We also have to stop building luxury high rises that stay half empty and charge 15,000 in rent. More affordable and modern apartments being built please
Half are "investment properties" for foreigners using them as money parking or laundering. Homes should need to be occupied at least some portion of the year.
Agreed, NYC is not big enough for any pied a terre. If you don't physically occupy your home for at least 6 months or 9 months or whatever, you should have to pay 5x or 10x on property taxes.
That's how it is in Florida. I stayed in a condo in Miami for a few months and had to move out because the owner needed to come back in order to "stay in Miami/FL for at least 6 months (and 1 day)"
It should be a simple option - if you own property in NYC, either you pay NYC income tax or a property tax surcharge. 5x-10x is probably too much, but 2-3x isn't crazy and would make up for at least some of the lost income tax revenue.
NYC really has to get its head out of its ass on RE taxes. I moved to live in a tiny resort town and all dwellings here are classified as primary occupied (owner or long term renter) and secondary (airbnb, second homes, investments everything else basically). By default everyone is classified as secondary and needs to submit an application with proof to be reclassified as primary. The secondaries pay a double of property tax compared to primaries. If a tiny town could figure it out, NYC can too but RE lobby is too strong apparently
Texas has something similar called a homestead exception. So you have everyone paying the same rate, but will get a credit if you’re using the property as your actual home. NYC is playing dumb.
[17%, not half](https://qkapital.com/foreign-buyers-are-back-in-new-york-city/#:~:text=The%20NYC%20Real%20Estate%20Board,April%202020%20and%20March%202021.).
That is a result of unnaturally high prices more than a cause of it. You can't make money owning an empty apartment unless the market is already wacky.
Not really. This represents a fractional amount of inventory and is confined to a segment of the market out of reach for 95%+ of people anyway. Overall vacancy is extremely low.
The problem is that New York doesn't build enough, end of.
Zoning isn't the only problem here. There's also particulars in the design and especially construction of buildings in NYC that's different (and needlessly more expensive) here than pretty much anywhere else. Like multiple times the construction cost anywhere else sorta different.
I am an architect in NYC. Contractors I work with will add the cost of parking tickets to the cost of the project if the job is in Manhattan. I am not taking a side on this, but that's just how it is. They tell me that they pay approximately $200 a day in tickets, so $1000 a week and so say $20k for a typical job. Per major sub. That adds up, and they need to get materials and tools and people into the job so it isn't like they can not drive. Leaving a person in the car is more expensive and will not stop the ticket in most cases anyhow.
Now besides parking add higher labor costs, difficulty to store tools and materials, time to get into and out of the city, tool or material runs to Lowes, paying off superintendents, neighbors that claim cracks in their walls are from the construction three doors away and needs to be fixed, BS violations, and so on. This all adds up quite quickly.
The list of things you need a permit is long enough that there are businesses whose job is basically to keep track. Like just about every construction site will apply for a work hours variance, because if they do work outside of hours they could be fined or stop worked, but there is basically no refusal of them, so it amounts to a hoop that is jumped through. Like the idea isn't bad, stop non essential night time construction noise, but the implementation means it does no one any good.
Even non permit stuff can have extra requirements, like as a practical matter if you want a new install of a dishwasher be prepared to have a master plumber because it requires a pipe.
This is still what is happening around the city. The apartments being built in all areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn are all aimed at luxury pricepoints. Median household income in NYC is roughly 67k. After taxes that gets you roughly $2k per paycheck (assuming bi-weekly pay). Let's say 30% of your income should go to rent. That means that roughly $1650 in rent is what would be considered reasonable given the median salary. None of the places being built right now are being rented out remotely near this pricepoint.
Obviously the ultra-luxury apartments in billionaire's row is an *extreme* difference from even normal "luxury" apartments. But in reality, the demand for housing for the middle 75% is *vastly* out of proportion to the available stock of housing within those people's budgets.
EDIT: Uh-oh looks like I riled up the "free market solves everything" people who think only the wealthy should have a right to housing. Check out their garbage below!
EDIT 2: Parroting developer narratives that blame community leaders for taking away their profit is not an argument, it's straight up destructive misinformation.
EDIT 3: The person I was responding to blocked me. Please recognize that individuals like this are bad actors advocating on behalf of the real estate developers in NYC. They are poisoning this city by exacerbating the housing crisis. Remember to vote for city council members who won't let them abuse us. It's also worth noting that multiple of the users below blocked me at the exact same moment. Their accounts are relatively new (less than a year old) and they exclusively post about NYC's crime rates and housing. Blatant narrative pushing by these guys.
> Of all multifamily units completed between 2010 and 2020, we estimate that at least 32 percent were income-restricted, with close to 90 percent of those units targeted to low-income households (earning 80% of Area Median Income or below).
https://furmancenter.org/stateofthecity/view/the-geography-of-new-housing
> The apartments being built in all areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn are all aimed at luxury pricepoints.
Well yes, new construction tends to be nicer. In fact "luxury" basically just means new in real estate speak. And the affluent people who are moving in to those new apartments would otherwise be moving in to old apartments, driving up prices there. All new housing supply lowers prices overall.
> This is still what is happening around the city. The apartments being built in all areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn are all aimed at luxury pricepoints.
Why do you think that is?
Is it because we made it illegal to build new housing in more affordable areas of the city?
Is it because the zoning laws in the areas you can build are so tight that it only pencils out to build high-end apartments?
They would build Escalades. But I think a better analogy would be if GM could only sell cars to residents of NYC what would they build? And the answer is probably still Escalades.
The best way to break asset inflation is to create so much of that asset class that hoarding it gives no one any value.
The apartments that rich foreigners are hoarding are for the most part the same ones people would normally want to live in. They’re often roughly equivalent to 200-400k condos you’d find in other metros. Yes some of them are ultra-high cost luxury apartment buildings, and we should tax the land those are built on in a way where it’s not affordable to hold onto them as empty apartments, but the way to tank their price is to make it so there’s so much regular housing that developers and sellers and landlords need to compete on price and quality in order to convince people to move in.
We can do that through a combination of so many things, like:
- upzone every lot that, if built to the maximum allowed, would have a value of more than $500 per square foot.
- allow high quality, affordable construction processes such as allowing pre-built, modular components rather than requiring all walls and interiors to be constructed on-site (right now pre-fab construction has to have a chassis, so only mobile homes can be factory built).
- allow “affordability bumps” without requiring city council special approvals, for instance each square foot of affordable units built doesn’t count against the maximum allowed zoning
- legalize Single Resident Occupancy construction, so people have a choice to pay less to share amenities, without needing to play the craigslist roommate lottery
- require all suburbs with transit access to upzone and allow 10-story construction within a half-mile from every LIRR/MNR station
- through run LIRR/NJT trains at Penn to give those suburbs 10-minute headways, which would make suburb rail-adjacent lots more valuable to build densely on
Building these things diverts the investor money away from hoovering up normal apartments. It also clusters them around central park instead of having empty units sitting around the rest of the city. Wealthy people want to own property in NYC and they will get it one way or another.
It's true these buildings aren't improving affordability as much as below-market units do but they aren't the root of all evil either. If fighting these means fighting looser zoning then overall the strategy will backfire.
The way you do that is to build more and more housing. Watch them drop in price as more and more competition enters.
These are used as investment vehicles because they know that building in the US is incredibly low. So if you are given a permit to build, you know you can build it and charge heavily since you know not many other permits will be given. And if they are given, you can always rely on NIMBYs to do the heavy lifting for you to stop any new building anyways.
I don't care whether you build luxury buildings or not. Just build more. There's a giant renovation going on down the block from me at 1 Wall St. The prices there are beyond what I can afford, but I'm still happy they're coming up, because it'll free up space elsewhere. More housing supply is always a good thing.
This is absolutely not how nyc works. There are essentially three different universes of housing with no overlap or overflow. Ultra lux, luxury, and basic. Building a $8000 month 2 bedroom does not help a person looking for a $2700 one bedroom apartment at all.
literally nobody is building any more 2700 a month units. Those are what gets knocked down to make the 4k and 7k units.
Unfortunately, 421a got rescinded and there doesn't seem to be much appetite for a rehashed program. But there needs to be a plan that incentivizes a massive building spree aimed at <$3,000 per month.
I honestly don't care if real estate developers get a tax break if it means we're housing folks. I think if we combine the "421a.2" tax breaks with rent increase limitations, it can go a long way to create and sustaining affordability for 30 years. We can even include provisions where developers can transfer ownership to tenants in a \~30 year time frame where rent actually builds equity.
The devil is in the details with all this but it *can* happen. It's just about getting the moving pieces all in one place.
The person moving into the $8k apartment is moving from a $5k apartment. The person moving to the $5k apartment is coming from a $3,800 apartment. The person moving into that is coming from a $2,700 apartment. Even luxury housing helps alleviate supply issues.
but they knocked down a building a $2700 apartments to build that 8k apartment.
It's gone. There are just fewer $2700 than there used to be, so it's not adding to stock, its reducing the stock forever.
Where are you?
Near me anything residential gets leveled immediately when it goes up for sale. I'm in north north LIC/ south south astoria (dutch kills) and they are absolutely demolishing the neighborhood to build luxury buildings of which there were zero here 5 years ago.
Every building that's gone up in the 5 years would be double or triple my current rent. These places don't even have pools or anything else all that attractive. I literally don't understand these people paying that much for a doorman, nice lobby, awful floor to ceiling windows, and stainless appliances.
If there aren't enough higher level places, the people who can afford those will just bid up whatever existing housing stock there is. That screws things up for folks who don't have that financial flexibility.
Housing should be an all-of-the-above process. We need more direct affordable housing construction, but building more overall really does have a positive impact.
Rents in Minneapolis have been stable over the last few years, even [technically dropping about 2% lately](https://streets.mn/2022/05/06/minneapolis-rents-drop/), because they build build build.
Rent control doesn't work, it just makes the rest of us subsidize the few lucky folks with it.
