6 ms·

Good! Second homes in any region with low inventory should be taxed...

nxk 5mo ago
Yup
ch4s3 5mo ago
It seems like a place like Manhattan might benefit from first up-zoning the low slung sections that are currently 4-8 stories. My point here is that I'd start with trying to build enough housing before spending political capital on marginal things that neither unlock supply nor generate much revenue.
- Daishiman 5mo ago
  In Manhattan the low zones are due to the soil not being good for higher construction. Lower Manhattan and midtown are made of basalt stone that is extremely strong and apt for skyscrapers.
  - ch4s3 5mo ago
    Bedrock is only a little lower in the "Midtown Gap", and in any case a lot of those 4 story buildings could be 8-10.
    - organsnyder 5mo ago
      I'm guessing it would be tough to make the numbers work demolishing a 4-story building and building one that's only 2-2.5x the square footage, especially with today's interest rates.
      - ch4s3 5mo ago
        That's pretty hard to say in a blanket way, I wouldn't want to speculate. But there's never a bad time to fix zoning.
      - cucumber3732842 5mo ago
        You'll lose a ton of square footage to compliance. Those wide doorways with non conflicting doors, wide staircases, required clearances around everything, all the other stuff that's been done to old apartments that isn't compatible with modern codes. So that 2.5x square footage is more like 1.5x when it comes to the number of units of like quality/liveability you can pack in.
    - bobthepanda 5mo ago
      the real reason midtown is where it is, is because that is where the train stations are due to the city banning surface running railways south of 42nd St. (The remaining surface railways north of that point have been covered up.) As a result, Midtown is now one of the few places in New York's metropolitan that can reach the millions of people in the five boroughs and the suburbs all at once, which means the labor market is substantially larger than what it is in Lower Manhattan or Downtown Brooklyn, and makes it massively more attractive for employers.
- nickv 5mo ago
  You're right, when I think of a place that has an overabundance of 2 floor single family homes, I think of Manhattan.
  - ch4s3 5mo ago
    You'll notice I specifically said 4 to 8 story buildings.
  - asdff 5mo ago
    It isn't that which is the issue. It is the fact greenwich village has been at the same height since even before Don Draper's time. You see, the suburban enclaves of long island and upstate and new jersey and the comparatively more built up areas of manhattan do have the exact same issue with regards to housing, and that is there is little room in the zoned capacity to legally add any more housing. In 1961, NYC adopted a zoning plan that saw zoned capacity reduced by 80%. These sort of changes to zoning happened around the country in the 1960s and 70s in response to red lining being made illegal. If you can't prevent black people from living near you by law, maybe you could instead prevent anyone from living near you and guarantee a supply side crisis such that the wealthiest individuals in the economy are who can afford to be your neighbors, and in 1961 surely they won't be black. You should look up the median income differences between a white nycer and a black nycer today, it is shocking. Median household wealth for whites just within the scope of new york state, not even at city resolution, is nearly 15x higher (1). Today, 80 years later, we have kept the racist-by-transitive-property laws on the books all over the country. And as such, cities remain highly segregated by both race and class. Civil right era in terms of housing was essentially a failure to achieve any change from this status quo. 1. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-racial-wealth-gap-in-new-york/ https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-racial-wealth-gap-in...
    - bobthepanda 5mo ago
      With historic landmarks or districts you can generally transfer unused development capacity to other sites. Grand Central famously was spared from demolition but its unused zoning rights have been transferred elsewhere.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- cyberax 5mo ago
