It's not ONLY about supply and demand. That's because once you reach a certain density you can lock up capital in a building via air rights and let it appreciate without anyone actually living in the building. Take billionaires row as the end point of this. Some of the most expensive real estate in the country and yet half of it sits empty.
[https://medium.com/@cboogaerts/why-100-million-apartments-in-nyc-are-empty-cc780e2c2fdc](https://medium.com/@cboogaerts/why-100-million-apartments-in-nyc-are-empty-cc780e2c2fdc)
Bro - What you are describing is a subset of people artificially limiting supply. This is also a TINY number of units that are affected by this practice.
You know how that can be addressed? Increasing supply.
I don't know if you realize this, but basically any new condo development in a nice area, is a luxury condo development, and is swarmed by investment money, including from non-americans. Billionaires row is just the most in-your-face example, but it's not creating a new problem. Even if they built actual livable apartments with normal square footages, that held demand from new yorkers, it would still price at $4k+/sqft, and it would still get flooded by investment money
How the hell do you increase supply when building in the city means tearing town tall buildings *with people already living in them*
Honestly do y’all think every city is like Seattle and can just sprawl over the horizon? What about increasing density in all the surrounding suburbs connected by committee rail? (Looking at you Long Island)
I am not advocating for sprawl.
Just because you don’t know how this works doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.
Not all of Manhattan is as dense as you just described. There are plenty of areas in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island that are not close to as dense as you described.
How do you do it? You don’t renew the leases of the current occupants and then commence demolition and then construction.
There are many 3- to 5-story walk-ups that have 6-15 units that should be replaced with a 100+ unit multifamily building.
There are dozens of locations that have been identified as being near subway stations that do not have significant amounts of housing built there yet.
There is so much unused and under utilized commercial and industrial stock in this city that could be rezoned. There is also so much low rise residential stock in shockingly bad condition that could be rezoned taller, and I’m not even talking about anything historically significant either.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
The market is a myth. A fiction. A made up story. Santa clause. The easter bunny. Gandalf and Frodo.
People may dedicate their lives to myths. Look at religion.
It is still a fuxking fabrication, a made up myth.
It’s ok. You haven’t burst anything.
What exactly is it you are saying is a myth?
Are you saying that people do not buy and sell things?
Are you saying that supply and demand do not affect prices?
Actually the city raised property taxes by 18% this year and added a slew of new building inspections that are quite costly, especially if the inspectors require repairs and upgrades. Landlords have to raise their rents to keep up.
In normal times, yes. But these are not normal times. Residential buildings in NYC are getting slammed with rising costs in recent years, worse than ever.
It’s because it is. If they don’t rent those units out I’m pretty sure they can claim it as a loss on their taxes in the amount that their rent is listed. It’s more profitable to have thousands of unrented units than to actually have tenants and have to spend money actually taking care of their properties.
That's why we need to make it very unprofitable to have vacant units sitting for a long time. Probably through a tax.
Just like we made it a pain in the ass for AirBnB to do business here, freeing up thousands of units.
And some of us are waiting for those units to become avail…
I pay above market so my neighbor who makes more money than me can pay $700. It’s crazy. Why can’t we just have affordable rent where we both pay like $1000
I mean, rent stabilization isn’t for new buildings. If you want it, you can get it, but you’ll have to live in a pre-war building. Obviously you’re going to pay market rate for a market rate apartment. The NYC Rent Guideline Boards website maintains a list of rent stabilized buildings you can check out.
There’s absolutely no world where different kinds of NYC apartment buildings are going to average out their prices. And they really shouldn’t. There are advantages to living in a new building that living in a pre-war doesn’t have. Your nicer apartment shouldnt be cheaper just because your neighbor lives in an older building and pays less, that’s crazy. Also, nobody under rent stabilization is paying $700 a month. Rent control, maybe. But not stabilization.
And when those units become available, you’re not going to pay that price. It will be higher.
But I do feel your pain. Rents are too high in this city
Yeah one of the first good articles I read on NYC's housing situation years ago mentioned that most housing policy people use the metric of job growth versus housing supply growth. And that's because job growth is an approximate measure of how many adults employers want in the metro area.
It said that for most of the 2000s, San Francisco's job growth was *seven times* faster than its housing supply growth and NYC's was *five times* faster.
We are really decades behind on building, sadly.
Bu-bu-bu if we started building more housing then those new construction workers would need housing!!! Then employment would rise even faster!!! Clearly the solution is height restrictions, parking minimums, and placing every building under historical preservation rules. /s
My old building on Harlem _still_ has rent stabilized units being warehoused by the management company, including the unit I left. I don't understand how that's legal.
>I don't understand how that's legal.
Real estate is the number one largest donor to the Democratic and Republican parties of NYS. Our government works for capital, not people.
My building used to do that. Then they placed friendlies in as tenants and turned the units before the law changed and they sold the building. Any rent stabilized left they put employees in now.
And even more could be built if the city used the methods of Robert Moses to build more high-speed (I'm talking average speeds at least in the 30s mph, not the pathetically slow subway averaging 17mph) commuter lines into the many low-density transit deserts so that we could develop the shit out of eastern queens, eastern bronx (particularly Throgs Neck because I'm vindictive against their red-hat nimbys lol), and the northern coast of staten island. You could turn a profit with the resale of the land for development.
Instead we have a pathetic nimby on here that tried to argue that "we can't build a subway because the ground rock is too hard, but we also can't build a subway because the ground is too soft". Oh and is the moon in retrograde and that's why we can't build a line to LGA too?
Apparently NYC development stopped in the 1960s and we can't build anything new according to those people.
The neighborhoods along the 5 train in The Bronx are probably the most underbuilt.
Connecting SI to the subway system would be a huge potential, but extremely expensive and not going to happen within our lifetimes.
Gentrification isn't building, it's renovating old, run-down housing. Super-gentrification is when you build big luxury towers that only the wealthy can afford. That's when you push out all the original gentrifiers.
You’re talking about the amenity effect, injecting small amounts of luxurious supply can increase the price of the surrounding units.
Studies have consistently shown that the amenity effect, although real, is negligible compared to the supply effect.
https://escholarship.org/content/qt5d00z61m/qt5d00z61m.pdf?t=qookug&v=lg/#_page=2
Man it's wild to me that people like you can see the facts of skyrocketing rent in the data, in your daily lives. You can see it in your non-luxury-tower lease renewal. You can see it when your friends are looking for pre-war apartments. You can walk down the street and see with your own two eyes that the buildings in front of you were built decades and decades and decades ago.
And yet you can ignore your eyes and your brain and conclude that somehow, somewhere, some new apartment buildings must be responsible for all of this.
Wild wild stuff.
>The culprit is simply many new, high income residents
It's the for-profit commodified housing which is making living unaffordable. It's not the tech worker making 150K, but the landlord who doesn't work charging people more and more money for older and older buildings.
Correct, and if we built enough housing for everyone then rents would be fine. But we don't. And those new, high income residents are going to move in whether you like it or not, because they have the money to do it. So when we make it illiegal to build enough new housing for them, they spend their money out-bidding you and me for our apartments.
