14 ms·

As usual, the NY Times sees an actual phenomenon, but fails to understand it. Softening rents? That’s because you have a limited resource of people willing and

by Decade 10y ago

As usual, the NY Times sees an actual phenomenon, but fails to understand it. Softening rents? That’s because you have a limited resource of people willing and able to pay $3000 to $5000 for a single bedroom apartment. It doesn’t take much construction to saturate that market. The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco. There are far more people who can pay $1000 for 1 bedroom, or $3000 for 4 bedrooms (roommates, typically), and it would be insane to ignore that market. But abusive zoning laws and the capricious permit process ensure that that price of housing would be unprofitable. So the big developers and financiers wait until the market goes to insanity levels before making a little boom of construction. We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing.

kevinstubbs 10y ago
Is there any merit to the argument that increasing population density will make bad traffic exponentially worse?
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  I can't imagine there wouldn't be, which is why a sane transit policy is also required. It's a slightly over-simplified but fairly-explanatory model to say that every mile traveled in a car is a failure of transit policy.
- erispoe 10y ago
  No. Because increased density goes with less reliance on individual cars. The majority of people (by far) in NY or SF don't have a car already. Traffic is not bad in the densest cities of the western world, because we have much more efficient ways of moving people around: public transit. But you also need density to sustain public transit. So you have sour spot where there's not enough density to have good public transit, but enough to create bad traffic. Edit: see below, it's actually the majority of new households that don't have a car in many large American cities, except for NYC, in majority car-free.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    About 30% of households in San Francisco do not own cars.[1] That's not the majority "by far." NYC is the only city in the US where the majority of households do not own a car (~56%). But "by far" still only really applies to Manhattan. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_households_without_a_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...
    - cowsandmilk 10y ago
      In the most dense part of NYC, Manhattan, 73% of people don't have access to a car[1], which supports the idea that with more density comes less car dependence/ownership. [1] https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_5YR/S0801/0600000US3606144919 https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_5YR/S...
      - L_Rahman 10y ago
        But this is true only if there's enough public infrastructure to support that kind of living. I'm in the East Village and I have these subways in a 10 min walk radius: 4|5|6|N|Q|R|B|D|F|M|L I can make a no transfer trip to anywhere in Manhattan and most parts of Brooklyn and Queens. If I lived in a part of Manhattan or NYC that didn't have these levels of access, I'd be very tempted to get a car.
        lloyd-christmas 10y ago
        I lived on a block just about the furthest from any subway in manhattan: 81st and York[0]. A car never crossed my mind. http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/99544282749/found-the-manhattan-apartment-thats-the-farthest http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/99544282749/found-the-manhat...
    - Tiksi 10y ago
      To be fair, of those in the outer boroughs of NY that do have a car, (anecdotally) they don't commute with it. From what I've seen, the car is for trips out of the city or occasionally getting something big home, or used as part of their job (Taxi, Contractor truck/van, etc).
- Tiktaalik 10y ago
  No because the size of roads in urban areas is fixed. Traffic will reach the carrying capacity of the roads and the incentives to drive get worse and worse and people will choose alternatives to driving. If roads and highways are expanded then traffic will increase.
- bluGill 10y ago
  Density should enable walking which changes everything. A farmer in the middle of nowhere (US or Canada - other countries have different situations that I cannot comment on) is looking at more than 30 minutes to the nearest grocery store if he drives. To walk would be 10 hours each way. As we go down we hit the suburbs - 10 minutes to the store, but still 2 hours to walk. (if you took the same route as the car it would be about an hour, but that means walking on a busy road with no sidewalks, so you end up having to take a much longer route) High density allows stores and restaurants to exist just to serve the people within a couple blocks. You take the elevator downstairs, and within a couple blocks is everything you need to buy, and the job you need to earn money to buy it with. When this is the world you rarely drive anywhere so you are not adding to congestion. Now there is still congestion all those stores/business need to be provided with goods to sell. However a truck that takes up 4 cars worth of space is bringing enough goods to last 400 people for the day, where the cars in the other examples where for 1 person (all facts in this sentence were made up - they seem reasonable but I don't know how to find the right ones). This limits how dense we can get with just surface streets. Note that the above is a should. Zoning laws often put high density far enough away from stores that you have to drive anyway - this makes congestion worse.