Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time

> I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America.

Coming from New Hampshire: this is just fantastically untrue. NYC is about one hundred times more violent than where I live. It is so thoroughly not the same that I can usually tell when people come from cities simply based on how nervous they are. I think most people don't realize how badly it affects them, or how violent cities are versus "the rest of America".

Some crime stats: https://imgur.com/a/qDKqC59

edit: NYC has 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people, which is 45% more violent than the USA median (4.0). I have no idea how 45% more violent got a reputation as "safer than the rest of America" but it's not true.

Just to provide a 3rd party reaction here: it sounds like you've circularly reasoned yourself into a trap of your own making. You don't want to live anywhere else because you like NYC. Because no other city is exactly like NYC, you aren't interested in living anywhere else. The reason it's "circular" is because there are cities with good transit, good arts, great food, have a tech scene, and even have financial districts and you'd be surprised to find out how well diverse cultures get along in a log of smaller towns across the US (far fewer racial/cultural over/under-tones) and how safe they are (safer than NYC). Yeah, no other place is the center for any of these things save SF being the tech nexus and maybe having better renditions of some types of cuisine. So if you have to be in the center of the world, then yeah, you're not going to find other centers of the world.

For me, personally, I'm disappointed by how few world cities the US has. NYC and Chicago are really it. My silly benchmark for what makes a city a world city is that it operates 24hrs a day (at least parts of it). Chicago barely does but I think it counts. Everywhere else in the US just dies past 10pm and especially past 2am.

I live in Brooklyn and feel the same way. Even if you discount all the empty luxury apartments held by foreigners who never show up, there are still tons of people who want to move here.

Why?, because when you have all these people crammed together - weird stuff happens and that's what makes NYC magical. We're constantly mixing together, in the subways, bars, restaurant, parks ,etc. You get to see firsthand all the humanity of this city. No other city in America has replicated that.

I see Boston as the tech hub of the East more than NYC. New York obviously has a large number of tech jobs, but Boston and DC both have a higher concentration of tech; in NYC the big fish is obviously finance.

I discount DC a little because a lot of that is government and defense related (not a bad thing, just not my cup of tea).

Boston has a lot of diversity in tech, lots of health/pharma like Moderna, web companies like TripAdvisor and Wayfair, robotics like Boston Dynamics, tons of startups doing ai/ml, and it seems like every big company has a substantial presence here (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce…)

I feel you here. I'm a relatively new NYC resident and worried that I'll be "ruined" forever. I've otherwise lived in Toronto and Seattle.

It really comes down to fear of change I think. Humans are very adaptable, and the same one can thrive in car-centric suburbs as they would in shoulder-to-shoulder metropolises. Given no constraints, you prefer city. But throw in kids (requirement for more space/better schools), or a dream job (passion), or a dying parent (obligation), or a lover.. and suddenly you're building a life in a completely different place. And it works.

At least I think/hope.. because outside of a busy city I am irritable and sad. But it sure would be nice to slow down on the treadmill/rat race a bit..

Having grown up in DC and New York, I would say more strongly that there's no other city in the USA that has comparable mass transit.

The way I would put it is -- in New York, it is more of a hassle to have a car than to go without. In all those other cities, while there is some mass transit, you will find yourself wanting a car.

If you really like mass transit and want to live without a car, America is probably not for you. USA got rid of most streetcar systems a long time ago and rebuilding them from scratch in current NIMBY climate is basically impossible. And subways, which are much more expensive than ground transit, only make economic sense in several metropolises.

Try some European city with reasonable rents like Warsaw. Even the skyscrapers will remind you of Manhattan.

But yeah, learning Polish is not easy.

As someone who grew up in NYC, the only lasting appeal to me is family and specific ethnic culture that is much less in every city in the US that isn't NYC.

The apartment I grew up in, in lower manhattan, today would cost more than 20-30 times what my parents paid for it in the 90s, and it wasn't a nice apartment. There was no laundry in the unit, it faced a dark courtyard, the tempurature of the apartment was never that comfortable, had yearly huge bug infestations, but it was in a great location and was about 5 rooms more or less.

I think people just romanticize a life different than the one they grew up with. I certainly miss some aspects of the city culturally, but life on the west coast, I've had considerably better living arrangements ever since I've graduated college than the one I grew up in, and my parents were both professionals with graduate degrees, it's even worse for a lot of other people.

I have a fantasy where a Robert Moses-type figure builds out super fast trains that connect Long Island, NJ, upstate New York, and effectively urbanize the entire tri-state area. New York becomes this super city where you can go from White Plains to the tip of Long Island in an hour. Housing becomes cheaper as neighborhoods that were previously impractical become feasible for New Yorkers. Car ownership drops in the outer suburbs as people embrace public transportation. Gentrification stays an issue but because of more housing, it's less brutal.

Unfortunately this is pretty unlikely unless there happens to be another political genius like Moses who also happens to love public transportation. Maybe an Andy Byford-Robert Moses combo?

>"I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America."

Is there any data to back this up? The latest NYPD crime statistics, show a city with increasing crime.

"Overall index crime in New York City increased by 27.8% in May 2022 compared with May 2021 (10,414 v. 8,149). Each of the seven major index crime categories saw increases, driven by a 42.1% increase in grand larceny (4,116 v. 2,897); a 28.3% rise in burglary (1,239 v. 966); and a 26.2% increase in robbery (1,506 v. 1,193)." See:

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00050/nypd-citywide-cri...

You are clearly not alone. Skyrocketing rents are a symptom of more people wanting a place to live than there are available spaces. It's not like NYC is bereft of skyscrapers either.

My partner and I have been agonizing over this exact dilemma. We have an income number and an expenses number and when those cross a certain point, we've gotta go somewhere else. So there's a very good chance that we'll immigrate somewhere in a few years. But yeah, try as we might, we couldn't come up with another US city that either of us would want to live in.

As a New Yorker who had to move to Seattle for a job five years ago and misses the city every single day, I totally agree with you.

I will say, depending on how close you are to a train station, Brooklyn isn’t bad. Yeah, it’s 45 minutes door to door, but you get to walk and listen to podcasts or whatever on the train. As commutes go, it’s definitely doable. But I totally agree with you that many people don’t want to live anywhere else and people who don’t love New York might not understand that, but New York is different from every other major city in the US.