  LOL. Why not just build bunkhouses and then rent out bunk beds there? For a cool $5000 a month. Because that's the end goal, isn't it? Manhattan is _already_ one of the densest cities in the world. It needs a good _downzoning_ to be liveable again.
  - bombcar 5mo ago
    If everyone who wants to pay $5k a month to live in NYC is able to; I’ll be super happy and pleased for them.
  - javanissen 5mo ago
    > bunk beds… $5000/month The market prices full one-bedrooms at less than this in most of Manhattan. Flophouse beds would cost a fraction of this and they would get cheaper the more of them you have. They’d also slow the growth of rent price in NYC. Let’s take your example at face value. Suppose Manhattan added one million beds to its existing ~3.8M bedroom housing stock via the “missing middle” housing that you described, perhaps over the next ten years. These might have small private bedrooms and shared kitchen/office/bathroom facilities. They might even include dorms, but I’ll focus on single-room occupancy units. You’d get the space for this from some mix of re-developing office buildings or upzoning or re-developing low-slung buildings. The rent of these single-room occupancy units would be a fraction of the rent of a normal place. The people living there would be far less rent-burdened than they would have been otherwise, freeing up more income for consumption or savings/investment, boosting economic activity. Some of them would be new residents, whose income taxes (if they pay them) and spent dollars/sales taxes would be a net benefit to the city budget. Some of them would otherwise become transiently homeless due to affordability concerns, which would be destabilizing for them and expensive for the city due to homeless program spending. Others would be people who currently live in apartments but would move to these units because they prefer cheaper rent, greater privacy (they might be sharing a room today), a newer building, or the greater efficiency of having multiple bathrooms. Maybe right now they are sharing e.g. a four-bedroom one-bathroom apartment with three strangers in Hell’s Kitchen for $1400/month. These people would otherwise be in the housing market for a full apartment, and removing them leaves more full apartments for people who want to occupy them, either alone or with roommates. Ergo we get downward pressure on full apartment rents. The flophouses and dorms and SROs were a key part of the housing market that kept Manhattan more affordable and therefore livable in the 20th century, when density was up to 40% greater than it is now. It was deeply shortsighted to get rid of them. The idea that we should downzone even further makes no sense to me; you get to decrease affordability and decrease the economic benefits of agglomeration to the local economy at the same time, all so… there are fewer people on the subway, I guess? I disagree with the “too much density” argument on its face anyway. Density has clear economic benefits via agglomeration and productivity gains; diverse and dense housing stock via upzoning increases affordability via supply/demand and filtering effects; and the way you manage density is through appropriate infrastructure spending on housing, services, and public spaces which—you guessed it!-becomes cheaper per person the denser you build. Seoul has twice the density of Manhattan. I live here. The thing making Manhattan unlivable is that a one-bedroom is $4500 in the east village due to not enough supply. Fix the housing costs by building more of any and all kinds of housing and then we can deal with the other problems via better governance and increased tax revenues. There’s nothing we can do otherwise that isn’t just rationing or some other bandaid solution.
- stvltvs 5mo ago
  Is increasing housing the goal of the tax, or is it just raising revenues to balance the budget?
  - bdangubic 5mo ago
    both
- bjourne 5mo ago
  How do you know it's ineffective? Other targeted taxes, such as alcohol tax, tobacco tax, congestion tax, etc., have been shown to be very effective.