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    Ideally you get to mixed use buildings. Ground and maybe first floor dedicated to businesses (shops, offices, gyms, etc.), everything above is residences. Not for every building, you'll still have highrise office buildings (because you need that density of workspaces still, and their ground and first floor will be their local restaurants and gyms and such). But now the average person can get to a small grocery within 100-200m, and a larger one within 500m. Busses can be more effective for transporting people between regions of high residential density to areas of higher office/industrial or shopping density (primarily used by shops carrying non-daily purchase items or requiring more space).
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    Grocery store is an interesting example. I've never lived in a dense city so I don't know how this is done. I doubt I could carry a week of groceries for my modest family (2 adults, 2 children) 1 block, let alone several. Do you maybe use personal carts or what?
rubicon33 10y ago
With any luck, millennials won't leave the city like their predecessors. If they stay long enough, they'll grow frustrated, and get active within city government. If they have the numbers, and the organization, we COULD see changes to restrictive housing policies in places like SF and NY. Lots of ifs. I'm hopeful.
- Decade 10y ago
  http://www.sfyimby.org/ http://www.sfyimby.org/ For the first time, I’m also hopeful.
- L_Rahman 10y ago
  You should be! I'm one of those millennials. I moved to the East Village last year and plan to attend to my first Community Board meeting early next month. From a quick glance of what the board did in January 2017: http://www.nyc.gov/html/mancb3/html/calendar/calendar.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/mancb3/html/calendar/calendar.shtml The focus was mostly on quality of life for existing residents - liquor license approvals, art installations and cultural activities. These are important things and people should care about them, but it's striking that those groups had meetings while the following didn't: - Transportation and Public Safety - Land Use, Zoning, Public and Private Housing - Public Housing and Section 8 Housing I'm going to spend the next couple of months attending these meetings to figure out how it all works. I should caveat however that I'm atypical in this attitude. Because I spent the entirety of my childhood in dense urban environments - Dhaka and New York - I'm attached to city living. Most of my millennial friends are planning to take make the suburban trek.
  - vdnkh 10y ago
    I moved to Kip's Bay in May and thanks for this comment - I'm going to attend a meeting too.
- deathanatos 10y ago
  > get active within city government. The problem with this is that you only have an indirect say in the government; one can't vote if one is priced out of the city.
deleted 10y ago
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deleted 10y ago
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gist 10y ago
> the NY Times sees an actual phenomenon, but fails to understand it. True but remember that the NYT, like any publication, isn't academic research or journal. It isn't 'graded' and doesn't succeed or fail on facts and accuracy. Almost the only job it has is in making interesting enough reading that will help them sell advertising. It's entertainment. Nobody (or at least no professional) is using it to make investment decisions. (Although actually I am sure that is perhaps the case but that's not the paper's responsibility).
- bluGill 10y ago
  NYT also has reputation. If they publish too many stories that are false/inaccurate their reputation falls and people with stop reading it. How low can they go before this happens is a question.
- kesselvon 10y ago
  Reputation for facts and accuracy is the lifeblood for mainstream newspapers, because it attracts a specific demographic that they can charge a premium for the ad space. Degrading newspapers to the point of 'entertainment' is just fallacious
jobu 10y ago
> So the big developers and financiers wait until the market goes to insanity levels before making a little boom of construction. Seems likely that housing market insanity also puts political pressure on the zoning and permitting process to be more lenient with exceptions and approvals.
CPLX 10y ago