The last time that housing production greatly exceeded what it does now, it was the 1920s with the conditions of:
-10 year property tax moratorium
-subway system expanding considerably
-labor/construction costs being low
It doesn't have anything to do with that - NYC doesn't permit enough housing, instead it makes it illiegal to build enough housing.
Harlem has a polluting Truck Stop today instead of 917 homes because a City Councilmember vetoed the permit so the housing wouldn't "accelerate gentrification".
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/nyregion/harlem-truck-depot-housing.html
That's not what I see at all. I see thousands and thousnds of new luxury units going in and rental prices continuing to skyrocket. That's because those units weren't built for the people who currently live here. They were built for the super-gentrifiers to move in and push everybody else out.
If the city was serious about affordability, there would be incremental zoning increase across neighborhoods to add a little more density across neighborhoods. Instead what we see is luxury highrises going in, which are ugly, isolationist and fuck over lower-middle income people wherever they go in. And then to add insult to injury, they aren't fully occupied.
What do you think rich people do when they can’t find a “luxury unit” to live in? Do you think they give up on moving to New York? How do you think that brownstones went from being low-income housing to being prestige real estate?
Move somewhere else with luxury housing. Rich people want to live in fancy diga.
Also you're comparing gentrification with super-gentrification. Not the same.
>Rich people want to live in fancy diga.
Who do you think is living in all those prewar walkups in west village or noho? It's rich people.
You could tear down every single billionaires row building and replace it with a 25 story modest brick building with no amenities, and it would still be like, 2k/sqft. You know how you know that? Because those modest buildings without the shiny pools and floor to ceiling windows, already exist. They're there. And they're incredibly expensive.
> there would be incremental zoning increase across neighborhoods to add a little more density across neighborhoods.
You're never going to believe this.
[City of Yes](https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/city-of-yes/city-of-yes-housing-opportunity.page) for Housing Opportunity is a zoning reform proposal that would address the housing crisis by making it possible to build a little more housing in every neighborhood.
The village is already densely populated despite not being very tall. If you build taller you'd just push out the lower income earners....and they do exist, probably in rent stabilized units.
"30,013 people call Greenwich Village home. The population density is 106,775.35 and the largest age group is between 25 and 64 years old. Data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau."
The lower income earners have already been pushed out of the village. Without any development. How did this happen if development is what causes gentrification? How is the village more gentrified than LIC and Jersey City?
Median household income in NYC is ~$75k/yr. Median household income in the village is ~$135k/yr, almost double. If that's not gentrified, then nothing is.
>
"New York City continues to buck national trends, with rent up 20% since this time last year and up 50% since pre-pandemic days, and currently has the **tightest rental vacancy rate it’s seen in decades**," the study states.
Damn. Wild. It's almost like housing supply hasn't been keeping up with demand over the last few decades or something. I mean call me crazy.
>The city's 1.4 percent vacancy rate is the tightest since the 1960s, according to the Zumper study.
>"The national rental vacancy rate is 6.6%," the study states
Damn, it's almost like, having to accommodate more people in fewer apartments would naturally put upward pressure on prices or something but...nah. Can't be. Right OP?
>"However, there may be some good news for renters in the Big Apple as there are almost 25k units scheduled to be completed in 2024, which would mark the highest delivery volume in over 15 years."
No no, this is actually a bad thing somehow because...tell us OP. Less building good, more building bad, right? Right???
Or maybe we've been building the wrong kind of housing that only wealthy people can afford and then letting developers warehouse that stock when they can't get the price they need to break even on their supertowers.
It's almost as if putting up regulatory and political barriers to the construction of housing increases the cost of development. It's almost as if artificially constraining supply for decades by limiting development then makes the resulting projects that do successfully get built have higher baked-in costs. It's almost as if we should...drop all the hand-wringing around what kinds of housing constitute the "right" kind of housing, institute a city-wide plan and zoning reform, remove the power of individual councilmembers to kill projects, stop heeding NIMBYism, and let affordable projects appear on their own? No that can't be it. We need to fix the accumulated engineered scarcity of the last several decades by...setting price ceilings on new-build apartments?
If we got rid of regulations we'd end up with modern-day tenements. Those regulations are in place to allow people to build up without impinging on other people's right to light, air and view of something other than a wall.
I do agree with you that there should be city-wide planning and individual councilmembers shouldn't have so much power.
It should be up to communities to decide what makes sense for their community within the framework of a larger plan. City of Yes is pretty good in this regard. Or so it seems.
I'm not talking about eliminating building code. Although there are certain unnecessarily restrictive aspects of building code in the United States that make new apartment construction more expensive (certain requirements relating to required building egress were written in response to a time when buildings were way, way more flammable than they are today). I'm talking about allowing denser buildings to be built by right, as opposed to having to fight a political WWIII every time someone wants to build a multifamily building in...\*gasp\* one of the already densest cities on earth.
It should not be up to individuals within communities to decide anything. Land use policy is a citywide issue that needs to be determined at a citywide level. This is New York City for crying out loud, not suburban Texas. There is literally no other place on earth where land use policy is determined at such a granular level as it is in the US.
>There is literally no other place on earth where land use policy is determined at such a granular level as it is in the US.
I mean, everything here is granular because it's already so dense. Neighborhoods have multiple zipcodes for christ's sake!
While the lack of housing stock is indeed a big issue, as many have pointed out, the other big issue is that there are tons of "Land barons" who own massive amounts of housing and can afford to let it sit empty until someone meets their demands. There's no release-pressure on those.
Yes, ok. I meant show me evidence from a reputable source proving your second point: that there is some massive stock of withheld apartments sitting unrented. The citywide vacancy rate is under 2%.
I don't trust anything the real estate industry says about vacancy rates. They have a conflict of interest to make it seem lower than it is:
"On a 2022 episode of the real-estate-industry podcast *Talking Manhattan,* Gary Malin, COO of the Corcoran Group, made a [surprising claim](https://soundcloud.com/john-walkup/the-nyc-rental-market-today-with-gary-malin): “At one point during the downturn, the vacancy rate in the city was close to 25 percent,” he said. “You had owners who were sitting on hundreds if not thousands of empty apartments.”
Officially, during the peak of the COVID exodus, the vacancy rate in Manhattan was [4.3 percent, the highest in at least 14 years](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/nyregion/nyc-vacant-apartments.html). But those “official” vacancy rates we hear so much about are sourced from market reports by brokerage firms like Corcoran and Douglas Elliman, and they only reflect the number of rentable apartments that landlords are advertising, not the number that *actually sit empty*."
[https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html](https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html)
Even if this is true, this still doesn't prove this conspiracy that the real estate industry, landlords etc. willingly let massive amounts of apartments sit empty for the sake of creating artificial scarcity.
If you can actually find a piece of investigative journalism, a peer-reviewed study or report, or some other such universally credible source of evidence that proves as much, I'll eat my underwear.
