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> The livability crisis that’s currently afflicting Seattle and San Francisco is evidence of how cities need to be careful what they wish for when it comes to t

> The livability crisis that’s currently afflicting Seattle and San Francisco is evidence of how cities need to be careful what they wish for when it comes to the explosive growth of technology companies (and the attendant wealth that comes with it) in their metropolises. Let me get this straight, New Yorkers should view Seattle and SF as cautionary tales for what happens when high-paying jobs arrive in a metropolitan area? Has the author ever visited New York City? SF's issues aren't caused by swanky new jobs, they're caused by NIMBY politics. NYC has easily 10x the number of high-earning jobs as SF, no matter how you define high-earning. Fortunately, the people running our local zoning are only like a 5 or 6 on a 10-scale of batshit crazy.

whatok 8y ago
New York definitely has an affordable housing issue but a vast over supply of luxury housing (a lot still going up to) that I'd imagine a good portion of these hires would be taking up.
- tfehring 8y ago
  In what sense is there an oversupply of luxury housing? Are there lots of vacant luxury units?
  - whatok 8y ago
    There are a lot of vacancies and nearly unheard of concessions being thrown out there. A ridiculous amount of construction as well. If there's prolonged weakness, concessions eventually turn into rent decreases. https://ny.curbed.com/2018/4/12/17227574/new-york-rent-market-reports-march-2018 https://ny.curbed.com/2018/4/12/17227574/new-york-rent-marke...
    - tfehring 8y ago
      All of that seems good and necessary - given that the median net effective rent is still over $3k/month in Manhattan, and that there's apparently room to profitably continue building, it sounds like things are headed in the right direction.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - SneakyMission 8y ago
    > In what sense is there an oversupply of luxury housing? Are there lots of vacant luxury units? Short answer, yes. If you're interested in detailed information about NYC housing, I definitely recommend checking out the Housing and Vacancy survey data (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/about/2017-hvs-initial-findings.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/about/2017-hvs...)
  - cowmoo728 8y ago
    The number of vacant apartments and the number of apartments listed for sale/rent are both at an all time high. Despite this, most new construction is priced at the high end of the market. In addition, there's been a big boom in ultra-high-end multimillion dollar apartments. https://www.6sqft.com/nearly-250000-nyc-rental-apartments-sit-vacant/ https://www.6sqft.com/nearly-250000-nyc-rental-apartments-si... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/realestate/brooklyn-development.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/realestate/brooklyn-devel...
    - bko 8y ago
      New construction of expensive high end apartments help lower the prices on other units. Wealthy people will move there rather than driving up prices on dilapidated brown-stones. Its kind of how the average new car price is 30k, which is off limits for many Americans. But the new car inventory drives down the price of older models.
      - JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
        The problem is likely more rooted in wealth inequality. As a smaller group of wealthy individuals control a larger portion of the nation's wealth, they will inevitably acquire all sorts of investments (stocks, real estate, etc) driving prices up. If there weren't luxury multi-million dollar apartments to buy, they'd be buying the brownstones anyways. And given that the multimillion dollar units sit on the market far longer than the more affordable housing stock, is there even really high demand among the wealthy to own premium housing? Luxury housing gets built because it's the only thing that's profitable to the builder once you take into account zoning and permits and regulations that need to be satisfied in order to build. What we really need is relaxed policy that allows for the profitable building of run-of-the-mill, average housing.
        goobynight 8y ago
        Wealthy people are less likely to stay put in one place I think. Thus, there's a demand to rent multimillion dollar units for 1-3 years at a time, but not necessarily own one. Poor or average people buy a house in order to save money on rent. Rich people don't care about that amount and can easily get their stuff moved with company money. They recover the rent vs mortgage cost via increased flexibility.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  Its a great example of how just building more housing isn't a complete solution, because all builders are going to target the top of the market if they at all can.
