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Rent-Stabilized Housing Is Disappearing Fast in NYC
- rekt 11y agoDarn, less opportunity for AirBnb arbitrage.
- misiti3780 11y agothe lease agreements for these apartments state that you cannot use AirBNB and analogous services - otherwise they can evicted you - and they do ...
- hanley 11y ago> After hearing through a FOIL request that it would cost the city $50,000 to deliver the building-by-building data (which implies that the city itself does have the data readily available), John, and some peers at BetaNYC, went about scraping the tax bills for NYC buildings to get the rent stabilization information out of PDFs. > In this new era of open data, you should not need to know how to write a PDF scraper to find a reasonably priced place to live, or discover where you are about to lose one. I'm having a hard time imagining how it would cost $50,000 to export data.
- aaronbrethorst 11y agoNYC employees cost ~$107,000/year [1]. They probably calculated that it take about 6 people months of labor to manually transcribe the data into an Excel spreadsheet (e.g. six people for a month, or whatever). [1] Or did, on average, a few years ago. Regardless, this is close enough for our purposes. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/nyregion/09salaries.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/nyregion/09salaries.html?_...
- dmitrygr 11y agoWhy do people panic so much about this? It has been shown time and time again that price floors or ceilings very rarely help a market be efficient. Quite the opposite usually.
- krschultz 11y agoIt's also really arbitrary. I live in the upper west side district mentioned. My rent is $2600, i.e my unit is skirting just above the rent control line. I bet my unit was 'de-controlled' in the last 8 years. But the classification doesn't matter to me personally at all. If the apartment went from $2400 to $2600, while it was decontrolled, the affordability hasn't changed that much. Meanwhile a unit that was $1900 several years ago could be $2400 now because they reset the rent every time the tenant switches. It is much less affordable, but it is still rent controlled. This data is not going to help you figure out if things have gotten significantly less affordable. Which really means this is just a map of where median rents are close to the line between rent controlled and not rent controlled. Notice that the areas that are much more expensive don't show change, since everything was over the line to begin with. The places that are really cheap also don't show a huge amount of change because even after increases the units are still rent controlled. So overall it's good data but it's not telling you that much.
- danhak 11y agoYour post assumes that the point of rent control is to provide some housing inventory that is below market value for new tenants. In actuality, the point is to ensure that long-time residents will not be swiftly priced out of their communities. i.e. it doesn't matter that I'll pay market rent for a rent-controlled unit I move into today. What matters is that the yearly increase in my rent will probably not outstrip my income over the long term.
- busterarm 11y agoplease don't conflate rent-stabilization with rent-control. They are two different things. "Rent Control" is something that specifically applies to residents occupying a unit prior to a specific day in 1971 and their qualified heirs.
- busterarm 11y agoWhy do people demonize it so much? The number of units under price ceiling have an insignificant impact on the market anyway.
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- forrestthewoods 11y agoGood!
- rmxt 11y agoCare to share why you think this is good?
- MBlume 11y agoPrice ceilings fuck up the housing market.
- rmxt 11y agoRent-stabilization, in it's NYC flavor, is not a hard price ceiling.
- anarchy8 11y agoRent control is bad for the price of rent
- rmxt 11y agoSincere question: bad from whose perspective? How do you balance these perspectives? Real estate regulation in its current form, especially in NYC, derives from the legacy of over-crowded tenements and massive blocks of slums. Sure, the overall quality of life has improved in NYC due to building codes and public sanitation, but totally removing rent "controls" (the general term, not the NYC term) seems like a slide towards poorer living conditions for the lower and middle classes.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoLots of people don't understand rent control.
- edutechnion 11y agoRent-stabilization is a flawed, lottery-based system that helps out a select few while sometimes having the unintended effect of helping out the wealthy: http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140430/new-york-city/rent-stabilized-apartments-are-being-occupied-by-millionaires-records-show A more equitable system would involve direct tax credits to all in need instead of relying on an antiquated system that helps out a few lucky enough to win the rent lottery.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ForHackernews 11y agoCan we just hurry up and turn all of Manhattan into luxury hotels for tourists already? It can be like Venice: 90% hotels and a few condo buildings near the park for billionaires. It's very well served by public transit, so anyone who works there can commute from elsewhere.
- murbard2 11y agoThe author seems very keen on rent control, but I think one should look more cool headedly at some alternatives that can achieve the same result by different means. Bombing the city in particular should be considered. Bombs could be supplied cheaply by the US army, where they are plentiful, and they could achieve the same level of devastation that rent control has produced in parts of NYC like the Bronx. Of course, they are also other ways to achieve the effects of rent control, like arson, bringing back Mongolian hordes from the dead, etc. What matters is that we can have an open, transparent debate about the best way to ruin the real estate stock of the city.
- busterarm 11y agoRent Controlled units comprise less than 2% of the TOTAL housing in New York City. Stop this devastation bullshit. Non-resident tenants/illegal hotels likely dwarf this number significantly.
- potatolicious 11y agoRent stabilization != rent control - this is confusing for people in other parts of the country where there is only one category of housing price regulation. 60% of all NYC housing units are under some form of rent regulation - either rent control, rent stabilization, or some other form of rent protection. Only about 40% of the housing stock is market-rate.
- bradleyjg 11y agoOn the other hand, many of those stabilized units are have market rate is less than the legal rate, and so are not effectively subject to price caps. Of course those units aren't in Manhattan south of 96th street or hip Brooklyn, so the type of people who write blog articles don't care.
- cynicalkane 11y agoNYC has several kinds of rent control. Some are called "rent control" by the city, others are called "rent stabilization". Economically, they are all rent control. And 60% of the city is subject to it.
- ChrisLTD 11y agoI'm all for rent-stabilization going away, if two things happen: 1) We remove building restrictions around the city that keep new taller apartment buildings from going up. Yes, almost all of NYC is developed land, but many parts of Brooklyn, for example, are full of one and two story buildings that aren't using the space effectively. 2) We upgrade the mass transit systems to handle the increased population. The subway system is already strained to the breaking point, and the buses can't help enough without getting personal cars off the road to free up traffic.
- busterarm 11y agoI love posts like this that never fail to remind me that the Hacker News intelligentsia has more respect for efficient markets than it does for poor people.
- ancap 11y agoYou say that as if efficient markets is at odds with poor people. When you look at an economic problem such as this, you almost always find that the culprit is some market intervention. In this case, the problem of high rents in relation to income usually results from building restrictions. No, high rents do not result from a group of greedy, fat rich guys, who wear monocles and enjoy preying upon the poor.
- busterarm 11y agoI'm not saying that, actually. I'm just trying to point out that the majority of the comments in the thread are focussed on price inefficiency instead of actually being concerned with problems of poverty. But you raise a great point because _zoning_ is absolutely the biggest market intervention problem...and that certainly is a problem of greed.
- ancap 11y agoThere's nothing wrong with greed. Greed is why you choose job A over job B, partner Y over partner Z, and many other choices in your life. Compulsion is the problem. That's why being a mugger is frowned upon and being a mechanic, generally, is not. Both are greedy, or look out for their self interest. It is compulsion which makes building restrictions abhorrent. Similarly, it is compulsion which makes rent control abhorrent.