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Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in NYC for nearly 10 years, have no plans to leave, and would really, really welcome a rent or apartment price reduction. However, I've been promised this magical thing every time there's some sort of disaster or terrorist attack and it never seems to happen! Curious!

Sarcasm aside, when we will we start to hold people like this accountable for the implicit and explicit predictions that are so easy to make? How can we even evaluate if this ever came to pass?

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As a fellow New Yorker, I think probably a much bigger impact for us is tourism and foreign wealth parking. People coming to NYC and staying in AirBnBs and Russian/Chinese/Saudi wealth dropping cash for properties to give their children pieds-a-terre have a way bigger impact than other middle/upper-middle income tech workers.

I'm also in NYC. If AirBnB went under, the real estate market here would be in deep trouble.

Sure, but that’s the point: a deep trouble for property owners is a boon for non-owners.

It's only deep trouble if they're over-leveraged, it's only a boon for non-owners who can afford to buy, and it only remains a boon as long as deep-pocketed buyers with long investment horizons stay out of the market.

I sure hope so!

That’s good for us as non-landlords though. I just want to live here. I don’t care about their ability to profit off of the demand which, by the way, has lead to a large amount of housing stock being left vacant!

There's pretty robust housing market data out there.

Anecdotally, an apartment in my building in SF with the exact same layout as mine (I got new terms and re-signed the lease in May) is now renting 10% cheaper than I signed two month ago.

I left my apartment in SF in May and they now have it listed for about 15% less than I was paying and they are tossing in a $1k move in bonus.

It's hard to observe what happens in real terms

Even if NYC rents don't go down, they can go up [faster] elsewhere driving nation-wide inflation, effectively reducing NYC rents. I don't know one way or the other whether this has happened but it's something to keep in mind before scoffing at historical predictions of rents going down in NYC

>I've lived in NYC for nearly 10 years, have no plans to leave, and would really, really welcome a rent or apartment price reduction.

If you aren't willing to leave, you aren't negotiating.

This is not true. I currently live in a really nice apt that I rent. My landlord hasn’t substantially raised my rent in 3 years. I will eventually buy once I find something that motivates me but what actually empowers me to negotiate buying is that I’m content to walk away from the table. I don’t have to change my living conditions right now even if I would really like to.

So you're saying you can't negotiating your rent unless you're willing to leave?

I don't live in NYC, but NYC will always be a desirable place to live, especially for older population. It's an epicenter for culture. It's a popular tourist destination. It's a home to old money. It has 2 giant international airports nearby. Barring some catastrophic environmental or natural event that makes it undesirable to live, I personally feel people will always want to live in NYC. It's an icon, like Paris and London.

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