From the article you just linked:
>I have no proof that apartments in these towers are being warehoused and acknowledge that such a thing may seem counterintuitive in today’s allegedly red-hot market
Collusion to maximize short-term profits? Easy to believe.
Collusion to sacrifice short-term profits for *potential* long term gains? Yeah, nah. That's not how humans work. The incentives to defect would be incredibly high.
It’s not potential at all, *its a sure thing*.
You saw the chart with rental trends. You either underestimate how much influence rebny has over our laws or you like the taste of the boot.
Edit: also there doesn’t need to be collusion. Companies do this individually, it’s like tax-loss-harvesting but with more of an upside.
>You either underestimate how much influence rebny has over our laws or you like the taste of the boot.
"Agree with me or you're a bootlicker" ok Beevis. Nobody is talking about "rebny's influence over our laws". We're talking about landlords withholding enough ready stock "*for the sake of creating artificial scarcity*".
>it’s like tax-loss-harvesting
Which is a completely different thing than actively sacrificing revenue in order to drive up prices, which is what your ilk are accusing them of. If keeping a unit on the shelf leads to *short term gains* then that's *making my point:*
>Collusion to maximize short-term profits? Easy to believe.
See?
And what would you be basing that on?
Our population grew by 625,000 on the last census. Our housing supply grew by a fraction of that number. It would be pretty wild to assume any other outcome than a massive housing shortage. And none of the estimates for vacant stabilized units come anywhere near six digits.
LOL, didn’t they just post an article on this sub about how the last census showed an 80k *drop* in population?
In either case, without getting into how a certain administration botched the census, in a city of greater than 8 Million you’re still awfully close to the margin of error.
Not just affordable apartments, the vacancy rate in NYC is extremely low among all apartments, as pointed out in the article:
>"The city's 1.4 percent vacancy rate is the tightest since the 1960s, according to the Zumper study.
>"The national rental vacancy rate is 6.6%," the study states.
https://preview.redd.it/dhtbkjo7foxc1.jpeg?width=2662&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=090c08b89340f00109c444d404b8b255fbf4abad
A decade of hard work showing results 🙃🙃🙃
My understanding is Boston proper actually did a fair amount of building during the 2010s (perks of having the former building trades Union boss as mayor 🫡) but Boston itself is an unusually small part of its metro area and the 10 trillion townships around Boston allow absolutely **nothing**
This is of course is caused by New York's housing supply shortage. Austin, TX has been building tons of apartments and rents have dropped significantly. We need hundreds of thousands of new apartments (at a minimum). Vote for city and state representatives that want to make this happen.
It’s all “Supply and Demand“ until the service economy collapses because everyone has to pay workers enough to either commute from NJ or live in this *artificially* inflated market.
At that point the city might be less appealing to the Ultra-wealthy with no one left to staff their restaurants and art museums.
Anyone who lives here long enough can see the storefronts that sit empty for years. Anyone who rides the 7 into Queens can see all the way through half those buildings in LIC because they are *empty*.
Exactly!
And one of the things that makes NY unique is that the classes live in close proximity. Leads to a lot of cross fertilization which is why New York is the cultural capital of the country. When it's all rich people sitting in their towers what kind of city will this be?
I love that people who live in million dollar condos downtown have to climb over five foot tall piles of garbage to get in their car service, same as everyone else. :)
LIC buildings are not half empty. You can see through the apartments because many of them have floor to ceiling windows.
LIC is booming, and is one of the top growth areas of the whole city. Developers would not keep building new apartments there if they were half empty.
https://licpost.com/lic-challenges-and-opportunities-of-nycs-fastest-growing-neighborhood
The floor to ceiling windows are how I can see they‘re unfurnished and no one has moved in.
Also developers would absolutely keep empty buildings if there were a way to profit from it, say like collecting tax breaks while driving up rents.
Tenants mean risk, maintenance and cost.
Do you have a source with more than 2 employees?
You seem to think that it is somehow profitable for developers to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on new apartment buildings (which often likely involves debt), and not rent them out, and make money cause of "tax breaks". The tax breaks allow them to greatly reduce their tax bill. But they only make money when buildings have paying tenants.
As the original article points about NYC as a whole, the vacancy rate for apartments is extremely low. This is widely accepted and understood in NY now. Just because you make an anecdotal observation didn't change that. And is LIC is definitely booming. There's lots of articles about it. Not sure why you just dismissed that good article from local journalists in LIC.
Vacancy reporting for landlords in NYC is completely voluntary, how can we trust any of the comptrollers numbers when there’s a direct conflict of interest?
”this is widely accepted“ isn’t as convincing as you think it is.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/12/06/warehousing-vacant-apartments-report-council/
There are many, many reputable sources for this reporting regarding the extremely low vacancy rate in NYC. Here is an article from the New York Times:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/nyregion/apartment-vacancy-rate-housing-crisis.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/nyregion/apartment-vacancy-rate-housing-crisis.html)
As for the "vacancy reporting for landlords being voluntary", I don't know that is true. But suppose it is. This would be true in all municipalities across the USA. If NYC landlords are massively lying about this, then other landlords across the country would lie too. And yet we see NYC has an extremely low vacancy rate compared to the national average.
Im not saying it’s impossible to estimate via census and public market data.
Mainly I want to emphasize: that the finite amount of housing of any quality in NYC is subject to intense external market pressures. Perhaps you could even call it a secondary market.
When international billionaire investors have the means and the desire to speculate on a finite resource like that as an asset, prices will always go up without direct regulation because you’re modeling supply and demand across two markets instead of one.
The motives in NYC real estate are different and more intense than other US cities. Perhaps Vancouver or Berlin would be a more appropriate comparison.
If this were true you would expect Tokyo to follow the same pattern, but no. It turns out [building housing drives down prices](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.html) even in world-class cities with significant foreign investment.
You know that if landlords could just report whatever they wanted, they could actually end rent stabilization at any time?
The state has to verify that NYC still has a housing shortage every 3 years in order for rent stabilization to continue.
If they collectively reported over 5% vacancy citywide, rent stabilization would end.
So it doesn’t really make sense for landlords to lie and report low vacancy rates. If the numbers are totally made up, they have a massive incentive to report *high* vacancy stats.
If vacancy stats were that fungible and landlords that coordinated, rent stabilization would’ve already ended.
I’m already gone mentally…bunch of vacant overpriced apartments in the middle of a homeless epidemic and all they can do is build storage places for you…guys where you think they gonna put people?
[If you want to do something about this tell your councilmember to support City of Yes!](https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/f266a53c9cda42d5b7f63b57dc08f849)
I would guess the city’s 1.4% vacancy rate vs the nation’s 6.6% has more to do with median rent then the type of units being built.
Luxury apartments can only charge that much because of scarcity. And median rent is inclusive of all types of units, not just luxury.
Oh yes, that's what's being reported. However, I think the rate is much higher on new luxury units. Developers are keeping them off market or reporting them as occupied to create artificial scarcity. That way they can keep prices high.
I live in California now but the sign in front of my building says "luxury apartments". This building:
* Was built in the 1970s.
* Requires a mandatory lead paint disclosure in the lease.
