10 ms·

NYC Lost 100K Homes in Apartment-to-House Conversions

52 points by robg 3y ago

cranky908canuck 3y ago
I'm all for more housing, but at least theoretically I'm on the fence about this. The example (17 => 1) is "not optimal", but the ability to buy two adjacent strata properties and merge them solves the "2br condo vs suburban house" problem. As in, the notion of "observed preference": that given that choice, people choose the latter, and so -- here's the fallacy -- people "want" the suburban house (and therefore that's what we should be optimizing for). Experimentation around the 'missing middle' (condo/townhouse with SFH square-footage/room diversity) seems very much a work in progress.
umeshunni 3y ago
In 70 years
- nocoiner 3y ago
  Actually “70+ years.” Some of the lost housing units are literally tenement apartments being made, you know, habitable.
rr808 3y ago
Fun fact, 2022 population in NYC is just 6% higher than it was in 1950. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City. (though probably is more like 10% this year)
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  IIRC the average household size in 1950 was around 3.5, and the average household size now is more like 2.5.
  - metaphor 3y ago
    More precisely[1]: - all households, all ages - 1950 = 3.37 - 2022 = 2.50 - family households, all ages - 1950 = 3.54 - 2022 = 3.13 [1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/families/time-series/households/hh6.xls https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/familie...
- woodruffw 3y ago
  The numbers here are kind of funky: NYC's population is larger than it was in 1950, but population has also sprawled significantly since then. Manhattan lost 300,000 people since 1950 (and is down nearly a million since its peak in the 1910s)[1], but the other boroughs have all stayed roughly flat (Brooklyn, the Bronx) or grown substantially (Queens, Staten Island). (This doesn't contradict your statement; only that the city's overall growth patterns can be misleading under a single number!) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan#Demographics
- CapitalistCartr 3y ago
  And Manhattan's population peaked in 1950, been lower ever since.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    Manhattan's population peaked in 1910. It's gone up, down, and up again since 1950.
jeffbee 3y ago
A recent Reason magazine article described Hawaii’s emergency suspension of zoning regulations as “YIMBY martial law” which is exactly what the entire country needs to crawl out from under its economy-choking housing crisis. A developer who proposes housing that meets basic health and safety criteria on a site within city limits that is already surrounded on three sides by other developed parcels should walk out of the permit office with over-the-counter approvals. They should not face five years of process and appeals. The only way to counteract the trends of this article is to build!
- slashdev 3y ago
  Yep, exactly this. All the barriers to entry are decreasing the supply. The only way to fix it is get rid of them in a dramatically big way. Politicians like to point at foreign investment, empty houses, immigration, anything except acknowledge and fix the real problem.
  - doublespanner 3y ago
    Rate of population growth (migration) is the demand side of the "real problem". And a slower rate of growth seems to have more benefits than fast growth with reduced building restrictions.
    - jeffbee 3y ago
      Migration is a very minor contributor overall. Longevity and birth rate are the main drivers of the housing crisis. Boomers squirted out the largest generation ever and then forgot to die.
      - beckingz 3y ago
        Intercity/ interstate migration is a huge contributor to the pressure in major US cities. If NYC or SF were 1/4th the cost I would move there immediately, but the value would be marginal at this point.
mikeyouse 3y ago
An interesting counterfactual I think about a fair amount is what would cities like NYC or SF look like if they just built tons of housing. Given the allure and success of the tech bubble in Northern California - would their population be a few million people higher today if we just built as fast as humanly possible over the past 25 years? Like if we just built enough housing to keep studios at $1k/month and 2-bedroom places at $2k/month -- everything else would have been cheaper as well (you wouldn't need to pay cooks and wait staff $80k/year for them to afford to stay) -- it would greatly expand the 'service' industry of e.g. teachers & daycare providers since they could afford to stay. Bringing SF's population density to that of Paris's would give you ~750k more residents. Bringing Alameda County's population density up to that of Long Island would give you ~1.5M more residents. Certainly capacity for a few million more in San Jose and the East Bay. You'd potentially run into water issues but with that population and tax base, it'd be easy math to justify a huge DeSal plant. I dunno.
