8 ms·

What Happened to the West Village?

67 points by kwindla 7y ago

undefined3840 7y ago
Cities change...it’s the longing for days past that created the housing crisis in SF in the name of preservation. I’m not familiar with the exact building restrictions in West Village but I assume there’s strict height restrictions that have been grandfathered in long ago...I’m going to guess these restrictions is the exact reason why the ultra wealthy can just buy up a small building and make it into a SFH, which obviously just exacerbates the housing problems in the neighborhood. The story touched on this a bit but also seems like every time I visit half the stores are either closed or new because rents are so high for businesses. The only stores that I see have staying power are the ones that look like obvious money laundering fronts like jewelry stores. It’s this strange ghost town for retail.
- vobios 7y ago
  There is a section that addresses that specific point: > The Landmarks Preservation Board protects the facades of historic buildings, but not their interiors. Thus landmarking led townhouses once divided into multiple apartments to be converted into single-family mansions for the incoming super-rich—serving only to further inflame the speculative energies that skyrocketed the prices of the buildings they preserved.
momokoko 7y ago
Cities are becoming expensive for two main reasons. People with unlimited funds buy them up because its an investment you can actually use, and dual income couples cannot move to smaller places where it is possible that only one of the two can get a well paying job in their chosen profession. The internet has created an environment where it is incredibly easy for landlords to find tenants and dramatically decrease the cost of tenant churn for them. This allows them to raise rents much more aggressively, and quickly, than they could have done in the past.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Cities are becoming more expensive because of zoning. If you build enough housing that demand equals supply prices will be stable. Tokyo’s population has gone up 50% over the last two decades and property prices and rents are basically flat because they’ve built more housing. Why does this happen in Japan but not NYC or SF? National, not local zoning. State level would probably work too.
  - sdrothrock 7y ago
    > property prices and rents are basically flat because they’ve built more housing. > Why does this happen in Japan but not NYC or SF? I don't think zoning is the complete answer here -- there's a lot of stuff going on in Japan, and in Tokyo in particular, that's very different from the US. For example, a lot of cheaper places are tiny and have no shower or a shared shower. I don't think a lot of Americans would be willing to deal with that, but Japan has a public bath culture/history. In Tokyo in particular, there's a huge amount of public transportation options, which allow people to live farther out and commute easily (with the commute costs being covered by work) -- that's not as simple in NYC. Imagine living in White Plains and commuting to the heart of Tokyo every day in a reliable, timely fashion. Another thing is that a lot of cheaper housing in Tokyo is just old (post-war wood construction with a veneer of modernity) or in just plain bad areas (low-lying areas near rivers, below the water table, on reclaimed land, far from hospitals/fire departments, etc.) On top of all that, housing here just isn't an investment like it is in America. Nobody's house or apartment appreciates with age. It's not as simple as pointing at the average rent and zoning.
    - shuckles 7y ago
      Zoning, building codes, and land use / value capture are all policies from which your observations stem. Housing itself is never the investment. It’s the land upon which the home sits, and I’d be willing to bet that land in Tokyo is expensive (though not as much as the infamous bubble highs) and probably increasingly so with improving amenities.
    - orthoxerox 7y ago
viburnum 7y ago
When nice places for people become too expensive, the obvious thing to do is to make more nice places for people. In America, however, it is only legal to make more nice places for cars.
- vinay427 7y ago
  What does this have to do with the issue in the article? In fact, it even mentions someone likely parking illegally, probably due to a lack of spaces.
semiotagonal 7y ago
I guess this is what they call a "hot take", but it's simply impossible to preserve a neighborhood's character and keep it affordable. You either have to build the same type of residences upward (in the city), or adjacent (in the suburbs), or have prices go through the roof, or have a period of crisis and collapse clear everyone out.
codingslave 7y ago
Was speaking with someone recently about the city feels increasingly empty. There are less store fronts and such for sure, but huge swaths of apartments in NYC are investments. They may sit vacant for years on end for some Saudi Arabian wealth fund. There are certainly reports of the dropping population, but in other ways things feel tangible. Living in NYC you come to discover how small of a world it is, disparate friend groups may in turn know each other, how big is this city really? Neighborhoods feel emptier, huge parts of the population of the city are from wealthy Chinese and foreign backgrounds (this is not to disparage them). They don't really work jobs or have traditional careers, but fill the city, making it seem more hollow.