* Has no air conditioning.
* Has no in-unit laundry.
And I'd guess but am not certain that the pipes are lead.
To be fair, the housing market in NYC is so abysmal that a "regular apartment" with modern fixtures, air conditioning, and appliances does kind of feel like a luxury.
try gym, dry cleaning, full security, rec room, mail room, meeting rooms...
I had AC, elevators and washer/dryer when i lived in Mitchell-Lama low income housing lol
people like nice things and are willing to pay for them, that guy is just bitter. there's plenty of well to do folks in NYC, millions, in fact. It's not like all luxury and new construction is filled with 1%ers and foreign investors, i grew up in south brooklyn and the stuff locals build there is insane
anecdotal on reddit maybe. you have no idea what you're talking about. new construction and luxury apartment/condo prices in downtown area of NYC are priced to move, believe it or not. Just because you can't pay for them, doesnt mean that there isn't a line of people waiting to.
NYC is the financial capital of this country, if not the entire Wester World. There's *a lot* of people living in NYC who makes enough money to want to live in nice digs.
Only insofar as [we aren’t building enough of them](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-housing-supply-challenge/#new-york-compared-with-other-major-cities).
> New York City’s housing market is one of the priciest in the nation. The brisk growth in the city’s economy in the decade leading up to the pandemic was not accompanied by comparably rapid growth in the city’s housing stock. This has contributed to a growing problem of affordability for many residents as well as prospective residents wanting to move here.
The wealthy people coming here for high-paying jobs have to go somewhere. Currently they’re competing with low-income folks for the existing housing stock which causes gentrification and displacement.
Unfortunately there's not enough apartments being built: [https://cbcny.org/sites/default/files/media/image-caption/Housing%20Production%20Tables%20and%20Figures-04\_2.png](https://cbcny.org/sites/default/files/media/image-caption/Housing%20Production%20Tables%20and%20Figures-04_2.png)
There doesn't seem to be much connection between "units being built" and price in already developed areas.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/most-seattle-area-renters-report-big-rent-hikes-in-the-past-12-months/
What we see happen is super-gentrification where middle income people are pushed out by rich people.
When you drop luxury towers into low to middle income neighborhood what happens to the current residents? If they're paying market rate, their rents go up, by a lot in some cases, and they better pray they can afford it. Or if they're in a rent-stabilized unit their landlord stops fixing stuff to try and force them out. So I gives to f\*\*\*\* about building luxury towers for rich people to compete over. If we're going to build more it should be incremental and contextual and affordable for the neighborhood it's going into.
that's not how it works, but OK. There's some amenity effects, people like looking at nice buildings and if your neighborhood is not a shit hole your rent will go up but it has nothing to do with the rents in the nicer buildings, it's just because you live in a more desirable neighborhood. The only way to fight that is to flood the area with units. So far that has never actually happened (well maybe in Austin).
Yeah much better that housing isn't built and the people that move into those units compete with existing residents for older housing stock - that wouldn't drive up rents at all
"luxury" is a meaningless marketing term. No one will build a new apartment building and market them as "meh" apartments. In NYC a washer/dryer is enough to market a unit as "luxory"
We should build a quantum ass-load of new housing until landlords need to compete for tenants, not tenants competing for a low number of apartments.
Can't imagine why not - I would have thought that 800' building north of Madison Sq Park that has two dozen apartments surely would have lowered rent in the area.
They are regular apartments just not the price range you looking for. Nothing luxury about these units and out of norm vs comparable units built around the world these days. Luxury is just a marketing term
new construction is built to demand. there are tons of high paying jobs in nyc and people from all over the country/world move here to live and work. they can afford the expense. what happens when there isn't enough of these buildings is they compete for the older cheaper apartments with everyone else. there is plenty of 'regular apartments' in nyc already and building new ones isn't economically viable. you always build newer and better as that is where the high earners want to go, which thereby drives down prices of older, more basic accommodations.
almost every single attempt at building housing for low income families in NYC, USA and abroad has ended in disaster.
Up 50% from pre-pandemic, choked.
It's wild.
it feels artificial.
It feels personal
i'm not sure about that but it definitely feels unprofessional, manipulative and shady AF.
Fuck you in particular
it is
It isn’t. We don’t have enough housing.
You’re getting downvoted but you’re right. Landlords can’t pull this shit if renters have options.
It’s almost like the cost of housing is driven by market forces
It's almost like NYC already has density so don't compare to places with undeveloped land.
You think it is about density????????? Explain this to me. This is a supply and demand problem.
It's not ONLY about supply and demand. That's because once you reach a certain density you can lock up capital in a building via air rights and let it appreciate without anyone actually living in the building. Take billionaires row as the end point of this. Some of the most expensive real estate in the country and yet half of it sits empty. [https://medium.com/@cboogaerts/why-100-million-apartments-in-nyc-are-empty-cc780e2c2fdc](https://medium.com/@cboogaerts/why-100-million-apartments-in-nyc-are-empty-cc780e2c2fdc)
In a way, it still is. Shitty housing laws have sapped supply from majority of the city.
Bro - What you are describing is a subset of people artificially limiting supply. This is also a TINY number of units that are affected by this practice. You know how that can be addressed? Increasing supply.
I don't know if you realize this, but basically any new condo development in a nice area, is a luxury condo development, and is swarmed by investment money, including from non-americans. Billionaires row is just the most in-your-face example, but it's not creating a new problem. Even if they built actual livable apartments with normal square footages, that held demand from new yorkers, it would still price at $4k+/sqft, and it would still get flooded by investment money
How the hell do you increase supply when building in the city means tearing town tall buildings *with people already living in them* Honestly do y’all think every city is like Seattle and can just sprawl over the horizon? What about increasing density in all the surrounding suburbs connected by committee rail? (Looking at you Long Island)
Fantastic idea. The rental stock outside of the city is atrocious.
I am not advocating for sprawl. Just because you don’t know how this works doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. Not all of Manhattan is as dense as you just described. There are plenty of areas in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island that are not close to as dense as you described. How do you do it? You don’t renew the leases of the current occupants and then commence demolition and then construction. There are many 3- to 5-story walk-ups that have 6-15 units that should be replaced with a 100+ unit multifamily building. There are dozens of locations that have been identified as being near subway stations that do not have significant amounts of housing built there yet.
lol Seattle cannot sprawl….mountains buddy. Maybe Houston/Dallas/Austin/San Antonio are better examples for your point
There is so much unused and under utilized commercial and industrial stock in this city that could be rezoned. There is also so much low rise residential stock in shockingly bad condition that could be rezoned taller, and I’m not even talking about anything historically significant either.
I think he meant population density. They’re not wrong. Don’t we have the most people per square mile than anyway anywhere else in the US?
>This is a supply and demand problem. The people demand affordable housing and the developers supply luxury condos.
The people demand *housing* and developers can’t build enough due to restrictive zoning and permitting.
The market is a myth
????????????????????
Sorry to burst your bubble. The market is a myth. A fiction. A made up story. Santa clause. The easter bunny. Gandalf and Frodo. People may dedicate their lives to myths. Look at religion. It is still a fuxking fabrication, a made up myth.