  - manfredo 8y ago
    No. The price of housing is not determined by the builder. Like any good its price is driven by what people are willing to pay. Here in SF, even 230 square foot studios are considered "luxury housing" because the shortage of housing is that extreme. Any new construction commands a premium over old housing. In effect, restrictions on building more "luxury housing" restricts the construction of most new housing even if it is high density. Building more housing, and giving incentives to build as much housing as possible is indeed a complete solution.
    - throwaway2048 8y ago
      Tell that to china https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19171099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19171099 They have something like 65 MILLION excess, unused apartments, almost exclusively targeting the luxury market (because they are created and valued as investment first, housing second), and they still have extreme affordability issues. Building more housing is absolutely not a complete solution.
      - whatok 8y ago
        I really don't think it's fair to compare China's housing policies to the United States' policies as they couldn't be more different.
        throwaway2048 8y ago
        Of course there are differences, merely pointing out if building more housing, even building more housing to an almost comically absurd extent solved affordability issues by themselves, China wouldn't have them.
thrownaway954 8y ago
A high paying job doesn't mean alot when a pack of cigarettes are $15 and rent is $4K a month. The issue with NY is the HIGH cost of living. You can only eat $1 slice pizza for so long.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Tempest1981 8y ago
Simply the rate of change/growth, and the pressure it places on cities and long-time residents, are valid reasons for caution. You imply that these issues are easily solved, if people like NIMBYs "simply" change their mindset. But history shows that mindset-change is a slow and stressful process. Cautionary tales are a chance to study such issues, and find solutions, or at least strategies -- something that govt is usually bad at. Not blame the victims.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  How is it putting a pressure on long-time residents exactly? New York is always changing it's a very expensive city to live in and it's getting more end more expensive. That's how it is for us living here. Everyone. I don't see the argument in what you are saying.
  - Gokenstein 8y ago
    In Chicago I saw first hand how it turned the Mayor into everyone's favorite punching bag: Housing prices go up. Developers move in and scoop up desirable properties, remodel the kitchen, paint it grey, and sell to a young tech worker for 3-4x what they bought the property for or demo a 100 year old beautiful greystone and put up a modern shipping container on stilts with 8 apartments and no parking. Property values go up, long time residents are getting older. The ones who CAN move sell first and you get a runaway housing bubble. The ones who CAN'T move? They're on a fixed income. They need public services but they can't afford more taxes. Property taxes go up. Sometimes older people on fixed income can get a freeze, but taxes go up anyway. More people, more services. People don't like taxes going up so either you put it off as long as you can while services atrophy and you make it the next guy's problem, or eventually schools start going bankrupt. Teachers go on strike, not enough police, not enough money to keep up transit and infrastructure, and you've got a lot of upper middle class people living in a very expensive post-apocalyptic hell hole. That's Chicago.
  - Tempest1981 8y ago
    Many long-time residents are renters, who get pushed out. Isn't New York over 50% renters? People see and fear gentrification. Granted, it can't be stopped, but it shouldn't be ignored.
Bartweiss 8y ago
I've seen quite a few takes suggesting NYC will be transformed by the sudden arrival of high earners, like the Seattle city councilors who went to NYC to warn the city about their mistakes.