed to a more rural or suburban area): a usually cosmopolitan agglomeration of people where the density/economies of scale/competition create an environment that allows art, culture, entertainment, public services, etc. to flourish. In that particular sense I think NYC is the clear best city in the country, no competition, with maybe Chicago being a somewhat distant runner-up. In that mode of thinking it's arguably the best city in the world, actually.

Now, that said: when I lived in the US I (mostly) preferred living in Seattle over NYC for the weather, natural beauty, and more laid-back vibe...subjectively Seattle was better for me, but I still don't have an issue with saying NYC is "objectively" a better city than Seattle.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#508

Post by CalRobert »

archagon wrote: post #492
CalRobert wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes the supply of housing can't increase. What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?

The accord you’re proposing is “I deserve your spot because I have more money than you, and we’ll just build more housing later to get you back in.” You can see why I’m not going to go for that as a renter and voter. > What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing? The one that we’re in the middle of talking about? Rent control.

You can do that, but now it's just "I was here first" which eventually turns in to "I'm old" (after all, young people were not there first, by virtue of not existing when rent control was enacted), which doesn't seem fair either.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#509

Post by archagon »

CalRobert wrote: post #508
archagon wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accord you’re proposing is “I deserve your spot because I have more money than you, and we’ll just build more housing later to get you back in.” You can see why I’m not going to go for that as a renter and voter. > What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing? The one that we’re in the middle of talking about? Rent control.

You can do that, but now it's just "I was here first" which eventually turns in to "I'm old" (after all, young people were not there first, by virtue of not existing when rent control was enacted), which doesn't seem fair either.

To be clear, the full solution I would like is rent control plus lots of new housing construction, using whatever incentives are necessary. I do not begrudge old people "taking up space" in a city they've called their home for most of their lives; in fact, I think it adds a lot to a city's character. I'd like to think that someday I'd be able to retire in my favorite city as well.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#510

Post by postflopclarity »

wk_end wrote: post #507
AdrianB1 wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very bold and subjective statement. I don't disagree it is the best city in US for some people, but the objective best - I doubt it.

We shouldn't talk about "objective best" without pinning down what that means. I can only really imagine it in a sort of Aristotelian sense - a city could be the best city because it most fully embodies the notion of what it means to be city (as opposed to a more rural or suburban area): a usually cosmopolitan agglomeration of people where the density/economies of scale/competition create an environment that allows a…

> In that particular sense I think NYC is the clear best city in the country,

yes. if you don't like cities, you won't like NYC. but as far as "city" goes, NYC is the clear best and I don't think it's particularly close.

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