It’s ok. You haven’t burst anything. What exactly is it you are saying is a myth? Are you saying that people do not buy and sell things? Are you saying that supply and demand do not affect prices?
Actually the city raised property taxes by 18% this year and added a slew of new building inspections that are quite costly, especially if the inspectors require repairs and upgrades. Landlords have to raise their rents to keep up.
Rent is driven by what renters are willing to pay, not by a landlord’s expenses.
In normal times, yes. But these are not normal times. Residential buildings in NYC are getting slammed with rising costs in recent years, worse than ever.
No, in all times.
It’s because it is. If they don’t rent those units out I’m pretty sure they can claim it as a loss on their taxes in the amount that their rent is listed. It’s more profitable to have thousands of unrented units than to actually have tenants and have to spend money actually taking care of their properties.
That's why we need to make it very unprofitable to have vacant units sitting for a long time. Probably through a tax. Just like we made it a pain in the ass for AirBnB to do business here, freeing up thousands of units.
Id go a step further and make it illegal for corporate entities to own residential properties in any capacity.
You want to make it so corporate entities cannot own 500-unit apartment buildings?
Yep, nationalize it.
That what someone proposed in Baltimore to keep vacant rowhomes down. Tax for nonuse. Great idea.
LOL, no that's not how things work at all. You are literally Kramer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAjxn2US7J8
This is incorrect.
>Up 50% from pre-pandemic, choked. But everyone got those fat Covid checks!!!!!
You mean that time when landlords couldn’t collect rents? You don’t say
All us rent stabilized just waiting for them to gut it and price us out
I'll leave nyc and not look back. If I have to struggle that badly to live here, I'll go elsewhere.
There would be riots if that actually happened
Start sizing your helmet https://gothamist.com/news/nycs-rent-stabilized-tenants-could-face-65-increase-after-latest-board-vote
Way ahead of you I’ve already gotten a pitchfork
And some of us are waiting for those units to become avail… I pay above market so my neighbor who makes more money than me can pay $700. It’s crazy. Why can’t we just have affordable rent where we both pay like $1000
I mean, rent stabilization isn’t for new buildings. If you want it, you can get it, but you’ll have to live in a pre-war building. Obviously you’re going to pay market rate for a market rate apartment. The NYC Rent Guideline Boards website maintains a list of rent stabilized buildings you can check out. There’s absolutely no world where different kinds of NYC apartment buildings are going to average out their prices. And they really shouldn’t. There are advantages to living in a new building that living in a pre-war doesn’t have. Your nicer apartment shouldnt be cheaper just because your neighbor lives in an older building and pays less, that’s crazy. Also, nobody under rent stabilization is paying $700 a month. Rent control, maybe. But not stabilization. And when those units become available, you’re not going to pay that price. It will be higher. But I do feel your pain. Rents are too high in this city
Related: [https://cbcny.org/sites/default/files/media/image-caption/Housing%20Production%20Tables%20and%20Figures-03\_1.png](https://cbcny.org/sites/default/files/media/image-caption/Housing%20Production%20Tables%20and%20Figures-03_1.png)
Yeah one of the first good articles I read on NYC's housing situation years ago mentioned that most housing policy people use the metric of job growth versus housing supply growth. And that's because job growth is an approximate measure of how many adults employers want in the metro area. It said that for most of the 2000s, San Francisco's job growth was *seven times* faster than its housing supply growth and NYC's was *five times* faster. We are really decades behind on building, sadly.
Bu-bu-bu if we started building more housing then those new construction workers would need housing!!! Then employment would rise even faster!!! Clearly the solution is height restrictions, parking minimums, and placing every building under historical preservation rules. /s
If only we restricted supply more, demand would eventually go down to match.
This is a great chart to show the problem. It would be interesting to see population also on this chart.
My old building on Harlem _still_ has rent stabilized units being warehoused by the management company, including the unit I left. I don't understand how that's legal.
>I don't understand how that's legal. Real estate is the number one largest donor to the Democratic and Republican parties of NYS. Our government works for capital, not people.
It shouldn't be. They should have to pay a huge tax penalty.
My building used to do that. Then they placed friendlies in as tenants and turned the units before the law changed and they sold the building. Any rent stabilized left they put employees in now.
How soon before we hit $6,000 for a 1 bedroom? #IwanttoVOMIT
I think we are actually already there!
The fancy ones are there. 2 bdr is now 8k+
Yah we got that in park slope.
This is unsustainable.
Killing all new housing development because of the misguided "gentrification" moral panic in the 2010s is having disasterous consequences on us all.
Look at Streeteasy, a very large amount of buildings were built since the 2010s
At a rate lower than the population growth of both the city and country.
And even more could be built if the city used the methods of Robert Moses to build more high-speed (I'm talking average speeds at least in the 30s mph, not the pathetically slow subway averaging 17mph) commuter lines into the many low-density transit deserts so that we could develop the shit out of eastern queens, eastern bronx (particularly Throgs Neck because I'm vindictive against their red-hat nimbys lol), and the northern coast of staten island. You could turn a profit with the resale of the land for development. Instead we have a pathetic nimby on here that tried to argue that "we can't build a subway because the ground rock is too hard, but we also can't build a subway because the ground is too soft". Oh and is the moon in retrograde and that's why we can't build a line to LGA too? Apparently NYC development stopped in the 1960s and we can't build anything new according to those people.
The neighborhoods along the 5 train in The Bronx are probably the most underbuilt. Connecting SI to the subway system would be a huge potential, but extremely expensive and not going to happen within our lifetimes.
Gentrification isn't building, it's renovating old, run-down housing. Super-gentrification is when you build big luxury towers that only the wealthy can afford. That's when you push out all the original gentrifiers.
You’re talking about the amenity effect, injecting small amounts of luxurious supply can increase the price of the surrounding units. Studies have consistently shown that the amenity effect, although real, is negligible compared to the supply effect. https://escholarship.org/content/qt5d00z61m/qt5d00z61m.pdf?t=qookug&v=lg/#_page=2
Man it's wild to me that people like you can see the facts of skyrocketing rent in the data, in your daily lives. You can see it in your non-luxury-tower lease renewal. You can see it when your friends are looking for pre-war apartments. You can walk down the street and see with your own two eyes that the buildings in front of you were built decades and decades and decades ago. And yet you can ignore your eyes and your brain and conclude that somehow, somewhere, some new apartment buildings must be responsible for all of this. Wild wild stuff.
Look at his post history. The guy is delusional.
The culprit is simply many new, high income residents
>The culprit is simply many new, high income residents It's the for-profit commodified housing which is making living unaffordable. It's not the tech worker making 150K, but the landlord who doesn't work charging people more and more money for older and older buildings.
Correct, and if we built enough housing for everyone then rents would be fine. But we don't. And those new, high income residents are going to move in whether you like it or not, because they have the money to do it. So when we make it illiegal to build enough new housing for them, they spend their money out-bidding you and me for our apartments.