I’m still carless in Seattle (I don’t drive and have no desire to drive) but it’s so much harder (my husband does have a car but I can’t rely on that for my own needs). And although Seattle is somewhat cheaper than Brooklyn (it’s really not but my luxury building in Capitol Hill definitely costs less than a luxury building in Williamsburg foot for foot — I pay about 70% more in Seattle than I did in Brooklyn, however), the things I’ve lost compared to New York are massive. I’ve definitely considered moving back now that I’m at a fully-remote company (that does have office space in NYC), but there are some practical realities about being in Seattle for my job that makes that hard. Maybe when my lease is up next year, I’ll reassess.

Part of the problem is that most people would rather move to an existing desirable city than try to improve their own to make it more desirable, myself included. In most major cities, less than 20% of people vote for mayor, let alone city council. Most of those who do vote in local elections are much old.

http://whovotesformayor.org/

I'm picturing this guy riding around on a New York City subway car and thinking to himself "Yep, this is worth $5,000 a month."

Have you been affected by the rent increase yet? Curious how much power the landlords have there. Can they raise your rent without warning, are they trying to force you out, etc.

Move to SF. Having lived here and Manhattan I think many of the things you like about NY are present here. Just don't listen to the headlines.

Sounds we should really build walkable city with convenient mass transit in the US and Europe. It's a shame that building anything infrastructure in the US is prohibitively expensive.

I went to NYC many many times when I lived in New England, my cousin went to school there and took the train down multiple times a week for years, her mother worked and lived there for decades, my father went there every week for work for many years. Anecdotally our experiences have been that the city is generally safe, none of us have any crime stories to tell.

My parents also used to go there a lot in the 90s and the city has come a long long way since then- for the better.

I'm confused what the "problem" is, is it that things you really like are expensive? I really like driving a Porsche, but it would seem a bit odd to lament a wild increase in new Porsche prices or my salary not keeping up with owning one as a "problem". I also really like that in Paris you can affordably get a glass of real champagne with every meal, but I hardly consider it a "problem" that in the US this isn't really reasonable.

Things are getting more expensive, for some people that means they can't eat steak as much as they like, for others it means they need to move in with their parents, for you it means you might not live in the heart of one of the most expensive and desirable cities in the world.

I've always found it a bit odd that in the tech community there is this assumption that people have the right to live wherever they want, and that somehow living in NYC or SF during it's prime isn't its own variety of luxury good. I enjoy champaign when I'm in Paris, and am glad that at least for today I can drive a Porsche. I've spent plenty of years in a beat-up old Ford and drinking yuengling, won't be terribly surprised if I spent plenty more doing the same in the future.

What % of available living space is not lived in, and further what % is owned by foreign nationals.

I know that in MANY countries, one is precluded from owning any property if not a citizen. Obviously this leads to a bunch of corruption issues with bribing and marrying nationals for access to property, but the USA has literally zero control on property ownership.

You know how much foreign money laundering is done through US property ownership?

MOST of it.

A vertical zoning law might be an option:

There are places like Singapore where you cant build a high-rise unless the subterranian aspects of the project dont include a connection to other sub services, like the walkway malls and such.

I say do a % split on a vertical level which must include subterranian levels as a course:

The building MUST include underground parking, a commerical section and a range of income level sections.

You cant just build a high-rise of $millions apartments.

Look at Millennial Tower in SF. What a disaster. I HUGE legal BS and not a single person with a net worth of south of 10 million was accommodated in that disaster - but it still cost the city (i.e. tax payers who are NOT worth >10 million -- millions of dollars.

How much of the rising rents are risk premia for future cases of "government says you dont have to pay rent and cant be evicted" that we experienced in 2020-present? I'm curious if there has been a Natural Experiment comparing rent increases in places which did vs didn't have eviction moratoriums during COVID.

> I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we generally get along in the city, across many cultures and backgrounds. I like it has some of the best food in the world.

Isn't most of that true for most large cities anywhere in the world?

Consider Amsterdam.

- Mass transit? Yes.

- Not owning a car? Sure.

- Safer than America.

- Tech hub, yes.

- Finance hub? uhh, does it really matter?

- Everybody gets along, across many cultures.

- Food? Depends on your taste, but all kinds of cuisine are available.

Or consider Singapore/London/Gothenburg/Paris/Toronto/so-many-others. Similar deal. Sometimes even a better deal, depending on your priorities.

Of course, I fully agree that NYC is a cool place :)

You and everyone else buddy, that's why you're going to be priced out just like the people before you.

It's nice you enjoyed your ride from $2,000/month to $5,000/month. That range was absurd to the people that went through an earlier range, and so on and so forth.

Train from White Plains is only like 30 min, but yeah it is a much different vibe.

Agree with everything except the last part. Brooklyn is a fantastic place to live, and takes 20 mins or so door to door to get to most parts of Manhattan.

Everyone should spend a couple of early years in NYC. You'll be better off for it even you end up moving to New Hampshire.

This reads like a silly NY maximalist without really any context of the rest of the country. New York is cool and all but I’m not paying 60k in rent to live somewhere marginally better then a handful of major cities in the country. I moved to the PNW and the idea of living in a city now seems insane

Honestly don't get what is so special about NY... It's not bad, but on the flipside is pretensious, expensive, and difficult to travel to/from.... also all of the things you mention that are positive points are by no means unique to new york.

I feel like the main deterrent for boston and chicago is the weather but I could be wrong.

There are many, many places to live with crime rates far lower than NYC so I'm not sure I really understand this. Maybe you mean compared with most places you could see yourself living?

For example, I live in a nice town in CT and the crime rate is 3.99 per 1000 vs NYC which is currently about 13.3 per 1000, making NYC (as a whole — I understand your point about neighborhoods within the city) 3x higher in crime.

I understand the other things you appreciate about the city. It's great to able to walk outside and have amazing restaurants and other amenities a few feet away; there's a reason many people like the city.

The city is safer?

As someone who currently lives in Philly… yeah, I feel this. I love being able to get around on foot and by transit, but Philly is still a pretty car-centric place compared to what I’ve seen of NYC, and I wish it weren’t.

That plus making it easier/safer to get around by bike/scooter/etc. That’s something even NYC doesn’t seem to do well; have to look at international peers to see good examples of that.

You just need to gentrify Newark. The PATH is faster than the subway from Brooklyn/Queens.

Are US cities the only options? Why not move to London or something?

An escooter might be a good transportation choice.

Have you considered Mexico City?

Before I start with my comment, I'll remind everyone that averages skew very high when there are outliers. NYC has a high quantity of extremely high rent tenants. I wish more news articles used medians and median per capita when discussing rents.

The main point I want to make: even with those high rents, we tend to forget how much our cars cost us, directly and indirectly.