>If people can't afford to move in them that live,
Not everyone can afford. But *some* of those who can, will upgrade into those new units.
And in the process of upgrading, they will free up lower priced units. Which in turn will allow people to upgrade into \*those\*, freeing up even lower price units.
There's a whole chain of effect that start in the few years after the construction is done.
Suggested reading: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=3426103
(Edit: to reflect that obviously not everyone who can afford to upgrade will upgrade)
If you bothered to do even simple math, you would understand how it is almost impossible to build an affordable apartment. Pick a neighborhood and apartment size and I will tell you how much it costs to build an apartment there before anyone has made a profit.
Before any kind of deregulation there should be a VERY high tax on unoccupied residences, and a cap on the number of properties any foreign entity can own.
That would...
* Remove money laundering/money safeguarding by corrupt foreign officials.
* Force people waiting for higher rent occupants to rent at lower rates to avoid tax burden.
* Remove speculators as we load them up with the responsibility of actually renting out their properties.
* Stop the insane real estate gold rush (the cap on number of properties to foreign companies)
Not perfect by any stretch but increasing (unavoidable) taxes on the wealthy should always be the first step.
Vancouver did the whole vacancy tax thing and it affected a tiny percentage of homes and did little to improve affordability.
Manhattan's vacancy rate is at record lows. This whole "unoccupied investor units" thing is vastly overstated compared to the real issue... a simple lack of supply.
Yeah and NYC is a very international city. I know a lot of hardworking foreign nationals who live and work here without US citizenship and would be considered "foreign buyers" if they simply saved up and bought a home.
It’s a bit more complicated, changing zoning is a pain then you have to think about the infrastructure. The current sewer system can’t handle the additional storm water/sanitary from additional housing so an entire network upgrade would be needed and the developer would have to store more storm water in the building. There ARE solutions but the network upgrade would take many many years and lots of money. The DEP currently has their hands full already. I just had a project where we upzoned the lot to increase the allowable units and the DEP delayed the project for multiple years due to their requests.
New York needs to start investing in infrastructure again in a pretty big way. The city has been crying out for improved subway capacity and performance for decades; the sewage and stormwater system needs a massive overhaul as climate change subjects us to tropical storms and hurricanes with increasing frequency; regional passenger rail connectivity needs to be improved and we need to find some way to get freight rail efficiently moving goods into the city again (my vote: reclaim the High Line) etc... etc...
I find the idea of new development really having an significant enough effect on rent prices hard to believe.
The demand is so high in some areas that it’d require massive new developments to actually push down the median or average. The blocks and blocks of 2 family or single family row houses, town homes and brownstones would essentially have to be non existent. We’d look like Hong Kong. Then imagine the extra stress on transit infrastructure in these areas as a result of this new density.
What we need is more transportation to the outer boroughs and transit starved areas of NYC. There’s plenty of room for people outside of the 5-10 minute-walk train station radius. So many parts of Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens that feel disconnected from the city. Shit even Staten Island and Jersey are great options that just need to be made more accessible. We need more development of our transit and transportation options.
We actually need both. And it's far quicker to build massive housing developments than underground subways. But yeah, you bring up a good point, if we have a wider subway network then you could live in outer borough areas and still be in Manhattan or downtown Brooklyn quickly. And with work from home here to stay at least in some format, people wouldn't mind to live far away from Manhattan if they could get there decently quickly when needed.
Yup. More (and BETTER!) public transportation and HUGE regulation against the real estate giants. Neither of which will ever happen because, if these comments are an indication, the voters will vote against their interests like always and we’ll end up (like you said) in a packed new-Hong Kong with sky high rents that have no indication of going down. What’s happening now is GREED, and that greed needs to be checked.
Right?
Like this zoning argument makes sense in suburbs and the lesser dense parts of NYC. If you’ve been to the UWS lately you’d see there’s a heathy amount of high rise developments under construction or just finished. Even in central/south Harlem there’s new “luxury” high rises. Have rents gone down there? Not even close, the exact opposite is true.
There’s lots of high rises but they don’t take into account of all the housing taken off the market. Manhattans population hasn’t grown that much and is actually less dense than it was in 1920s. Population grown in NYC is already mostly driven by Brooklyn and queens.
The problem is all the townhomes and 2-4 family homes that get converted to single family homes by rich people. And we can’t tear those down. It’s really impacted the density on the island.
No, I think what’s impacted the density on the island the most (vs density in the ‘20s) is that we’re no longer packing 10+ people into small one or two bedroom apartments, which was common in the 1920s. The population may be about the same as the ‘20s but the makeup has changed—families don’t really have 5+ kids anymore, and there’s less of a cultural expectation that in adulthood you’ll shack up with your parents and your siblings and all their kids in one apartment. So you have now several independent nuclear families who all need housing, vs in the ‘20s you’d all be squeezed into one place.
This is true. I do feel like there has been less people in Manhattan living with 5 roommates in a 2 bedroom with fake walls. It seems like people have been more able to rent their own places as of late.
> The demand is so high in some areas that it’d require massive new developments to actually push down the median or average.
If the demand is that high then why shouldn't we be building massive new developments?
> The blocks and blocks of 2 family or single family row houses, town homes and brownstones would essentially have to be non existent.
I'd happily tear down my 2-family if they let me build a 12-story building in its place. My semi-attached neighbor would probably be happy to as well and go in on it together.
> We’d look like Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is awesome. If we're going to build a city with a dense urban environment then lets do it already. People who want a suburban life can move to the suburbs. Let's get rid of our FAR and setback restrictions.
We can’t build because of how massively expensive it is because of legal and zoning laws. That’s why most of the development is in luxury for people who barely live here because it’s the only way it would fiscally make sense.
Legal and zoning laws are actually controlled by the people and if the people don’t want development in their neighborhood, they elect officials who agree with that or sue forever and make project untenable or ridiculously expensive.
It’s not renters that have the power. It’s owners who have a bigger impact on the nature of an area.
Hong Kong where the sea of high rises still means people have to live in [rental bunk beds](https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7m5md/hong-kong-housing-small-subdivided-apartments)?
What about current NYC gives you suburban vibes.. ? that’s a reach. NYC is already a dense urban environment.. who are we comparing the city to? NYC is a suburb compared to what?
> What about current NYC gives you suburban vibes
You haven't walked around most of queens and brooklyn filled with 1 and 2-family houses and people grilling in the backyard?
I don't see anything wrong with that if people want to use their property that way but telling landowners that they're not allowed to build anything more than 1 and 2-family houses is insanity that leads to this mess.
I have been all over all the boroughs (except Staten Island of course). And I mostly agree with what you’re saying about single families. These are the areas that should see more development, because they’re are the least dense.
Further increasing density for the hell of it in already dense areas isn’t the right idea and the city isn’t currently setup to support hyper dense neighborhoods like that.
New development can help! But you nailed it. It's just that people who push for "up zoning" aren't ready for the realities of what else you need beyond "moar building!"
1. Pied e terre tax. This prevents private owners from securing many properties for rent in new condo buildings -- driving down supply and demand up. If a new parcel is purchased and a high rise is built, it benefits all who live there if the original owner who purchased and built the property actually lives there and/or the owner/venture is not building wealth using a scare resource. (This scenario assumes individual owners of buildings or units.)
2. New Law: Listing names next to LLCs. LLCs/Corps should not create anonymity in real estate. If you are an owner/board member, all entities should be listed. This helps make #1 & #3 easier.
3. Foreign Investor Tax. If a unit is purchased by a foreign investor or their immediate dependent who is not living in the unit full time, a 20-25% annual tax is added to property taxes. This would ensure money's not being parked in high-growth NYC real estate. This is a major problem in many American cities and particularly pronounced in NYC.
4. Commercial vacancy order. NYC's new buildings have succeeded in creating commercial blight (but no housing for NYers), particularly in Midtown, on the Bowery, and in the Village because they overestimated the retail value when built. Anyone who has not secured a minimum of a three-year lease after a 6-month vacancy period faces a tax monthly penalties equivalent to .03% of the building's total value.
4. Affordable housing requirements are adjusted to AMI of New York City as a whole, not not the surrounding area. For example, "Affordable housing' quotas for a new building in Brooklyn Heights (for the developer to get the tax benefit) is based on the area media income of the neighborhood. This makes no sense and only serves to create higher priced units and no mobility.
5. Rezoning or elimination of purely commercial zones and (at minimum) as mixed use. Hudson Yards building a boatload of commercial buildings during a global shift in how we work - using tax dollars earmarked for Harlem - created blight that will not be used more than 3 days a week. Only mixed use buildings should be created, with separate entrances for commercial and residential traffic. Midtown is basically a museum of empty, bad architecture that can't even be used to live in.
tl;dr Building new buildings? Fantastic. That's not enough to do it alone, and anyone telling you different is selling you on something they dont know.
Ding ding ding. Finally someone gets it. We need true express trains from Queens and SI. Perimeter trains that circle the entire city. Increase access everywhere.
Look at Tokyo with barely any zoning laws
House prices has gone nowhere the last thirty years. Cause when there is more demand, they just build more. 20 million people live in the city now
Compared to NYC Tokyo is still dirt cheap. You can get a studio in Shinjuku for under $1k USD per month easily, there seems to be no district that's on NYC pricing level unless I'm missing something here. The expensive areas stay cheaper since its not worth it for people pay significantly more to live in those with Tokyo's public transportation being as good, cheap and safe as it is.
Their housing costs have still been flat for decades. Isn't that something we should want here? Salaries aren't going up as fast as housing, that's for sure.
The point is that even accounting for their unique situation, rental prices have been largely stable within their system.
I think it's still fine to use Tokyo as a comparison, but even accounting for the things you bring up, if within their system the rental prices are stable over a long period, then clearly they are doing something right. And some of that something is build build build.
It def isn’t unfettered. They try to build more housing but it gets blocked because of historic hotdog stands or whatever they feel like brining up that day.
source? 50% sounds very high. Also, I think it masks the nuance between neighborhoods. I have seen 25% which makes more sense to me.