> The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco. What's the basis for this comment? I feel like I read something like this on HN every time the topic of affordable housing comes up, and it's usually written by a Bay Area resident who just kind of assumes that's the way things work rather than a uniquely dysfunctional characteristic of where they live. NYC has it's issues, and expensive housing, obviously, but it doesn't seem similar to SF really at all. Where I live in downtown Brooklyn, literally dozens of huge high rise residential rental buildings have been built in just the last few years, the area is almost unrecognizable. We're talking thousands of apartments, literally. What are these abusive zoning policies, specifically? Is NYC really suffering from a problem of low density? You sure? There are many issues with affordable housing in NYC, but I'm not at all convinced that you've really hit on any of them.
- fovc 10y ago
  NYC is quite challenging to develop. For the story of some of those units in Brooklyn you're talking about, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Park,_Brooklyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Park,_Brooklyn
  - CPLX 10y ago
    That's not even remotely representative of the general climate for development in the area, and wasn't one of the projects I was talking about. That was a huge and high profile project to reshape the busiest street and transit hub in a borough of 2.5 million people involving the relocation of a pro sports franchise, building over railroad tracks, etc. It was bound to be complicated, and it's worth noting that it got built anyways. I've lived walking distance from the neighborhood in question for 17 years, and that project has nothing to do with a developer wanting to put up a regular old high rise rental apartment building or three, which seems to happen nearly daily around here. The Fulton/Flatbush corridors have been transformed literally in a matter of months.
  - mgce 10y ago
    Pacific Park has been a uniquely challenging and contentious project. It's an extreme outlier.
diminoten 10y ago
I realize this is super unpopular as an opinion, but why is it always a given that everyone should be able to live everywhere? What's inherently wrong with high rent in San Francisco? I'm sure we can talk about lots of bad reasons why rent is high, but the mere fact of high rent isn't itself bad, right? Why do we need to reform?
- Decade 10y ago
  Some people paying high rent is fine. You are rich, you get to spend a lot of money. Usually, I don't care. Cities are important for too many reasons for me to enumerate right now. Basically, if we can't keep cities healthy, then our civilization will collapse, and we won't be able to rebuild. We have a problem when the option to spend less is not available. Then, to have access to the jobs and opportunities of the city, the workers have to spend inordinate amounts of money on expensive rents and time on commuting, which reduces the social benefit of having jobs. https://medium.com/@laurafooteclark/how-do-we-avoid-another-trump-1d4fcf04b9fe https://medium.com/@laurafooteclark/how-do-we-avoid-another-... It also reduces the real wealth, as value is diverted to past landowners (and tenants taking advantage of abusive laws, which are why I never supported the San Francisco Tenants Union) and not to the city as a whole. The Bay Area schools can't even hire teachers for all of their classrooms. We are awash in money, but experiencing poverty.
  - diminoten 10y ago
    If it were a "real" poverty experience, house values would drop, wouldn't they? Apparently the issues experienced as a result of high housing prices aren't valued enough to drive prices of the homes down, yet. I guess my point, if I had one at all, is that it seems like the housing market is absurdly high in such a way that will eventually self balance, one way or another. Either the city will continue to sustain itself on the backs of the long commuters who can't afford to live in the city, or the quality of life in the city will drop, which will in turn lower housing prices until the workers who make the city life appealing can afford to live close enough to again commute reasonably. If, as you say, education is suffering, people will stop buying the houses, or they'll stop bringing kids to the districts. Either way, problem self-corrects, right?
Eridrus 10y ago
Construction costs for housing are pretty non-negligible in these cities, I spent a few hours reading about the situation in NYC; this article (based on a private report) puts average costs in Manhattan of $400-600 per square foot: https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-craze/ https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-cr... I couldn't figure out if this included the cost of land, but I saw other estimates put the hard construction cost (i.e. not including insurance, etc) at ~$330/sqft in NYC (not just Manhattan). With those sorts of prices, it's clear why people are building luxury condos. I spent some time looking at prefab construction costs for sky scrapers to see if they could be part of the solution, and in NYC they were targeting cost reductions in the 20% range (even with union concessions), but ended with huge cost overruns and ended construction at ~60% of the planned height. So, I'm all for building more housing, it's really the only thing that can fundamentally fix things, but it sounds like we need to get better at building cheaper housing. A lot of that might end up as making people want to spread out, by building more transit (which also needs to get cheaper) or convincing people that they should spread out and build their own communities; they don't have to look like the suburbs, Brooklyn certainly doesn't.
