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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 t

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...
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  This is a really interesting point, thank you. I hadn't realized NYC's population as a whole was only up 300,000 since 1950, either. Maybe most interesting, the 2 boroughs that gained population are larger (combined) than the 3 that lost it, and even today Queens and Staten Island have the lowest population density. The metro area has grown massively, but for the city proper it looks like not only has growth been slow, it's been steadily evening out density. I wonder how this has played out elsewhere; are there patterns of outcome (and relative unhappiness cause) for population spikes/declines and for lower, prolonged levels of excess demand?
nerfhammer 8y ago
I've found that people the Bay Area at least often don't have an intuitive grasp of the scale of NYC. Something like they think that a borough is more like on the scale of a neighborhood, like the financial district is like Manhattan or Brooklyn is roughly like the Mission.

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...

Bartweiss 8y ago
This is a really interesting point, thank you. I hadn't realized NYC's population as a whole was only up 300,000 since 1950, either. Maybe most interesting, the 2 boroughs that gained population are larger (combined) than the 3 that lost it, and even today Queens and Staten Island have the lowest population density. The metro area has grown massively, but for the city proper it looks like not only has growth been slow, it's been steadily evening out density. I wonder how this has played out elsewhere; are there patterns of outcome (and relative unhappiness cause) for population spikes/declines and for lower, prolonged levels of excess demand?

nerfhammer 8y ago

I've found that people the Bay Area at least often don't have an intuitive grasp of the scale of NYC. Something like they think that a borough is more like on the scale of a neighborhood, like the financial district is like Manhattan or Brooklyn is roughly like the Mission.