- vobios 7y ago
  Are there really that many empty apartments? I am sure they exist, but are there really enough of them to make a dent in the market? Having lived in the city for years, I've never actually seen one. I also wonder if you have enough cash to buy and hold NYC apartments, wouldn't your money do better in some sort of a REIT?
  - timidiceball 7y ago
    It’s a problem at the high end (which is most of what’s been built lately) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/realestate/new-development-new-york.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/realestate/new-developmen...
    - vobios 7y ago
      Does the data presented in that article really suggest that the apartments are actually empty or is it simply that it takes a while to sell out a new development? It's going to take a while to move a hundred units, especially if you want to increase the profits. The StreetEasy report the article is inspired by actually shows that in 2019 there were more condos sold than completed.
  - corporateslave5 7y ago
    Where do you put 1 trillion dollars when your main goal is to just preserve it or lose just a little?
ppod 7y ago
The author explicitly acknowledges that the result of rent control is nepotism. Why is someone's friend's niece a better resident of this neighborhood than anyone else?
imgabe 7y ago
Ultimately the people who buy up housing in major cities as a place to park money are going to end up shooting themselves in the foot. Parking a few million dollars in a Manhattan apartment is desirable because it's unlikely to lose value and you can actually use it when you visit. But if all the apartments are owned by people who mostly don't live there and only visit a few times a year, the thing that made them valuable - being located in a desirable, dynamic city where lots of people live and work, is no longer going to be true and they're going to lose value. Cities should implement punitively high property taxes on any homes or apartments that are not used as a primary residence, either by the owner or a tenant.
- gniv 7y ago
  Ironically, strong rent control policies help the rich exactly because of this dynamic. The city is thriving while its most valuable real estate is empty.
  - afpx 7y ago
    Please explain for those of us who fail to see the connection.
    - legitster 7y ago
      Occupancy with rent-control is virtually 100% and guarantees the desirability of non-rent controlled units in the same area. It's an interesting point, but I don't think would crack the top 10 list for reasons rent control is bad.
    - gniv 7y ago
      Note that I'm not saying rent control is bad. Anyway, imgabe argued that having more and more apts owned by rich folks that don't live in them changes the city for the worse, reducing the value of these apts as well. I'm arguing that having rent control means there is a base of people who live there and keep the city/neighbourhood thriving, thus (as a side effect) helping the expensive apts keep their value.
- 7y ago
MisterTea 7y ago
I used to hang out in the village from around 96 or so to the late 00's. The place was packed with all sorts of people visiting the numerous quirky shops, many of which lined 8th st. Punks, metal heads (me included), hip hop, skaters, artsy and bohemian types, tourists, from high school kids to elderly. There was real life there. Record stores, book stores, comic book shops, clothing and fabric shops, collectibles, gaming, etc. We'd go to bleecker bobs and go to this grugy dude in the back and order black metal imports. Generation records always had tons of vinyl and they had a great band tee shirt collection. The chess shop was few doors down and one friend was a frequent player. Over the summer I took the train in to walk around the village and was heartbroken. Half the stores along 8th st are indeed boarded up. Shops I was familiar with were gone. The eerie part that struck me was how empty village was. Sure there were people walking around but not the hustle and bustle of all walks of life prowling the shops. It's been sanitized. And thats whats happening. The white glove suburbanites are doing their damndest to scrub away New York City's "dirty" history so they can live in/visit their septic utopia devoid of unsightly things and people. And the same thing happened to Williamsburg too. They killed my home and I increasingly feel like a stranger in my own city.
- jonahbenton 7y ago
  Has nothing to do with sanitization, frankly. It has everything to do with exploding rents, which themselves are due to the consolidation of commercial (and residental) ownership, changes in yield expectations from real estate, changes in global capital availability, and the benefits that accrue to owners at scale when property lies vacant. And the complete lack of energy or imagination from De Blasio. I have personally seen commercial rents rise by 10x in some extreme cases, from contract to contract, with 2x-4x being more common. When demand isn't there at those prices capital rich owners often can wait and take paper "losses" while the neighborhood takes real losses.
rasz 7y ago
It might be quite eye opening to learn 2000 square foot storefront in Manhattan starts around $10000 a month in the cheapest (ABCD) parts.