[1] Whatever Amazon's merits, the specific arguments seem ludicrous. Seattle lawmakers talked about how Amazon took up 20% of the city's office space. That was 45,000 workers in a city of 730,000 (6%), and a metro area of 3,800,000. NYC was looking at 25,000 Amazon employees against a city population of 8,600,000 (0.02%), and a metro population of 20,300,000. This claim looks similarly awful. NYC and Seattle have surprisingly similar average salaries ($69K), but the relative impact of 25k workers earning double that is 1%-5% as large in NYC. Manhattan is already the highest-earning county in the entire nation, so much so that adding Amazon employees there would bring down the average salary! If anything, what I find wildest is that NYC has kept its housing prices halfway sane. It's wrapped around a river and a bay, half on an island, in the middle of an area so urbanized it inspired the word 'megalopolis'. A huge fraction of its development is pre-automotive, so transport in and out ranges from 'tricky' to 'crisis'. It has the highest-earning county in the country, which is also one of the highest wealth-throughput areas in the world. And so the median house price there is... perhaps 20% higher than Seattle's, despite 4x the population density? Manhattan prices are at the same income multiple as Seattle and the rest of NYC? What the heck? It's not that people don't know Seattle housing prices are excessive, and the boom is pretty recent, but I don't understand why it's viewed as a narrow issue of wages and population growth. Whatever raised those prices, they still point to something seriously wrong with the way things are functioning now. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/07/seattle-lawmakers-warn-new-york-city-about-amazon https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/07/seattle-l...
- tanilama 8y ago
  That has more due to the local zoning law, I don't think Seattle housing would be this expensive had there be more high rises like NYC.
- derekdahmer 8y ago
  What a lot of people don't realize is Manhattan in 2018 still has less people living in it then it did in 1950. The massive immigration of young working people in the 1920s led to large scale development high density housing. Living costs were out of control and people lived 8 to a room in extremely unsafe tenements but the upside is the city's housing and transportation infrastructure was built for a capacity it still has not yet claimed back today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City#Manhattan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor...
vkou 8y ago
> SF's issues aren't caused by swanky new jobs, they're caused by NIMBY politics. What are Seattle's issues, caused by, then? Because if you look at the Seattle city skyline, you'll find it absolutely covered in cranes. This town of 700,000 people, in a state of 7 million people, has more active cranes then any other city in North America. It's a construction free-for-all here. And I consider that a good thing - but clearly, its not enough to keep me from having to step over human shit on my way to work. We also have no rent control, no proposition 13, we aren't surrounded by water on three sides, and our suburbs are actually developing - so you can't blame those boogiemen, either. But we do have an explosion of incredibly well-paid tech professionals... With the only thing trickling down to normal people being rent increases.
- anth_anm 8y ago
  Rents have been doing better over the while haven't they? Still have a massive shortage of housing to buy. :/
  - vkou 8y ago
    Growth of the average has slowed, but rent for lower-end units is growing. Growth in housing prices has slowed, but at this point, the only homes normal people can afford are an hour out of town - North Bend/Everett/etc. And, even if things magically get better tomorrow, the lower class has gone through a decade of pain to get there.
oarabbus_ 8y ago
>NYC has easily 10x the number of high-earning jobs as SF, no matter how you define high-earning. Well it does have 10x the population so you'd expect around 10x the number of high paying jobs.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  True enough, and the two cities actually have similar average salaries. But Amazon wasn't proposing to bring in 10x as many workers to NYC as Seattle; they were proposing a bit over half as many. In both wealth and space, one Amazon office is just a far smaller deal in NYC than Seattle. The more controversial part is whether that just means "less effect", or can actually change the role played. I'm very much in the second camp. The conflict here is not so much over "good or bad" but timeframe; rising demand helps cities and raises the standard of living for residents, but demand shocks can destabilize people and produce housing shortages even under good policy. Seattle saw 18% population growth by migration in a decade, with Amazon staff becoming 6% of the population, and housing prices rose about 80% in seven years. That sort of disruptive change just isn't on the table in NYC.
Bartweiss 8y ago
> SF's issues aren't caused by swanky new jobs, they're caused by NIMBY politics. A fun stat I just learned: Seattle's population density is 13 people per acre, but its parking density is 29 spaces per acre. Complaining about too many high earners and too much migration into a city seems like a pretty hostile place to start when there's still room to have two parking spaces for every human.