- yardie 10y ago
  $400x1000 sqftx50% markup is around $600k. Which seems reasonable to me for NYC. But the real prices are way above that.
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    600k seems like a best case estimate here. Given that $400 is the low end of Manhattan construction and these projects are definitely not risk free. Even at 600k per apartment, you're not going to solve housing for everyone, you're still only hitting a price point that is good for the upper middle class. I wish I had a clearer breakdown of costs, but most of Manhattan is built up, so land costs are going to be huge in most areas; you know that developers are looking at the least developed areas because that's where land is cheapest, so if you start building in places that are already expenses your costs will go up.
metaphorm 10y ago
NYTimes reliably notices trends 10 years late, and gets the analysis wrong even with the benefit of hindsight.
bufordsharkley 10y ago
"We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing." But why do we tend to create such restrictive zoning and approval processes? I think it's inescapable to conclude that this is a rational response to the low holding cost we currently impose on holding land. If you're a landowner equipped with the power of zoning, why would you want to allow more development elsewhere? In the immediate reaction (common to NIMBYs), one has everything to gain and nothing to lose. In a more market-driven situation, the landowner would weigh the desire for lower density against a real cost-- that is, the rising value of land would create more of a tax burden. (This would be the case in California if not for the anti-market behavior of Prop 13.) In an ideal situation, the burden of additional development nearby (congestion, shadows, etc), would be perfectly balanced against a drop in a tax burden. So I'll just conclude that you're correct, but not looking deeply enough. All things eventually go back to the taxation policy on land and other natural resources. I can't recommend enough the book by William Fischel, "The Economics of Zoning Laws"[0] (later published in a revised edition as "Zoning Rules!") to see the rationality of all actors in the current paradigm. And the constructive recommendations? 1) Repeal Prop 13. 2) Push for a Land Value Tax. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Zoning-Laws-Property-Approach/dp/0801835623 https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Zoning-Laws-Property-Approa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
- kspaans 10y ago
  I think that in CA the biggest factor you can point at is Prop 13. Current residential landowners are getting the benefits of rising values without the costs of higher taxes. NIMBY or otherwise, the incentives are pretty clear when framed this way. And I think the costs trickle down to things like lot-rental prices for mobile home parks rise just like rents do.
dcposch 10y ago
> We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing. There's a group working hard to do this every day. Consider joining SF Yimby: https://sfyimby.org https://sfyimby.org Alternatively, you can donate to Carla, basically the legal wing of SF Yimby. They are also a nonprofit & tax deductible. They sue Bay Area cities that are not meeting building targets under the Housing Accountability Act. If they win and set precedent it will be very high leverage / make a big difference, since most municipalities here are nowhere close to meeting their housing targets today. http://www.carlaef.org http://www.carlaef.org
dcosson 10y ago
Agree, it's absurd that housing costs in these cities have been growing many times faster than GDP, wages, you name it for 20-30 years. Now the second that the housing markets soften a bit and we might actually have a chance of catching up a little to where we should have been in terms of keeping cities affordable to more people, they're acting like we should just forget about the whole thing.
monksy 10y ago
You hit the nail on the head with that one. Chicago is seeing this. New housing is being built all arround me. However it's 1.5k for a studio. That's the cheapest it goes. 2 rooms goes for 2.6k starting. Nobody is building modest housing options. They're all going luxory in Logan Square. That's incredibly unreasonable. I kind of hope that some of these developers are going to go belly up over this.
- closeparen 10y ago
  Why does it need to be the new housing that's affordable? Or are you not seeing any effect on the pricing of older housing?
  - monksy 10y ago
    The new luxury apartments are demonstrating that a higher price point is achievable in the area. Older housing pretty much is most of the market. But the newer high rises are replacing them. New affordable housing is needed as that the demand is high. (Chicago has had a very liquidable market for housing in the last few years)
- lists 10y ago
  Have you looked in Pilsen, Humboldt Park, or West Logan Square? I live in Ukrainian Village and live alone in a 2BR I pay $800/mo for.
branchless 10y ago
The price of money sets the cost of the land. The cost to build is not the driving factor.

