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Comment by bobbydroptables | Hacker News Reader

It's really hard to wrap your head around whether a city is building a lot by looking at a raw number. But fewer than 7,000 building permits in a city of 8 million is frighteningly little.

You need to compare it to population growth, decades of building backlog, job growth, etc.

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New York City has been losing residents for some time. This is not a supply and demand thing as much as easy money policy chasing hard assets. I’ll have to dig it up the numbers, but Manhattan many condos are vacant, and have been bought by foreign money who don’t live in nyc or investors looking to park assets.

It's a complex problem but the value of NYC real estate for foreign investors assumes scarcity of NYC real estate.

Foreign money or no, if you have a very desirable city with a growing job market and stagnant construction, prices will appreciate. I would challenge you to find a single counterexample

Foreign money doesn't help prices but it's more a symptom of our problems than a cause.

Also, NYC population is not declining. I wish. There have been some stagnant years but nowhere near enough to compensate for 50 years of underbuilding.

New construction in New York can have hundreds of units. I don’t know why you would automatically assume that 7,000 is a “frightening” number.

I probably could have made my comment clearer. I'm not assuming anything. It's well documented that NYC is building frighteningly little housing per capita.

I was just pointing out the the linked post shows how NYC construction is stagnant, not "active". It was unclear if he meant "active" as in "they're building a large quantity" or as in "currently happening".

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