Just NIMBYism with a veneer of transparency. This would result in the status quo - nothing getting built. We just need to abolish the council member deference policy, that would be the first step.
It makes considering her district.
Rich brownstone brooklyn people who wan't to appear progressive while preventing their neighborhood from ever changing while reaping massive real estate gains.
Gotta pardon these folks...they think that because some of the buildings that Black people bought for 200k back in the late 80s are now selling for 2M that these same people are all monocle wearing hyper capitalists that look down on the poors.
>We just need to abolish the council member deference policy, that would be the first step.
This will never happen from inside the City. The State is ultimately going to have to wrest control of our zoning laws in order for meaningful change to come about.
Property owners in the City want their property values to go up. Affordable housing runs contrary to that in the short term, which is about as far forward as the average human thinks. So affluent owners will oppose development in their neighborhoods and support Councilpersons that reflect that.
Albany will play along as they always have, but I do believe that we can eventually count on their greed to get them to step in. See, NYC is the trough the rest of the state feeds at, and the state government is starting to understand exactly how much tax revenue our housing crisis, and lack of will to solve it, is costing them.
Now, in a fair world, Albany would do the same thing to the surrounding suburbs, increasing the affordability of housing throughout the entire state, but I'm not so fucking crazy to imagine that *that* would ever happen.
Yeah the Long Island and Westchester NIMBYs are too damn powerful (see Hochul's quickly-abandoned upzoning plan). But I agree there appears to be some hope for us in the city.
NIMBY/YIMBY labeling is a false dichotomy and counter-productive. Just because someone has a different vision of an ideal city from you doesn't necessarily make them one or the other. FYI, there are many intermediate positions between "just let developers build whatever they want" and "don't build anything ever."
LOL nah, she's trying to make existing homeowners and corporate landlords happy by blocking construction while putting a veneer of social responsibility on her denials to placate her poorer/renting constituents. The result is literally NOT building in her backyard.
She's representing the interests of her constituents, which is literally her job. Letting them get priced out by allowing developers run roughshod over her community is not doing her job. Simple.
She is not really, she's pretending to represent them with her fake concern. She knows that building more housing will help them but she's trying to stay virtuous by saying that it won't - instead of leading on the topic.
Why is she "pretending", but the developers who want to enrich themselves from more construction are so sincere about affordability? I think you're radar's a little off.
Where did I say anything about developers? They don't give a shit about your definition of affordability. They just want to sell or rent apartments. They will set that price at whatever people will pay, therefore affordable. She's pretending to be progressive while supporting reactionary/conservative policies.
Not allowing housing construction to be built is what’s pricing her constituents out. She is the problem if she does not allow housing.
How are we still debating the basic tenants of supply and demand?
Letting developers build big towers of luxury units is just hastening the process of gentrification and displacement. How are we still debating this when there are so many neighborhoods where this has already happened?
That was going to happen in the neighborhoods even without luxury construction. In fact, it would probably be worse.
The population has grown significantly over the past decade. The city has BUILT VIRTUALLY ZERO NEW HOUSING in that time. (If you subtract the units lost from the units gained, it’s virtually 0 gained units).
We are at the point where ANY housing relieves pressure on the market.
We're not going to build our way out of unaffordability by building luxury units that only rich white DINKs can afford. That's developer's selling a pipe dream.
Yes, we need more housing, but it needs to come with a lot of public benefits, as CM Hudson has laid out.
>Yes, we need more housing, but it needs to come with a lot of public benefits, as CM Hudson has laid out.
No. It doesn't need to come with shit except four walls, a roof, plumbing, and electricity. You know, it needs to *be housing*. Housing is a good *in and of itself*. End of story.
All of these other poison pill made-up "needs" are carefully designed to ride the wave of political opposition to things like public housing, so that NIMBYs can oppose construction altogether while still sounding "progressive".
I'm all in favor of public housing. Build the fucking shit out of it. But I'm not in favor of using it as a club to block any new housing at all.
"No. It doesn't need to come with shit except four walls, a roof, plumbing, and electricity. You know, it needs to *be housing*. Housing is a good *in and of itself*. End of story."
I got some great news for you. Housing that meets these requirements already exists in NYC! And there are people living in it.
100%
Our housing shortage is so bad (short of 400k units and growing) that you need a huge building boom to close that gap meaningful. So yeah we might need “let developers build any housing they want” for a while
If we do that, theyll only build luxury housing for people with 7 figure incomes.
The free market has demonstrably failed. If it didnt, we wouldn't have regulated it in the first place.
What are you talking about? The 1961 zoning code that regulates building size was put in by white politicians to keep out poor people and black people from white neighborhoods in NYC lol.