by Decade 10y ago

kevinstubbs 10y ago

Is there any merit to the argument that increasing population density will make bad traffic exponentially worse?

wutbrodo 10y ago
I can't imagine there wouldn't be, which is why a sane transit policy is also required. It's a slightly over-simplified but fairly-explanatory model to say that every mile traveled in a car is a failure of transit policy.
erispoe 10y ago
No. Because increased density goes with less reliance on individual cars. The majority of people (by far) in NY or SF don't have a car already. Traffic is not bad in the densest cities of the western world, because we have much more efficient ways of moving people around: public transit. But you also need density to sustain public transit. So you have sour spot where there's not enough density to have good public transit, but enough to create bad traffic. Edit: see below, it's actually the majority of new households that don't have a car in many large American cities, except for NYC, in majority car-free.
- ghaff 10y ago
  About 30% of households in San Francisco do not own cars.[1] That's not the majority "by far." NYC is the only city in the US where the majority of households do not own a car (~56%). But "by far" still only really applies to Manhattan. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_households_without_a_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...
  - cowsandmilk 10y ago
    In the most dense part of NYC, Manhattan, 73% of people don't have access to a car[1], which supports the idea that with more density comes less car dependence/ownership. [1] https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_5YR/S0801/0600000US3606144919 https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_5YR/S...
    - L_Rahman 10y ago
      But this is true only if there's enough public infrastructure to support that kind of living. I'm in the East Village and I have these subways in a 10 min walk radius: 4|5|6|N|Q|R|B|D|F|M|L I can make a no transfer trip to anywhere in Manhattan and most parts of Brooklyn and Queens. If I lived in a part of Manhattan or NYC that didn't have these levels of access, I'd be very tempted to get a car.
      - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
        I lived on a block just about the furthest from any subway in manhattan: 81st and York[0]. A car never crossed my mind. http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/99544282749/found-the-manhattan-apartment-thats-the-farthest http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/99544282749/found-the-manhat...
  - Tiksi 10y ago
    To be fair, of those in the outer boroughs of NY that do have a car, (anecdotally) they don't commute with it. From what I've seen, the car is for trips out of the city or occasionally getting something big home, or used as part of their job (Taxi, Contractor truck/van, etc).
Tiktaalik 10y ago
No because the size of roads in urban areas is fixed. Traffic will reach the carrying capacity of the roads and the incentives to drive get worse and worse and people will choose alternatives to driving. If roads and highways are expanded then traffic will increase.
bluGill 10y ago
Density should enable walking which changes everything. A farmer in the middle of nowhere (US or Canada - other countries have different situations that I cannot comment on) is looking at more than 30 minutes to the nearest grocery store if he drives. To walk would be 10 hours each way. As we go down we hit the suburbs - 10 minutes to the store, but still 2 hours to walk. (if you took the same route as the car it would be about an hour, but that means walking on a busy road with no sidewalks, so you end up having to take a much longer route) High density allows stores and restaurants to exist just to serve the people within a couple blocks. You take the elevator downstairs, and within a couple blocks is everything you need to buy, and the job you need to earn money to buy it with. When this is the world you rarely drive anywhere so you are not adding to congestion. Now there is still congestion all those stores/business need to be provided with goods to sell. However a truck that takes up 4 cars worth of space is bringing enough goods to last 400 people for the day, where the cars in the other examples where for 1 person (all facts in this sentence were made up - they seem reasonable but I don't know how to find the right ones). This limits how dense we can get with just surface streets. Note that the above is a should. Zoning laws often put high density far enough away from stores that you have to drive anyway - this makes congestion worse.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  Ideally you get to mixed use buildings. Ground and maybe first floor dedicated to businesses (shops, offices, gyms, etc.), everything above is residences. Not for every building, you'll still have highrise office buildings (because you need that density of workspaces still, and their ground and first floor will be their local restaurants and gyms and such). But now the average person can get to a small grocery within 100-200m, and a larger one within 500m. Busses can be more effective for transporting people between regions of high residential density to areas of higher office/industrial or shopping density (primarily used by shops carrying non-daily purchase items or requiring more space).
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Grocery store is an interesting example. I've never lived in a dense city so I don't know how this is done. I doubt I could carry a week of groceries for my modest family (2 adults, 2 children) 1 block, let alone several. Do you maybe use personal carts or what?

