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

The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 47 posts

Re: The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

#31

Post by IncreasePosts »

jollyllama wrote: post #19
IncreasePosts wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affordable is a stretch. When they went out of business in 2014, they were charging $30/night - $900/mo. You could definitely get actual rooms in NY or even a studio apartment for that much. Yes, it will be way out in the Bronx or Queens, in not a great neighborhood, but it is certainly better than a 4x6' room with a plank in it and just a knee wall between you and a number of strangers. Obviously for a lot of people…

Perhaps they entered a price-increase death spiral as they were saddled with free-riders as the operator in TFA says.

Even the article from 1996 is $10/day | $300/mo which would easily afford you a room in a cheaper neighborhood back then (I'll have to trust the HUD reports from 1996 since I was a child at that point with no direct experience)

Re: The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

#32

Post by bccdee »

delichon wrote: post #4
johnnylambada wrote: post #3

I imagine they’re all gone now. A great example of the free market creating a niche product that was useful and affordable to its customers and the government regulating it out of existence. I’m sure there were abuses by owners but the system worked for the majority.

If you can't afford a home up to our standards, better that you should be homeless? If you can't land a job at minimum wage, better for you to be unemployed? I wish that these were reductio ad absurdems rather than common place luxury beliefs.

The market for labour is a monopsony (the limited number of buyers relative to sellers make it a buyer's market). Just as suppressing price in a monopolistic market is unlikely to drive down supply and can actually increase overall sales, recent minimum wage increases have been found to have a net positive effect on employment.

> We present the first causal analysis of recent large minimum wage increases, focusing on 47 large U.S. counties that reached $15 or more by 2022q1. [...] We then find significant and larger positive employment effects, as the monopsony model predicts. We go on to document the presence of monopsony in the restau- rant industry. [...] The fast food industry’s monopsony power allowed it to accommodate large minimum wage increases and raise employment.

Source: https://irle.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Minimum...

Re: The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

#33

Post by bccdee »

cyberax wrote: post #30

Your daily reminder that urbanism leads only to more misery. Dense cities will never have cheaper housing. And it will only get worse and worse as the density continues to grow. And we know that the misery won out when people pose it like this: > If you can't afford a home up to our standards, better that you should be homeless? The third option is to LIVE IN CHEAPER PLACES. The US has 1.1 housing units per household…

I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save?

And yeah, bike lanes are part of it too. They make it easy to get around quickly & cheaply. Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero. Bike lanes are popular because they work.

High rent is caused by low supply of high-density housing. Apartment blocks are cheap. It's bad zoning, NIMBYs, and a slow pace of construction due to disproportionate focus on luxury units that cause housing supply issues.

> The third option is to LIVE IN CHEAPER PLACES. The US has 1.1 housing units per household.

Yeah, you know why people don't live in those places? They're in exurbs of Arizona, a thousand miles from anything. During the housing bubble, we built a bunch of homes in unlivable areas and now we're dealing with the fact that they're functionally useless.

Re: The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

#34

Post by cyberax »

bccdee wrote: post #33
cyberax wrote: post #30

Your daily reminder that urbanism leads only to more misery. Dense cities will never have cheaper housing. And it will only get worse and worse as the density continues to grow. And we know that the misery won out when people pose it like this: > If you can't afford a home up to our standards, better that you should be homeless? The third option is to LIVE IN CHEAPER PLACES. The US has 1.1 housing units per household…

I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save? And yeah, bike lanes are part of it too. They make it easy to get around quickly & cheaply. Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero. Bike lanes are popular because they work. High rent is cau…

> I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save?

None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit. Transit is FREAKISHLY expensive in time and money, it's not even funny how inefficient it is.

> Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero.

So you're in Manhattan? Figures

> High rent is caused by low supply of high-density housing.

Wrong. Hint: Manhattan is one of the most expensive places in the US. And recently elected a socialist who was promising state-run grocery stores.

> Yeah, you know why people don't live in those places?

Because toxic urbanism strangled the democracy with bike lanes. There are no jobs because it's cheaper for companies to build offices in Downtowns of large cities, offloading the externalities.