67 points by kwindla 7y ago

Cities change...it’s the longing for days past that created the housing crisis in SF in the name of preservation. I’m not familiar with the exact building restrictions in West Village but I assume there’s strict height restrictions that have been grandfathered in long ago...I’m going to guess these restrictions is the exact reason why the ultra wealthy can just buy up a small building and make it into a SFH, which obviously just exacerbates the housing problems in the neighborhood. The story touched on this a bit but also seems like every time I visit half the stores are either closed or new because rents are so high for businesses. The only stores that I see have staying power are the ones that look like obvious money laundering fronts like jewelry stores. It’s this strange ghost town for retail.

vobios 7y ago
There is a section that addresses that specific point: > The Landmarks Preservation Board protects the facades of historic buildings, but not their interiors. Thus landmarking led townhouses once divided into multiple apartments to be converted into single-family mansions for the incoming super-rich—serving only to further inflame the speculative energies that skyrocketed the prices of the buildings they preserved.

momokoko 7y ago

Cities are becoming expensive for two main reasons. People with unlimited funds buy them up because its an investment you can actually use, and dual income couples cannot move to smaller places where it is possible that only one of the two can get a well paying job in their chosen profession. The internet has created an environment where it is incredibly easy for landlords to find tenants and dramatically decrease the cost of tenant churn for them. This allows them to raise rents much more aggressively, and quickly, than they could have done in the past.

barry-cotter 7y ago
Cities are becoming more expensive because of zoning. If you build enough housing that demand equals supply prices will be stable. Tokyo’s population has gone up 50% over the last two decades and property prices and rents are basically flat because they’ve built more housing. Why does this happen in Japan but not NYC or SF? National, not local zoning. State level would probably work too.
- sdrothrock 7y ago
  > property prices and rents are basically flat because they’ve built more housing. > Why does this happen in Japan but not NYC or SF? I don't think zoning is the complete answer here -- there's a lot of stuff going on in Japan, and in Tokyo in particular, that's very different from the US. For example, a lot of cheaper places are tiny and have no shower or a shared shower. I don't think a lot of Americans would be willing to deal with that, but Japan has a public bath culture/history. In Tokyo in particular, there's a huge amount of public transportation options, which allow people to live farther out and commute easily (with the commute costs being covered by work) -- that's not as simple in NYC. Imagine living in White Plains and commuting to the heart of Tokyo every day in a reliable, timely fashion. Another thing is that a lot of cheaper housing in Tokyo is just old (post-war wood construction with a veneer of modernity) or in just plain bad areas (low-lying areas near rivers, below the water table, on reclaimed land, far from hospitals/fire departments, etc.) On top of all that, housing here just isn't an investment like it is in America. Nobody's house or apartment appreciates with age. It's not as simple as pointing at the average rent and zoning.
  - shuckles 7y ago
    Zoning, building codes, and land use / value capture are all policies from which your observations stem. Housing itself is never the investment. It’s the land upon which the home sits, and I’d be willing to bet that land in Tokyo is expensive (though not as much as the infamous bubble highs) and probably increasingly so with improving amenities.
  - orthoxerox 7y ago

viburnum 7y ago

When nice places for people become too expensive, the obvious thing to do is to make more nice places for people. In America, however, it is only legal to make more nice places for cars.

vinay427 7y ago
What does this have to do with the issue in the article? In fact, it even mentions someone likely parking illegally, probably due to a lack of spaces.

semiotagonal 7y ago

I guess this is what they call a "hot take", but it's simply impossible to preserve a neighborhood's character and keep it affordable. You either have to build the same type of residences upward (in the city), or adjacent (in the suburbs), or have prices go through the roof, or have a period of crisis and collapse clear everyone out.

codingslave 7y ago

Was speaking with someone recently about the city feels increasingly empty. There are less store fronts and such for sure, but huge swaths of apartments in NYC are investments. They may sit vacant for years on end for some Saudi Arabian wealth fund. There are certainly reports of the dropping population, but in other ways things feel tangible. Living in NYC you come to discover how small of a world it is, disparate friend groups may in turn know each other, how big is this city really? Neighborhoods feel emptier, huge parts of the population of the city are from wealthy Chinese and foreign backgrounds (this is not to disparage them). They don't really work jobs or have traditional careers, but fill the city, making it seem more hollow.