rubicon33 10y ago

With any luck, millennials won't leave the city like their predecessors. If they stay long enough, they'll grow frustrated, and get active within city government. If they have the numbers, and the organization, we COULD see changes to restrictive housing policies in places like SF and NY. Lots of ifs. I'm hopeful.

Decade 10y ago
http://www.sfyimby.org/ http://www.sfyimby.org/ For the first time, I’m also hopeful.
L_Rahman 10y ago
You should be! I'm one of those millennials. I moved to the East Village last year and plan to attend to my first Community Board meeting early next month. From a quick glance of what the board did in January 2017: http://www.nyc.gov/html/mancb3/html/calendar/calendar.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/mancb3/html/calendar/calendar.shtml The focus was mostly on quality of life for existing residents - liquor license approvals, art installations and cultural activities. These are important things and people should care about them, but it's striking that those groups had meetings while the following didn't: - Transportation and Public Safety - Land Use, Zoning, Public and Private Housing - Public Housing and Section 8 Housing I'm going to spend the next couple of months attending these meetings to figure out how it all works. I should caveat however that I'm atypical in this attitude. Because I spent the entirety of my childhood in dense urban environments - Dhaka and New York - I'm attached to city living. Most of my millennial friends are planning to take make the suburban trek.
- vdnkh 10y ago
  I moved to Kip's Bay in May and thanks for this comment - I'm going to attend a meeting too.
deathanatos 10y ago
> get active within city government. The problem with this is that you only have an indirect say in the government; one can't vote if one is priced out of the city.

deleted 10y ago

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gist 10y ago

> the NY Times sees an actual phenomenon, but fails to understand it. True but remember that the NYT, like any publication, isn't academic research or journal. It isn't 'graded' and doesn't succeed or fail on facts and accuracy. Almost the only job it has is in making interesting enough reading that will help them sell advertising. It's entertainment. Nobody (or at least no professional) is using it to make investment decisions. (Although actually I am sure that is perhaps the case but that's not the paper's responsibility).

bluGill 10y ago
NYT also has reputation. If they publish too many stories that are false/inaccurate their reputation falls and people with stop reading it. How low can they go before this happens is a question.
kesselvon 10y ago
Reputation for facts and accuracy is the lifeblood for mainstream newspapers, because it attracts a specific demographic that they can charge a premium for the ad space. Degrading newspapers to the point of 'entertainment' is just fallacious

jobu 10y ago

> So the big developers and financiers wait until the market goes to insanity levels before making a little boom of construction. Seems likely that housing market insanity also puts political pressure on the zoning and permitting process to be more lenient with exceptions and approvals.

CPLX 10y ago

> The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco. What's the basis for this comment? I feel like I read something like this on HN every time the topic of affordable housing comes up, and it's usually written by a Bay Area resident who just kind of assumes that's the way things work rather than a uniquely dysfunctional characteristic of where they live. NYC has it's issues, and expensive housing, obviously, but it doesn't seem similar to SF really at all. Where I live in downtown Brooklyn, literally dozens of huge high rise residential rental buildings have been built in just the last few years, the area is almost unrecognizable. We're talking thousands of apartments, literally. What are these abusive zoning policies, specifically? Is NYC really suffering from a problem of low density? You sure? There are many issues with affordable housing in NYC, but I'm not at all convinced that you've really hit on any of them.

