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Comment by sgjohnson | Hacker News Reader

> In announcing M-CORE in May, Adams portrayed the new tax break as a step to protect the city’s budget and the services it funds. “Every office sitting empty means less funding for everything from schools and affordable housing to emergency food and police officers, and that’s why it’s vital we get workers back into offices,” he said.

Comedy gold. Nobody needs more overpriced office space in NYC. If people needed more overpriced office space, it most likely wouldn’t be sitting empty. Plenty of people need more housing.

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Is every NYC mayor an outright criminal, trying to transfer the wealth from Americans to their rich real estate buddies?

Adams is doing it right now. de Blasio did it. Bloomberg was a Bloomberg, and did it. Giuliani is so crooked that post-mayorship he lost his license to practice law while working for another well known long time thief and scammer in the NYC real estate scene (Trump, which they became criminal partners while Giuliani was mayor); I bet if I keep going back, I'll keep finding names associated with the real estate machine.

I'm surprised this Adams guy thinks there will be no repercussions. America is pissed and wants revenge: we, collectively, don't care who gets thrown under the bus as long as they're a politician or a businessman.

NYC made a bad bet on trying to maintain modern day slavery. The City should suffer, not the people who live there: force the real estate scammers to go bankrupt and take their skyscrapers, tear them down, replace them with something the city needs.

Welcome to NY. The city government and the state government are both incredibly corrupt, and basically always have been. Giuliani may have actually been the most honest one in recent history (only because he put down the mask), it just hasn't caught up with the rest of them yet.

Chicago is the same. New Jersey is probably worse than NY. SF less so, but also pretty bad. I hear Texas is also really bad. Basically anywhere you have a political monoculture (and thus no risk of getting booted for a scandal), you get corruption.

Arizona checking in. Joe Arpaio is still in AZ politics in 2023.

> modern day slavery

If there's any way to make people laugh at your otherwise cogent points, it'd be this

NYC made a bad bet on trying to maintain modern day slavery

Today I learned that working in a nice, air-conditioned office with a view for lots of money is considered "modern day slavery."

The slaves are the ones cleaning the place or commuting hours to work other lowly service jobs. They too suffer when too much space is devoted to offices and not enough to housing.

A key part of slavery is that you’re not allowed to leave, what is keeping people in NYC?

There's a huge reason why for many (myself included), the last competent (aka good) NYC mayor was the late David Dinkins. 30 years ago to the day he left office.

That's how far NYC has fallen, maybe you can say it has been like that since the 1970s if you go that far in history.

This is hilarious coming from a mayor that literally cut funding to schools and police to support all the illegal migrants coming to NYC

Cut funding to funnel money into the pockets of large businesses under the guise of "supporting illegal migrants". It's genius, really. You get to siphon off the tax pool and blame it on migrants.

No problem, in the future everyone will be employed directly by the government or a ngo that is funded by the government that provides support to people that will be funded by the government. Just keep that money velocity really high, it will work out swell.

> for everything from schools and affordable housing

Affordable housing, eh? Maybe convert some of that CRE into housing then?

We don’t need “affordable housing,” we need the price of housing to be affordable.

The former is exactly the same kind of ungodly expensive , corruption filled mess as what this article is talking about.

What's the difference between affordable housing and hiring that is affordable?

Affordable housing is the constellation of set aside programs, lotteries, income limits, etc in exchange for tax breaks, subsidized loans, bonus square footage, etc.

Housing that is affordable just means that there’s sufficient inventory that the market clearing rate is affordable.

Ah yes

Don’t we have the problem where, because so many people view housing as an investment, the demand for housing exceeds the number of residents? I.e., there’s an incentive to maintain scarcity, so that people’s investments don’t lose value. How do you keep the new housing supply from being instantly bought up by investors rather than residents?

Presumably through a combination of building enough housing to meet the demand in the long term and by strongly disincentivizing ownership of multiple housing properties and/or outright bans when it comes to corporations.

I don’t claim it’s an easy problem to solve but it’s the problem at hand.

The biggest barrier is not market dynamics—-you could just build through the demand—-but the political pressure of all those current owners that demand a windfall and will be very unhappy if affordability is achieved.

I would laugh if it wasn’t so sad.

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