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The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

nytimes.com

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

#41

Post by bccdee »

cyberax wrote: post #38
bccdee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

> The TRUE cost of one month's pass is about $3000 (with capital cost).

Lol as if you can't just look up the transit commission's budget. (Annual budget) ÷ (average daily ridership × 12 months per year) = $180 per month per rider at most (since the pool of riders is larger than the daily average).

> Yes, and it is metastasizing into other neighborhoods.

Good. More apartments means cheaper rent.

> If density works so well, why is there a significant number of people too poor to buy groceries?

The cost of living is high because rent is expensive, obviously. I never said it was cheap to live in NYC. Focus on the actual subject of our discussion, please. Do you think rent in Manhattan would be cheaper if there were fewer apartments?

> Not anymore.

You're just saying stuff now. Only 40% of jobs are located downtown in my city, and compared to the other cities I saw when I was poking around for this data, that's high.

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

#42

Post by cyberax »

bccdee wrote: post #41
cyberax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

> The TRUE cost of one month's pass is about $3000 (with capital cost). Lol as if you can't just look up the transit commission's budget. (Annual budget) ÷ (average daily ridership × 12 months per year) = $180 per month per rider at most (since the pool of riders is larger than the daily average). > Yes, and it is metastasizing into other neighborhoods. Good. More apartments means cheaper rent. > If density works so…

> Lol as if you can't just look up the transit commission's budget. (Annual budget) ÷ (average daily ridership × 12 months per year) = $180 per month per rider at most (since the pool of riders is larger than the daily average).

The farebox recovery rate for NYC is 20%, which is higher than usual, actually. So you can just multiply the price by 5 for a rough estimate.

Or you can do it your way, the 2023 operating budget for MTA was $19.379B and the annual ridership was 1.15B (2023). It works out to about the same: ~$17 per trip or ~$500 per month. Figures are from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Transportation_Au...

Also, WTF are your car numbers? The average total expense for _new_ cars in the US is about $1000 per month ( https://www.way.com/blog/the-real-cost-of-car-ownership-in-t... ), and for used cars it's about $600.

But wait, there's more! This is not an honest comparison. Not at all. It completely misses the capital spending on transit. Just one mile of tunnel in Manhattan now costs more than 1500 miles of 6-lane freeway! Unfortunately, there is no easy way to estimate the total capital expense wasted on public transit.

So the _real_ numbers for transit and cars are not even close. And not in the favor of transit.

> Good. More apartments means cheaper rent.

Nope. More apartments mean more _expensive_ rent. This is an ironclad law of real real estate.

The ONLY way to reduce the housing costs is to decrease the city population.

> The cost of living is high because rent is expensive, obviously.

Yup. And the rent is high because...?

> You're just saying stuff now. Only 40% of jobs are located downtown in my city, and compared to the other cities I saw when I was poking around for this data, that's high.

The problem is the continuing enshittification. Look at the dynamics, check the average pay in areas that don't have direct access to the city cores and the average pay in Downtowns. The gap is exploding.

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

#43

Post by cyberax »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #40
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.

> Yeah there’s a correlation but I doubt it’s causation.

There is. Density-misery death spiral.

You can usually check for correlation vs. causation by looking for counterexamples. Do you know a city that increased density and that resulted in cheaper housing?

I don't. And I checked the stats for all of the US, Western Europe, and Japan.

So far, it looks like the only way to decrease the cost is to reduce the city population.

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

#44

Post by bccdee »

cyberax wrote: post #42
bccdee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The TRUE cost of one month's pass is about $3000 (with capital cost). Lol as if you can't just look up the transit commission's budget. (Annual budget) ÷ (average daily ridership × 12 months per year) = $180 per month per rider at most (since the pool of riders is larger than the daily average). > Yes, and it is metastasizing into other neighborhoods. Good. More apartments means cheaper rent. > If density works so…

> Lol as if you can't just look up the transit commission's budget. (Annual budget) ÷ (average daily ridership × 12 months per year) = $180 per month per rider at most (since the pool of riders is larger than the daily average). The farebox recovery rate for NYC is 20%, which is higher than usual, actually. So you can just multiply the price by 5 for a rough estimate. Or you can do it your way, the 2023 operating bud…

> Nope. More apartments mean more _expensive_ rent. This is an ironclad law of real real estate.

I don't know how to explain to you that an increase in supply results in the price of a good decreasing.

> Yup. And the rent is high because...?

High demand, low supply. Obviously.

> check the average pay in areas that don't have direct access to the city cores and the average pay in Downtowns

Yeah, because downtown office space costs more & goes disproportionately to higher-paying finance jobs. That has nothing to do with density—that's just finance bros wanting to work in the fanciest skyscrapers.