fovc 10y ago
NYC is quite challenging to develop. For the story of some of those units in Brooklyn you're talking about, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Park,_Brooklyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Park,_Brooklyn
- CPLX 10y ago
  That's not even remotely representative of the general climate for development in the area, and wasn't one of the projects I was talking about. That was a huge and high profile project to reshape the busiest street and transit hub in a borough of 2.5 million people involving the relocation of a pro sports franchise, building over railroad tracks, etc. It was bound to be complicated, and it's worth noting that it got built anyways. I've lived walking distance from the neighborhood in question for 17 years, and that project has nothing to do with a developer wanting to put up a regular old high rise rental apartment building or three, which seems to happen nearly daily around here. The Fulton/Flatbush corridors have been transformed literally in a matter of months.
- mgce 10y ago
  Pacific Park has been a uniquely challenging and contentious project. It's an extreme outlier.

diminoten 10y ago

I realize this is super unpopular as an opinion, but why is it always a given that everyone should be able to live everywhere? What's inherently wrong with high rent in San Francisco? I'm sure we can talk about lots of bad reasons why rent is high, but the mere fact of high rent isn't itself bad, right? Why do we need to reform?

Decade 10y ago
Some people paying high rent is fine. You are rich, you get to spend a lot of money. Usually, I don't care. Cities are important for too many reasons for me to enumerate right now. Basically, if we can't keep cities healthy, then our civilization will collapse, and we won't be able to rebuild. We have a problem when the option to spend less is not available. Then, to have access to the jobs and opportunities of the city, the workers have to spend inordinate amounts of money on expensive rents and time on commuting, which reduces the social benefit of having jobs. https://medium.com/@laurafooteclark/how-do-we-avoid-another-trump-1d4fcf04b9fe https://medium.com/@laurafooteclark/how-do-we-avoid-another-... It also reduces the real wealth, as value is diverted to past landowners (and tenants taking advantage of abusive laws, which are why I never supported the San Francisco Tenants Union) and not to the city as a whole. The Bay Area schools can't even hire teachers for all of their classrooms. We are awash in money, but experiencing poverty.
- diminoten 10y ago
  If it were a "real" poverty experience, house values would drop, wouldn't they? Apparently the issues experienced as a result of high housing prices aren't valued enough to drive prices of the homes down, yet. I guess my point, if I had one at all, is that it seems like the housing market is absurdly high in such a way that will eventually self balance, one way or another. Either the city will continue to sustain itself on the backs of the long commuters who can't afford to live in the city, or the quality of life in the city will drop, which will in turn lower housing prices until the workers who make the city life appealing can afford to live close enough to again commute reasonably. If, as you say, education is suffering, people will stop buying the houses, or they'll stop bringing kids to the districts. Either way, problem self-corrects, right?

Eridrus 10y ago

Construction costs for housing are pretty non-negligible in these cities, I spent a few hours reading about the situation in NYC; this article (based on a private report) puts average costs in Manhattan of $400-600 per square foot: https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-craze/ https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-cr... I couldn't figure out if this included the cost of land, but I saw other estimates put the hard construction cost (i.e. not including insurance, etc) at ~$330/sqft in NYC (not just Manhattan). With those sorts of prices, it's clear why people are building luxury condos. I spent some time looking at prefab construction costs for sky scrapers to see if they could be part of the solution, and in NYC they were targeting cost reductions in the 20% range (even with union concessions), but ended with huge cost overruns and ended construction at ~60% of the planned height. So, I'm all for building more housing, it's really the only thing that can fundamentally fix things, but it sounds like we need to get better at building cheaper housing. A lot of that might end up as making people want to spread out, by building more transit (which also needs to get cheaper) or convincing people that they should spread out and build their own communities; they don't have to look like the suburbs, Brooklyn certainly doesn't.