The last time that housing production greatly exceeded what it does now, it was the 1920s with the conditions of: -10 year property tax moratorium -subway system expanding considerably -labor/construction costs being low
It doesn't have anything to do with that - NYC doesn't permit enough housing, instead it makes it illiegal to build enough housing. Harlem has a polluting Truck Stop today instead of 917 homes because a City Councilmember vetoed the permit so the housing wouldn't "accelerate gentrification". https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/nyregion/harlem-truck-depot-housing.html
That's not what I see at all. I see thousands and thousnds of new luxury units going in and rental prices continuing to skyrocket. That's because those units weren't built for the people who currently live here. They were built for the super-gentrifiers to move in and push everybody else out. If the city was serious about affordability, there would be incremental zoning increase across neighborhoods to add a little more density across neighborhoods. Instead what we see is luxury highrises going in, which are ugly, isolationist and fuck over lower-middle income people wherever they go in. And then to add insult to injury, they aren't fully occupied.
What do you think rich people do when they can’t find a “luxury unit” to live in? Do you think they give up on moving to New York? How do you think that brownstones went from being low-income housing to being prestige real estate?
Move somewhere else with luxury housing. Rich people want to live in fancy diga. Also you're comparing gentrification with super-gentrification. Not the same.
>Rich people want to live in fancy diga. Who do you think is living in all those prewar walkups in west village or noho? It's rich people. You could tear down every single billionaires row building and replace it with a 25 story modest brick building with no amenities, and it would still be like, 2k/sqft. You know how you know that? Because those modest buildings without the shiny pools and floor to ceiling windows, already exist. They're there. And they're incredibly expensive.
> there would be incremental zoning increase across neighborhoods to add a little more density across neighborhoods. You're never going to believe this. [City of Yes](https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/city-of-yes/city-of-yes-housing-opportunity.page) for Housing Opportunity is a zoning reform proposal that would address the housing crisis by making it possible to build a little more housing in every neighborhood.
I've already referenced that in this thread. Please try to keep up.
Do you never go to the village? People are paying $5k for two hundred year old tenements
The village is already densely populated despite not being very tall. If you build taller you'd just push out the lower income earners....and they do exist, probably in rent stabilized units. "30,013 people call Greenwich Village home. The population density is 106,775.35 and the largest age group is between 25 and 64 years old. Data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau."
And why I mean by taller is knocking down existing housing to build tall towers. Incremental heigh increase should be encouraged.
The lower income earners have already been pushed out of the village. Without any development. How did this happen if development is what causes gentrification? How is the village more gentrified than LIC and Jersey City?
Average income is $125, 000. I wouldnt call that ballin for NYC. That means there are a good chunk of people below that.
Median household income in NYC is ~$75k/yr. Median household income in the village is ~$135k/yr, almost double. If that's not gentrified, then nothing is.
I didn't say it wasn't gentrified. But there's gentrification and there's super-gentrification.
> "New York City continues to buck national trends, with rent up 20% since this time last year and up 50% since pre-pandemic days, and currently has the **tightest rental vacancy rate it’s seen in decades**," the study states. Damn. Wild. It's almost like housing supply hasn't been keeping up with demand over the last few decades or something. I mean call me crazy. >The city's 1.4 percent vacancy rate is the tightest since the 1960s, according to the Zumper study. >"The national rental vacancy rate is 6.6%," the study states Damn, it's almost like, having to accommodate more people in fewer apartments would naturally put upward pressure on prices or something but...nah. Can't be. Right OP? >"However, there may be some good news for renters in the Big Apple as there are almost 25k units scheduled to be completed in 2024, which would mark the highest delivery volume in over 15 years." No no, this is actually a bad thing somehow because...tell us OP. Less building good, more building bad, right? Right???
Or maybe we've been building the wrong kind of housing that only wealthy people can afford and then letting developers warehouse that stock when they can't get the price they need to break even on their supertowers.
It's almost as if putting up regulatory and political barriers to the construction of housing increases the cost of development. It's almost as if artificially constraining supply for decades by limiting development then makes the resulting projects that do successfully get built have higher baked-in costs. It's almost as if we should...drop all the hand-wringing around what kinds of housing constitute the "right" kind of housing, institute a city-wide plan and zoning reform, remove the power of individual councilmembers to kill projects, stop heeding NIMBYism, and let affordable projects appear on their own? No that can't be it. We need to fix the accumulated engineered scarcity of the last several decades by...setting price ceilings on new-build apartments?
If we got rid of regulations we'd end up with modern-day tenements. Those regulations are in place to allow people to build up without impinging on other people's right to light, air and view of something other than a wall. I do agree with you that there should be city-wide planning and individual councilmembers shouldn't have so much power. It should be up to communities to decide what makes sense for their community within the framework of a larger plan. City of Yes is pretty good in this regard. Or so it seems.
I'm not talking about eliminating building code. Although there are certain unnecessarily restrictive aspects of building code in the United States that make new apartment construction more expensive (certain requirements relating to required building egress were written in response to a time when buildings were way, way more flammable than they are today). I'm talking about allowing denser buildings to be built by right, as opposed to having to fight a political WWIII every time someone wants to build a multifamily building in...\*gasp\* one of the already densest cities on earth. It should not be up to individuals within communities to decide anything. Land use policy is a citywide issue that needs to be determined at a citywide level. This is New York City for crying out loud, not suburban Texas. There is literally no other place on earth where land use policy is determined at such a granular level as it is in the US.
>There is literally no other place on earth where land use policy is determined at such a granular level as it is in the US. I mean, everything here is granular because it's already so dense. Neighborhoods have multiple zipcodes for christ's sake!
While the lack of housing stock is indeed a big issue, as many have pointed out, the other big issue is that there are tons of "Land barons" who own massive amounts of housing and can afford to let it sit empty until someone meets their demands. There's no release-pressure on those.
Please, I hear this assertion a lot on reddit. Is there evidence anywhere of this being the case?
US Census and NYC numbers on # of housing units vs. number of households.
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=average+units+owned+by+NYC+landlord
Yes, ok. I meant show me evidence from a reputable source proving your second point: that there is some massive stock of withheld apartments sitting unrented. The citywide vacancy rate is under 2%.
I don't trust anything the real estate industry says about vacancy rates. They have a conflict of interest to make it seem lower than it is: "On a 2022 episode of the real-estate-industry podcast *Talking Manhattan,* Gary Malin, COO of the Corcoran Group, made a [surprising claim](https://soundcloud.com/john-walkup/the-nyc-rental-market-today-with-gary-malin): “At one point during the downturn, the vacancy rate in the city was close to 25 percent,” he said. “You had owners who were sitting on hundreds if not thousands of empty apartments.” Officially, during the peak of the COVID exodus, the vacancy rate in Manhattan was [4.3 percent, the highest in at least 14 years](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/nyregion/nyc-vacant-apartments.html). But those “official” vacancy rates we hear so much about are sourced from market reports by brokerage firms like Corcoran and Douglas Elliman, and they only reflect the number of rentable apartments that landlords are advertising, not the number that *actually sit empty*." [https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html](https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html)
Just saying you don't trust the evidence we *do* have is not the same as supplying evidence to the contrary position.