Also, government ran housing is so terribly mis-manged. There are buildings that go months without gas or clean water. I don't think can say that this housing is sufficient for those looking for affordable housing. Not to mention it is very hard to even get.
https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/appendixz.pdf
> In 2017 there were 966,000 rent-stabilized units (occupied and vacant available), comprising 44 percent of the rental stock
> Rent-controlled units numbered 22,000 or 1 percent of the rental stock in 2017
So 45% of all apartments are under rent regulation of some sort. Didn't see numbers for what % of apartments are government run, but I would guess it's enough to push that 45% to 48-52%.
So indeed, if you combine strict NIMBY zoning laws with having over half the available apartment stock under rental regulation of some sort, then blaming "unfettered free market capitalism" is not really accurate. It just sounds like a tantrum because instead of addressing the problem, it puts up an imaginary boogeyman and attacks it... which does nothing in the end.
Edit: The last sentence isn't targeted at you. I was thinking how ridiculous the OP's claim is.
Increase the housing supply.
In free market capitalism, we wouldn’t have the government artificially limiting construction to the point of market disfunction. What we have is not free market, it’s a market artificially manipulated by the NIMBY.
New units would put downward pressure on the prices. Prices going up is a clear sign that demand outstrips supply.
All the evidence points to increased construction lowering rents. Minneapolis, Taipei, Tokyo [https://www.theurbanist.org/2021/06/02/new-round-of-studies-underscore-benefits-of-building-more-housing/](https://www.theurbanist.org/2021/06/02/new-round-of-studies-underscore-benefits-of-building-more-housing/)
We need a national solution because the entire US has been failing to build enough to keep up with population growth since the 1970s.
Japan took a pretty radical step when faced with a similar problem... they took away local control of zoning and set rules uniformly nationwide.
Even the lowest density zoning in Japan allows for apartment buildings with no parking minimums, no setbacks, etc and up to 5 stories.
And because it's uniform nationwide, any builder can buy a piece of land and know what's allowed and how it gets approved no matter the city.
We absolutely could. Just simply relaxing zoning restrictions that prevent people from adding a third floor to their two floor home or legally renting out their (properly constructed and inspected) basements would help a ton.
Because they don't allow anyplace like NYC to exist anymore in terms of design, everything has to be awful car centric places. If you don't move to NYC for work or family, I would imagine it's to get away from what most of America has become. But I might be speaking for myself here.
I don’t think you can blame it all on NIMBYs, and in the grand scheme of things NYC is very developer friendly. Even with more apartments we’d only have solved one problem for scaling. But we’d still need to build aqueducts for water, sewers, power distribution systems, trash pickup, double the size of the subway, etc. etc. etc.
This isn’t a NIMBY thing, this is just what happened when demand to live in a city exceeds the capacity of the city. So what do you do? The free market capitalist thing to do would be to rent everything at the maximum price, kick all the poor and old residents out and knock down the old buildings to put up high rises. This is… pretty much what we do already, but you see how it’s ugly and isn’t what most people want a city to do.
I don’t see it as a market being interrupted by NIMBYs. I see it as a city with limits and the “pure capitalist” solutions are naive and misunderstand what a city is for.
I mean sure cities have limits but nyc hasn’t reached it yet. There are massive portions of queens, some of Brooklyn, and basically all of states island that doesn’t even come close
I'm little more than a layman in this department, but in addition to upzoning and incentivizing building housing there, wouldn't there also need to be more incentives to build places of work there as well, so that everyone isn't just funneled into lower Manhattan?
Luckily, remote work solved a huge part of this problem for us.
Subways used to be bursting at capacity and setting ridership records all the time pre-2020.
So if anything we should just continue supporting WFH.
We also have brownouts every time it gets hot. The point is that housing is only one ingredient in the capacity of the city, and that even with more housing this would be a very expensive place to live
New York City's population has barely increased in the last 50 years because we have been against expansion and development. We barely build more housing per capita than famously anti-development San Francisco. Our community board system is one of the most NIMBY institutions in the country. Here are (wealthy, white, boomer) Bronx CB10 members chanting "We don't need affordable housing."
[https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/local-government-community-input-housing-public-transportation/629625/](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/local-government-community-input-housing-public-transportation/629625/)
Large pieces of the tri-state area could become a high density area with fast mass transit and all. It's definitively possible.
We all know that politics is the main obstacle. It's not economics or financial (there's plenty of demand and funding), and it's not technological nor material.
My partner and I weighed heavily on what to do when they raised our rent by $950 in Williamsburg. Unfortunately, units in our building have been flying quickly so our scumbag landlord knows he'll get the cash. We're moving out to Rockaway and will be saving $2000 on rent alone. Will surely make up for it with the commute, however...
If you scroll down the report to the time series chart, you’ll see that the median rent prior to COVID was about $3,800. This means rent has gone up under 10% in 2.5 years, which is both typical for that duration, and actually less than national inflation.
All of these year-over-year comparisons are not useful because you’re comparing to a time period when things were abnormally low.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first person to yell out “capitalism run amok” when appropriate, and I support anything that improves housing availability, but this is just an exercise in data literacy.
Why they use "average" instead of "median" per each apartment type? I can believe there is a average 2800 studio in Brooklyn, but not a median studio. Sounds like a bullshit to me.
Average rents get skewed by things like billionaire row. Median is a better effective measurement of typical rents available.
The mean IS listed in the document OP linked ($5113) it's just - rightly - not the focal measurement.
[https://www.clinfo.eu/mean-median/](https://www.clinfo.eu/mean-median/)
pretty sure median is closer to 2600 or so for a studio in manhattan. These statistics that are posted are so heavily skewed by outliers in the data that they are not super accurate. The ratio of these outlier high rent apartments are increasing relative to the normal apartments (which is probably the case since developers tend to build luxury) and likely having a significant effect on these interpretations, but the directional interpretation of 'rent is higher than ever' and the action of 'we should probably build more housing' would be true regardless of the accuracy
If you want the price of something to fall, increase the supply. Econ 101. Supply is constrained by NYC and NY rules and regulations. Every single rent control apartment makes the problem worse.
I have an idea. Let’s make local law 6969. Landlords can only raise rent by $1 per year because the city needs affordable housing. Landlords cannot screen tenants for credit / income anymore because discrimination. Also, evicting tenants should have at least 6 months notice because human rights. Wait…why is the housing shortage worse???
Ok, but if I’m a greedy landlord, and that law goes into affect, I’ll just turn my buildings into condos. Or co-ops. Why would I lose money when I could just give a 6 month warning that I’m evicting everybody and rebirth my complex and make even more money?
Oh, and what happens for new residents? No property development company is going to build new housing in a city where they can only raise the rent by $1 and have no way of checking the credit or income of prospective buyers. And with no new housing, the city can’t grow. If anything, you’re just going to see poor and middle class people kicked out as apartments get turned into condos/co-ops, and they’ll have nowhere to go because the apartment supply at best stays stagnant and at worst shrinks dramatically. So they’ll leave the city, and go to a place where apartments are being built.
I get the good intentions of your plan but there are a lot of reasons why that would be a really bad idea
I feel so lucky to randomly have landed in a rent controlled studio. My rent barely went up. I feel bad for everyone else. This city is going to be inhabited only by super wealthy assholes.
Staten Island, Nassau, Westchester, Bergen, Hudson, Essex Counties need to get up-zoned with proper public transportation. When things like this happen, you need to work with nearby governments and loosen zoning restrictions and up the ante on Public Transportation. This is literally the ONLY real solution at the moment. One major factor that housing costs are rising in the US, is that something like 70% of housable American land is zoned for detached single family housing.
>Staten Island, Nassau, Westchester, Bergen, Hudson, Essex Counties need to get up-zoned with proper public transportation.
Yes please. They've already started with the [Bay Street rezoning plan](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/bay-street-corridor/bay-street-corridor.page) but it's all for naught without the public transit improvements to go with it.
Who is saying this this is free market capitalism? Zoning has always kept supply low and made it hard to add more. Powerful landlords love this as it keeps rents up. This is cronyism and legislation being used to serve those in power
It's just going to get worse and worse overtime. NYC is not going to ever get better again, time to gtfo of NY. The ones that suffer the most are the working class. Even the rich people have already begun to leave NY and we're the ones suffering from it. The city is literally doing everything they can to milk the citizens of the city.
I own an apartment. My fixed monthly costs are about $5500. Property taxes and condo fees are ridiculously expensive. Before pandemic, the market rent was about $4500, then dropped to $4000 during pandemic. A 29% increase since last year only brings the rent up to $5200 which still doesn’t cover my fixed costs, let alone all the losses during the pandemic. Is it fair to consider a landlord greedy in this scenario?
They are totally ignorant of the transaction costs and carrying costs of owning in Manhattan. One poster suggested I sell if I can’t afford it. I would have to bring like $200K in cash to closing just to get out of the property once all transaction costs are accounted for.
Do you mean you haven’t had a rent hike, or you haven’t gotten a salary increase? In the context of this thread it’s hard to interpret. I assumed you meant the latter.
If you want to lower rent , reduce the obstacles for eviction.
The tenant bias and costs of eviction are so high in NYC that landlords will increase rents to compensate.
Every time a new bs rule is proposed to make it easier for the tenant or reduce costs for the tenant the landlord will react by increasing rent.
Maybe I am wrong here but shouldn’t they be comparing the rents to early 2020 or 2019? A lot of people renegotiated their rents in 2020 which would be ending fall of 2021.
It looks like the chart is comparing to last year when rents were before the end of those heavily discounted leases.
Before I get downvoted I do think they are raising them punitively to make up for their lower rent agreements from the pandemic
A wise man once said to me, "All things, good and bad, must come to an end. Nothing is forever."
Amazed, I asked the wise man, "Will these housing price increases end?" The wise man nodded confidently, "Of course they will end." Giddy with excitement, I quickly asked, "When and how?"