Directly: AAA's average new car TCO is close to $10,000 a year. Multiply by two for a typical couple and that's $1600 a month you could dump into your NYC apartment's high rent. Unlimited MTA rides only cost $1500/year/person.

Indirectly: There's the obvious car crash issue, the top killer of children (well, guns just passed that, but luckily NYC is safer than the average American city in that regard), but the other main example is health. We're not supposed to sit all day. My doctor moved from a car suburb to the city and admitted they lost weight and walk a lot more. When walking is the easier option compared to attempting to drive to your daily errands, it's much better for you and extends your life, especially when considering your high-quality years of life.

Number one premature killer is heart disease, by far.

Even if you're just walking to the subway, that's a lot more activity than your commute to your garage.

NYC's obesity rate is half of the national rate. HALF! That's downright incredible.

In NYC I see very old people walking everywhere, stereotypically playing chess in the park, meanwhile I have suburban relatives struggling to walk across the Walmart parking lot and they haven't even hit 70 years old. They may live into their 80's but it will not be pleasant for them. The difference in alertness is noticeable. As a bonus, old people in NYC never had to drive so they never have a retired life feeling isolated to their home.

I think the best way to try and stabilize rent is to buy a condo. It's not a silver bullet due to property taxes and HOA fees that rise with inflation, but it's still a slower rise than renting, I think. You can definitely find 2 bedroom condos with monthly payments under $5000 in Manhattan.

If you're interested in what NYC apartments are really like and how far your money gets you (along with some general YouTube vlogging entertainment), a channel I recommend is Cash Jordan. I won't link it but I'm sure you can find it. Like any other real estate market, it's all about compromises. If you want to live in NYC and pay $1000/month/person, you can definitely do it. You can also pay $10,000/month if you want.

The big caveat to everything I'm saying is that the poor are unlikely to live in the most walkable areas, and a lot of them will perhaps have to own a car. This is definitely the case in Chicago, where the most walkable areas are also the most desirable and affluent (I wonder why that is? Maybe our whole country would be more desirable and affluent if it wasn't designed to be a cash funnel where we dump our income into constructing vehicles, maintaining the infrastructure and utilities utilities of nearly unused land, and burning oil?)

People that want to be conspicuous have to display their success where it's going to be seen. Living in a place that is "central" in so many ways is a competition to see who can hang in there. The only way to stay is to keep winning bigger.

Housing =/= Land. But our policies which heavily kneecap our ability to build more [0] make it such that Housing starts behaving like Land.

The solution is to build more, and the success of Vienna does not come from public intervention but from the added supply. Tokyo is another city with famously cheap housing, and the secret is that they make it easy to build.

I personally think that achieving affordable housing prices via mainly government intervention is not a sustainable approach. You end up consuming both economic and political capital.

A more sustainable approach sets clear, transparent rules that specify under what conditions do you get to build by right. Then 90% gets satisfied by the market, the remaining 10% can be addressed by government investments, if needed.

The only sustainable way to get affordable housing is when the market price is affordable.

Land, on the other hand, is another story. There is strong economic evidence that many of the observations of Henry George [1] are spot on: Land rents tend to take a massive toll in the economy, cause inequality and misery, all without requiring their owners to provide any added value. The proposed solution, again with solid economic fundamentals, is to tax the unimproved value of land at 100%. Henry George further argues that the proceeds should be equally divided among citizens, a citizen dividend if you will.

[0] e.g. it takes 4 years on average to get a new building permit in SF, 90% of the city is zoned for single family housing, any neighbor etc.

[1] https://www.gameofrent.com/

> CMV

Rent is high because the demand in large cities majorly out strips supply.

All policies that attempt to address housing costs that don't increase supply are treating a symptom and not the underlying cause.

> (...) there should be heavy state intervention (...)

This has been tried so many times throughout different cultures and time periods, and by different means. It will not benefit whoever is actually living on the properties, but will detract from their situation.

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt has several concrete examples of attempted interventions, and is written to give a basic intuition on why this happens (Spoiler: Opportunity costs).

The only permanent solution is just to build more buildings, or at a political level simply making it easier to build new buildings, which directly increases supply and thus causes the lowering of prices. This makes perfect sense when you think about it: There are not enough buildings, so we need to have more buildings.

Vienna was only able to pull that off after a devasting war left nearly everyone poor. It's not clear that the US could seize 40% of rentals in Manhattan without starting a revolution.

To your other points yes. Land Value Tax now! There's simply no good reason for why we're all taxed so heavily on our labor while land speculators get away for pennies.

> preferably by doing the same as Vienna

have 2.25 million population before WW1 and then decline in population for almost 100 years? They still haven't recovered (1.89m). It may be an enormous mistake to read into their allocation policy because they've simply had a very easy time allocating so far.

St Louis population has declined for 70 years. It is very affordable. It's just not hard to accomplish affordability like that.

> should be heavy state intervention on it, preferably by doing the same as Vienna, which is holding >40% of the renting stock and charging according to income

This is great policy if you want to make housing unaffordable. When supply is less than demand, prices go up. Those price increases incentivize builders to increase the housing stock (which subsequently lowers prices). Capping prices prevents the price mechanism from working, leaving a shortage of housing.

> Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy

I’m happy (perhaps not quite the right word…) to pay rent. I don’t want to own property. It’s a large, illiquid investment with high transaction fees, carry costs, and concentration risk. My landlord takes all the risk of owning the property (prices don’t always go up after all).

> and property owners provide almost no value, but to provide access to housing for people who has no capital for it, which is service that could be perfectly provided by a state entity.

Property of course requires maintenance and management, so the sleight of hand here is to define away all those aspects of ownership so that by definition all that's meant by "landlord" is "old guy who cashes checks."

But somebody has to maintain the property, somebody has to prioritize upgrades and improvements, somebody has to cut the grass, somebody has to pay the taxes, somebody has to -- yes -- collect and cash the checks. Somebody has to respond to tenant requests and emergencies. Somebody has to advertise the property when it's vacant. Someone conducts showings and screens tenants. And, maybe most important, somebody assumes the risk of a bad tenant or a down market or a declining neighborhood. And so on and so on.

Whether all this is done by the owner personally or hired out is irrelevant. There's no reason to believe government can perform these functions better than private owners in a market.

A simple proof that landlording is not free/easy money is to realize that millions of middle- and upper-middle class Americans who -- if not today, certainly 5 years ago before this most recent run-up in prices -- could, if they wanted to, afford to buy property and become landlords, but they mostly do not do it. And since nobody turns down free/easy money, landlording simply cannot be free/easy money. QED.

