2 ms·

Maybe they should allow the construction of more housing. Seems like if you have supply problems, you should permit supply to grow.

mancerayder 10y ago
It's NYC, not Houston. :-) Some considerations: * The city's already very densely populated, increasing the density comes at the price of having to ensure the infrastructure can handle it. The most obvious is the creaking subway system, which has gotten hella overcrowded in the last few years, but you also have other infra that needs to go along with it (the type where you tear up the street and fix layers of piping, cabling, and all the rest) * The 'not Houston' comment is partly snarky, partly to make the point that what makes New York City what it is, or Paris or London what they are, is their character and that's partially zoning and building code. I suppose you could raze all the brownstones in Brooklyn Heights and build mega apartments, but do we really want to do that? * Politically, changing zoning is hard. Density is pushed back on by the local neighborhood. Next you have affordable housing advocates that push back against zoning, in fact in places like Bushwick, even if you include 25-30% affordable housing in a new development, you still have picketing, protests and loudspeakers. In Williamsburg, under Bloomberg there was massive rezoning that lead to the neighborhood essentially turning into an extension of Manhattan. Partly this involved rezoning light manufacturing, and allowing building by the riverfront. That said, affordable housing advocates and people in that camp decry Williamsburg as a great tragedy because the rents went up for the poorer people that were there before. * Finally, after all I said they ARE building more housing. But they can't build housing faster than the people are moving here and also the people are making babies. People have a tendency to multiply, and the economy here has been pretty stable. 8M residents in 2000 compared to 8.5M today. The demand fills faster than the supply can keep up.
- snrplfth 10y ago
  Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn are very densely populated, but there's a lot more to the city than that. Huge swaths of the New York metropolitan area are two-storey houses, and what I suggest is upgrading these to five or six storey brownstone-style housing. Yes, infrastructure does need to be built, but by putting more people in less space, you increase the ability of the city to pay for infrastructure. After all, cities that are losing population (de-densifying) generally do not find it any easier to pay for their existing infrastructure. And if people want New York to stay just the way it is physically, then they're going to have to stop complaining about the prices. Increased supply or increased prices, that's the trade-off. Yes, changing zoning is difficult, and the way Bloomberg went about it only made it worse. Because the up-zoning (permitting more development) was limited to a very few neighbourhoods, it meant that the new development was concentrated there, with noticeable effects. If he'd up-zoned a wider area, that development could have been more spread-out and less disruptive. As it is, though, he actually down-zoned large areas of the city, often those low-rise neighbourhoods which could have handled more density. Just as in San Francisco, increased housing supply will in large part need to happen in the inner and outer suburbs. New York is building housing, but not that much: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nyc-housing.png?w=600&h=371 https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nyc-hou... . Just because there's a few big noticeable towers going up does not mean that there's a large amount of housing being built. Also, just because supply isn't keeping up, doesn't mean it does nothing at all. By building more housing, the increase in price is less than it otherwise would be.

mancerayder 10y ago

It's NYC, not Houston. :-) Some considerations: * The city's already very densely populated, increasing the density comes at the price of having to ensure the infrastructure can handle it. The most obvious is the creaking subway system, which has gotten hella overcrowded in the last few years, but you also have other infra that needs to go along with it (the type where you tear up the street and fix layers of piping, cabling, and all the rest) * The 'not Houston' comment is partly snarky, partly to make the point that what makes New York City what it is, or Paris or London what they are, is their character and that's partially zoning and building code. I suppose you could raze all the brownstones in Brooklyn Heights and build mega apartments, but do we really want to do that? * Politically, changing zoning is hard. Density is pushed back on by the local neighborhood. Next you have affordable housing advocates that push back against zoning, in fact in places like Bushwick, even if you include 25-30% affordable housing in a new development, you still have picketing, protests and loudspeakers. In Williamsburg, under Bloomberg there was massive rezoning that lead to the neighborhood essentially turning into an extension of Manhattan. Partly this involved rezoning light manufacturing, and allowing building by the riverfront. That said, affordable housing advocates and people in that camp decry Williamsburg as a great tragedy because the rents went up for the poorer people that were there before. * Finally, after all I said they ARE building more housing. But they can't build housing faster than the people are moving here and also the people are making babies. People have a tendency to multiply, and the economy here has been pretty stable. 8M residents in 2000 compared to 8.5M today. The demand fills faster than the supply can keep up.

snrplfth 10y ago
Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn are very densely populated, but there's a lot more to the city than that. Huge swaths of the New York metropolitan area are two-storey houses, and what I suggest is upgrading these to five or six storey brownstone-style housing. Yes, infrastructure does need to be built, but by putting more people in less space, you increase the ability of the city to pay for infrastructure. After all, cities that are losing population (de-densifying) generally do not find it any easier to pay for their existing infrastructure. And if people want New York to stay just the way it is physically, then they're going to have to stop complaining about the prices. Increased supply or increased prices, that's the trade-off. Yes, changing zoning is difficult, and the way Bloomberg went about it only made it worse. Because the up-zoning (permitting more development) was limited to a very few neighbourhoods, it meant that the new development was concentrated there, with noticeable effects. If he'd up-zoned a wider area, that development could have been more spread-out and less disruptive. As it is, though, he actually down-zoned large areas of the city, often those low-rise neighbourhoods which could have handled more density. Just as in San Francisco, increased housing supply will in large part need to happen in the inner and outer suburbs. New York is building housing, but not that much: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nyc-housing.png?w=600&h=371 https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nyc-hou... . Just because there's a few big noticeable towers going up does not mean that there's a large amount of housing being built. Also, just because supply isn't keeping up, doesn't mean it does nothing at all. By building more housing, the increase in price is less than it otherwise would be.