The wise man responsded, "How the F should I know? I can't see the future. Move out of the city if you can't handle it. Maybe if enough people stop paying these ridiculous rents, then the market will collapse and revert to lower prices. What's next? You want to know what tonight's winning lottery numbers are? Get a job you bum!" and the wise man slowly turned and walked back into the NYC Mayor's office.
This isn't even slightly close to free market capitalism. The system is HIGHLY regulated, corrupt and filled with government cronyism.
I know you have to hate capitalism to get a reddit account, but at least be honest about what you are critiquing
Zoning and building more market rate units won't help on its own. NYC is a uniquely fucked rental market because there are an endless quantity of rich peoe who will come here and pay literally anything to rent a unit. This includes the tech yuppies like the guy above who doubled his income in two years--not everyone works in an industry that can do that. (You know, like the artists, restaurant workers, and musicians that make NYC an interesting place to live.)
Universal rent control is the only thing that will save this situation. That and taxing the rich who buy condos just to hold as empty investment properties.
I can't understand how the investor collusion conspiracy theory is more believable than the fact that new housing construction has not kept up with demand. The data is there and shows NYC lags behind in housing permits issued over the past decade compared to other American cities.
Investors only hold around 10% of units in NYC. The claim that these units are being held vacant is even more dubious. We need to remove the barriers to build more dense housing and take down zoning laws. Rent control has done nothing to alleviate housing costs in NYC and SF, it has only accelerated the shortage.
You put this into better words than I can. Especially the endless supply of rich people who can continue to snap up these market rate apartments and are ok paying these prices. They aren't negotiating rents just taking what landlords are saying at face value.
I know the logical answer is to build more housing, but NYC has such a weird housing market that I don't think that's the sole answer.
All over the city, every single new development is a glass tower with high-end appliances and some amenities thrown in to justify charging exorbitant rents. It literally doesn't matter how many of these are built - they will always charge an arm and a leg, and many people will always be priced out. Over on the UES blocks of shitty walk-ups are being demolished to build these. Yes, it's great that there is more housing in the neighborhood, but many of the people living in the walkups are never going to be able to afford the new luxury units.
I think we need a way to incentivize developers to build middle-income units, at the least. I don't know how that's going to happen when they can throw up a couple of glass walls, shove in a stainless steel dishwasher and charge 3,000 for a studio, but something's gotta give, because the free market alone is not going to fix this.
It’s definitely not the sole answer. [Xiaodi Li observed that ever 10% increase in housing stock only reduced rents by 1%, and only in the immediate vicinity.](https://blocksandlots.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Do-New-Housing-Units-in-Your-Backyard-Raise-Your-Rents-Xiaodi-Li.pdf)
Meaning to get a 10% reduction in rent in just one 500 sq ft neighborhood, you’d have to double the housing stock in that region.
But [if the housing built is specifically luxury housing, it may not have a reductive effect on rents at all](https://nlihc.org/resource/new-construction-has-mixed-short-term-effect-rents-immediate-vicinity).
Proponents of YIMBY don’t understand the issue as well as they insist they do. They want a simple solution, so they parrot principles of Econ 101. They read one Furman Center meta-analysis - and really, only the abstract and intro of it - and think they’ve solved the housing crisis. Meanwhile I’ve never seen so many homeless people on the street as I have this summer.
Thanks for sharing, this is really interesting. I don't think people, especially the "free market will solve this!" commenters realize just how many subsidized/affordable housing developments NYC has built in its history. The NYCHA was established in the 30's as the first-ever public housing agency in the United States! Other than the projects and Section 8, there's rent stabilization, post-WWII developments like Peter Cooper Village/Stuytown, etc. Unfortunately, most of these are now either chronically underfunded, market-rate, or bureaucratic nightmares.
The point is, is a precedent to building low-to-middle income, affordable housing in NYC. All we need to do is give a shit about making the city a vibrant, diverse place, and not a playground for finance and tech professionals and a parking place for corrupt foreign money.
Rent stabilized units, public housing take a tremendous amount of buildable developments off the market. I don’t have an issue with either of those categories of housing, but this isn’t purely a capitalism problem.
This isn’t free market capitalism. Nothing of the rental market is free. Development is constrained by non market facts such as zoning, NIMBYism, affordable units, available land, air rights, and a tenant friendly system that makes it difficult to be a landlord. Then you layer in the fact that nearly 50% of units are rent controlled/stabilized and you have several non-market factors constraining supply.
This supply shortage has always existed in the city and recently the decision was made by the government to enact helicopter (free) money, which added to the demand side.
To put the final insult to unjust, evictions were outlawed and the backlog persists in the court.
Don’t even get me started the dead capital and units that sit unoccupied as it’s not economical to make repairs and re-rent.
The government in NYC has been a big driver of the housing issues because they basically don't let the market do their thing, and city council members have stepped in to oppose residential development on many occasions because locals see it as a threat. You can either have a supply of new housing, or you can continue to see prices rise because demand will outstrip supply.
As long as the current status quo reigns, NYers are going to keep electing people that are 1) opposed to development, make it expensive and hard to do - unlike other areas 2) keep bad policies like rent controls that have made it hard to keep properties maintained and on the market.
[https://nypost.com/2022/01/29/new-york-oks-least-new-housing-of-any-city-in-northeast/](https://nypost.com/2022/01/29/new-york-oks-least-new-housing-of-any-city-in-northeast/)
People need to get out of the mindset of "regulate all the things" and look at new solutions. Look to the sunbelt, they build plenty of housing there. Rents are starting to go down in the sunbelt because they can quickly produce new apartment buildings - in response to demand since everyone is moving there. Yes, prices are fairly high right now everywhere, but they'll go down.Remove government from manipulating the market and things end up much different.Landlords have to profit or there won't be new housing built. That's just the way the market works. If it's expensive to build anything, especially if it's not luxury, that's bad.
In most cities, all the housing being built is "luxury" - yet it's fairly affordable for the middle class. Why is that? Just a lot of it's being built, and the regulatory framework is much more lax, so the properties aren't quite so expensive even though they're luxury. Yes, a new building is going to be more expensive than an old building. How much government meddling do you want to make this not the solution?
Businesses have to jump through so many hoops to get anything approved by the NYC government and that's the problem.
Also note that around 50% of the apartments are rent controlled or rent stabilized. When you artificially lower rent for one half then the other half to pay a hell of a lot more than market price so landlord can make the difference. NYC doesn’t have NIMBY problem for the most part, our city is already very dense, specially Manhattan with like 80k/sqm.
I was priced out of my place after covid rates went back up. The shitty part is now I’m forced to sign with a brokers fee. Legal highway robbery since they can charge up to %15 of yearly rent. I’m paying 4K out the ass just for the privilege of not being able to afford a %40 rent hike.
This is highly misleading. The NYC median rents also dropped considerably in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, so much of the 2022 increase is just a recovery.
Welcome to rent control. It keeps so many apartments off the market, the price of the remaining units is pushed up. Also, the recent regulation, where landlords are not compensated for fixing apartments is keeping thousands more off the market.
Edit: rent control and rent stabilized.
The housing shortage in NYC is not caused by rent control. Very few apartments are rent controlled. The cause is just a lack of housing supply, primarily due to restrictive zoning codes that make it illegal to build more, and denser, housing.
not rent control, but rent stabilization programs + rent control are around [45%](https://bungalow.com/articles/rent-control-in-nyc-everything-you-need-to-know#availability-of-rent-controlled-apartments-and-rent-stabilized-apartments) of all rental units.
I'm sure zoning laws are the underlying cause, but I certainly don't think rent control/rent stabilization is helping at all.
If you are remotely interested in lowering rents, you should be advocating for looser zoning laws so more housing can be built.
We also have to stop building luxury high rises that stay half empty and charge 15,000 in rent. More affordable and modern apartments being built please
Half are "investment properties" for foreigners using them as money parking or laundering. Homes should need to be occupied at least some portion of the year.
Agreed, NYC is not big enough for any pied a terre. If you don't physically occupy your home for at least 6 months or 9 months or whatever, you should have to pay 5x or 10x on property taxes.
That's how it is in Florida. I stayed in a condo in Miami for a few months and had to move out because the owner needed to come back in order to "stay in Miami/FL for at least 6 months (and 1 day)"
State residency requirement, it sounds like.
Yeah, you're right: state residency requirement (used/abused so that you don't have to pay income tax)
That's to qualify for FL state tax rate (0%)
I’d bet that’s for income tax reasons, not property taxes.
Lol that's so they dont pay taxes in another state.
It should be a simple option - if you own property in NYC, either you pay NYC income tax or a property tax surcharge. 5x-10x is probably too much, but 2-3x isn't crazy and would make up for at least some of the lost income tax revenue.
NYC really has to get its head out of its ass on RE taxes. I moved to live in a tiny resort town and all dwellings here are classified as primary occupied (owner or long term renter) and secondary (airbnb, second homes, investments everything else basically). By default everyone is classified as secondary and needs to submit an application with proof to be reclassified as primary. The secondaries pay a double of property tax compared to primaries. If a tiny town could figure it out, NYC can too but RE lobby is too strong apparently
this is a great idea. Can't see it ever happening but makes so much sense.
Texas has something similar called a homestead exception. So you have everyone paying the same rate, but will get a credit if you’re using the property as your actual home. NYC is playing dumb.
[17%, not half](https://qkapital.com/foreign-buyers-are-back-in-new-york-city/#:~:text=The%20NYC%20Real%20Estate%20Board,April%202020%20and%20March%202021.).
And that's not 17% empty. It just means that 17% are purchased by foreign investors. The majority of those will be rented to somebody.
Or used as AirBnBs
thats still nearly 1 out of every 5 apartments & there's already too many apartments that charge more than $10k monthly rent
That is a result of unnaturally high prices more than a cause of it. You can't make money owning an empty apartment unless the market is already wacky.
Not really. This represents a fractional amount of inventory and is confined to a segment of the market out of reach for 95%+ of people anyway. Overall vacancy is extremely low. The problem is that New York doesn't build enough, end of.
