A world-famous urbanist says New York is becoming a “gated suburb” | Hacker News Reader

A world-famous urbanist says New York is becoming a “gated suburb”

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19 pointsendswapper14 comments

I work as a software developer in Silicon Alley. I don't know anyone that owns an apartment in Manhattan that paid for it with money they earned. A few paid for apartments with family money, but the rest of us rent. My family has lived in the city for a long, long time, and I understand this isn't a wholly new phenomenon, but it's gotten much worse in the last 3 years.

How is this sustainable in the long term?

To make things worse, where I live in Astoria the local community board is so obsessed with parking (we have 2 fucking subway lines, more than the Upper East Side) that all large new buildings have underground parking, making them dramatically more expensive. This is to "keep things affordable."

It feels so kafkaesque. I've thought about moving to Kansas City, where they've been building like crazy and the new streetcar is very useful.

Heh, the only people I know that "own" their own places that they purchased in the last few years live down here in Sunset Park and nearby "lower Brooklyn" neighborhoods which only have a tolerable commute if you work near a D line below midtown.

I'm wondering when it'll stop... Sunset Park is largely a working class neighborhood. Many of Manhattan's kitchen workers live here, for example. I can't see where they'd go if prices around here doubled.

Anyway I agree with you. New York is fun to live in as a software developer don't get me wrong (you make enough money to actually enjoy the city) but when it comes to family and/or house-owning even the highest income earners I know moved upstate.

Many of the buildings that get rented are owned by real estate companies, and professional renting organizations with lots of employees.

I have very rarely (only once, actually) rented from an individual, or non-professional property owner.

Figure the process is as sustainable as any other business model? Do corporations arbitrarily inflate their prices ad infinitum? What are the checks and balances to that?

But it's a timing thing. I know lots of people who own apartments in Manhattan, and even more in Brooklyn and Queens. It's an age thing. If you're 25-30, even a hotshot dev making 150-200 or more, it takes a little while to save up for a down payment. Not even taking into consideration student loan debts, etc.

Let's be clear, you'll have no problem affording a mortgage on a 1 bed or a large studio in a tolerable neighborhood in Manhattan at that salary, probably even today. It's the down payment that's the issue.

But it's also timing. Asset prices have gotten so high, especially given that almost everything is leveraged at a low interest rate, things are inflated for someone starting their real estate ladder climb.

4-5 years ago things were a lot easier.

Also expecting to live in the absolute prime areas is folly, of course people from all over the country and world want to live in the East Village or Chelsea or whatnot. No one wanted to live in LES, now they do and the prices have approached luxury territory there too now. And so it goes.

I purchased a place in a gentrifying part of Brooklyn, because I was priced out of places that had just gentrified that were a little better. 10 years ago I'd have purchased in Manhattan, but 10 years ago I didn't have the down payment required.

There's a lot more to it than the 'trust fund and mommy and daddy' narrative. There's a treadmill of price appreciation that seems to spill over from one neighborhood to the next.

It's a disaster. No single factor affects people's decisions as much as the rent in this city; lives here revolve around it, especially if you're only making so-so money. I think about how different life here would be if everyone's rent was only, let's say, 10% of their income (jobs, hobbies, social lives, etc.)

The rental increase treadmill keeps turning faster and faster, and the need to keep moving neighborhoods every few years is not a picnic.

I was born in Brooklyn and have lived in NYC my whole life, and the rental situation just gets worse every year. Unless and until we start dealing with the issue seriously, it's just going to keep eating more and more of people's incomes. I wrote a post on this a while ago summarizing the issue:

https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/fixing-the-nyc-rent-crisi...

My rental history looks like this:

1995: 300/month sublet (Kensington)

1997: 625/month 1BR walkup (Brighton Beach)

1999: 675/month

2000: 1450/month 1BR walkup (Upper East Side)

2001: Above raised to 1650, moved

2002: 1125/month studio (Yorksvillle)

2009: 1175/month studio (Yorksville) - landlord wanted the apartment for a relative, had to move

2010: 1750 1BR walkup (Lower East Side)

2011: 1800

2012: 1850

2013: 1900

2014: 1950

2015: 2000

2016: 2180

All the old apartments I lived in are now at least 400-500+ more. It's out of control. I'm probably heading back to south BK when my lease is up; at least studios under 1400 still exist there.

> This problem is ingrained not just in New York, but a stack of “superstar” Western cities like London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Florida argued

I can attest that it is certainly happening in Austin, TX.