This in turn makes housing near Downtowns more expensive because workers have to live there in order to get a job. This further increases the talent pool nearby, incentivizing more companies to open offices there.

Rinse, wash, repeat, and you get a misery-density housing spiral.

Re: The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

#35

Post by user3939382 »

pas wrote: post #17
user3939382 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a lose lose. If you remove the wage floor many people with “livable” wages now would have theirs cut, it’s a problem of adversarial incentives a la nash.

Sure, but now there's a deadweight loss by allocation inefficiencies (plus the disemployment effects are strongest at the margin, so now many people are working less than they want to, because they cannot sell more of their work for less, so ie. they have part time jobs). The "obvious" thing is to subsidize employment (by negative income tax for low-incomes to avoid discontinuities), and sectoral/collective bargainin…

You have two underlying factors which make everything else downstream moot. Fractional reserve lending and plastic imports. FRL means a bank is depositing $5 and lending $50 then charging you interest for the $45 they never had in the first place. Now you must extract that interest from someone else, who likely finances the missing amount and compounds the problem. So that’s how we stay ‘afloat’ if you can call it that despite the problem of #2. #2. Plastic is made from oil. Whereas anyone would exchange labor for energy, energy prices money. It’s the civilizational bottleneck. It would be cheaper to empty fort knox into Boston Harbor than accept another ship of disposable plastic goods that we send to a landfill. It’s effectively taking a big wad of US wealth every day and lighting it on fire, then using the nonsense FRL to make up the difference.

Given all that, whatever labor or wage trick you do is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I know how to remediate the plastic issue, which is an engineering question. Until that’s addressed the union sq debt clock is counting the cargo ships docking to feed our money/energy/oil->landfill pipeline.

Re: The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

#36

Post by bccdee »

cyberax wrote: post #34
bccdee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save? And yeah, bike lanes are part of it too. They make it easy to get around quickly & cheaply. Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero. Bike lanes are popular because they work. High rent is cau…

> I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save? None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit. Transit is FREAKISHLY expensive in time and money, it's not even funny how inefficient it is. > Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impa…

> None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit.

Oo, totally wrong! Fun guess though. The average monthly cost of car ownership is $1,300. The cost of a one-month transit pass is $150. I'm not gonna save $1,150 on rent by moving to a shitty suburb.

> So you're in Manhattan?

Nope.

> Wrong. Hint: Manhattan is one of the most expensive places in the US.

Yeah, because there's a shortage of apartments—that's what I said. Manhattan Island (being a rather small island) has physically run out of room for buildings, but that's not true of other areas.

> And recently elected a socialist who was promising state-run grocery stores.

Ok? So what? Maybe they'll expose private-sector price fixing & maybe they'll just be grocery stores.

> Because toxic urbanism strangled the democracy with bike lanes.

I'm honestly baffled. What makes you think bike lanes are undemocratic? Bikes are super cheap and take up very little space. Bike lanes really cut down on traffic.

> This in turn makes housing near Downtowns more expensive because workers have to live there in order to get a job.

Have you heard of industrial parks? It's pretty common for offices in big cities to be outside the city centre—far more common on the whole than downtown offices are.

The big advantage of downtown offices is that a city's downtown is the nexus of its public transit: If you work downtown, you can easily live a ways outside the city on cheaper land and then come in by train. So no, the point of a downtown is that you don't need to live there to work there.

Do you actually live in a city? I feel like you don't have a very strong understanding of how they're structured.

Re: The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

#37

Post by pas »

user3939382 wrote: post #35
pas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but now there's a deadweight loss by allocation inefficiencies (plus the disemployment effects are strongest at the margin, so now many people are working less than they want to, because they cannot sell more of their work for less, so ie. they have part time jobs). The "obvious" thing is to subsidize employment (by negative income tax for low-incomes to avoid discontinuities), and sectoral/collective bargainin…

You have two underlying factors which make everything else downstream moot. Fractional reserve lending and plastic imports. FRL means a bank is depositing $5 and lending $50 then charging you interest for the $45 they never had in the first place. Now you must extract that interest from someone else, who likely finances the missing amount and compounds the problem. So that’s how we stay ‘afloat’ if you can call it th…

Money supply management is important for price stability. There's no debt problem in fractional reserve banking. (Exactly because debt is slowly inflated away while real assets keep their value [as their nominal value increases].)