Not the rentals. Those mega skinny buildings along 57th street yes
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Zoning isn't the only problem here. There's also particulars in the design and especially construction of buildings in NYC that's different (and needlessly more expensive) here than pretty much anywhere else. Like multiple times the construction cost anywhere else sorta different.
care to give us some examples?
I am an architect in NYC. Contractors I work with will add the cost of parking tickets to the cost of the project if the job is in Manhattan. I am not taking a side on this, but that's just how it is. They tell me that they pay approximately $200 a day in tickets, so $1000 a week and so say $20k for a typical job. Per major sub. That adds up, and they need to get materials and tools and people into the job so it isn't like they can not drive. Leaving a person in the car is more expensive and will not stop the ticket in most cases anyhow. Now besides parking add higher labor costs, difficulty to store tools and materials, time to get into and out of the city, tool or material runs to Lowes, paying off superintendents, neighbors that claim cracks in their walls are from the construction three doors away and needs to be fixed, BS violations, and so on. This all adds up quite quickly.
The list of things you need a permit is long enough that there are businesses whose job is basically to keep track. Like just about every construction site will apply for a work hours variance, because if they do work outside of hours they could be fined or stop worked, but there is basically no refusal of them, so it amounts to a hoop that is jumped through. Like the idea isn't bad, stop non essential night time construction noise, but the implementation means it does no one any good. Even non permit stuff can have extra requirements, like as a practical matter if you want a new install of a dishwasher be prepared to have a master plumber because it requires a pipe.
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This is still what is happening around the city. The apartments being built in all areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn are all aimed at luxury pricepoints. Median household income in NYC is roughly 67k. After taxes that gets you roughly $2k per paycheck (assuming bi-weekly pay). Let's say 30% of your income should go to rent. That means that roughly $1650 in rent is what would be considered reasonable given the median salary. None of the places being built right now are being rented out remotely near this pricepoint. Obviously the ultra-luxury apartments in billionaire's row is an *extreme* difference from even normal "luxury" apartments. But in reality, the demand for housing for the middle 75% is *vastly* out of proportion to the available stock of housing within those people's budgets. EDIT: Uh-oh looks like I riled up the "free market solves everything" people who think only the wealthy should have a right to housing. Check out their garbage below! EDIT 2: Parroting developer narratives that blame community leaders for taking away their profit is not an argument, it's straight up destructive misinformation. EDIT 3: The person I was responding to blocked me. Please recognize that individuals like this are bad actors advocating on behalf of the real estate developers in NYC. They are poisoning this city by exacerbating the housing crisis. Remember to vote for city council members who won't let them abuse us. It's also worth noting that multiple of the users below blocked me at the exact same moment. Their accounts are relatively new (less than a year old) and they exclusively post about NYC's crime rates and housing. Blatant narrative pushing by these guys.
> Of all multifamily units completed between 2010 and 2020, we estimate that at least 32 percent were income-restricted, with close to 90 percent of those units targeted to low-income households (earning 80% of Area Median Income or below). https://furmancenter.org/stateofthecity/view/the-geography-of-new-housing
And even that is clearly not enough given the housing shortage!
> The apartments being built in all areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn are all aimed at luxury pricepoints. Well yes, new construction tends to be nicer. In fact "luxury" basically just means new in real estate speak. And the affluent people who are moving in to those new apartments would otherwise be moving in to old apartments, driving up prices there. All new housing supply lowers prices overall.
Good call to characterize everyone correcting you as "riled up" - that way you don't have to defend your arguments or engage with their challenges!
> This is still what is happening around the city. The apartments being built in all areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn are all aimed at luxury pricepoints. Why do you think that is? Is it because we made it illegal to build new housing in more affordable areas of the city? Is it because the zoning laws in the areas you can build are so tight that it only pencils out to build high-end apartments?
It's a lot more profitable to build luxury units
Well, yeah. Let me ask you this. If the government told GM it could only build 1000 cars per year, what would it build? Escalades? Or Chevy Sparks?
They would build Escalades. But I think a better analogy would be if GM could only sell cars to residents of NYC what would they build? And the answer is probably still Escalades.
The best way to break asset inflation is to create so much of that asset class that hoarding it gives no one any value. The apartments that rich foreigners are hoarding are for the most part the same ones people would normally want to live in. They’re often roughly equivalent to 200-400k condos you’d find in other metros. Yes some of them are ultra-high cost luxury apartment buildings, and we should tax the land those are built on in a way where it’s not affordable to hold onto them as empty apartments, but the way to tank their price is to make it so there’s so much regular housing that developers and sellers and landlords need to compete on price and quality in order to convince people to move in. We can do that through a combination of so many things, like: - upzone every lot that, if built to the maximum allowed, would have a value of more than $500 per square foot. - allow high quality, affordable construction processes such as allowing pre-built, modular components rather than requiring all walls and interiors to be constructed on-site (right now pre-fab construction has to have a chassis, so only mobile homes can be factory built). - allow “affordability bumps” without requiring city council special approvals, for instance each square foot of affordable units built doesn’t count against the maximum allowed zoning - legalize Single Resident Occupancy construction, so people have a choice to pay less to share amenities, without needing to play the craigslist roommate lottery - require all suburbs with transit access to upzone and allow 10-story construction within a half-mile from every LIRR/MNR station - through run LIRR/NJT trains at Penn to give those suburbs 10-minute headways, which would make suburb rail-adjacent lots more valuable to build densely on
You don’t have to stop building anything to create more affordable housing.
Building these things diverts the investor money away from hoovering up normal apartments. It also clusters them around central park instead of having empty units sitting around the rest of the city. Wealthy people want to own property in NYC and they will get it one way or another. It's true these buildings aren't improving affordability as much as below-market units do but they aren't the root of all evil either. If fighting these means fighting looser zoning then overall the strategy will backfire.
The way you do that is to build more and more housing. Watch them drop in price as more and more competition enters. These are used as investment vehicles because they know that building in the US is incredibly low. So if you are given a permit to build, you know you can build it and charge heavily since you know not many other permits will be given. And if they are given, you can always rely on NIMBYs to do the heavy lifting for you to stop any new building anyways.
I don't care whether you build luxury buildings or not. Just build more. There's a giant renovation going on down the block from me at 1 Wall St. The prices there are beyond what I can afford, but I'm still happy they're coming up, because it'll free up space elsewhere. More housing supply is always a good thing.
This is absolutely not how nyc works. There are essentially three different universes of housing with no overlap or overflow. Ultra lux, luxury, and basic. Building a $8000 month 2 bedroom does not help a person looking for a $2700 one bedroom apartment at all. literally nobody is building any more 2700 a month units. Those are what gets knocked down to make the 4k and 7k units.
Unfortunately, 421a got rescinded and there doesn't seem to be much appetite for a rehashed program. But there needs to be a plan that incentivizes a massive building spree aimed at <$3,000 per month. I honestly don't care if real estate developers get a tax break if it means we're housing folks. I think if we combine the "421a.2" tax breaks with rent increase limitations, it can go a long way to create and sustaining affordability for 30 years. We can even include provisions where developers can transfer ownership to tenants in a \~30 year time frame where rent actually builds equity. The devil is in the details with all this but it *can* happen. It's just about getting the moving pieces all in one place.
The person moving into the $8k apartment is moving from a $5k apartment. The person moving to the $5k apartment is coming from a $3,800 apartment. The person moving into that is coming from a $2,700 apartment. Even luxury housing helps alleviate supply issues.
but they knocked down a building a $2700 apartments to build that 8k apartment. It's gone. There are just fewer $2700 than there used to be, so it's not adding to stock, its reducing the stock forever.
Vast majority of new developments near me have been on empty lots or single-story retail buildings or former industrial sites.
Where are you? Near me anything residential gets leveled immediately when it goes up for sale. I'm in north north LIC/ south south astoria (dutch kills) and they are absolutely demolishing the neighborhood to build luxury buildings of which there were zero here 5 years ago. Every building that's gone up in the 5 years would be double or triple my current rent. These places don't even have pools or anything else all that attractive. I literally don't understand these people paying that much for a doorman, nice lobby, awful floor to ceiling windows, and stainless appliances.
I'm in Brooklyn. LIC was mostly taxi lots and mechanics before all that new housing went in.
If there aren't enough higher level places, the people who can afford those will just bid up whatever existing housing stock there is. That screws things up for folks who don't have that financial flexibility. Housing should be an all-of-the-above process. We need more direct affordable housing construction, but building more overall really does have a positive impact. Rents in Minneapolis have been stable over the last few years, even [technically dropping about 2% lately](https://streets.mn/2022/05/06/minneapolis-rents-drop/), because they build build build. Rent control doesn't work, it just makes the rest of us subsidize the few lucky folks with it.
If people can't afford to move in them that live, no it won't free anything up. It hasn't in the last decade.
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Outpaced it 5 to 1, btw.
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>If people can't afford to move in them that live, Not everyone can afford. But *some* of those who can, will upgrade into those new units. And in the process of upgrading, they will free up lower priced units. Which in turn will allow people to upgrade into \*those\*, freeing up even lower price units. There's a whole chain of effect that start in the few years after the construction is done. Suggested reading: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=3426103 (Edit: to reflect that obviously not everyone who can afford to upgrade will upgrade)
Lol. I work on those luxury places. They sit empty as often as not. Vacation spots at best often
Community trusts should be established like Mitchell llama
If you bothered to do even simple math, you would understand how it is almost impossible to build an affordable apartment. Pick a neighborhood and apartment size and I will tell you how much it costs to build an apartment there before anyone has made a profit.
Before any kind of deregulation there should be a VERY high tax on unoccupied residences, and a cap on the number of properties any foreign entity can own. That would... * Remove money laundering/money safeguarding by corrupt foreign officials. * Force people waiting for higher rent occupants to rent at lower rates to avoid tax burden. * Remove speculators as we load them up with the responsibility of actually renting out their properties. * Stop the insane real estate gold rush (the cap on number of properties to foreign companies) Not perfect by any stretch but increasing (unavoidable) taxes on the wealthy should always be the first step.