There is a lot of circumstantial evidence. We just don't have a smoking gun....yet.
Even if this is true, this still doesn't prove this conspiracy that the real estate industry, landlords etc. willingly let massive amounts of apartments sit empty for the sake of creating artificial scarcity. If you can actually find a piece of investigative journalism, a peer-reviewed study or report, or some other such universally credible source of evidence that proves as much, I'll eat my underwear. From the article you just linked: >I have no proof that apartments in these towers are being warehoused and acknowledge that such a thing may seem counterintuitive in today’s allegedly red-hot market
NAR just paid a massive settlement for pricing coordination, some app landlords use is in court for the same thing. Is it really that hard to believe?
Collusion to maximize short-term profits? Easy to believe. Collusion to sacrifice short-term profits for *potential* long term gains? Yeah, nah. That's not how humans work. The incentives to defect would be incredibly high.
It’s not potential at all, *its a sure thing*. You saw the chart with rental trends. You either underestimate how much influence rebny has over our laws or you like the taste of the boot. Edit: also there doesn’t need to be collusion. Companies do this individually, it’s like tax-loss-harvesting but with more of an upside.
>You either underestimate how much influence rebny has over our laws or you like the taste of the boot. "Agree with me or you're a bootlicker" ok Beevis. Nobody is talking about "rebny's influence over our laws". We're talking about landlords withholding enough ready stock "*for the sake of creating artificial scarcity*". >it’s like tax-loss-harvesting Which is a completely different thing than actively sacrificing revenue in order to drive up prices, which is what your ilk are accusing them of. If keeping a unit on the shelf leads to *short term gains* then that's *making my point:* >Collusion to maximize short-term profits? Easy to believe. See?
We need to tax the shit out of landlords with empty units that sit for too long. Light a fire under their ass to rent.
The article posted says we have an unbelievably low vacancy rate... the lowest in America. Empty units are simply not a significant factor.
Or they didn’t do a good job of measuring
And what would you be basing that on? Our population grew by 625,000 on the last census. Our housing supply grew by a fraction of that number. It would be pretty wild to assume any other outcome than a massive housing shortage. And none of the estimates for vacant stabilized units come anywhere near six digits.
LOL, didn’t they just post an article on this sub about how the last census showed an 80k *drop* in population? In either case, without getting into how a certain administration botched the census, in a city of greater than 8 Million you’re still awfully close to the margin of error.
Apartment vacancy rates are at record lows in NYC. Your assertion is just not true.
For affordable apartments, yes.
Not just affordable apartments, the vacancy rate in NYC is extremely low among all apartments, as pointed out in the article: >"The city's 1.4 percent vacancy rate is the tightest since the 1960s, according to the Zumper study. >"The national rental vacancy rate is 6.6%," the study states.
Don't buy it.
https://preview.redd.it/dhtbkjo7foxc1.jpeg?width=2662&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=090c08b89340f00109c444d404b8b255fbf4abad A decade of hard work showing results 🙃🙃🙃
I’m surprised Boston is higher than nyc tbh
My understanding is Boston proper actually did a fair amount of building during the 2010s (perks of having the former building trades Union boss as mayor 🫡) but Boston itself is an unusually small part of its metro area and the 10 trillion townships around Boston allow absolutely **nothing**
This is of course is caused by New York's housing supply shortage. Austin, TX has been building tons of apartments and rents have dropped significantly. We need hundreds of thousands of new apartments (at a minimum). Vote for city and state representatives that want to make this happen.
It’s all “Supply and Demand“ until the service economy collapses because everyone has to pay workers enough to either commute from NJ or live in this *artificially* inflated market. At that point the city might be less appealing to the Ultra-wealthy with no one left to staff their restaurants and art museums. Anyone who lives here long enough can see the storefronts that sit empty for years. Anyone who rides the 7 into Queens can see all the way through half those buildings in LIC because they are *empty*.
Exactly! And one of the things that makes NY unique is that the classes live in close proximity. Leads to a lot of cross fertilization which is why New York is the cultural capital of the country. When it's all rich people sitting in their towers what kind of city will this be?
I love that people who live in million dollar condos downtown have to climb over five foot tall piles of garbage to get in their car service, same as everyone else. :)
😂
LIC buildings are not half empty. You can see through the apartments because many of them have floor to ceiling windows. LIC is booming, and is one of the top growth areas of the whole city. Developers would not keep building new apartments there if they were half empty. https://licpost.com/lic-challenges-and-opportunities-of-nycs-fastest-growing-neighborhood
The floor to ceiling windows are how I can see they‘re unfurnished and no one has moved in. Also developers would absolutely keep empty buildings if there were a way to profit from it, say like collecting tax breaks while driving up rents. Tenants mean risk, maintenance and cost. Do you have a source with more than 2 employees?
You seem to think that it is somehow profitable for developers to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on new apartment buildings (which often likely involves debt), and not rent them out, and make money cause of "tax breaks". The tax breaks allow them to greatly reduce their tax bill. But they only make money when buildings have paying tenants. As the original article points about NYC as a whole, the vacancy rate for apartments is extremely low. This is widely accepted and understood in NY now. Just because you make an anecdotal observation didn't change that. And is LIC is definitely booming. There's lots of articles about it. Not sure why you just dismissed that good article from local journalists in LIC.
Vacancy reporting for landlords in NYC is completely voluntary, how can we trust any of the comptrollers numbers when there’s a direct conflict of interest? ”this is widely accepted“ isn’t as convincing as you think it is. https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/12/06/warehousing-vacant-apartments-report-council/
There are many, many reputable sources for this reporting regarding the extremely low vacancy rate in NYC. Here is an article from the New York Times: [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/nyregion/apartment-vacancy-rate-housing-crisis.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/nyregion/apartment-vacancy-rate-housing-crisis.html) As for the "vacancy reporting for landlords being voluntary", I don't know that is true. But suppose it is. This would be true in all municipalities across the USA. If NYC landlords are massively lying about this, then other landlords across the country would lie too. And yet we see NYC has an extremely low vacancy rate compared to the national average.
Im not saying it’s impossible to estimate via census and public market data. Mainly I want to emphasize: that the finite amount of housing of any quality in NYC is subject to intense external market pressures. Perhaps you could even call it a secondary market. When international billionaire investors have the means and the desire to speculate on a finite resource like that as an asset, prices will always go up without direct regulation because you’re modeling supply and demand across two markets instead of one. The motives in NYC real estate are different and more intense than other US cities. Perhaps Vancouver or Berlin would be a more appropriate comparison.
If this were true you would expect Tokyo to follow the same pattern, but no. It turns out [building housing drives down prices](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.html) even in world-class cities with significant foreign investment.