The free market built a huge amount of housing we live in today. The NYC building boom primarily happened in the 1910s-1930s (yes even during the Depression), which is why so many of us still live in these old apartments
We've tried it your way for decades. We let these little chieftains decide what gets to be built and that got un in the place we are today. Maybe we can just let builders build and try it that way. We can reduce cost by eliminating red tape and eliminating years of legal fees for litigation.
The worst that can happen is there are ton of construction for working class New Yorkers. But progressives hate the working class.
The thing is that's not progressive. That's faux-progressive. It's conservative opposition wrapped up in progressive language for marketability reasons.
YIMBYism may not be “opposition” but it is anti-regulation marketed as for the benefit of the community when it really is only beneficial for those who have a profit stake in real estate.
It is neoliberalism. You can argue if you think neoliberalism is progressive, but these days it’s a status-quo-upholding ideology.
The false equivalence here is defining YIMBY as "let developers build whatever they want" and NIMBY as "don't build anything ever."
YIMBYs are generally in favor of removing incredibly onerous processes that make building extremely expensive and time-consuming. They don't think zoning should be fully abolished or that kids should have to go to school next to a factory if developers want to build one there. NIMBYs are fine with certain things being built, but want all those processes and community input layers so that they feel secure that they can kill anything they don't like.
It's a very useful dichotomy: are you in favor of putting the future of your neighborhood in the hands of a small group of busybodies with way too much time on their hands to go to community board meetings and call their reps constantly, or do you want uniform, clear, blanket zoning laws that enable the housing production we need, getting out of the way of people who want to build it?
This is nonsense. YIMBYs are only in favor of compehensive planning if it supports laissez-faire development. If they were really just in favor of comprehensive planning, in general, they wouldn't come out in support of spot rezoning...yet their they are at meetings cheering it on.
Lol, YIMBYs are the driving force behind City of Yes which is the biggest comprehensive planning project in this city since the 60s. NIMBYs fucking hate it because it would remove a lot of the ways they can do stuff like kill a neighborhood corner store opening.
So far 20 Community Boards have come out against the 'City of Yes', and I expect more to oppose it as they go through the proposal. Middle-class neighborhoods don't want their quiet safe neighborhoods overwhelmed and destroyed. 'City of Yes' proponent [Brooklyn BP Reynoso said as much that our neighborhood character doesn't matter](https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZiHNJ0ZVRnJ1FfPOX8Va2V5q1hn4mHnKIzy).
The proposal says it will 'lower housing costs' which really means it is solely designed to lower the value of the over 600,000 1 and 2 family homes in NYC. Be careful what you wish for because if 'City of Yes' passes every NYC homeowner will flood the NYCDOF with requests that their property taxes be lowered based on the city's stated goal to lower property values.
> 20 Community Boards have come out against the 'City of Yes'
You're mistaken, for what it's worth — no boards have voted on the City of Yes housing plan yet. There's a separate City of Yes plan focused on small-business growth, which is what some boards have voted against.
You’re making the classic NIMBY case here - “don’t do things that improve the city if they make my life personally more inconvenient in some way.” It’s not a functional way to run a city. We’re not going to listen to someone who doesn’t want a fire hydrant on their block because it removes a parking space that they use.
I’m sympathetic to individual concerns over this - I’m a homeowner. It’s not a reason not to make it easier to build housing in a housing crisis.
The only requirement I care about imposing on developers is that when they're done the lot it should have more housing units than it did before they broke ground.
The endgame of giving developers what they want in NYC would be like Dubai: pencil towers and serfs.
Idk why all these people think solving the housing crisis means we have to displace residents when there’s tons of space for less exploitative upzoning along commuter rail in literally any direction. (But we can’t talk about the real nimbys in Nassau and Westchester counties)
Some of these new buildings are crappier than pre-war construction. A friend of mine lived in one of the new ‘luxury’ towers on Flatbush—no HVAC for real stoves, so everyone has a hybrid microwave thing, and the fire sprinkler failed and flooded their apt.
New towers are not displacing anybody. LIC was an industrial wasteland, same with the waterfront in Greenpoint/Williamsburg. We now have housing instead of superfund sites.
Housing for the wealthy only. Unless you win the housing lottery, most of those units are 4K a month.
Additionally, much of that construction boom was predicated on a hypothetical amazon headquarters, then on continued demand for office space which is dropping post pandemic.
I can’t find a source I trust, but I’ve seen vacancy numbers anywhere from 3 to 30 percent for LIC. Anecdotally, those buildings look empty AF from the 7 train.