  - sylos 5mo ago
    The power to tax is the power to destroy
- throwaway27448 5mo ago
  Why not both? To suggest otherwise is absurd. If I might put my tinfoil hat on for a moment, I think the recent obsession with upzoning is to distract from the possibility of regulating landlords—as if there were any large number of people opposed to upzoning before....
- bityard 5mo ago
  If someone tried to "up-zone," wouldn't they incur enormous popular and media backlash for demolishing buildings and displacing communities that have been there for decades just so they could build high-rent luxury skyscrapers? I feel like that was the backdrop to about half the movies I watched in the '80s.
  - ch4s3 5mo ago
    Then star with Greenwich Village.
- 8note 5mo ago
  i think upzoning which requires kicking people out of the homes they currently live in is spending more political capital than changing tax policy to get more utilization out of the existing empty houses. The people that have second luxury homes in new york are the people that spent through the roof to avoid mamdani being elected
- al_borland 5mo ago
  If I was a developer and building owner who only cared about money, it seems like it would be much better to build a luxury building where the units are sold, but sit empty most of the time. This seems to be the environment in NYC. The proper systems need to be in place so it makes sense to build housing for actual people, rather than building stored real estate value for the ultra rich, especially foreign investors who may never even set foot in the US and are just looking to diversify their portfolio. I’m not an “eat the rich” person, but these mostly vacant buildings in a city with a housing affordability problem are a crime. I don’t necessarily fault the billionaires for this, I fault the politicians who sat back and watched it happen, approving all the projects along the way.
  - javanissen 5mo ago
    > these mostly vacant buildings in a city with a housing affordability problem Vacancy rates are extremely low in NYC at 1.4%. Anything below 5% indicates drastic under-supply of housing. I don’t think that vacant real estate for billionaires is a significant contributor; it’s almost exclusively an issue of supply.
    - lux-lux-lux 5mo ago
      That percentage only includes the openly listed units; NYC has a massive shadow inventory of rentable inventory deliberately kept off-market for various reasons. 1 Wall St, for example, kept 85% of its units arbitrarily off market in order to prop up rents, and thus imputed property valuation. This kind of behavior shouldn’t be encouraged by the state and financial system, but guess what we do!
- dgellow 5mo ago
  Spending political capital? Mamdani is gaining political capital with such taxes!
  - ch4s3 5mo ago
    Gaining in some places and losing it in others.
    - eliaspro 5mo ago
      Among a few ultrarich which amplify their voices by screaming through their media mouthpieces to make them sound like they're of any importance to society, from which they leech their wealth in the first place.
dlenski 5mo ago
We have similar taxes in major cities in Canada (including both metro and provincial taxes here in Vancouver). Housing is still massively squeezed and unaffordable for many in the Vancouver metro area, but the taxes definitely have encouraged some homeowners to sell or rent their properties, especially foreign investors, and their seem to be few or no downsides for people of middle-class and even moderately-affluent incomes. I doubt that NYC will lose too much sleep over the protestations from extraordinarily wealthy people who own multiple extraordinarily expensive homes, and where NYC isn't their primary residence.
- dlenski 5mo ago
  "there seem", not *their seem… argh, embarrassingly uneditable
temp8830 5mo ago
All the owners have to do is transfer the property to an LLC. I'm sure none of them will figure this out. This proposal's only purpose is PR.
- dgellow 5mo ago
  Which isn’t a bad thing per se. A lot of politics is about messaging, there is value in formalizing a position such as this one