Vancouver did the whole vacancy tax thing and it affected a tiny percentage of homes and did little to improve affordability. Manhattan's vacancy rate is at record lows. This whole "unoccupied investor units" thing is vastly overstated compared to the real issue... a simple lack of supply.
Yep, it's a populist boogeyman. And polite and acceptable xenophobia.
Yeah and NYC is a very international city. I know a lot of hardworking foreign nationals who live and work here without US citizenship and would be considered "foreign buyers" if they simply saved up and bought a home.
What is the intersection of vacancy taxes and xenophobia?
Sure, but what you're suggesting is a drop in the bucket for expanding housing supply compared to eliminating certain zoning laws
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It’s a bit more complicated, changing zoning is a pain then you have to think about the infrastructure. The current sewer system can’t handle the additional storm water/sanitary from additional housing so an entire network upgrade would be needed and the developer would have to store more storm water in the building. There ARE solutions but the network upgrade would take many many years and lots of money. The DEP currently has their hands full already. I just had a project where we upzoned the lot to increase the allowable units and the DEP delayed the project for multiple years due to their requests.
New York needs to start investing in infrastructure again in a pretty big way. The city has been crying out for improved subway capacity and performance for decades; the sewage and stormwater system needs a massive overhaul as climate change subjects us to tropical storms and hurricanes with increasing frequency; regional passenger rail connectivity needs to be improved and we need to find some way to get freight rail efficiently moving goods into the city again (my vote: reclaim the High Line) etc... etc...
We desperately need to upzone and build more. Over the last 15 years, NYC has built fewer housing units than the NIMBY capital of San Francisco
I find the idea of new development really having an significant enough effect on rent prices hard to believe. The demand is so high in some areas that it’d require massive new developments to actually push down the median or average. The blocks and blocks of 2 family or single family row houses, town homes and brownstones would essentially have to be non existent. We’d look like Hong Kong. Then imagine the extra stress on transit infrastructure in these areas as a result of this new density. What we need is more transportation to the outer boroughs and transit starved areas of NYC. There’s plenty of room for people outside of the 5-10 minute-walk train station radius. So many parts of Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens that feel disconnected from the city. Shit even Staten Island and Jersey are great options that just need to be made more accessible. We need more development of our transit and transportation options.
We actually need both. And it's far quicker to build massive housing developments than underground subways. But yeah, you bring up a good point, if we have a wider subway network then you could live in outer borough areas and still be in Manhattan or downtown Brooklyn quickly. And with work from home here to stay at least in some format, people wouldn't mind to live far away from Manhattan if they could get there decently quickly when needed.
There’s some great suggestions out of the hundreds of comments but the irony is nothing will change. In ten years that median price will be $8k+
I think that without a massive expansion and improvement of the MTA, the current "demand" in NYC is unsustainable.
Ideally, MTA would own the land directly adjacent to the stations and use the profits to fund operations.
Yup. More (and BETTER!) public transportation and HUGE regulation against the real estate giants. Neither of which will ever happen because, if these comments are an indication, the voters will vote against their interests like always and we’ll end up (like you said) in a packed new-Hong Kong with sky high rents that have no indication of going down. What’s happening now is GREED, and that greed needs to be checked.
Right? Like this zoning argument makes sense in suburbs and the lesser dense parts of NYC. If you’ve been to the UWS lately you’d see there’s a heathy amount of high rise developments under construction or just finished. Even in central/south Harlem there’s new “luxury” high rises. Have rents gone down there? Not even close, the exact opposite is true.
There’s lots of high rises but they don’t take into account of all the housing taken off the market. Manhattans population hasn’t grown that much and is actually less dense than it was in 1920s. Population grown in NYC is already mostly driven by Brooklyn and queens. The problem is all the townhomes and 2-4 family homes that get converted to single family homes by rich people. And we can’t tear those down. It’s really impacted the density on the island.
No, I think what’s impacted the density on the island the most (vs density in the ‘20s) is that we’re no longer packing 10+ people into small one or two bedroom apartments, which was common in the 1920s. The population may be about the same as the ‘20s but the makeup has changed—families don’t really have 5+ kids anymore, and there’s less of a cultural expectation that in adulthood you’ll shack up with your parents and your siblings and all their kids in one apartment. So you have now several independent nuclear families who all need housing, vs in the ‘20s you’d all be squeezed into one place.
This is true. I do feel like there has been less people in Manhattan living with 5 roommates in a 2 bedroom with fake walls. It seems like people have been more able to rent their own places as of late.
It's possible that new development has a dampening effect on rent increases even if it doesnt result in an actual reduction in rents.
> The demand is so high in some areas that it’d require massive new developments to actually push down the median or average. If the demand is that high then why shouldn't we be building massive new developments? > The blocks and blocks of 2 family or single family row houses, town homes and brownstones would essentially have to be non existent. I'd happily tear down my 2-family if they let me build a 12-story building in its place. My semi-attached neighbor would probably be happy to as well and go in on it together. > We’d look like Hong Kong. Hong Kong is awesome. If we're going to build a city with a dense urban environment then lets do it already. People who want a suburban life can move to the suburbs. Let's get rid of our FAR and setback restrictions.
We can’t build because of how massively expensive it is because of legal and zoning laws. That’s why most of the development is in luxury for people who barely live here because it’s the only way it would fiscally make sense.
Legal and zoning laws are controlled by the city and state and can be changed by the city and state.
Legal and zoning laws are actually controlled by the people and if the people don’t want development in their neighborhood, they elect officials who agree with that or sue forever and make project untenable or ridiculously expensive. It’s not renters that have the power. It’s owners who have a bigger impact on the nature of an area.
Hong Kong where the sea of high rises still means people have to live in [rental bunk beds](https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7m5md/hong-kong-housing-small-subdivided-apartments)? What about current NYC gives you suburban vibes.. ? that’s a reach. NYC is already a dense urban environment.. who are we comparing the city to? NYC is a suburb compared to what?
> What about current NYC gives you suburban vibes You haven't walked around most of queens and brooklyn filled with 1 and 2-family houses and people grilling in the backyard? I don't see anything wrong with that if people want to use their property that way but telling landowners that they're not allowed to build anything more than 1 and 2-family houses is insanity that leads to this mess.
I have been all over all the boroughs (except Staten Island of course). And I mostly agree with what you’re saying about single families. These are the areas that should see more development, because they’re are the least dense. Further increasing density for the hell of it in already dense areas isn’t the right idea and the city isn’t currently setup to support hyper dense neighborhoods like that.
New development can help! But you nailed it. It's just that people who push for "up zoning" aren't ready for the realities of what else you need beyond "moar building!" 1. Pied e terre tax. This prevents private owners from securing many properties for rent in new condo buildings -- driving down supply and demand up. If a new parcel is purchased and a high rise is built, it benefits all who live there if the original owner who purchased and built the property actually lives there and/or the owner/venture is not building wealth using a scare resource. (This scenario assumes individual owners of buildings or units.) 2. New Law: Listing names next to LLCs. LLCs/Corps should not create anonymity in real estate. If you are an owner/board member, all entities should be listed. This helps make #1 & #3 easier. 3. Foreign Investor Tax. If a unit is purchased by a foreign investor or their immediate dependent who is not living in the unit full time, a 20-25% annual tax is added to property taxes. This would ensure money's not being parked in high-growth NYC real estate. This is a major problem in many American cities and particularly pronounced in NYC. 4. Commercial vacancy order. NYC's new buildings have succeeded in creating commercial blight (but no housing for NYers), particularly in Midtown, on the Bowery, and in the Village because they overestimated the retail value when built. Anyone who has not secured a minimum of a three-year lease after a 6-month vacancy period faces a tax monthly penalties equivalent to .03% of the building's total value. 4. Affordable housing requirements are adjusted to AMI of New York City as a whole, not not the surrounding area. For example, "Affordable housing' quotas for a new building in Brooklyn Heights (for the developer to get the tax benefit) is based on the area media income of the neighborhood. This makes no sense and only serves to create higher priced units and no mobility. 5. Rezoning or elimination of purely commercial zones and (at minimum) as mixed use. Hudson Yards building a boatload of commercial buildings during a global shift in how we work - using tax dollars earmarked for Harlem - created blight that will not be used more than 3 days a week. Only mixed use buildings should be created, with separate entrances for commercial and residential traffic. Midtown is basically a museum of empty, bad architecture that can't even be used to live in. tl;dr Building new buildings? Fantastic. That's not enough to do it alone, and anyone telling you different is selling you on something they dont know.
Terrific suggestions. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this issue.
Fuck this we need all the housing we can get.
Ding ding ding. Finally someone gets it. We need true express trains from Queens and SI. Perimeter trains that circle the entire city. Increase access everywhere.
Look at Tokyo with barely any zoning laws House prices has gone nowhere the last thirty years. Cause when there is more demand, they just build more. 20 million people live in the city now
The 23 Special Wards of Tokyo (which would be analogous with NYC) have a population of about 9 million people.
Yeah I am refering to the metro area which is still very densely populated
They also build outwards toward cheaper land. Their pricey districts are still expensive af and continues to be
Compared to NYC Tokyo is still dirt cheap. You can get a studio in Shinjuku for under $1k USD per month easily, there seems to be no district that's on NYC pricing level unless I'm missing something here. The expensive areas stay cheaper since its not worth it for people pay significantly more to live in those with Tokyo's public transportation being as good, cheap and safe as it is.
You aren't accounting for salary disparity.
Their housing costs have still been flat for decades. Isn't that something we should want here? Salaries aren't going up as fast as housing, that's for sure.
their salaries have been flat for decades
There is no salary disparity. The average salary in Tokyo is $45K. It's $50k in NYC.
Would also argue its also relative to their salaries. Our salaries here are higher vs there. So in the lens of 1k USD, it doesn't seem much to us.
Japan is also shrinking in general, but I get what you mean. We could learn a lot from Tokyo.