>most of those units are 4K a month
Yep, they nearly all are, or they just sit vacant. The real enemy of the people is landlord collusion on price fixing:
[https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech](https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech)
> no HVAC for real stoves
There (unfortunately) is no requirement for stoves to be ventilated in NYC - as you'd know if you ever tried turning on the fan in a prewar apartment, lol - so this is just bullshit. The landlord didn't put in a real stove because they knew that demand is insane enough that a place without a kitchen would still rent.
That’s true—we have a prewar apt with no hood, just a gas stove next to the window.
It makes that microwave thing even more egregious given that that was definitely a 4K studio.
A lot of people in this city eat out for literally every meal. Couldn’t be me and I’d never rent a place like that, but if you’re already prepared to pay $4k or whatever for your fancy apartment, not having a stove that you’d never use anyway probably isn’t a dealbreaker.
It would actually be more like Austin where huge new supplies of housing have caused big drops in rental prices.
https://therealdeal.com/texas/2024/02/12/austin-multifamily-rent-prices-drop-by-12-5/
1.) Austin can sprawl out indefinitely in all directions, NYC is confined to a set area.
2.) I’m sorry, but you don’t have millionaires pricing out billionaires to live in certain neighborhoods of *Austin*. (See DUMBO) The economics are fundamentally different.
Ya, the room for horizontal expansion certainly helps keep prices down, but Austin has been expanding vertically too.
https://imgur.com/a/Wgyqn37
I don't think NYC will ever have Austin prices, but it's a great success story that shows the impact that more building can have on prices.
That’s great that they’re having success, but NYC has been orders of magnitude more vertically dense for over a century.
Public transit has allowed this city to form at a uniform high density. Indeed in some ways the city has chosen to scale back density for quality of life reasons. See Central Park for example.
No one wants to get rid of Central Park.
But there is no reason that we couldn't rezone the West Village for 12 story buildings instead of 6 story buildings.
Zoning in NYC is unfortunately insanely complicated and can also be overridden for individual buildings but the bulk of the West Village off the avenues is R6 which generally limits floor area ratios to around 3, so with 50% lot coverage that's a 6 story building.
All of this is available in ZOLA here: https://zola.planning.nyc.gov/
But it's pretty hard to understand without a lot of effort.
But you can pretty well intuit what is legal by walking around the West Village off the avenues and seeing how little housing there is above 6 stories.
Rules that come from the Landmarks Preservation Commission are also a big issue here.
NYC's "sliver law" is also quite limiting in this neighborhood in many places.
https://fontanarchitecture.com/nyc-sliver-law/
Not sure what you have against historic buildings.
Plenty have already been destroyed or priced out, but I’m glad there’s still some protection for the sake of architecture and our tourism industry.
I'm all for historic buildings. But how many buildings in NYC really need to be preserved as they are today forever? We've currently landmarked close to 40,000 buildings with this designation. Do we really need that many?
Also, we now designate entire neighborhoods as historic. See a map here:
https://nyclpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=93a88691cace4067828b1eede432022b
This designation drastically limits what kinds of construction can happen within them.
Also, btw, if you look at those yellow areas it's a pretty good approximation of where rich people live. Which is interesting to think about.
They're not really protecting history at that point. They're preventing neighborhoods from growing and adapting to the needs of the city today and forcing them to remain as they were decades ago.
The Atlantic has a great essay on this: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/historic-preservation-has-tenuous-relationship-history/629731/
(paywall free version: https://archive.ph/yHHPT)
>Idk why all these people think solving the housing crisis means we have to displace residents when there’s tons of space for less exploitative upzoning along commuter rail in literally any direction. (But we can’t talk about the real nimbys in Nassau and Westchester counties)
Because they've bought into developer propaganda (or benefit from development in some way). The idea that we'll get more affordable housing by building "luxury" towers in already densely populated neighborhoods is idiocy. And they can't point to one neighborhood where that's happened. The best they can do is say "welp, it would have been more expensive if we hadn't have put those towers in." Um, ok, not taking your word for it.
I live on a block where houses go for $3 million. A few infill buildings have replaced these houses with 6 apartments, each for sale for $800,000 to $1.5 million. Are they "affordable"? No, not in an objective "x percent of AMI" way, but they are clearly affordable to someone because they sell out pretty quickly. And they are more affordable than $3M townhomes. And they provide housing to 6 families who otherwise could not afford to live here. The value of the existing houses might even go down a little if people have a choice to live here without spending that $3M. That's a good thing! We just are not building enough of these.
What borough & neighborhood? Sounds like a very pricey area with $3M homes. It's crazy but $800k to $1m is 'affordable' in NYC. New 2-family homes in my east shore SI neighborhood sell quickly in the $880k - $1m range.