nxk 5mo ago

Yup

ch4s3 5mo ago

It seems like a place like Manhattan might benefit from first up-zoning the low slung sections that are currently 4-8 stories. My point here is that I'd start with trying to build enough housing before spending political capital on marginal things that neither unlock supply nor generate much revenue.

Daishiman 5mo ago
In Manhattan the low zones are due to the soil not being good for higher construction. Lower Manhattan and midtown are made of basalt stone that is extremely strong and apt for skyscrapers.
- ch4s3 5mo ago
  Bedrock is only a little lower in the "Midtown Gap", and in any case a lot of those 4 story buildings could be 8-10.
  - organsnyder 5mo ago
    I'm guessing it would be tough to make the numbers work demolishing a 4-story building and building one that's only 2-2.5x the square footage, especially with today's interest rates.
    - ch4s3 5mo ago
      That's pretty hard to say in a blanket way, I wouldn't want to speculate. But there's never a bad time to fix zoning.
    - cucumber3732842 5mo ago
      You'll lose a ton of square footage to compliance. Those wide doorways with non conflicting doors, wide staircases, required clearances around everything, all the other stuff that's been done to old apartments that isn't compatible with modern codes. So that 2.5x square footage is more like 1.5x when it comes to the number of units of like quality/liveability you can pack in.
  - bobthepanda 5mo ago
    the real reason midtown is where it is, is because that is where the train stations are due to the city banning surface running railways south of 42nd St. (The remaining surface railways north of that point have been covered up.) As a result, Midtown is now one of the few places in New York's metropolitan that can reach the millions of people in the five boroughs and the suburbs all at once, which means the labor market is substantially larger than what it is in Lower Manhattan or Downtown Brooklyn, and makes it massively more attractive for employers.
nickv 5mo ago
You're right, when I think of a place that has an overabundance of 2 floor single family homes, I think of Manhattan.
- ch4s3 5mo ago
  You'll notice I specifically said 4 to 8 story buildings.
- asdff 5mo ago
  It isn't that which is the issue. It is the fact greenwich village has been at the same height since even before Don Draper's time. You see, the suburban enclaves of long island and upstate and new jersey and the comparatively more built up areas of manhattan do have the exact same issue with regards to housing, and that is there is little room in the zoned capacity to legally add any more housing. In 1961, NYC adopted a zoning plan that saw zoned capacity reduced by 80%. These sort of changes to zoning happened around the country in the 1960s and 70s in response to red lining being made illegal. If you can't prevent black people from living near you by law, maybe you could instead prevent anyone from living near you and guarantee a supply side crisis such that the wealthiest individuals in the economy are who can afford to be your neighbors, and in 1961 surely they won't be black. You should look up the median income differences between a white nycer and a black nycer today, it is shocking. Median household wealth for whites just within the scope of new york state, not even at city resolution, is nearly 15x higher (1). Today, 80 years later, we have kept the racist-by-transitive-property laws on the books all over the country. And as such, cities remain highly segregated by both race and class. Civil right era in terms of housing was essentially a failure to achieve any change from this status quo. 1. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-racial-wealth-gap-in-new-york/ https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-racial-wealth-gap-in...
  - bobthepanda 5mo ago
    With historic landmarks or districts you can generally transfer unused development capacity to other sites. Grand Central famously was spared from demolition but its unused zoning rights have been transferred elsewhere.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
cyberax 5mo ago
LOL. Why not just build bunkhouses and then rent out bunk beds there? For a cool $5000 a month. Because that's the end goal, isn't it? Manhattan is _already_ one of the densest cities in the world. It needs a good _downzoning_ to be liveable again.
- bombcar 5mo ago
  If everyone who wants to pay $5k a month to live in NYC is able to; I’ll be super happy and pleased for them.
- javanissen 5mo ago
  > bunk beds… $5000/month The market prices full one-bedrooms at less than this in most of Manhattan. Flophouse beds would cost a fraction of this and they would get cheaper the more of them you have. They’d also slow the growth of rent price in NYC. Let’s take your example at face value. Suppose Manhattan added one million beds to its existing ~3.8M bedroom housing stock via the “missing middle” housing that you described, perhaps over the next ten years. These might have small private bedrooms and shared kitchen/office/bathroom facilities. They might even include dorms, but I’ll focus on single-room occupancy units. You’d get the space for this from some mix of re-developing office buildings or upzoning or re-developing low-slung buildings. The rent of these single-room occupancy units would be a fraction of the rent of a normal place. The people living there would be far less rent-burdened than they would have been otherwise, freeing up more income for consumption or savings/investment, boosting economic activity. Some of them would be new residents, whose income taxes (if they pay them) and spent dollars/sales taxes would be a net benefit to the city budget. Some of them would otherwise become transiently homeless due to affordability concerns, which would be destabilizing for them and expensive for the city due to homeless program spending. Others would be people who currently live in apartments but would move to these units because they prefer cheaper rent, greater privacy (they might be sharing a room today), a newer building, or the greater efficiency of