7 ms·
No one wants to go back to the days of tenements, but we need to relax these zoning rules. We need more housing stock at every income level except ultra-luxury.
by gregwtmtno 10y ago
No one wants to go back to the days of tenements, but we need to relax these zoning rules. We need more housing stock at every income level except ultra-luxury.
- lr4444lr 10y agoHow about fewer residents?
- ju-st 10y agoWhy are there so many businesses/jobs in Manhattan?
- afarrell 10y agoBefore railroads, the Erie Canal was one of the few ways to ship bulk goods over the Appalachian divide. This caused the mouth of the Hudson to be a center of trade, particularly shipping goods to Europe. To make money on the return trip, they would put passengers in steerage and so lots of immigrants landed in New York City.
- ghaff 10y agoEven before the Erie Canal, New York City was basically the best port on the Eastern seaboard so it was a natural trading center when it was initially settled by the Dutch. (And the Hudson provided good access to the interior even without the canal.)
- michaelt 10y agoAt least in London: Every employer moves to London because that's where the employees are; and every employee moves to London because that's where the employers are. Of course I don't mean /literally/ every employer or employee. But I've certainly been offered jobs in remote locations and turned them down because the locations only had one employer who needed someone with my skill set.
- hiou 10y agoBecause a service and investment economy is based on proximity to those with money as opposed to proximity to factories or resources.
- Shivetya 10y agowell autonomous driving will do that to cities more than public transportation did.
- akgerber 10y agoNot Manhattan, or most other dense cities. There is simply not enough room for every human being who wants to visit to have 50 square feet of steel, rubber, and plastic around them.
- Shivetya 10y agoI think many are vastly underestimating what full autonomous driving will do to society and movement patterns. Granted it won't be all on the individual level but it will reshape both cities and country side.
- ghaff 10y agoLeaving aside timeframes (which I'd argue for cities are decades out) for purposes of discussion, Manhattan is perhaps notable in how relatively little I'd expect autonomous vehicles to affect it. After all, it already has vast fleets of self-driving cars. They just have (admittedly often rather flawed) organic computers in control. I'd be much less surprised to see impacts in more distributed areas where I could easily imagine people becoming much more tolerant of very long commutes. Especially if, at the same time, there's a greater overall acceptance of sometimes-remote work in some professions, it's not hard to imagine people doing a 2-3 hour commute a couple of days a week.
- ajmurmann 10y agoHigher density is much more efficient. There is so much expensive infrastructure that you must have that you can share (roads, sewers, phone lines etc.) and infrastructure that's not even viable otherwise like different forms of public transit. If you don't like cities for esthetic reasons you can always move to the country side.
- ghaff 10y agoHowever, as density increases, the supporting infrastructure also can get significantly more expensive to create. Case in point: NYC's Second Avenue subway line that's been in the works for somewhere between a century and a few decades, depending upon how you count, and will end up costing something like $20 billion.
- ajmurmann 10y agoTrue. But that's probably still cheaper than just the roads alone would be if all those people were living in the suburbs.
- arethuza 10y agoWhat's wrong with tenements? [NB Scot here and tenement pretty much means "block of flats"]
- ghaff 10y agoTenement has a specific meaning, at least in the context of Manhattan, of extremely crowded immigrant housing especially in the late 19th and early 20th century. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_East_Side_Tenement_Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_East_Side_Tenement_Museu...
- MBlume 10y agoOk, and what's wrong with that, if the market demands it?
- weeksie 10y agoNothing at all is wrong with tenements. The East Village and LES are full of old tenement apartments that rent upwards of $2500-$3000/month.
- 10y ago
- ILoveMonads 10y agoWhat's wrong with ultra luxury? Rich people spend a lot of money.
- lallysingh 10y agoI think op was just excluding them from the statement that more are needed. There are plenty of ultra luxury properties available in NYC.
- ajmurmann 10y agoWhy not let the market decide what needs to be built? Edit: Built too many luxury apartments and those come down I price and are the new middle class apartments. It's the developers loss. Built tons of tenements and either people are happy over cheap housing out no one moves in and they get upgraded or even cheaper. It's magical!
- metaphorm 10y agobecause the market is dysfunctional, for many different reasons. did you read the original article? it describes some of that dysfunction.
- ajmurmann 10y agoYeah, apparently "skinny towers" and "boxy apartments" are for some reason undesirable.
- PeterisP 10y agoThe original article describes dysfunction caused by regulations, that would improve overnight by market actors simply it wasn't forbidden.
- metaphorm 10y agosome of the regulations are necessary and important. others of them are corruption of the system by (literally) rent-seekers trying to protect their incumbent positions. sorting that out is no easy task. saying "that would improve overnight" sounds like an embrace of oversimplification, which I think is an inappropriate position for an issue like this with so much complexity and uncertainty.
- tangent128 10y agoOr surplus luxury apartments simply go unoccupied, being used as stores of value.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
- akgerber 10y agoI live in a tenement in Brooklyn. It's perfectly nice.
- hugh4 10y agoI dunno man, there's plenty of housing, and room to build it, once you get outside New York City. The dumb part, I think, is the tendency for humans to huddle together in ever-greater masses in the corners of our vast continents, like Emperor Penguins. Penguins, of course, do it so that they don't freeze to death. But many of the people who live in New York seem to just want to live in New York so they can live a New York lifestyle because that's what looks cool on TV.