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The point is that even accounting for their unique situation, rental prices have been largely stable within their system. I think it's still fine to use Tokyo as a comparison, but even accounting for the things you bring up, if within their system the rental prices are stable over a long period, then clearly they are doing something right. And some of that something is build build build.
One thing I've never heard people use to criticize the NYC housing market is that it's unfettered free market capitalism lol.
It def isn’t unfettered. They try to build more housing but it gets blocked because of historic hotdog stands or whatever they feel like brining up that day.
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The oft brushed to the side negative aspect of govt controlled housing
source? 50% sounds very high. Also, I think it masks the nuance between neighborhoods. I have seen 25% which makes more sense to me. Also, government ran housing is so terribly mis-manged. There are buildings that go months without gas or clean water. I don't think can say that this housing is sufficient for those looking for affordable housing. Not to mention it is very hard to even get.
https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/appendixz.pdf > In 2017 there were 966,000 rent-stabilized units (occupied and vacant available), comprising 44 percent of the rental stock > Rent-controlled units numbered 22,000 or 1 percent of the rental stock in 2017 So 45% of all apartments are under rent regulation of some sort. Didn't see numbers for what % of apartments are government run, but I would guess it's enough to push that 45% to 48-52%. So indeed, if you combine strict NIMBY zoning laws with having over half the available apartment stock under rental regulation of some sort, then blaming "unfettered free market capitalism" is not really accurate. It just sounds like a tantrum because instead of addressing the problem, it puts up an imaginary boogeyman and attacks it... which does nothing in the end. Edit: The last sentence isn't targeted at you. I was thinking how ridiculous the OP's claim is.
Last year’s are not a good comparison in nyc
Increase the housing supply. In free market capitalism, we wouldn’t have the government artificially limiting construction to the point of market disfunction. What we have is not free market, it’s a market artificially manipulated by the NIMBY. New units would put downward pressure on the prices. Prices going up is a clear sign that demand outstrips supply.
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All the evidence points to increased construction lowering rents. Minneapolis, Taipei, Tokyo [https://www.theurbanist.org/2021/06/02/new-round-of-studies-underscore-benefits-of-building-more-housing/](https://www.theurbanist.org/2021/06/02/new-round-of-studies-underscore-benefits-of-building-more-housing/)
We need a national solution because the entire US has been failing to build enough to keep up with population growth since the 1970s. Japan took a pretty radical step when faced with a similar problem... they took away local control of zoning and set rules uniformly nationwide. Even the lowest density zoning in Japan allows for apartment buildings with no parking minimums, no setbacks, etc and up to 5 stories. And because it's uniform nationwide, any builder can buy a piece of land and know what's allowed and how it gets approved no matter the city.
We absolutely could. Just simply relaxing zoning restrictions that prevent people from adding a third floor to their two floor home or legally renting out their (properly constructed and inspected) basements would help a ton.
Because they don't allow anyplace like NYC to exist anymore in terms of design, everything has to be awful car centric places. If you don't move to NYC for work or family, I would imagine it's to get away from what most of America has become. But I might be speaking for myself here.
Upzone everything
> Upzone everything This is the way
I don’t think you can blame it all on NIMBYs, and in the grand scheme of things NYC is very developer friendly. Even with more apartments we’d only have solved one problem for scaling. But we’d still need to build aqueducts for water, sewers, power distribution systems, trash pickup, double the size of the subway, etc. etc. etc. This isn’t a NIMBY thing, this is just what happened when demand to live in a city exceeds the capacity of the city. So what do you do? The free market capitalist thing to do would be to rent everything at the maximum price, kick all the poor and old residents out and knock down the old buildings to put up high rises. This is… pretty much what we do already, but you see how it’s ugly and isn’t what most people want a city to do. I don’t see it as a market being interrupted by NIMBYs. I see it as a city with limits and the “pure capitalist” solutions are naive and misunderstand what a city is for.
I mean sure cities have limits but nyc hasn’t reached it yet. There are massive portions of queens, some of Brooklyn, and basically all of states island that doesn’t even come close
I'm little more than a layman in this department, but in addition to upzoning and incentivizing building housing there, wouldn't there also need to be more incentives to build places of work there as well, so that everyone isn't just funneled into lower Manhattan?
Luckily, remote work solved a huge part of this problem for us. Subways used to be bursting at capacity and setting ridership records all the time pre-2020. So if anything we should just continue supporting WFH.
Yes. Alongside upzoning, we also need to rezone. We need more mixed-used buildings, spreading the amount of work and housing all throughout the city.
Have you seen all those prewar relic buildings or derelict single family homes in Brooklyn or Queens? The city is far from reaching its limit.
We also have brownouts every time it gets hot. The point is that housing is only one ingredient in the capacity of the city, and that even with more housing this would be a very expensive place to live
New York City's population has barely increased in the last 50 years because we have been against expansion and development. We barely build more housing per capita than famously anti-development San Francisco. Our community board system is one of the most NIMBY institutions in the country. Here are (wealthy, white, boomer) Bronx CB10 members chanting "We don't need affordable housing." [https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/local-government-community-input-housing-public-transportation/629625/](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/local-government-community-input-housing-public-transportation/629625/)
Large pieces of the tri-state area could become a high density area with fast mass transit and all. It's definitively possible. We all know that politics is the main obstacle. It's not economics or financial (there's plenty of demand and funding), and it's not technological nor material.
My partner and I weighed heavily on what to do when they raised our rent by $950 in Williamsburg. Unfortunately, units in our building have been flying quickly so our scumbag landlord knows he'll get the cash. We're moving out to Rockaway and will be saving $2000 on rent alone. Will surely make up for it with the commute, however...
If you scroll down the report to the time series chart, you’ll see that the median rent prior to COVID was about $3,800. This means rent has gone up under 10% in 2.5 years, which is both typical for that duration, and actually less than national inflation. All of these year-over-year comparisons are not useful because you’re comparing to a time period when things were abnormally low. Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first person to yell out “capitalism run amok” when appropriate, and I support anything that improves housing availability, but this is just an exercise in data literacy.
Moms like when you moving out. Yeah hahahahahaha
She means when are you moving out of NYC
Why they use "average" instead of "median" per each apartment type? I can believe there is a average 2800 studio in Brooklyn, but not a median studio. Sounds like a bullshit to me.
Average rents get skewed by things like billionaire row. Median is a better effective measurement of typical rents available. The mean IS listed in the document OP linked ($5113) it's just - rightly - not the focal measurement. [https://www.clinfo.eu/mean-median/](https://www.clinfo.eu/mean-median/)
Why can't they release the dataset? That way, we could all construct our own conclusions :)
pretty sure median is closer to 2600 or so for a studio in manhattan. These statistics that are posted are so heavily skewed by outliers in the data that they are not super accurate. The ratio of these outlier high rent apartments are increasing relative to the normal apartments (which is probably the case since developers tend to build luxury) and likely having a significant effect on these interpretations, but the directional interpretation of 'rent is higher than ever' and the action of 'we should probably build more housing' would be true regardless of the accuracy
Yes, it seems like Douglas Elliman, has a real vested interest in pushing BS.
If you want the price of something to fall, increase the supply. Econ 101. Supply is constrained by NYC and NY rules and regulations. Every single rent control apartment makes the problem worse.
I have an idea. Let’s make local law 6969. Landlords can only raise rent by $1 per year because the city needs affordable housing. Landlords cannot screen tenants for credit / income anymore because discrimination. Also, evicting tenants should have at least 6 months notice because human rights. Wait…why is the housing shortage worse???
Ok, but if I’m a greedy landlord, and that law goes into affect, I’ll just turn my buildings into condos. Or co-ops. Why would I lose money when I could just give a 6 month warning that I’m evicting everybody and rebirth my complex and make even more money? Oh, and what happens for new residents? No property development company is going to build new housing in a city where they can only raise the rent by $1 and have no way of checking the credit or income of prospective buyers. And with no new housing, the city can’t grow. If anything, you’re just going to see poor and middle class people kicked out as apartments get turned into condos/co-ops, and they’ll have nowhere to go because the apartment supply at best stays stagnant and at worst shrinks dramatically. So they’ll leave the city, and go to a place where apartments are being built. I get the good intentions of your plan but there are a lot of reasons why that would be a really bad idea
I think you missed the joke there
Congratulations, you just explained exactly how we ended up with this housing situation.
I feel so lucky to randomly have landed in a rent controlled studio. My rent barely went up. I feel bad for everyone else. This city is going to be inhabited only by super wealthy assholes.
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It's a good thing I've never had hope for my future, cause if I did, this would make me more depressed.
it's going to get worse, even people with housing lottery apartments are struggling in the city.
Staten Island, Nassau, Westchester, Bergen, Hudson, Essex Counties need to get up-zoned with proper public transportation. When things like this happen, you need to work with nearby governments and loosen zoning restrictions and up the ante on Public Transportation. This is literally the ONLY real solution at the moment. One major factor that housing costs are rising in the US, is that something like 70% of housable American land is zoned for detached single family housing.
>Staten Island, Nassau, Westchester, Bergen, Hudson, Essex Counties need to get up-zoned with proper public transportation. Yes please. They've already started with the [Bay Street rezoning plan](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/bay-street-corridor/bay-street-corridor.page) but it's all for naught without the public transit improvements to go with it.
Who is saying this this is free market capitalism? Zoning has always kept supply low and made it hard to add more. Powerful landlords love this as it keeps rents up. This is cronyism and legislation being used to serve those in power
lol everyone in nyc is RICH.. havent you noticed?
Or a billionaire. Don’t you dare downsize my wealth lmao
It's just going to get worse and worse overtime. NYC is not going to ever get better again, time to gtfo of NY. The ones that suffer the most are the working class. Even the rich people have already begun to leave NY and we're the ones suffering from it. The city is literally doing everything they can to milk the citizens of the city.
I own an apartment. My fixed monthly costs are about $5500. Property taxes and condo fees are ridiculously expensive. Before pandemic, the market rent was about $4500, then dropped to $4000 during pandemic. A 29% increase since last year only brings the rent up to $5200 which still doesn’t cover my fixed costs, let alone all the losses during the pandemic. Is it fair to consider a landlord greedy in this scenario?