yardie 10y ago
$400x1000 sqftx50% markup is around $600k. Which seems reasonable to me for NYC. But the real prices are way above that.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  600k seems like a best case estimate here. Given that $400 is the low end of Manhattan construction and these projects are definitely not risk free. Even at 600k per apartment, you're not going to solve housing for everyone, you're still only hitting a price point that is good for the upper middle class. I wish I had a clearer breakdown of costs, but most of Manhattan is built up, so land costs are going to be huge in most areas; you know that developers are looking at the least developed areas because that's where land is cheapest, so if you start building in places that are already expenses your costs will go up.

metaphorm 10y ago

NYTimes reliably notices trends 10 years late, and gets the analysis wrong even with the benefit of hindsight.

bufordsharkley 10y ago

"We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing." But why do we tend to create such restrictive zoning and approval processes? I think it's inescapable to conclude that this is a rational response to the low holding cost we currently impose on holding land. If you're a landowner equipped with the power of zoning, why would you want to allow more development elsewhere? In the immediate reaction (common to NIMBYs), one has everything to gain and nothing to lose. In a more market-driven situation, the landowner would weigh the desire for lower density against a real cost-- that is, the rising value of land would create more of a tax burden. (This would be the case in California if not for the anti-market behavior of Prop 13.) In an ideal situation, the burden of additional development nearby (congestion, shadows, etc), would be perfectly balanced against a drop in a tax burden. So I'll just conclude that you're correct, but not looking deeply enough. All things eventually go back to the taxation policy on land and other natural resources. I can't recommend enough the book by William Fischel, "The Economics of Zoning Laws"[0] (later published in a revised edition as "Zoning Rules!") to see the rationality of all actors in the current paradigm. And the constructive recommendations? 1) Repeal Prop 13. 2) Push for a Land Value Tax. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Zoning-Laws-Property-Approach/dp/0801835623 https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Zoning-Laws-Property-Approa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

kspaans 10y ago
I think that in CA the biggest factor you can point at is Prop 13. Current residential landowners are getting the benefits of rising values without the costs of higher taxes. NIMBY or otherwise, the incentives are pretty clear when framed this way. And I think the costs trickle down to things like lot-rental prices for mobile home parks rise just like rents do.

dcposch 10y ago

> We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing. There's a group working hard to do this every day. Consider joining SF Yimby: https://sfyimby.org https://sfyimby.org Alternatively, you can donate to Carla, basically the legal wing of SF Yimby. They are also a nonprofit & tax deductible. They sue Bay Area cities that are not meeting building targets under the Housing Accountability Act. If they win and set precedent it will be very high leverage / make a big difference, since most municipalities here are nowhere close to meeting their housing targets today. http://www.carlaef.org http://www.carlaef.org

dcosson 10y ago

Agree, it's absurd that housing costs in these cities have been growing many times faster than GDP, wages, you name it for 20-30 years. Now the second that the housing markets soften a bit and we might actually have a chance of catching up a little to where we should have been in terms of keeping cities affordable to more people, they're acting like we should just forget about the whole thing.

monksy 10y ago

You hit the nail on the head with that one. Chicago is seeing this. New housing is being built all arround me. However it's 1.5k for a studio. That's the cheapest it goes. 2 rooms goes for 2.6k starting. Nobody is building modest housing options. They're all going luxory in Logan Square. That's incredibly unreasonable. I kind of hope that some of these developers are going to go belly up over this.

closeparen 10y ago
Why does it need to be the new housing that's affordable? Or are you not seeing any effect on the pricing of older housing?
- monksy 10y ago
  The new luxury apartments are demonstrating that a higher price point is achievable in the area. Older housing pretty much is most of the market. But the newer high rises are replacing them. New affordable housing is needed as that the demand is high. (Chicago has had a very liquidable market for housing in the last few years)
lists 10y ago
Have you looked in Pilsen, Humboldt Park, or West Logan Square? I live in Ukrainian Village and live alone in a 2BR I pay $800/mo for.

branchless 10y ago

The price of money sets the cost of the land. The cost to build is not the driving factor.