whatok 8y ago

New York definitely has an affordable housing issue but a vast over supply of luxury housing (a lot still going up to) that I'd imagine a good portion of these hires would be taking up.

tfehring 8y ago
In what sense is there an oversupply of luxury housing? Are there lots of vacant luxury units?
- whatok 8y ago
  There are a lot of vacancies and nearly unheard of concessions being thrown out there. A ridiculous amount of construction as well. If there's prolonged weakness, concessions eventually turn into rent decreases. https://ny.curbed.com/2018/4/12/17227574/new-york-rent-market-reports-march-2018 https://ny.curbed.com/2018/4/12/17227574/new-york-rent-marke...
  - tfehring 8y ago
    All of that seems good and necessary - given that the median net effective rent is still over $3k/month in Manhattan, and that there's apparently room to profitably continue building, it sounds like things are headed in the right direction.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- SneakyMission 8y ago
  > In what sense is there an oversupply of luxury housing? Are there lots of vacant luxury units? Short answer, yes. If you're interested in detailed information about NYC housing, I definitely recommend checking out the Housing and Vacancy survey data (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/about/2017-hvs-initial-findings.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/about/2017-hvs...)
- cowmoo728 8y ago
  The number of vacant apartments and the number of apartments listed for sale/rent are both at an all time high. Despite this, most new construction is priced at the high end of the market. In addition, there's been a big boom in ultra-high-end multimillion dollar apartments. https://www.6sqft.com/nearly-250000-nyc-rental-apartments-sit-vacant/ https://www.6sqft.com/nearly-250000-nyc-rental-apartments-si... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/realestate/brooklyn-development.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/realestate/brooklyn-devel...
  - bko 8y ago
    New construction of expensive high end apartments help lower the prices on other units. Wealthy people will move there rather than driving up prices on dilapidated brown-stones. Its kind of how the average new car price is 30k, which is off limits for many Americans. But the new car inventory drives down the price of older models.
    - JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
      The problem is likely more rooted in wealth inequality. As a smaller group of wealthy individuals control a larger portion of the nation's wealth, they will inevitably acquire all sorts of investments (stocks, real estate, etc) driving prices up. If there weren't luxury multi-million dollar apartments to buy, they'd be buying the brownstones anyways. And given that the multimillion dollar units sit on the market far longer than the more affordable housing stock, is there even really high demand among the wealthy to own premium housing? Luxury housing gets built because it's the only thing that's profitable to the builder once you take into account zoning and permits and regulations that need to be satisfied in order to build. What we really need is relaxed policy that allows for the profitable building of run-of-the-mill, average housing.
      - goobynight 8y ago
        Wealthy people are less likely to stay put in one place I think. Thus, there's a demand to rent multimillion dollar units for 1-3 years at a time, but not necessarily own one. Poor or average people buy a house in order to save money on rent. Rich people don't care about that amount and can easily get their stuff moved with company money. They recover the rent vs mortgage cost via increased flexibility.
throwaway2048 8y ago
Its a great example of how just building more housing isn't a complete solution, because all builders are going to target the top of the market if they at all can.
- manfredo 8y ago
  No. The price of housing is not determined by the builder. Like any good its price is driven by what people are willing to pay. Here in SF, even 230 square foot studios are considered "luxury housing" because the shortage of housing is that extreme. Any new construction commands a premium over old housing. In effect, restrictions on building more "luxury housing" restricts the construction of most new housing even if it is high density. Building more housing, and giving incentives to build as much housing as possible is indeed a complete solution.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    Tell that to china https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19171099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19171099 They have something like 65 MILLION excess, unused apartments, almost exclusively targeting the luxury market (because they are created and valued as investment first, housing second), and they still have extreme affordability issues. Building more housing is absolutely not a complete solution.
    - whatok 8y ago
      I really don't think it's fair to compare China's housing policies to the United States' policies as they couldn't be more different.
      - throwaway2048 8y ago
        Of course there are differences, merely pointing out if building more housing, even building more housing to an almost comically absurd extent solved affordability issues by themselves, China wouldn't have them.

thrownaway954 8y ago

A high paying job doesn't mean alot when a pack of cigarettes are $15 and rent is $4K a month. The issue with NY is the HIGH cost of living. You can only eat $1 slice pizza for so long.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Tempest1981 8y ago

Simply the rate of change/growth, and the pressure it places on cities and long-time residents, are valid reasons for caution. You imply that these issues are easily solved, if people like NIMBYs "simply" change their mindset. But history shows that mindset-change is a slow and stressful process. Cautionary tales are a chance to study such issues, and find solutions, or at least strategies -- something that govt is usually bad at. Not blame the victims.

ThomPete 8y ago
How is it putting a pressure on long-time residents exactly? New York is always changing it's a very expensive city to live in and it's getting more end more expensive. That's how it is for us living here. Everyone. I don't see the argument in what you are saying.
- Gokenstein 8y ago
  In Chicago I saw first hand how it turned the Mayor into everyone's favorite punching bag: Housing prices go up. Developers move in and scoop up desirable properties, remodel the kitchen, paint it grey, and sell to a young tech worker for 3-4x what they bought the property for or demo a 100 year old beautiful greystone and put up a modern shipping container on stilts with 8 apartments and no parking. Property values go up, long time residents are getting older. The ones who CAN move sell first and you get a runaway housing bubble. The ones who CAN'T move? They're on a fixed income. They need public services but they can't afford more taxes. Property taxes go up. Sometimes older people on fixed income can get a freeze, but taxes go up anyway. More people, more services. People don't like taxes going up so either you put it off as long as you can while services atrophy and you make it the next guy's problem, or eventually schools start going bankrupt. Teachers go on strike, not enough police, not enough money to keep up transit and infrastructure, and you've got a lot of upper middle class people living in a very expensive post-apocalyptic hell hole. That's Chicago.
- Tempest1981 8y ago
  Many long-time residents are renters, who get pushed out. Isn't New York over 50% renters? People see and fear gentrification. Granted, it can't be stopped, but it shouldn't be ignored.