- kajecounterhack 3y ago
  SF needs more public transportation as much as it needs housing :(
  - nocoiner 3y ago
    With that tax base, is there any reason BART couldn’t be expanded and enhanced?
    - doublespanner 3y ago
      In my experience, the motivation for rapid growth in an area comes from an opposite direction to improving services in an area.
    - farzinadil 3y ago
      BART is struggling to fund it's operations currently as ridership is down significantly from per-pandemic. Bart is already constructing a 5 mile extension into downtown San Jose and Santa Clara. But BART should not prioritize any more extensions after that. It is better for BART to focus on transit oriented development (TOD). There are many good opportunities for TOD. Currently. too many stations are surrounded by low density housing and surface parking lots. Also, it is better for BART to use money to improve operations as frequency is abysmal on weekends and nighttime. Better to use money on expanding service and building TOD before any further extensions.
boplicity 3y ago
Related -- Toronto, which has been building like crazy for many years -- lost over 7,000 housing units in a recent 5 year span. Despite many new residential towers being built. This, of course, has been disastrous for the cost of housing, which has ballooned. https://www.thestar.com/business/despite-downtown-construction-toronto-has-lost-housing-units-over-five-years-a-report-tells-us/article_df253b2c-e467-551b-8534-4fd24d486275.html https://www.thestar.com/business/despite-downtown-constructi...
remote_phone 3y ago
The solution isn’t to celebrate how families need to live in tiny apartments. The solution is to expand new housing outside of the main areas into new developments, and create new business centers or allow for remote work.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
robg 3y ago
I was struck by the home / house contrast in the original headline but left as is because, in American English, home is a nice way of saying where someone lives regardless of the type of structure, apartment or house or even a houseboat. The flip side is someone can be homeless and living in their car or a shelter, neither would typically be thought of as homes.
jmkb 3y ago
Just to be clear, I find conversion of viable multifamily buildings into mansions generally repugnant. The opposite process also happens, though... not just a 3- and 4-story residential buildings demolished for large residential towers (plenty of that in NYC) but single-family brownstones carved up into smaller dwelling units. The map caption "Conversions Have Erased Some Gains in NYC's Housing Stock" would make a less deceptive headline. The map shows data from a defined timespan ("between 2010 and 2021") and shows that there's not a single community district that hasn't added housing units. The headline, meanwhile, refers to a vague "70-plus years" timeframe. That's long enough that you could probably find hundreds of buildings that have bounced between single- and multi-family several times. And in fact the underlying research characterizes any building that was ever recorded as multifamily and currently isn't as a "loss." I fear it risks romanticizing the 20th century's cramped tenements. (And again, just to be clear, I find conversion of viable multifamily buildings into mansions generally repugnant.)
- pottertheotter 3y ago
  Yeah, there's a lot of nuance here that is being lost. The second paragraph says: "Take for example 34 E. 68th St. in Manhattan: The 1879 row house, located in the Upper East Side Historic District, once housed 17 separate apartments, according to property records. Now, it is a 9,600-square-foot single-family mansion after changing hands for $11.5 million in 2011 and a subsequent gut renovation." 1879 and an average of 565 sqft each. I don't think what those apartments were is what we want today.
  - adriancr 3y ago
    > 1879 and an average of 565 sqft each. I don't think what those apartments were is what we want today. That's ~50 m^2, pretty decent for young people (can have separate living room/bedroom/bathroom/kitchen if split properly) So, instead of housing 17-34 young people that could contribute a lot to the area it now houses a single family.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      As a single person living in 55 m^2 bedroon + decent kitchen + small bathroom(including waching machine) + large living room. I don't see much issue with that floor space. Probably could be even enough for two people. It is reasonable trade to live affordably in a city.