>Many attempts at public housing failed because they just tried to provide housing for low-income people in separated and/or undesirable areas, with a predictable outcome.

So the taxpayers should pay so the people with low income or no income can live iny Manhattan? Why not also provide them with expensive cars and exotic vacations?

> Housing and land is a non-transable good, and therefore there should be heavy state intervention on it

That's a bold claim. What led you to believe that's the case? And what is a "non-transable good"?

> CMV

Questions more than anything else:

- How does the system decide which applicants out of multiple get the unit? Lottery? How does the system decide which units get rented first (so the owners get income) e.g. 3 identical units on the same floor, in the same building?

- With a sliding scale on price base on income, is there a price floor for the owner? E.g. low income tenant pays 500 euros, but the system guarantees 1000 euros to the owner so the system pays the difference?

- Has supply increased with this system in Vienna? Why would say an invesntor take the risk of putting capital into apartments or condos construction with this system in place?

I agree 100% - on top of all that, the current housing strategy reduces the mobility of the workforce, so it becomes more difficult to move skilled workers from one region to another. On top of that, being generally considered as a persons most valuable asset, almost no-one wants "affordable housing" in there area, as it would bring down the value of their most valuable asset. We need to start considering people as the valuable asset, and not the house they live in.

>The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas, hurting social mobility,

Maybe some groups of people don't want to live together with other groups of people? Different people living in different parts of the city is just natural evolution.

Why should the state force them to live together?

And why should the state tell you where to live? Why should the state be involved in your private life at all?

Housing/rent is a part of your disposable income. Some people live in expensive places because they want too, but no one is required to live in an expensive place because they have too. I agree in the idea of affordable housing but I don’t think it’s fair to promote sweeping changes because people decide to live in expensive cities like NYC.

> property owners provide almost no value

I think you have no idea how much things break and need fixing. I have a friend that owns a few houses that he rents out, and it's a part time job just keeping up with fixing things. Between them, there's a few thousand items that can and do break and need maintenance. He would not be profitable if he hired out to fix things. Outside Labour can easily be $100/hour and if you need something even a little bit more serious its easily $1000/day.

This is the hidden cost of manufacturers making things as cheaply as possible, and often out of plastic. Property taxes and utility bills and problem with tenants. Navigating disputes, noise complaints, missed rent, move outs and move ins, signing new lease agreements, landscaping, leaky plumbing, damaged flooring, overgrown trees, it's endless. It's a part time job.

IMO the heavy state intervention should be massive capital investment into FAST public transportation infrastructure. Make areas further away from city centers viable for commuting and the problem gets largely addressed.

Government intervention reflects popular will, and The People will themselves a housing crisis. They don't like change, they don't like neighbors, and they certainly don't like neighbors from different income levels than their own. The New York and San Francisco housing markets might be better governed by the Viennese electorate, but that's not on the table. They are governed by their own electorates, badly, and these are the results. Increasing the intensity of that governance will only amplify their already-revealed and already-governing preference that their cities be exclusionary museum pieces.

Put another way, if you accept that housing scarcity is bad, going to the public and saying "How do you want housing in your city to be?" is only going to make it worse.

> Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy, and property owners provide almost no value,

Have you considered that housing might actually be valuable? If it didn’t provide value, why do you think that Vienna seized so much of it to give out to its citizens? Maybe try to find a different way to phrase whatever you’re trying to say.

Assuming you’re referring to property owners getting by doing nothing. That’s false unless they are a slumlord.

Let me ask you another question. What do people do who are not happy with the housing provided by the govt in Vienna?

> The current setup creates guettos by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas

This is not how it works in the US for the last 50 years or so. Most places force every new building to include low income units.

New York City already has like 150k+ income based public housing units.

It’s not ideal.

I don't understand why you think state intervention would actually help. The state has no incentive to solve the problems you are talking about.

>and renting to a representative distribution of tenants so to prevent guettos

Sounds like a creative way of saying "make sure the poors have enough rich people near them that they feel compelled to stay in line and keep a low profile."

There are few things that make apartment living worse than having neighbors who think your standards of behavior are too low and who you have to avoid pissing off.

Property owners providing almost no value is just factually wrong. Their function is similar to insurance. You pay rent to live somewhere because you don't want to take the risk or can't get the loans to buy a property yourself. And it costs real money and time (i.e. real resources) to build those homes and maintain them.

In return property owners (or insurance runners) can get rich off your monthly payments as well as the inherent value of the property (/insurance company), but because of risk of ruin, opportunity cost for other investments and other related phenomena, it can mathematically be a total win-win for both sides.

What everyone complaining about property prices also always seems to forgoe are two things: First, people are clearly able to afford them or the prices wouldn't go higher. The myth that property investors buy homes on mass and don't rent them out which supposedly creates this pricing hike is idiotic. All of these big cities with insane rents have very low vacancy rates compared to the national average.

In almost all of these places where people complain about rent, we are talking about big popular places where everyone wants to go even though there are tons of realistic alternatives all around the country. The situations where it's economically totally necessary for you to move to an expensive place but at the same time you can't afford the rent is so rare as to be virtually non-existent.

Even the idea that people are displaced from their homes is an issue on a smaller scale than people make it out to be. That's because income in those expensive places is much higher than in cheaper places. There are people displaced from their homes, but that's because of poverty and other aspects of gentrification that are not necessarily tied to rent.

This post is stupid beyond all measure.

One of the principal reasons Manhattan rent is so ridiculous is because of state intervention. More intervention, the worse it is going to get.

> Rent is the main detractor of disposable income which hurts the rest of the economy,

This is a silly statement. Rent is part of the economy. Paying rent doesn't damage the economy anymore then paying for food or paying your electrical bill.

> and property owners provide almost no value,

They provide and maintain their property.

> but to provide access to housing for people who has no capital for it,

And for a wide variety of other reasons. Not everybody wants or is a place in their life were massive permanent investment makes sense.

> which is service that could be perfectly provided by a state entity.

Absolutely not.

New York did this. Rent control. It’s why they ended up with tons of slums.

We have tons of land In the US. Lots of people leave New York for cheaper places.

Hi, what is a non-transable good? You're using a non-dictionary word to justify a pretty radical policy, so I'm curious.

Empty property tax at up to 1000%. For full time occupied properties, a sliding scale rebate toward rent based on income.

A huge percentage of the people living in NYC live in income restricted housing, it's in the millions of people.

Very high quality comment and very insightful!

Totally agree. It is one of the perfect resources to extort people with. Unlike food the price of houses rarely drop to zero, and often go up. Like food, it is very essential to people.