vobios 7y ago
Are there really that many empty apartments? I am sure they exist, but are there really enough of them to make a dent in the market? Having lived in the city for years, I've never actually seen one. I also wonder if you have enough cash to buy and hold NYC apartments, wouldn't your money do better in some sort of a REIT?
- timidiceball 7y ago
  It’s a problem at the high end (which is most of what’s been built lately) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/realestate/new-development-new-york.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/realestate/new-developmen...
  - vobios 7y ago
    Does the data presented in that article really suggest that the apartments are actually empty or is it simply that it takes a while to sell out a new development? It's going to take a while to move a hundred units, especially if you want to increase the profits. The StreetEasy report the article is inspired by actually shows that in 2019 there were more condos sold than completed.
- corporateslave5 7y ago
  Where do you put 1 trillion dollars when your main goal is to just preserve it or lose just a little?

ppod 7y ago

The author explicitly acknowledges that the result of rent control is nepotism. Why is someone's friend's niece a better resident of this neighborhood than anyone else?

imgabe 7y ago

Ultimately the people who buy up housing in major cities as a place to park money are going to end up shooting themselves in the foot. Parking a few million dollars in a Manhattan apartment is desirable because it's unlikely to lose value and you can actually use it when you visit. But if all the apartments are owned by people who mostly don't live there and only visit a few times a year, the thing that made them valuable - being located in a desirable, dynamic city where lots of people live and work, is no longer going to be true and they're going to lose value. Cities should implement punitively high property taxes on any homes or apartments that are not used as a primary residence, either by the owner or a tenant.

gniv 7y ago
Ironically, strong rent control policies help the rich exactly because of this dynamic. The city is thriving while its most valuable real estate is empty.
- afpx 7y ago
  Please explain for those of us who fail to see the connection.
  - legitster 7y ago
    Occupancy with rent-control is virtually 100% and guarantees the desirability of non-rent controlled units in the same area. It's an interesting point, but I don't think would crack the top 10 list for reasons rent control is bad.
  - gniv 7y ago
    Note that I'm not saying rent control is bad. Anyway, imgabe argued that having more and more apts owned by rich folks that don't live in them changes the city for the worse, reducing the value of these apts as well. I'm arguing that having rent control means there is a base of people who live there and keep the city/neighbourhood thriving, thus (as a side effect) helping the expensive apts keep their value.
7y ago

MisterTea 7y ago

I used to hang out in the village from around 96 or so to the late 00's. The place was packed with all sorts of people visiting the numerous quirky shops, many of which lined 8th st. Punks, metal heads (me included), hip hop, skaters, artsy and bohemian types, tourists, from high school kids to elderly. There was real life there. Record stores, book stores, comic book shops, clothing and fabric shops, collectibles, gaming, etc. We'd go to bleecker bobs and go to this grugy dude in the back and order black metal imports. Generation records always had tons of vinyl and they had a great band tee shirt collection. The chess shop was few doors down and one friend was a frequent player. Over the summer I took the train in to walk around the village and was heartbroken. Half the stores along 8th st are indeed boarded up. Shops I was familiar with were gone. The eerie part that struck me was how empty village was. Sure there were people walking around but not the hustle and bustle of all walks of life prowling the shops. It's been sanitized. And thats whats happening. The white glove suburbanites are doing their damndest to scrub away New York City's "dirty" history so they can live in/visit their septic utopia devoid of unsightly things and people. And the same thing happened to Williamsburg too. They killed my home and I increasingly feel like a stranger in my own city.

jonahbenton 7y ago
Has nothing to do with sanitization, frankly. It has everything to do with exploding rents, which themselves are due to the consolidation of commercial (and residental) ownership, changes in yield expectations from real estate, changes in global capital availability, and the benefits that accrue to owners at scale when property lies vacant. And the complete lack of energy or imagination from De Blasio. I have personally seen commercial rents rise by 10x in some extreme cases, from contract to contract, with 2x-4x being more common. When demand isn't there at those prices capital rich owners often can wait and take paper "losses" while the neighborhood takes real losses.

rasz 7y ago

It might be quite eye opening to learn 2000 square foot storefront in Manhattan starts around $10000 a month in the cheapest (ABCD) parts.