52 points by robg 3y ago

I'm all for more housing, but at least theoretically I'm on the fence about this. The example (17 => 1) is "not optimal", but the ability to buy two adjacent strata properties and merge them solves the "2br condo vs suburban house" problem. As in, the notion of "observed preference": that given that choice, people choose the latter, and so -- here's the fallacy -- people "want" the suburban house (and therefore that's what we should be optimizing for). Experimentation around the 'missing middle' (condo/townhouse with SFH square-footage/room diversity) seems very much a work in progress.

umeshunni 3y ago

In 70 years

nocoiner 3y ago
Actually “70+ years.” Some of the lost housing units are literally tenement apartments being made, you know, habitable.

rr808 3y ago

Fun fact, 2022 population in NYC is just 6% higher than it was in 1950. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City. (though probably is more like 10% this year)

rootusrootus 3y ago
IIRC the average household size in 1950 was around 3.5, and the average household size now is more like 2.5.
- metaphor 3y ago
  More precisely[1]: - all households, all ages - 1950 = 3.37 - 2022 = 2.50 - family households, all ages - 1950 = 3.54 - 2022 = 3.13 [1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/families/time-series/households/hh6.xls https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/familie...
woodruffw 3y ago
The numbers here are kind of funky: NYC's population is larger than it was in 1950, but population has also sprawled significantly since then. Manhattan lost 300,000 people since 1950 (and is down nearly a million since its peak in the 1910s)[1], but the other boroughs have all stayed roughly flat (Brooklyn, the Bronx) or grown substantially (Queens, Staten Island). (This doesn't contradict your statement; only that the city's overall growth patterns can be misleading under a single number!) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan#Demographics
CapitalistCartr 3y ago
And Manhattan's population peaked in 1950, been lower ever since.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  Manhattan's population peaked in 1910. It's gone up, down, and up again since 1950.

jeffbee 3y ago

A recent Reason magazine article described Hawaii’s emergency suspension of zoning regulations as “YIMBY martial law” which is exactly what the entire country needs to crawl out from under its economy-choking housing crisis. A developer who proposes housing that meets basic health and safety criteria on a site within city limits that is already surrounded on three sides by other developed parcels should walk out of the permit office with over-the-counter approvals. They should not face five years of process and appeals. The only way to counteract the trends of this article is to build!

slashdev 3y ago
Yep, exactly this. All the barriers to entry are decreasing the supply. The only way to fix it is get rid of them in a dramatically big way. Politicians like to point at foreign investment, empty houses, immigration, anything except acknowledge and fix the real problem.
- doublespanner 3y ago
  Rate of population growth (migration) is the demand side of the "real problem". And a slower rate of growth seems to have more benefits than fast growth with reduced building restrictions.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    Migration is a very minor contributor overall. Longevity and birth rate are the main drivers of the housing crisis. Boomers squirted out the largest generation ever and then forgot to die.
    - beckingz 3y ago
      Intercity/ interstate migration is a huge contributor to the pressure in major US cities. If NYC or SF were 1/4th the cost I would move there immediately, but the value would be marginal at this point.

mikeyouse 3y ago

An interesting counterfactual I think about a fair amount is what would cities like NYC or SF look like if they just built tons of housing. Given the allure and success of the tech bubble in Northern California - would their population be a few million people higher today if we just built as fast as humanly possible over the past 25 years? Like if we just built enough housing to keep studios at $1k/month and 2-bedroom places at $2k/month -- everything else would have been cheaper as well (you wouldn't need to pay cooks and wait staff $80k/year for them to afford to stay) -- it would greatly expand the 'service' industry of e.g. teachers & daycare providers since they could afford to stay. Bringing SF's population density to that of Paris's would give you ~750k more residents. Bringing Alameda County's population density up to that of Long Island would give you ~1.5M more residents. Certainly capacity for a few million more in San Jose and the East Bay. You'd potentially run into water issues but with that population and tax base, it'd be easy math to justify a huge DeSal plant. I dunno.