What you propose is a very socialist solution. I've read somewhere that in the USSR paying more than 4% of your income to housing was considered criminal (as they calculated that's what housing would cost using cost-based-pricing).

Lol just tax land

I already had communism and state-owned housing in my country, so no thanks! Never again. You are welcome to move to a state-managed economies though.

> charging according to income

Perhaps only as part of a way to ease those with low income. But this is no good in general. You are charging one person more than another for the same good simply because of higher income. This is price discrimination and is unjust. Usury can work in an analogous way, such as when someone raises prices to exploit increased need even though the cost of production of the good sold is the same.

> property owners provide almost no value

They provide shelter and must maintain that property. Problems occur when they begin to charge unjustly for services rendered. This calls for regulation, not state ownership. No need to go to extremes.

> The current setup creates guettos [sic] by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas, hurting social mobility

Social mobility isn't the only consideration and not the summum bonum and it exists precisely to allow people to sort themselves into social classes (otherwise, why have social mobility in the first place). People of a given social class tend to live closer to each other because they share class cultural similarities, concerns, and affinities. That doesn't mean there is no contact between people of different classes, but the solution isn't to mix everyone up into a uniform mass. There's a middle way between the hermetically sealed ghetto and uniform distribution, and it doesn't involve violating the principle of subsidiary.

Ultimately, it is poverty that is a problem, not having a lower or higher income as such.

I don't want to live in the projects

Agreed. Housing is as basic a need as food. Either end food subsidies and make farmers rich, or deregulate housing

Moreover artist communities flourish in urban spaces with cheap rent, like New York in the 1970s, Paris in the 1920s, Berlin in the 1990s and so on. Without that you just end up with Dubai or Monaco with shittier weather.

Half hour? That's been debatable for some time now. As an example, it takes 20-30 minutes to commute from the Upper East Side to Midtown West, barring any subway issues.

There are very few grocery store clerk, delivery drivers, and coffee baristas who live in UES. They've already been pushed out to the edges of Manhattan and other boroughs.

The 20-30 minute commutes have been snapped up by younger people who have been priced out of the 10-15 minute commutes. You currently see a lot more ads for rentals that seem to stretch the boundaries of neighborhoods (e.g. West 110th Street == "Upper West Side").

The wait lists for rent stabilized apartments are incredibly long, so the chances of a grocery store clerk, delivery driver, or coffee barista getting into more affordable housing closer to their place of work is pretty slim.

And good luck if you're an hourly employee with a long commute when the MTA lets you down in the form of a delayed train, or express-turned-local, etc. You're either penalized by your employer (or angry customers) for arriving late, or you penalize yourself by leaving the house 30-45 minutes earlier and sitting around unpaid until it's time for your shift to start (ignoring any cost of leaving the house earlier, e.g. cost of extra child care, or risk of being unreachable on the subway by a dependent).

I'm a well paid software eng in nyc and I have a 30-45 minute commute to work, I think the people you're talking about are already commuting 60-90 minutes if they work in desirable Manhattan neighborhoods. But I agree with your message.

Hate to break it to you and your relatively high paid friends but that bodega cashier is spending an hour on the subway both ways from their current working class neighborhood. Furthermore, half of that persons salary is going to groceries due to inflation. There has to be a breaking point at where NYC will hit stagflation and hopefully all useless instagram coffee shops will be hit by "market conditions".

Also as a New Yorker, worth noting that many of the lowest paid workers are undocumented, and their flexibility to pursue higher paying work is limited. Sadly, this means that 60-90 minute commutes are not out of the ordinary.

> no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job

Perhaps not minimum wage, but if the Bay Area is any evidence, people will commute that much time for a low wage job.

They are often losing out longer term (i.e. not considering the accelerated depreciation of their car), but in the thick of day to day survival they might not see that slowly happening.

Do the costs of goods and services need to go up?

Or do the places paying low wages now just need to accept a smaller profit margin or lower executive pay?

It's unquestionably true that there are some places that pay low wages that cannot afford to pay better wages without increasing prices; however, we seem to have collectively decided that that's the only way wages can increase. But that ignores the fact that corporations in all (or at least many) sectors have been enjoying record profits recently, and executive-to-worker pay ratios are absurdly high.

Remember that next time you see someone claiming that raising wages necessarily means that prices will need to rise.

>no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere

A few things:

1. The premise there (when there are plenty of jobs elsewhere) is kinda flimsy -- its already easier to find jobs in larger cities (that's why people move there), and nothing guarantees this won't get worse

2. Yes, there is a breaking point where people can't afford (in terms of time and/or money) a long and/or expensive commute. Humans have a workaround for that. Its called slums.

As a Bay Area resident, I have been surprised by how far people will commute for minimum wage jobs. Just Monday, I think, our public radio station had their morning local topics show where the subject was the city of Stockton. There was a lengthy discussion about low-income commuters coming daily from Stockton to Palo Alto, to work in and around the tech campuses of SV. Personally, I have known people to come from Modesto and Merced, even one from the far side of Sacramento. Daily!

Given that, I'm just not sure where the breaking point is.

> But as they get pushed further and further out it’s going to break down somewhere

It seems that higher rent is more likely to reduce standard of living first. Low wage earners who really want to be in the city will find a way, which generally means having a roommate and then I guess having even more roommates. I do wish NYC would build more dense buildings though so that a barista doesn't need to have 6 roommates.

"Wages will need to go up, which means the costs of goods and services will need to go up, and the city will get even less affordable."

That is already what happened. It just never stopped happening. The end game is... it keeps happening. It's just more noticeable right now because of high inflation and the stark contrast from the pandemic years.

It can go a lot further before people revolt. We don't yet have Calcutta style slums or impoverished favelas like San Paulo.

Or course it'd be great if we weren't heading that direction but try convincing voting demographics that property values should be lower.

Longer and longer commute for your grocery store workers. See fig. 1 (San Francisco)

> Wages will need to go up, which means the costs of goods and services will need to go up, and the city will get even less affordable.

Which shouod decrease the number of people living there, putting a limit on cost growth.

Isn't it a big talking point that wages aren't a large component of costs anyway for these services/goods provided by near minimum wage workers?

It's all debt which inflation will wash away and the landlords will come out on top.

Wages will rise

> no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere.

They absolutely will, this concern has never really made sense to me. Poverty is like a badge of honor for many folks, and the harder one works for the lower the pay ends up being a little game some folks like to engage in, almost as a self flagellation; "I suffer therefore I'm noble."