> The average total expense for _new_ cars in the US is about $1000 per month

Your source refers to cars generally: "As of 2025, the average annual cost of owning a car in the U.S. has reached approximately $12,297, translating to about $1,025 per month." Even with your $500/month figure, transit is still much cheaper. And that $500 isn't just distributed among riders—drivers pay some of it too, as they should, since every person on the subway is person not driving on the road, reducing the need for road infrastructure maintenance & expansion.

> Just one mile of tunnel in Manhattan now costs more than 1500 miles of 6-lane freeway!

Again, Manhattan is unique. I don't know why you keep referring back to it as if its problems are easily generalizable. They put their trash on the street in bags because they don't have room for dumpsters. Also, yes, that's why LRTs are popular—no tunnel required.

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

#45

Post by cyberax »

bccdee wrote: post #44
cyberax wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lol as if you can't just look up the transit commission's budget. (Annual budget) ÷ (average daily ridership × 12 months per year) = $180 per month per rider at most (since the pool of riders is larger than the daily average). The farebox recovery rate for NYC is 20%, which is higher than usual, actually. So you can just multiply the price by 5 for a rough estimate. Or you can do it your way, the 2023 operating bud…

> Nope. More apartments mean more _expensive_ rent. This is an ironclad law of real real estate. I don't know how to explain to you that an increase in supply results in the price of a good decreasing. > Yup. And the rent is high because...? High demand, low supply. Obviously. > check the average pay in areas that don't have direct access to the city cores and the average pay in Downtowns Yeah, because downtown offic…

> I don't know how to explain to you that an increase in supply results in the price of a good decreasing.

You assume that the _demand_ is constant. It's not. And the supply increases can't feasibly outpace the demand increases.

> Yeah, because downtown office space costs more & goes disproportionately to higher-paying finance jobs. That has nothing to do with density—that's just finance bros wanting to work in the fanciest skyscrapers.

And why does this happen in Seattle, SF, Chicago?

> Your source refers to cars generally

New cars. An average car is now 13 years old.

> Even with your $500/month figure, transit is still much cheaper.

I literally provided you the source that proves that just the OPERATIONS budget is the same order of magnitude as the _total_ cost of car ownership, including capital expenses, insurance, and financing. This ensures that the total cost of transit will dwarf the cost of car ownership.

> Again, Manhattan is unique.

No, it's not. Seattle's failrail will cost about the same amount per track mile. It's so far projected to cost $120B, or over $120k for each and every houseshold.

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

#46

Post by user3939382 »

pas wrote: post #37
user3939382 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contin…

> Money supply management is important for price stability

That’s an academic answer but it’s wrong. Price stability is derived from economic equilibrium, which means energy however you want to label it in and out must be stable. It’s not a philosophical debate nash models most of it. Our landfill pipeline is the source of our debt.

The classical hypothesis is that a swamp of credit is always going to buy some magic wand where the ends justify the means and there are infinite ways for society to store debt. What you get is fraud after a phase transition which is the society we live in now. Basically all I’m pointing out is no free lunch. There’s nothing to debate. I’m mapping no free lunch to the various materializations of energy in the economy. Food fuel labor oil power whatever you want to label it you have to pay for that oil. It’s potential energy whose current payment date is hundreds of years in the future. The whole global supply chain theology is laid bare a bunch of horrible trade offs which falsely claim credit for largely unrelated gains in raw human output and hidden costs.

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

#47

Post by pas »

user3939382 wrote: post #46
pas wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contin…

> Money supply management is important for price stability That’s an academic answer but it’s wrong. Price stability is derived from economic equilibrium, which means energy however you want to label it in and out must be stable. It’s not a philosophical debate nash models most of it. Our landfill pipeline is the source of our debt. The classical hypothesis is that a swamp of credit is always going to buy some magic…

Of course there's no free lunch, but economic equilibrium includes future obligations too (at a discounted rate), it includes the value of current unfinished things, there's a lot of real economic value backed by demand, because otherwise there's nowhere for supply to go. (Imagine if suddenly no one wants to build houses, because let's say everyone gets a tent. Suddenly there is an oversupply of construction services, and construction materials, and architects, and inspectors, and labor in general. Which will immediately triggers a drop in wages.)

You have a hypothesis about price stability, and it's easy to see that while energy prices do impact everything so do interest rates (and in general monetary policy), therefore you need a model that's more complex than what you propose.

Prices inherently aggregate almost all concerns, so even logically it cannot be simply determined by one thing (like energy). Even if energy is cheap if we misallocate it then food, housing, or transportation gets more expensive.

You seem to be mixing up monetarism with sustainability and diminishing returns.

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