There's a tremendous amount of economic growth. And as long as there are places where we can put in some better technology, a more efficient process or organization, then growth will continue, and the money supply will have to grow, and it's currently done via bank-issued money, because it provides some risk management. (Which is the most important factor of money creation. This is why finance and insurance developed intertwined.)

Energy is one bottleneck, sure, but there's no serious slowdown of growth of electricity generation capacity for example. And GDP growth is decoupling from carbon intensity. (As it should as we started to invest a lot of our economic surplus to do so.)

...

The important thing to remember is that there's a balance between how much money is needed now and how much is issued to be paid back later, and obviously if the growth would be almost zero the interest rate would be almost zero too.

If growth slows down (the fiscal multiplier goes down, there are no more public things to do, no more houses to insulate to get a smaller HVAC bill, no unemployed person to teach skills who would then work) then need for money also goes down, as no one will offer to pay it back with interest, so interest rate will go down, so whatever amount of money we have (as debt) we can keep rolling it over.

And of course the central bank can always exchange debt money to non-debt money. (And every time it wants to increase the interest rate it used to do something similar, it sold assets [US Treasury bonds] which removed debt money from the system. And back in the 90s there was talk about how the US central bank will adapt if the US government starts to run surpluses permanently.)

Re: The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

#38

Post by cyberax »

bccdee wrote: post #36
cyberax wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save? None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit. Transit is FREAKISHLY expensive in time and money, it's not even funny how inefficient it is. > Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impa…

> None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit. Oo, totally wrong! Fun guess though. The average monthly cost of car ownership is $1,300. The cost of a one-month transit pass is $150. I'm not gonna save $1,150 on rent by moving to a shitty suburb. > So you're in Manhattan? Nope. > Wrong. Hint: Manhattan is one of the most expensive places in the US. Yeah, because there's a sho…

> Oo, totally wrong! Fun guess though. The average monthly cost of car ownership is $1,300. The cost of a one-month transit pass is $150. I'm not gonna save $1,150 on rent by moving to a shitty suburb.

The TRUE cost of one month's pass is about $3000 (with capital cost). The pure "just-keep-the-lights-on" cost is around $750. It's that you're paying it from your taxes and rent.

> Yeah, because there's a shortage of apartments—that's what I said. Manhattan Island (being a rather small island) has physically run out of room for buildings, but that's not true of other areas.

Yes, and it is metastasizing into other neighborhoods.

> Ok? So what? Maybe they'll expose private-sector price fixing & maybe they'll just be grocery stores.

Think about it again. If density works so well, why is there a significant number of people too poor to buy groceries?

> Have you heard of industrial parks? It's pretty common for offices in big cities to be outside the city centre—far more common on the whole than downtown offices are.

Not anymore.

Re: The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

#39

Post by [deleted] »

cyberax wrote: post #30

Your daily reminder that urbanism leads only to more misery. Dense cities will never have cheaper housing. And it will only get worse and worse as the density continues to grow. And we know that the misery won out when people pose it like this: > If you can't afford a home up to our standards, better that you should be homeless? The third option is to LIVE IN CHEAPER PLACES. The US has 1.1 housing units per household…

[deleted]

Re: The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

#40

Post by pixelatedindex »

cyberax wrote: post #30

Your daily reminder that urbanism leads only to more misery. Dense cities will never have cheaper housing. And it will only get worse and worse as the density continues to grow. And we know that the misery won out when people pose it like this: > If you can't afford a home up to our standards, better that you should be homeless? The third option is to LIVE IN CHEAPER PLACES. The US has 1.1 housing units per household…

> Dense cities will never have cheaper housing.

Yeah there’s a correlation but I doubt it’s causation. There are underlying aspects like zoning (and other regulations as mentioned in article) that can make an impact on housing prices. Other reasons are because employment and career prospects are higher so that attracts more people, which creates more demand.

Post reply on HN