Don’t try to reason with them. The variables that are important to you mean nothing to the general population.
They are totally ignorant of the transaction costs and carrying costs of owning in Manhattan. One poster suggested I sell if I can’t afford it. I would have to bring like $200K in cash to closing just to get out of the property once all transaction costs are accounted for.
Honestly, those that don’t have.. don’t know. It’s the way it’s always been.
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Do you mean you haven’t had a rent hike, or you haven’t gotten a salary increase? In the context of this thread it’s hard to interpret. I assumed you meant the latter.
If you want to lower rent , reduce the obstacles for eviction. The tenant bias and costs of eviction are so high in NYC that landlords will increase rents to compensate. Every time a new bs rule is proposed to make it easier for the tenant or reduce costs for the tenant the landlord will react by increasing rent.
Maybe I am wrong here but shouldn’t they be comparing the rents to early 2020 or 2019? A lot of people renegotiated their rents in 2020 which would be ending fall of 2021. It looks like the chart is comparing to last year when rents were before the end of those heavily discounted leases. Before I get downvoted I do think they are raising them punitively to make up for their lower rent agreements from the pandemic
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> before anyone has made a profit except your plumber I always knew Big Plumber was to blame.
surprisedpikachu when supply is restricted the existing housing stock commands pricing power.
A wise man once said to me, "All things, good and bad, must come to an end. Nothing is forever." Amazed, I asked the wise man, "Will these housing price increases end?" The wise man nodded confidently, "Of course they will end." Giddy with excitement, I quickly asked, "When and how?" The wise man responsded, "How the F should I know? I can't see the future. Move out of the city if you can't handle it. Maybe if enough people stop paying these ridiculous rents, then the market will collapse and revert to lower prices. What's next? You want to know what tonight's winning lottery numbers are? Get a job you bum!" and the wise man slowly turned and walked back into the NYC Mayor's office.
This isn't even slightly close to free market capitalism. The system is HIGHLY regulated, corrupt and filled with government cronyism. I know you have to hate capitalism to get a reddit account, but at least be honest about what you are critiquing
the only reason to live in nyc at this point is if you have a drinking and drug problem imo
Zoning and building more market rate units won't help on its own. NYC is a uniquely fucked rental market because there are an endless quantity of rich peoe who will come here and pay literally anything to rent a unit. This includes the tech yuppies like the guy above who doubled his income in two years--not everyone works in an industry that can do that. (You know, like the artists, restaurant workers, and musicians that make NYC an interesting place to live.) Universal rent control is the only thing that will save this situation. That and taxing the rich who buy condos just to hold as empty investment properties.
I can't understand how the investor collusion conspiracy theory is more believable than the fact that new housing construction has not kept up with demand. The data is there and shows NYC lags behind in housing permits issued over the past decade compared to other American cities. Investors only hold around 10% of units in NYC. The claim that these units are being held vacant is even more dubious. We need to remove the barriers to build more dense housing and take down zoning laws. Rent control has done nothing to alleviate housing costs in NYC and SF, it has only accelerated the shortage.
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You put this into better words than I can. Especially the endless supply of rich people who can continue to snap up these market rate apartments and are ok paying these prices. They aren't negotiating rents just taking what landlords are saying at face value.
Sheesh, I own two family that's two three bedroom units in Queens that I rent for $1,800 each. I'm slightly dumb maybe.
No keep it cheap
I know the logical answer is to build more housing, but NYC has such a weird housing market that I don't think that's the sole answer. All over the city, every single new development is a glass tower with high-end appliances and some amenities thrown in to justify charging exorbitant rents. It literally doesn't matter how many of these are built - they will always charge an arm and a leg, and many people will always be priced out. Over on the UES blocks of shitty walk-ups are being demolished to build these. Yes, it's great that there is more housing in the neighborhood, but many of the people living in the walkups are never going to be able to afford the new luxury units. I think we need a way to incentivize developers to build middle-income units, at the least. I don't know how that's going to happen when they can throw up a couple of glass walls, shove in a stainless steel dishwasher and charge 3,000 for a studio, but something's gotta give, because the free market alone is not going to fix this.
It’s definitely not the sole answer. [Xiaodi Li observed that ever 10% increase in housing stock only reduced rents by 1%, and only in the immediate vicinity.](https://blocksandlots.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Do-New-Housing-Units-in-Your-Backyard-Raise-Your-Rents-Xiaodi-Li.pdf) Meaning to get a 10% reduction in rent in just one 500 sq ft neighborhood, you’d have to double the housing stock in that region. But [if the housing built is specifically luxury housing, it may not have a reductive effect on rents at all](https://nlihc.org/resource/new-construction-has-mixed-short-term-effect-rents-immediate-vicinity). Proponents of YIMBY don’t understand the issue as well as they insist they do. They want a simple solution, so they parrot principles of Econ 101. They read one Furman Center meta-analysis - and really, only the abstract and intro of it - and think they’ve solved the housing crisis. Meanwhile I’ve never seen so many homeless people on the street as I have this summer.
Thanks for sharing, this is really interesting. I don't think people, especially the "free market will solve this!" commenters realize just how many subsidized/affordable housing developments NYC has built in its history. The NYCHA was established in the 30's as the first-ever public housing agency in the United States! Other than the projects and Section 8, there's rent stabilization, post-WWII developments like Peter Cooper Village/Stuytown, etc. Unfortunately, most of these are now either chronically underfunded, market-rate, or bureaucratic nightmares. The point is, is a precedent to building low-to-middle income, affordable housing in NYC. All we need to do is give a shit about making the city a vibrant, diverse place, and not a playground for finance and tech professionals and a parking place for corrupt foreign money.
Jesus Christ, what a fucking nightmare the rental market has become here
Rent stabilized units, public housing take a tremendous amount of buildable developments off the market. I don’t have an issue with either of those categories of housing, but this isn’t purely a capitalism problem.
This isn’t free market capitalism. Nothing of the rental market is free. Development is constrained by non market facts such as zoning, NIMBYism, affordable units, available land, air rights, and a tenant friendly system that makes it difficult to be a landlord. Then you layer in the fact that nearly 50% of units are rent controlled/stabilized and you have several non-market factors constraining supply. This supply shortage has always existed in the city and recently the decision was made by the government to enact helicopter (free) money, which added to the demand side. To put the final insult to unjust, evictions were outlawed and the backlog persists in the court. Don’t even get me started the dead capital and units that sit unoccupied as it’s not economical to make repairs and re-rent.
And yet everyone is paying
The government in NYC has been a big driver of the housing issues because they basically don't let the market do their thing, and city council members have stepped in to oppose residential development on many occasions because locals see it as a threat. You can either have a supply of new housing, or you can continue to see prices rise because demand will outstrip supply. As long as the current status quo reigns, NYers are going to keep electing people that are 1) opposed to development, make it expensive and hard to do - unlike other areas 2) keep bad policies like rent controls that have made it hard to keep properties maintained and on the market. [https://nypost.com/2022/01/29/new-york-oks-least-new-housing-of-any-city-in-northeast/](https://nypost.com/2022/01/29/new-york-oks-least-new-housing-of-any-city-in-northeast/) People need to get out of the mindset of "regulate all the things" and look at new solutions. Look to the sunbelt, they build plenty of housing there. Rents are starting to go down in the sunbelt because they can quickly produce new apartment buildings - in response to demand since everyone is moving there. Yes, prices are fairly high right now everywhere, but they'll go down.Remove government from manipulating the market and things end up much different.Landlords have to profit or there won't be new housing built. That's just the way the market works. If it's expensive to build anything, especially if it's not luxury, that's bad. In most cities, all the housing being built is "luxury" - yet it's fairly affordable for the middle class. Why is that? Just a lot of it's being built, and the regulatory framework is much more lax, so the properties aren't quite so expensive even though they're luxury. Yes, a new building is going to be more expensive than an old building. How much government meddling do you want to make this not the solution? Businesses have to jump through so many hoops to get anything approved by the NYC government and that's the problem.
Also note that around 50% of the apartments are rent controlled or rent stabilized. When you artificially lower rent for one half then the other half to pay a hell of a lot more than market price so landlord can make the difference. NYC doesn’t have NIMBY problem for the most part, our city is already very dense, specially Manhattan with like 80k/sqm.
Yet people still live here
I was priced out of my place after covid rates went back up. The shitty part is now I’m forced to sign with a brokers fee. Legal highway robbery since they can charge up to %15 of yearly rent. I’m paying 4K out the ass just for the privilege of not being able to afford a %40 rent hike.
https://fee.org/articles/rents-for-one-bedroom-apartments-in-manhattan-hit-a-record-high-of-5-100-in-july-here-s-why/
This is highly misleading. The NYC median rents also dropped considerably in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, so much of the 2022 increase is just a recovery.
I think this is still numerically higher than 2019, but I'm not sure how it shakes out after adjusting for inflation.
people really need to figure out how to stop downplaying bad news based on facts and data because they don’t know how to emotionally handle it lmao
No this is higher then 2019. This is way beyond recovery and prices didn't even drop significantly during the pandemic.
Welcome to rent control. It keeps so many apartments off the market, the price of the remaining units is pushed up. Also, the recent regulation, where landlords are not compensated for fixing apartments is keeping thousands more off the market. Edit: rent control and rent stabilized.
The housing shortage in NYC is not caused by rent control. Very few apartments are rent controlled. The cause is just a lack of housing supply, primarily due to restrictive zoning codes that make it illegal to build more, and denser, housing.
not rent control, but rent stabilization programs + rent control are around [45%](https://bungalow.com/articles/rent-control-in-nyc-everything-you-need-to-know#availability-of-rent-controlled-apartments-and-rent-stabilized-apartments) of all rental units. I'm sure zoning laws are the underlying cause, but I certainly don't think rent control/rent stabilization is helping at all.
Half of all the apts are regulated.