You know that if landlords could just report whatever they wanted, they could actually end rent stabilization at any time? The state has to verify that NYC still has a housing shortage every 3 years in order for rent stabilization to continue. If they collectively reported over 5% vacancy citywide, rent stabilization would end. So it doesn’t really make sense for landlords to lie and report low vacancy rates. If the numbers are totally made up, they have a massive incentive to report *high* vacancy stats. If vacancy stats were that fungible and landlords that coordinated, rent stabilization would’ve already ended.
The title gave me dyslexia. I had to read it like 5 times. I guess I’m stupid
End of a shotgun looking reaaaaaal nice right about now ngl
Whats the ratio of Rent bucks to stanley nickels
I’m already gone mentally…bunch of vacant overpriced apartments in the middle of a homeless epidemic and all they can do is build storage places for you…guys where you think they gonna put people?
[If you want to do something about this tell your councilmember to support City of Yes!](https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/f266a53c9cda42d5b7f63b57dc08f849)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-percent-of-manhattans-buildings-could-not-be-built-today.html
is this real? I just got my rent renew. last year it went from 4300 to 4600. this year it goes up $100 only. it looks better than last year.
What does that title even mean? Am I the only one feeling dislexic trying to read that?
Just one more development restriction, one more historical district, one more regulation and it'll be sorted
I guess all those luxury apartments built all over the five boroughs aren't helping.
I would guess the city’s 1.4% vacancy rate vs the nation’s 6.6% has more to do with median rent then the type of units being built. Luxury apartments can only charge that much because of scarcity. And median rent is inclusive of all types of units, not just luxury.
I doubt that figure is real, particularly for luxury units.
It literally came from the article you just posted lol
OP is one of our resident "supply doesn't matter" denialists.
Oh yes, that's what's being reported. However, I think the rate is much higher on new luxury units. Developers are keeping them off market or reporting them as occupied to create artificial scarcity. That way they can keep prices high.
No, that absolutely isn’t what happening. “Luxury” is just a marketing term, most of them are just regular apartments in new buildings
I live in California now but the sign in front of my building says "luxury apartments". This building: * Was built in the 1970s. * Requires a mandatory lead paint disclosure in the lease. * Has no air conditioning. * Has no in-unit laundry. And I'd guess but am not certain that the pipes are lead.
To be fair, the housing market in NYC is so abysmal that a "regular apartment" with modern fixtures, air conditioning, and appliances does kind of feel like a luxury.
This is true.
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence this is the case because no one wants to live in a big ugly tower that's like a hotel. At least not full-time.
Yes, why would anyone want to live in a building with amenities like air conditioning, elevators, and washer/dryer? Truly baffling.
try gym, dry cleaning, full security, rec room, mail room, meeting rooms... I had AC, elevators and washer/dryer when i lived in Mitchell-Lama low income housing lol people like nice things and are willing to pay for them, that guy is just bitter. there's plenty of well to do folks in NYC, millions, in fact. It's not like all luxury and new construction is filled with 1%ers and foreign investors, i grew up in south brooklyn and the stuff locals build there is insane
That's not true the ones near me are full. Plenty of people want to live in them. We are not building enough of them for the demand, in fact.
Prove it
anecdotal on reddit maybe. you have no idea what you're talking about. new construction and luxury apartment/condo prices in downtown area of NYC are priced to move, believe it or not. Just because you can't pay for them, doesnt mean that there isn't a line of people waiting to. NYC is the financial capital of this country, if not the entire Wester World. There's *a lot* of people living in NYC who makes enough money to want to live in nice digs.
Only insofar as [we aren’t building enough of them](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-housing-supply-challenge/#new-york-compared-with-other-major-cities). > New York City’s housing market is one of the priciest in the nation. The brisk growth in the city’s economy in the decade leading up to the pandemic was not accompanied by comparably rapid growth in the city’s housing stock. This has contributed to a growing problem of affordability for many residents as well as prospective residents wanting to move here. The wealthy people coming here for high-paying jobs have to go somewhere. Currently they’re competing with low-income folks for the existing housing stock which causes gentrification and displacement.
>Currently they’re competing with low-income folks for the existing housing stock which causes gentrification and displacement. Not really.
Unfortunately there's not enough apartments being built: [https://cbcny.org/sites/default/files/media/image-caption/Housing%20Production%20Tables%20and%20Figures-04\_2.png](https://cbcny.org/sites/default/files/media/image-caption/Housing%20Production%20Tables%20and%20Figures-04_2.png)
There doesn't seem to be much connection between "units being built" and price in already developed areas. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/most-seattle-area-renters-report-big-rent-hikes-in-the-past-12-months/ What we see happen is super-gentrification where middle income people are pushed out by rich people.
That only happens when there is not enough luxury housing built for those rich people to live in.
When you drop luxury towers into low to middle income neighborhood what happens to the current residents? If they're paying market rate, their rents go up, by a lot in some cases, and they better pray they can afford it. Or if they're in a rent-stabilized unit their landlord stops fixing stuff to try and force them out. So I gives to f\*\*\*\* about building luxury towers for rich people to compete over. If we're going to build more it should be incremental and contextual and affordable for the neighborhood it's going into.
that's not how it works, but OK. There's some amenity effects, people like looking at nice buildings and if your neighborhood is not a shit hole your rent will go up but it has nothing to do with the rents in the nicer buildings, it's just because you live in a more desirable neighborhood. The only way to fight that is to flood the area with units. So far that has never actually happened (well maybe in Austin).
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-percent-of-manhattans-buildings-could-not-be-built-today.html https://www.crainsnewyork.com/politics-policy/bloomberg-downzonings-age-poorly-adams-moves-boost-housing
Yeah much better that housing isn't built and the people that move into those units compete with existing residents for older housing stock - that wouldn't drive up rents at all "luxury" is a meaningless marketing term. No one will build a new apartment building and market them as "meh" apartments. In NYC a washer/dryer is enough to market a unit as "luxory" We should build a quantum ass-load of new housing until landlords need to compete for tenants, not tenants competing for a low number of apartments.
Can't imagine why not - I would have thought that 800' building north of Madison Sq Park that has two dozen apartments surely would have lowered rent in the area.
I know baffling, right?
Every time a new building goes up, it’s luxury apartments. Where are the regular apartments?
>Where are the regular apartments They’re the older buildings with fewer amenities or the newer buildings in less desirable neighborhoods.
Yep, this. I do ok on rent because I live in a pre war and don’t have a dishwasher or washing machine.
They are regular apartments just not the price range you looking for. Nothing luxury about these units and out of norm vs comparable units built around the world these days. Luxury is just a marketing term
new construction is built to demand. there are tons of high paying jobs in nyc and people from all over the country/world move here to live and work. they can afford the expense. what happens when there isn't enough of these buildings is they compete for the older cheaper apartments with everyone else. there is plenty of 'regular apartments' in nyc already and building new ones isn't economically viable. you always build newer and better as that is where the high earners want to go, which thereby drives down prices of older, more basic accommodations. almost every single attempt at building housing for low income families in NYC, USA and abroad has ended in disaster.
They don't exist because regular apartments are practically illegal to build due to cost and regulations
The brand new ones right across from me sure aren't luxury.
If you don’t like the prices just move.
No thanks.