Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

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Not if other neighborhoods have also gone down in liveliness to the same extent.

Imagine a liveliness scale, which is the amount of bars, restaurants, independent stores, coffee shops, music venues, theaters, arts/music expos, and other such things available in the neighborhood.

If the top neighborhood for liveliness in some city last year scored 84 on that scale, but this year it went down 10 points to 74, because of hiking rents and commercial buildings unwilling to lower their prices even if it prices out all such business from the area, preferring to even keep units vacant instead.

Now imagine all other neighborhoods similarly dropped 10 points on that scale. So the next one up last year might have been worth 80, but is now worth 70.

That makes it that the same neighborhood is still the most lively, and therefore still the #1 place where renters hope to live, but overall the entire city is getting less lively. And now imagine this is happening in all cities, making every city similarly impacted.

That would continue to keep prices distributed the same between neighborhoods, the most desirable neighborhood is still the most desirable one, yet the overall liveliness of everything is going down, while simultaneously having prices rise.

I think most people are observing this phenomenon, but the question is why the hell is it happening? Why are landlords choosing to price rentals above market, losing their existing tenants in the process and yet having it vacant as no other business can afford the rent either?

There is no law of conservation of total value over a locality. If one neighborhood declines, and every neighborhood around it also declines, they have all lost value. In your model of real estate, there is no such thing as a ghost town.

> And now imagine this is happening in all cities, making every city similarly impacted.

I can imagine it, but I also know that it cannot occur in reality. Some places go down; some places go up.

> I can imagine it, but I also know that it cannot occur in reality. Some places go down; some places go up.

It doesn't though, that's why you see all those vacant commercial spaces, it's not because no business wants to move in, it's because they don't want to move in given the rent being asked.

The current businesses are forced to close, but not because they are being priced out by someone else, they close because the rent gets jacked, and then the space stays vacant for years after they closed, and yet the rent is never lowered back down.

This goes against common sense, that's why it's so strange and clearly something is broken. You'd expect that the rent would adjust to the market, if no business is willing to rent for the asking price, you'd expect the rent to lower, but it doesn't. You'd expect the value of the building to go down, but it doesn't.

I think you're insinuating that the neighborhood is dying down, because people are choosing to move out or something like that, but that's not the case.

> In your model of real estate, there is no such thing as a ghost town

That's right, because we are talking about major cities. The cities are not dying at all, it is only their liveliness which is. The cities still have all the jobs, and they still have all the infrastructure.

If a neighborhood used to have some of the best coffee shops, and greatest restaurants and comedy club, and those close down. The people in that neighborhood are not going to choose to move out to a small remote town which never had any of that to begin with. They'll stay in the neighborhood, because they go to work at some office job downtown or because they go to the university nearby, or their kids go to the school. Also, the neighborhood might still be livelier than the suburbs which often score very low on my hypothetical liveliness scale, as suburbs generally simply have no such business at all to begin with, only offering residential housing, and even often lacking any walkability.

Edit: I realize maybe saying lively is a bit confusing. I'm not talking about population going up/down, I'm talking about businesses in a neighborhood that create things to do for the people living in the neighborhood. If a neighborhood is only residential, it's not lively, while the more it has of parks, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, libraries, bowling alleys, arcades, bakeries, cute shops, etc., and the more those things are well decorated and designed, and accessible to quickly go to or hop from one to another, the more lively it is.

They were moving out before those rent increases. The problem is the kind of boutique retail people seem to want in cities isn't profitable; even the older midsized or speciality chains got edged out by national ones. This is kind of like wondering what happened to all those computer places back in the 80s and 90s that would build you custom PCs.

And HN did its part to kill it too. Can't have music shops when you destroy physical music as a concept; can't have bookstores when no one wants to buy books. Movie sales and rentals? Internet. Electronics? Online category killers. Second hand stores? Ebay.

The rent jacking up is an issue too, but even if it were lower, you still wont get businesses. There's been a big change in retail overall due to the hyperefficiency of the internet; the kind of stores that existed pre-net can't compete.

> They were moving out before those rent increases

Have we read the same article? That's not what it says. Where's your source that shows that?

You're focused on stores that I don't even include in what I'm talking. I'm specifically mentioning bars, restaurants, music venues, theaters, clubs, coffee shops, arcades and all such things. I'm not talking about retail stores.

Though I think small boutique stores can be a part of it, and the article specifically calls out an example of a local bookstore that the landlord was trying to push out by raising rent, not that it closed as part of waiding demand. And then it went to say this particular landlord is infamous for doing that and sitting on vacant units.

> the kind of stores that existed pre-net can't compete

That's true for a lot of retail stores, but also doesn't explain why commercial rentals are sitting vacant.

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