I suspect this is strongly correlated with the drop in crime in cities as well. The very concept of “gated suburb” cities is pretty cyberpunk, imo.

> If you look at what people are living in on the Upper East Side, in these new towers, [it’s] 3,500 square feet for a family of two, a parking spot in the garage or next to your unit

What the heck is he talking about? At least here in Toronto, high-rise units tend to be small, often very small compared to suburban houses. And it's hard to find condos with three or four bedrooms. They tend to have two at most.

3500 square feet? That's the penthouse, man. It's for the guy in the silk ascot and velvet robe who invites his friends (who are of an age with his daughter or granddaughter) over for a pool party.

Getting development permission in New York City is extremely difficult and expensive, much more so than in Toronto. Also the level of demand is much higher. This tends to drive developers to serve the upper end of the market moreso than the middle. As a result, new Manhattan residential towers really do have a remarkable amount of big luxury units. (Richard Florida would probably know, he owns a house in Rosedale. He travels in these circles.)

Always wanted to live in NY, but knew owning a place would be impossible (also a developer). Chicago is probably as close as NY as I'll get, and that's fine. Can easily afford a large SFH or two-flat (with tenant paying most of my mortgage) with a yard. This is with a short walk to train station (less than 30 minute commute), to work in a big city with a wealth of culture and entertainment options.

I can't find that particular combination anywhere else in the US.

Washington, DC? I think though that in the surrounding metro area, a SFH costs more on average than in Chicago.

DC would also be an excellent choice, but anecdotes seem to imply housing is very expensive--I'll have to look more in depth.

Maybe they should allow the construction of more housing. Seems like if you have supply problems, you should permit supply to grow.

It's NYC, not Houston. :-) Some considerations:

* The city's already very densely populated, increasing the density comes at the price of having to ensure the infrastructure can handle it. The most obvious is the creaking subway system, which has gotten hella overcrowded in the last few years, but you also have other infra that needs to go along with it (the type where you tear up the street and fix layers of piping, cabling, and all the rest)

* The 'not Houston' comment is partly snarky, partly to make the point that what makes New York City what it is, or Paris or London what they are, is their character and that's partially zoning and building code. I suppose you could raze all the brownstones in Brooklyn Heights and build mega apartments, but do we really want to do that?

* Politically, changing zoning is hard. Density is pushed back on by the local neighborhood. Next you have affordable housing advocates that push back against zoning, in fact in places like Bushwick, even if you include 25-30% affordable housing in a new development, you still have picketing, protests and loudspeakers. In Williamsburg, under Bloomberg there was massive rezoning that lead to the neighborhood essentially turning into an extension of Manhattan. Partly this involved rezoning light manufacturing, and allowing building by the riverfront. That said, affordable housing advocates and people in that camp decry Williamsburg as a great tragedy because the rents went up for the poorer people that were there before.

* Finally, after all I said they ARE building more housing. But they can't build housing faster than the people are moving here and also the people are making babies. People have a tendency to multiply, and the economy here has been pretty stable. 8M residents in 2000 compared to 8.5M today. The demand fills faster than the supply can keep up.

Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn are very densely populated, but there's a lot more to the city than that. Huge swaths of the New York metropolitan area are two-storey houses, and what I suggest is upgrading these to five or six storey brownstone-style housing. Yes, infrastructure does need to be built, but by putting more people in less space, you increase the ability of the city to pay for infrastructure. After all, cities that are losing population (de-densifying) generally do not find it any easier to pay for their existing infrastructure. And if people want New York to stay just the way it is physically, then they're going to have to stop complaining about the prices. Increased supply or increased prices, that's the trade-off.

Yes, changing zoning is difficult, and the way Bloomberg went about it only made it worse. Because the up-zoning (permitting more development) was limited to a very few neighbourhoods, it meant that the new development was concentrated there, with noticeable effects. If he'd up-zoned a wider area, that development could have been more spread-out and less disruptive. As it is, though, he actually down-zoned large areas of the city, often those low-rise neighbourhoods which could have handled more density. Just as in San Francisco, increased housing supply will in large part need to happen in the inner and outer suburbs.

New York is building housing, but not that much: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nyc-hou... . Just because there's a few big noticeable towers going up does not mean that there's a large amount of housing being built. Also, just because supply isn't keeping up, doesn't mean it does nothing at all. By building more housing, the increase in price is less than it otherwise would be.

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