Just look at some of the most oppressive places in the world, and how people continue to opt into that abject horror because it's a path to marginally help themselves or others they care about. NYC is nowhere near approaching the levels of, say, Qatar, in how it treats its workers, and a 90 minute commute each way wouldn't do much to push NYC closer to Qatar on that particular front.

You think we're at the bottom? No, we can go so much lower. So very much lower...

This comment nicely attempts to paint high earning (not necessarily wealthy) upper middle class professionals as the scapegoat for an issue they did not create. The reality is, the people who are actually wealthy (think deca millionaires on up through billionaires) and investment firms and corporations are the ones suppressing supply for individual home owners.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...

Steve Waldman has a great blog post on this topic that goes beyond big city rents (though I agree that's a huge issue):

https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7263.html

It's a really really weird space that didn't really exist in 1984. I would say that today's "engineers" below the 80% salary threshold for this space are today's "construction workers" and heavily democratic voters (There are also of course "construction workers" too, of course).

Maybe about 5 years ago I would have said that people making 200k are wealthy. Today I would say that they are a lot of people that have been duped into a lifestyle where they "think" they are wealthy but are not. They spend MOST of their salary on non-essential and non-asset building things. So in a sense they are people that should be rich, but are not. Instead they don't own property (renters) buy lattes, restaurant food (for every meal) and the rest of that income is just going to payments - the tesla, rv/campers/boats, storage facilities for the stuff that doesn't fit in the apartment.

Those people certainly could become winners of the economic system if they stopped paying everyone else - but they identify with wealthy people making 400k but have absolutely no appreciating assets (ok except for their self driving module that Elon duped them into - which it turns out isn't actually "sellable" to the next owner anyway!).

I don't think these people identify with working class - instead they are pushing a narrative for themselves as poor to feel less guilty about that large salary and how poorly it's being pissed away.

That's the closest I can "explain" that from my personal perspective at least.

> while it should be 2% points over inflation

Do you really think we solved central banking in 1992 [1], and if only you were one of the central bank chiefs we would be fine?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_rule

people have taken on all this cheap debt and are just realising they have to pay for it

>Year over year inflation is 9.3% and Fed interest rate is only 1.5%, while it should be 2% points over inflation.

This ignores the realities of the market. A much lower rate than 11.3% (e.g. a 4%) would lead to a deep recession due to a shrinking money supply, which in turn would "counteract" inflation.

> But rate hikes are driving higher rents

This doesn't make sense to me. Rate hikes decrease spending overall, so why would rent be any different?

> But rate hikes are driving higher rents, which are fueling inflation

Rate hikes appear to be doing the opposite to rents here in NZ

> But rate hikes are driving higher rents, which are fueling inflation.

how is higher rents fueling inflation? People paying higher rents (but on the same income) will have to forego some spending, thus reducing demand for some goods/services. So you'd actually expect that higher rents would drive _down_ inflation!

this is bullshit. big time

This is the per apartment rate, so anyone with roommates is paying a fraction of the listed rent.

If the median is higher than the mean that probably means the distribution is heavier on the positive side.

Cheap apartments are illegal and the legal ones don't get financed/constructed. There's a cutoff much higher than zero for housing costs everywhere in the US and I'd imagine it's pretty high in NYC.

I was wondering this too, I know plenty of people who live alone in Manhattan and don't pay anywhere near $5k. Some renewed recently even but I don't know who had stabilization and who didn't.

Where did you see the $4k number? This looks like condo and co-op numbers mostly?

4000 in rent is not significantly lower than 5000?

Whenever I hear about the rental market in NYC I always ask myself: why do people want to live there?

In a way it's a rhetorical question but in another way it's not. Sure some will move there for a job but I'm sure not everyone is there just for work. Why do people put up with all that? Is it just the dream of living in NYC.

I’m paying $1600 for a 3 bed in one of chicagos hottest neighborhoods. The trick is density, Chicago is made up of 3/4 flats and apartment blocks with solid public transport, so supply meets demand at a reasonable price. Of course the shitty weather and corruption helps lower demand too, but I’d say $600 a month housing cost is worth it.

I was paying $2k for a very nice apartment in a very nice DC suburb within walking distance to my office. I moved to an even cheaper house (in a very walkable neighborhood) just outside Richmond. No people are not paying anywhere near NYC rent for urban living elsewhere.

This is temporary, right? Those tier 2 cities will feel much cheaper once NYC rents rise another 30%.

The median individual income in NYC is $34k. In Manhattan, it's $52k. Making 200k puts you in the top 5% of earners in New York City.

Hey now, we can't all be entrepreneurs working on the cutting edge stuff. Lots and lots of boring work needs to be done, and that's why you pay bankers, lawyers, consultants, etc. hefty sums.

You don't need to be original to do that kind of work, but it still needs to be done.

How much is the take-home pay if you make $200k a year? About 12K a month? A rent of 5k would take away almost half of that. A $4K rent would be at the limit of the 1/3 recommendation but not sure what you can find these days for a $4K rent. It's doable, but I don't think it's sustainable if you want to save money or live comfortably

i’d say there is a pretty big difference between Manhattan and the other boroughs in this regard though it’s still too expensive. i’ve found reason to go to Manhattan only a couple times in the past few years.

NYC uses much lax requirements:

Your yearly gross income (before any taxes, in aggregate, including other sources) must be greater than 40x the rent price. The example of 5k would require a gross income of 200k or higher, making it much easier to qualify for than what you're assuming. Is it a good idea to spend 5k on rent when you earn 200k is a different question.

Landlords in NYC require pre-tax income of 40 times the monthly rent.

For $5k monthly rent you need $200,000 pre-tax income.

These ratios are generally applied against gross (pre-tax) income.

>To meet the requirement of many landlords to earn in excess of 3x rent, one would have to earn 15k a month after tax, or 180k a year after tax. To earn 180k after tax in NY, you need to earn 300k pre tax.

But that's household income not individual ?

> Income After Taxes: $181,196

What? I thought that in U.S. taxes would be so much lower than in EU!

In Bavaria, Germany, the income after taxes on €300,000 euros is €168.131,35 in the highest contribution bracket, and €178.251,07 in the lowest!

Those are mostly corporate landlords in large buildings. Many smaller landlords don’t have such stringent requirements.

Source: rented and invested in NYC apartments for more than 20 years.

This is a little excessive, you are not taking into account the standard deduction, and taxing the entire income at the highest bracket.

Edit: I take that back, I see you used an effective tax rate including the standard deduction for a single filer instead of the marginal rate. This would be slightly better if you’re married filing jointly or have other deductions.

Short answer: No.