kajecounterhack 3y ago
SF needs more public transportation as much as it needs housing :(
- nocoiner 3y ago
  With that tax base, is there any reason BART couldn’t be expanded and enhanced?
  - doublespanner 3y ago
    In my experience, the motivation for rapid growth in an area comes from an opposite direction to improving services in an area.
  - farzinadil 3y ago
    BART is struggling to fund it's operations currently as ridership is down significantly from per-pandemic. Bart is already constructing a 5 mile extension into downtown San Jose and Santa Clara. But BART should not prioritize any more extensions after that. It is better for BART to focus on transit oriented development (TOD). There are many good opportunities for TOD. Currently. too many stations are surrounded by low density housing and surface parking lots. Also, it is better for BART to use money to improve operations as frequency is abysmal on weekends and nighttime. Better to use money on expanding service and building TOD before any further extensions.

boplicity 3y ago

Related -- Toronto, which has been building like crazy for many years -- lost over 7,000 housing units in a recent 5 year span. Despite many new residential towers being built. This, of course, has been disastrous for the cost of housing, which has ballooned. https://www.thestar.com/business/despite-downtown-construction-toronto-has-lost-housing-units-over-five-years-a-report-tells-us/article_df253b2c-e467-551b-8534-4fd24d486275.html https://www.thestar.com/business/despite-downtown-constructi...

remote_phone 3y ago

The solution isn’t to celebrate how families need to live in tiny apartments. The solution is to expand new housing outside of the main areas into new developments, and create new business centers or allow for remote work.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

robg 3y ago

I was struck by the home / house contrast in the original headline but left as is because, in American English, home is a nice way of saying where someone lives regardless of the type of structure, apartment or house or even a houseboat. The flip side is someone can be homeless and living in their car or a shelter, neither would typically be thought of as homes.

jmkb 3y ago

Just to be clear, I find conversion of viable multifamily buildings into mansions generally repugnant. The opposite process also happens, though... not just a 3- and 4-story residential buildings demolished for large residential towers (plenty of that in NYC) but single-family brownstones carved up into smaller dwelling units. The map caption "Conversions Have Erased Some Gains in NYC's Housing Stock" would make a less deceptive headline. The map shows data from a defined timespan ("between 2010 and 2021") and shows that there's not a single community district that hasn't added housing units. The headline, meanwhile, refers to a vague "70-plus years" timeframe. That's long enough that you could probably find hundreds of buildings that have bounced between single- and multi-family several times. And in fact the underlying research characterizes any building that was ever recorded as multifamily and currently isn't as a "loss." I fear it risks romanticizing the 20th century's cramped tenements. (And again, just to be clear, I find conversion of viable multifamily buildings into mansions generally repugnant.)

pottertheotter 3y ago
Yeah, there's a lot of nuance here that is being lost. The second paragraph says: "Take for example 34 E. 68th St. in Manhattan: The 1879 row house, located in the Upper East Side Historic District, once housed 17 separate apartments, according to property records. Now, it is a 9,600-square-foot single-family mansion after changing hands for $11.5 million in 2011 and a subsequent gut renovation." 1879 and an average of 565 sqft each. I don't think what those apartments were is what we want today.
- adriancr 3y ago
  > 1879 and an average of 565 sqft each. I don't think what those apartments were is what we want today. That's ~50 m^2, pretty decent for young people (can have separate living room/bedroom/bathroom/kitchen if split properly) So, instead of housing 17-34 young people that could contribute a lot to the area it now houses a single family.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    As a single person living in 55 m^2 bedroon + decent kitchen + small bathroom(including waching machine) + large living room. I don't see much issue with that floor space. Probably could be even enough for two people. It is reasonable trade to live affordably in a city.