Bartweiss 8y ago

I've seen quite a few takes suggesting NYC will be transformed by the sudden arrival of high earners, like the Seattle city councilors who went to NYC to warn the city about their mistakes.[1] Whatever Amazon's merits, the specific arguments seem ludicrous. Seattle lawmakers talked about how Amazon took up 20% of the city's office space. That was 45,000 workers in a city of 730,000 (6%), and a metro area of 3,800,000. NYC was looking at 25,000 Amazon employees against a city population of 8,600,000 (0.02%), and a metro population of 20,300,000. This claim looks similarly awful. NYC and Seattle have surprisingly similar average salaries ($69K), but the relative impact of 25k workers earning double that is 1%-5% as large in NYC. Manhattan is already the highest-earning county in the entire nation, so much so that adding Amazon employees there would bring down the average salary! If anything, what I find wildest is that NYC has kept its housing prices halfway sane. It's wrapped around a river and a bay, half on an island, in the middle of an area so urbanized it inspired the word 'megalopolis'. A huge fraction of its development is pre-automotive, so transport in and out ranges from 'tricky' to 'crisis'. It has the highest-earning county in the country, which is also one of the highest wealth-throughput areas in the world. And so the median house price there is... perhaps 20% higher than Seattle's, despite 4x the population density? Manhattan prices are at the same income multiple as Seattle and the rest of NYC? What the heck? It's not that people don't know Seattle housing prices are excessive, and the boom is pretty recent, but I don't understand why it's viewed as a narrow issue of wages and population growth. Whatever raised those prices, they still point to something seriously wrong with the way things are functioning now. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/07/seattle-lawmakers-warn-new-york-city-about-amazon https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/07/seattle-l...

tanilama 8y ago
That has more due to the local zoning law, I don't think Seattle housing would be this expensive had there be more high rises like NYC.
derekdahmer 8y ago
What a lot of people don't realize is Manhattan in 2018 still has less people living in it then it did in 1950. The massive immigration of young working people in the 1920s led to large scale development high density housing. Living costs were out of control and people lived 8 to a room in extremely unsafe tenements but the upside is the city's housing and transportation infrastructure was built for a capacity it still has not yet claimed back today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City#Manhattan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor...

vkou 8y ago

> SF's issues aren't caused by swanky new jobs, they're caused by NIMBY politics. What are Seattle's issues, caused by, then? Because if you look at the Seattle city skyline, you'll find it absolutely covered in cranes. This town of 700,000 people, in a state of 7 million people, has more active cranes then any other city in North America. It's a construction free-for-all here. And I consider that a good thing - but clearly, its not enough to keep me from having to step over human shit on my way to work. We also have no rent control, no proposition 13, we aren't surrounded by water on three sides, and our suburbs are actually developing - so you can't blame those boogiemen, either. But we do have an explosion of incredibly well-paid tech professionals... With the only thing trickling down to normal people being rent increases.

anth_anm 8y ago
Rents have been doing better over the while haven't they? Still have a massive shortage of housing to buy. :/
- vkou 8y ago
  Growth of the average has slowed, but rent for lower-end units is growing. Growth in housing prices has slowed, but at this point, the only homes normal people can afford are an hour out of town - North Bend/Everett/etc. And, even if things magically get better tomorrow, the lower class has gone through a decade of pain to get there.

oarabbus_ 8y ago

>NYC has easily 10x the number of high-earning jobs as SF, no matter how you define high-earning. Well it does have 10x the population so you'd expect around 10x the number of high paying jobs.

Bartweiss 8y ago
True enough, and the two cities actually have similar average salaries. But Amazon wasn't proposing to bring in 10x as many workers to NYC as Seattle; they were proposing a bit over half as many. In both wealth and space, one Amazon office is just a far smaller deal in NYC than Seattle. The more controversial part is whether that just means "less effect", or can actually change the role played. I'm very much in the second camp. The conflict here is not so much over "good or bad" but timeframe; rising demand helps cities and raises the standard of living for residents, but demand shocks can destabilize people and produce housing shortages even under good policy. Seattle saw 18% population growth by migration in a decade, with Amazon staff becoming 6% of the population, and housing prices rose about 80% in seven years. That sort of disruptive change just isn't on the table in NYC.

Bartweiss 8y ago

> SF's issues aren't caused by swanky new jobs, they're caused by NIMBY politics. A fun stat I just learned: Seattle's population density is 13 people per acre, but its parking density is 29 spaces per acre. Complaining about too many high earners and too much migration into a city seems like a pretty hostile place to start when there's still room to have two parking spaces for every human.