The problem with these insane prices isn't really that you have disparity within the same country, but that a significant amount of people in these places cannot afford to live in there. You can't have a restaurant because you need to hire waiters but you can't pay waiters enough for them to pay the rent. So your service industry is disrupted or alternatively: people need to commute 1 or 2 hours to get to these jobs.

The reason it is not shocking that people in the midwest pay more than people in developed countries is because in the midwest most people have a relatively better life than most people in those developing countries. Whereas, say, a waiter living in San Francisco is not going to live a very different life from a waiter living in the Midwest who will, in turn, be living a much better life than a waiter in a developing nation.

So I think people are shocked because they realise their quality of life is not so different but there is a huge disparity in prices. Same country, similar quality of life, hugely different prices? This is definitely an anomaly!

There's probably a lot of reasons building up to this. I suspect that a lot of this comes from the constant reinforcement of equality as broad concept. The idea that all people should have equal opportunities seems to have been perverted by some into the idea that all people should be the same. Then there's the idea of america as "one nation" instead of a massive collection of communities. Throw in the american need to spread out, and you start to get this culture that is far more homogenous than in the patchwork of cultures of europe and africa.

So with that backdrop, it seems the problem is people who think they're the same get shocked to find out they're not.

I think the comparison with other places makes no sense if you compare nominal prices. What I think you have to compare is (among other things) how much of your salary you spend on rent. Yeah, a non-developed nation you may get a 3 room apartment for 400 USD - but your salary may be not higher than 1k USD per month.

If the average salary in Manhattan would be 300k per year I think no one would care. But it is not.

Can you clarify what you mean by development? As far as the apartments themselves, they can range from newly developed, to newly renovated, to very old and needing renovations. I figured the apartments along the coasts, and in particular the Manhattan area are quite old.

I do think that development on a global scale has given people the ability to move to places like Manhattan, and so development outside, as well as within could create the demand for higher rent.

Affordable apartments may not be developing at high enough rate to keep up with demand - but in a place like Manhattan, surely it is difficult to develop affordable housing.

Yes and no. They are a sign of development, in that prices are high because there are enough people in the market with enough money to sustain these prices. Its a bad thing however because it means there isn't enough supply to keep prices reasonable for the actual real population versus just the top echelon that can afford these inflated rates on the shortened supply. The sticker shock doesn't matter as much as the relative buying power of hourly wages.

I think it’s the phrase “less developed country.” The US midwest and the US coast at the same, developed country.

Sure, they’re long distance apart, and drastically different, but that’s not on people’s minds.

> You could easily make the same comparison between the midwest and some non-developed nation. The difference is, nobody is shocked about how prices are higher in the USA midwest compared to an arbitrary less-developed country. Why is that exactly?

Because there's no freedom of movement, legal or cultural, between the midwest and the large coastal US cities.

I think the best comparison would be to other developed countries with strong economic growth

NZ doesn't do 30 year fixed mortgages like the USA does, so I presume this effects things a lot when interest rates go up? The bipartisan "medium density residential standard" legislation gave me a lot of hope for the future of NZs housing market, despite all the grumbling from some of my older relatives. Remains to be seen whether building supplies can keep up. Would be nice to have a land/capital gains tax though.

Many cities are experiencing asset price bubbles far beyond the rental price increases (driven by central banks). But NYC rental prices are actually rising rapidly. It’s quite a different situation

Prior to the NZ Land Tax Abolition Act it was pretty good there no?

Id love to see a breakout of Airbnb rentals by number of bedrooms. 1 and 2 bedroom airbnbs are seemingly never economical anymore compared to hotels, at least in the places I visit.

I’d love for someone to do an analysis where they look at the number of AirBnB’s in a city, and model out what would happen to the rents in that city if those units were put back into the rental market.

Would be absolutely fascinating if there was a tight correlation

NYC has technically outlawed Airbnb rentals of less than 30 days already. They just need a lot better enforcement of that law.

Should people who come to the city for a couple of weeks not be able to find any accommodation? Why do you think that they should have less rights that people that live in the city full-time? They already have obvious market forces working against them (short-term rents are always more expensive than long-term).

When considering this topic, it's worth noting that NYC recently made the construction of all new hotels illegal.

Eh, I think the ability to internalize the costs and profits of an apartment building allows for a more efficient and incentive aligned situation than a bunch of condo owners with a condo board where there's a kind of tragedy of the commons to look after the building.

This is a great idea that would never be allowed to made into legislation because of corporate lobbyist.

NYC apartment vacancy is at 4% compared to 6% nationally. The “vacant apartments and foreign owners are cashing rents to go up meme” is a straight up conspiracy theory.

We need to build more units. It’s really that simple. Any regulation that leads to less units should be heavily reconsidered. Limiting the number of units someone can own would be horrible for increasing supply.

You are confused about the economic dynamics behind high rents. There are already tens (hundreds?) of thousands of landlords around New York City and no single landlord controls more than a tiny fraction of the housing stock or has even the tiniest bit of price setting power. The problem isn’t cartels keeping prices artificially high, it’s immense demand running up against zero new supply.

Haha. No one loves it. Everyone wishes it was better. But no one wants delays or more crowded trains for 1-? years while it gets fixed/updated.

Be careful. It seems from the comments here that NYC transit is one of the attraction factors.

If NYC politics serves property developers first, then it probably wouldn't be illegal for property developers to develop new property in the vast majority of the city.

I think you've misdiagnosed the problem.

Another commenter in this thread mentioned the median is $4000 as of a few months ago.

Actually, that's not true in a strange perverse way. Higher interest rates = higher mortgage rates = higher monthly costs to own = More people being stuck in the rental market = more demand in an already over-heated rental market.

Remember housing prices going down doesn't turn to a lower monthly cost (it keeps at pace typically). This is pure wealth loss (which is the point so we can cut inflation).

This is already happening in NYC (and this article is the outcome of that).

More details: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/11/business/economy/rent-inf...

Remote work is essentially what created a large housing cost increase in other cities. Also for cities like NYC, reducing demand will be difficult. NYC has always been a city where lots of people want to live(maybe not you or me, but it does attract a lot of attention). It is historically significant, vibrant, and many parts are beautiful. People will flock there, even as others are leaving.