having multiple bathrooms. Maybe right now they are sharing e.g. a four-bedroom one-bathroom apartment with three strangers in Hell’s Kitchen for $1400/month. These people would otherwise be in the housing market for a full apartment, and removing them leaves more full apartments for people who want to occupy them, either alone or with roommates. Ergo we get downward pressure on full apartment rents. The flophouses and dorms and SROs were a key part of the housing market that kept Manhattan more affordable and therefore livable in the 20th century, when density was up to 40% greater than it is now. It was deeply shortsighted to get rid of them. The idea that we should downzone even further makes no sense to me; you get to decrease affordability and decrease the economic benefits of agglomeration to the local economy at the same time, all so… there are fewer people on the subway, I guess? I disagree with the “too much density” argument on its face anyway. Density has clear economic benefits via agglomeration and productivity gains; diverse and dense housing stock via upzoning increases affordability via supply/demand and filtering effects; and the way you manage density is through appropriate infrastructure spending on housing, services, and public spaces which—you guessed it!-becomes cheaper per person the denser you build. Seoul has twice the density of Manhattan. I live here. The thing making Manhattan unlivable is that a one-bedroom is $4500 in the east village due to not enough supply. Fix the housing costs by building more of any and all kinds of housing and then we can deal with the other problems via better governance and increased tax revenues. There’s nothing we can do otherwise that isn’t just rationing or some other bandaid solution.
stvltvs 5mo ago
Is increasing housing the goal of the tax, or is it just raising revenues to balance the budget?
- bdangubic 5mo ago
  both
bjourne 5mo ago
How do you know it's ineffective? Other targeted taxes, such as alcohol tax, tobacco tax, congestion tax, etc., have been shown to be very effective.
- sylos 5mo ago
  The power to tax is the power to destroy
throwaway27448 5mo ago
Why not both? To suggest otherwise is absurd. If I might put my tinfoil hat on for a moment, I think the recent obsession with upzoning is to distract from the possibility of regulating landlords—as if there were any large number of people opposed to upzoning before....
bityard 5mo ago
If someone tried to "up-zone," wouldn't they incur enormous popular and media backlash for demolishing buildings and displacing communities that have been there for decades just so they could build high-rent luxury skyscrapers? I feel like that was the backdrop to about half the movies I watched in the '80s.
- ch4s3 5mo ago
  Then star with Greenwich Village.
8note 5mo ago
i think upzoning which requires kicking people out of the homes they currently live in is spending more political capital than changing tax policy to get more utilization out of the existing empty houses. The people that have second luxury homes in new york are the people that spent through the roof to avoid mamdani being elected
al_borland 5mo ago
If I was a developer and building owner who only cared about money, it seems like it would be much better to build a luxury building where the units are sold, but sit empty most of the time. This seems to be the environment in NYC. The proper systems need to be in place so it makes sense to build housing for actual people, rather than building stored real estate value for the ultra rich, especially foreign investors who may never even set foot in the US and are just looking to diversify their portfolio. I’m not an “eat the rich” person, but these mostly vacant buildings in a city with a housing affordability problem are a crime. I don’t necessarily fault the billionaires for this, I fault the politicians who sat back and watched it happen, approving all the projects along the way.
- javanissen 5mo ago
  > these mostly vacant buildings in a city with a housing affordability problem Vacancy rates are extremely low in NYC at 1.4%. Anything below 5% indicates drastic under-supply of housing. I don’t think that vacant real estate for billionaires is a significant contributor; it’s almost exclusively an issue of supply.
  - lux-lux-lux 5mo ago
    That percentage only includes the openly listed units; NYC has a massive shadow inventory of rentable inventory deliberately kept off-market for various reasons. 1 Wall St, for example, kept 85% of its units arbitrarily off market in order to prop up rents, and thus imputed property valuation. This kind of behavior shouldn’t be encouraged by the state and financial system, but guess what we do!
dgellow 5mo ago
Spending political capital? Mamdani is gaining political capital with such taxes!
- ch4s3 5mo ago
  Gaining in some places and losing it in others.
  - eliaspro 5mo ago
    Among a few ultrarich which amplify their voices by screaming through their media mouthpieces to make them sound like they're of any importance to society, from which they leech their wealth in the first place.

dlenski 5mo ago

We have similar taxes in major cities in Canada (including both metro and provincial taxes here in Vancouver). Housing is still massively squeezed and unaffordable for many in the Vancouver metro area, but the taxes definitely have encouraged some homeowners to sell or rent their properties, especially foreign investors, and their seem to be few or no downsides for people of middle-class and even moderately-affluent incomes. I doubt that NYC will lose too much sleep over the protestations from extraordinarily wealthy people who own multiple extraordinarily expensive homes, and where NYC isn't their primary residence.

dlenski 5mo ago
"there seem", not *their seem… argh, embarrassingly uneditable

temp8830 5mo ago

All the owners have to do is transfer the property to an LLC. I'm sure none of them will figure this out. This proposal's only purpose is PR.

dgellow 5mo ago
Which isn’t a bad thing per se. A lot of politics is about messaging, there is value in formalizing a position such as this one