It's just diffusing the problem from urban centers to mid-sized cities elsewhere in the united states. Say for simplicity that the core result of the problem is that people not making astronomical tech/finance/etc. salaries can't live in NYC because people making those salaries are scooping up supply and driving up rent ($5,000/month and higher). Then say the solution is to let some amount of people move to smaller cities and work remotely, enough that NYC prices somehow magically drop 20%. Well, where are those jobs going to go / how much of a salary penalty are people going to take to move from NYC to STL, Austin, Nashville, Columbus, Denver, Ann Arbor, and Raleigh? Because they're not going to suddenly be making the same salaries that engineers already in those cities make, they're going to want more. And they're going to scoop up housing supply and put pressure on those housing markets. The same forces keeping NYC rent at $5,000 have caused places like Nashville to become unlivable for the lifers; your grocery store workers and baristas can't get by with $3,000/month rent there either.

It would be lovely if the solution for skyrocketing rents in the big 2-3 urban centers didn't simply shift the problem to every other city, but there's no indication at all that will happen.

And then the residents in those cities will hate remote tech workers for taking all their affordable rentals. There is not an easy answer here.

My understanding is that houses are being built, but they're not affordable. This Last Week Tonight segment from a few weeks ago covers this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4qmDnYli2E&t=676s

NIMBYism. The incentive is definitely there but the issue is that existing landowners don’t want any more buildings. After all - more supply while keeping demand fixed hurts their profitability.

You need eminent domain from the government to fix this. At this point - it’s complete class warfare and landowners are fucking over many generations.

The amount of homes being built in areas where people want them built aren't enough to offset demand. In areas where denser housing is required (coastal cities), zoning and NIMBYism prevents it.

It's mostly illegal to build new housing in Manhattan.

Toronto builds ~3x new units per capita every year compared to NY, let's hope they don't slow down.

You could rent a 5,600 sq foot house with a 3 car garage and a full basement in a top 10 high school area for $5k down the street from me in Metro Atlanta.

Funny seeing this! In 2010 I lived with a group in a five bedroom house in Sugar Hill on St Nicholas Pl for about $6000

It's more like Hollywood as a whole. You have wealthy areas where the landed gentry live, and you have extremely impoverished areas where multiple working class families share a bedroom in a run down apartment and can't save enough to leave and find better prospects.

I live in central London and pay a lot of rent, but I disagree, I don't think it's possible to compare London rents to New York. Certainly, the average rent across the entirety of London might average out at similar levels because there's a large number of renters and the floor is higher but at the upper levels, our rent is cheaper: you can live in almost any building in London for £3k/month, it's almost impossible to find an apartment building here where the rental floor is >£3k/month, luxury in London is comparatively cheap.

Not according to this:

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/find.html?locat...

I guess it depends on your definition of central London.

This would have been true when GBP was strong, but it's now trading at 1.18 USD. The glory days of 2.05 USD from 2007 are long gone, sadly!

Even in Kensington and Chelsea, average rent of £2.5K or even £3K GBP is only $3K-$3.5K USD these days.

https://www.homeviews.com/renting/average-rent-in-london-for...

How did that work for Berlin? Try moving there today and tell me how affordable it is for newcomers.

Rent control is basically subsidizing existing grandfathered tenants by fleecing those new wishing to move in, without fixing the underlying housing shortage in any way.

The solution is always, always, having (building) more supply than the demand, yet nobody seems to get it.

Indeed! What we need is a wealth transfer from new residents paying _even higher_ market prices to legacy tenants grandfathered in to apartments that landlords have no incentive to maintain.

Rent control only helps people who already have a home and want to stay there forever. Everyone else loses because there are few vacancies. This means less job mobility, more difficulty recovering after being evicted, and less development, which further exacerbates the rent problem.

> 100% of this price hike is going into landlord's pockets

This is true, and the solution to this is a land-value-tax and to use that to offset the city's sales tax, which disproportionately impacts the poor. Hell, it would probably be enough if the city just assessed property taxes more accurately. My TL was bragging about his home being assessed at $800k, when it's easily worth $2M.

Rent control doesn’t work. Sane zoning laws and higher density housing should help.

NYC already has rent control. It's why rents are $5k.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_New_York

How has that worked out for San Francisco ?

"We clearly just need more Jesus"

With the right moralizing as your hammer, every problem becomes a convenient supportive nail for your story.

But they aren't. I just did an apartment search after living in Manhattan for years and 5k was the number my partner and I wanted to be under. It was basically impossible and I'm now leaving my neighborhood.

Maybe, but you are also advocating for climate arson. Every person who leaves NYC for any other American city other than Berkeley is raising their carbon footprint, dramatically in the case of most cities. So that isn't great.

The other perspective that you need to consider is there are huge populations who simply will not consider living in the cities you mentioned. Women, for example, do not want to move to Ohio. Homosexuals would rather not live in Oklahoma. People who are not white can rule out a happy existence in 90% of American cities. It's true that a single, straight, white male with no children can pick up and move anywhere, but that's a relatively small fraction of the people.

Sure, but this is totally antithetical to american culture which is extremely selfish, entirely oriented around acquiring money, and obsessed with pop culture which generally leads people to pursue positions that are high paying and locales that are “the place to be”.

When the only values that remain are the acquisition of capital, self-love, and fame, the majority of the population will elect to be in the places that present those possibilities to them, even if it requires making short-term decisions that harm them (absurd renting costs), because they believe they might make it work given time.

It's $5k a month, i.e. the same as five thousand euros a month. In rent. Now, I haven't rented in Paris, but in Munich, that would be a castle.

You probably are talking about yearly amount, not monthly.

In Warsaw you would get top tier places with private pool and cleaning service for no more than 2500 USD per month.

I really wish you took the time, after what appears to be a rather inflammatory comment, to reply to the folks who are very specifically questioning your argument.

What is an average place that costs $5k a month in Paris? That sounds like way too much.

What? $5k a month is absolutely not something you pay for an above average place in east European capitals, nor in old European cities. Check e.g. https://www.expats.cz/praguerealestate/apartments/for-rent for a pretty expensive central european capital - around 20k CZK for studios, or 800 euros/usd. There are only 16 out of 1042 properties at over 120k CZK (~5k eur/usd), and they're huge (around 200m^2 and central).

This is monthly rent, not yearly...

For a 1-2 bedroom apartment ?

Those prices would mean a software engineer in Europe would not even have money for rent after paying taxes, much less anything else.

From the article:

> If those numbers seem low — after all there are headlines about 40% rent increases — it's because the CPI measure includes renewal rents, the price you pay when you renew your lease.

Maybe we have different definitions of posh, but 5k gets you very far in East Europe capitals. That’s a lot of money that can get you 6+ bedroom villas in downtown Bucharest.

What are you talking about? 5k in Munich, you can rent a 200mq apartment in Maxvorstadt

Per month?