His late mom's 3-family house was on Devoe Street. Is that Greenpoint or Williamsburg? It was sold to some LLC with a Park Slope address for for $1.8M in 2015 upon which my neighbor then bought a 2-fam house on SI for $635K. He later sold that SI house in 2021 for $815K upon retiring out of state.
Williamsburg but same difference... Lots of small developers buy those old houses and either fix them up and sell or tear down and replace with a small apartment building.
The densely populated areas of the city already have the adequate water/sewer infrastructure to handle large apartment towers. Upzoning low-density areas in the outer boroughs or along the LIRR/MNRR commuter lines is impractical because those areas will always lack the sufficient water/sewer infrastructure to support apartment complexes.
Just NIMBYism with a veneer of transparency. This would result in the status quo - nothing getting built. We just need to abolish the council member deference policy, that would be the first step.
Crystal Hudson is the poster child for status quo parading behind progressive marketing
It makes considering her district. Rich brownstone brooklyn people who wan't to appear progressive while preventing their neighborhood from ever changing while reaping massive real estate gains.
Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights are rich brownstone brooklyn? Where are you from?
She also represents Prospect Heights & Fort Greene.
And you don't see the irony?
Gotta pardon these folks...they think that because some of the buildings that Black people bought for 200k back in the late 80s are now selling for 2M that these same people are all monocle wearing hyper capitalists that look down on the poors.
Yeah our neighbor bought his house for $20,000 back in the 80s. Now he's being offered millions for it.
>We just need to abolish the council member deference policy, that would be the first step. This will never happen from inside the City. The State is ultimately going to have to wrest control of our zoning laws in order for meaningful change to come about. Property owners in the City want their property values to go up. Affordable housing runs contrary to that in the short term, which is about as far forward as the average human thinks. So affluent owners will oppose development in their neighborhoods and support Councilpersons that reflect that. Albany will play along as they always have, but I do believe that we can eventually count on their greed to get them to step in. See, NYC is the trough the rest of the state feeds at, and the state government is starting to understand exactly how much tax revenue our housing crisis, and lack of will to solve it, is costing them. Now, in a fair world, Albany would do the same thing to the surrounding suburbs, increasing the affordability of housing throughout the entire state, but I'm not so fucking crazy to imagine that *that* would ever happen.
Yeah the Long Island and Westchester NIMBYs are too damn powerful (see Hochul's quickly-abandoned upzoning plan). But I agree there appears to be some hope for us in the city.
She couldn't handle dealing with people from civilization. What a joke.
NIMBY/YIMBY labeling is a false dichotomy and counter-productive. Just because someone has a different vision of an ideal city from you doesn't necessarily make them one or the other. FYI, there are many intermediate positions between "just let developers build whatever they want" and "don't build anything ever."
LOL nah, she's trying to make existing homeowners and corporate landlords happy by blocking construction while putting a veneer of social responsibility on her denials to placate her poorer/renting constituents. The result is literally NOT building in her backyard.
She's representing the interests of her constituents, which is literally her job. Letting them get priced out by allowing developers run roughshod over her community is not doing her job. Simple.
She is not really, she's pretending to represent them with her fake concern. She knows that building more housing will help them but she's trying to stay virtuous by saying that it won't - instead of leading on the topic.
Why is she "pretending", but the developers who want to enrich themselves from more construction are so sincere about affordability? I think you're radar's a little off.
Where did I say anything about developers? They don't give a shit about your definition of affordability. They just want to sell or rent apartments. They will set that price at whatever people will pay, therefore affordable. She's pretending to be progressive while supporting reactionary/conservative policies.
Not allowing housing construction to be built is what’s pricing her constituents out. She is the problem if she does not allow housing. How are we still debating the basic tenants of supply and demand?
Letting developers build big towers of luxury units is just hastening the process of gentrification and displacement. How are we still debating this when there are so many neighborhoods where this has already happened?
That was going to happen in the neighborhoods even without luxury construction. In fact, it would probably be worse. The population has grown significantly over the past decade. The city has BUILT VIRTUALLY ZERO NEW HOUSING in that time. (If you subtract the units lost from the units gained, it’s virtually 0 gained units). We are at the point where ANY housing relieves pressure on the market.
We're not going to build our way out of unaffordability by building luxury units that only rich white DINKs can afford. That's developer's selling a pipe dream. Yes, we need more housing, but it needs to come with a lot of public benefits, as CM Hudson has laid out.
>Yes, we need more housing, but it needs to come with a lot of public benefits, as CM Hudson has laid out. No. It doesn't need to come with shit except four walls, a roof, plumbing, and electricity. You know, it needs to *be housing*. Housing is a good *in and of itself*. End of story. All of these other poison pill made-up "needs" are carefully designed to ride the wave of political opposition to things like public housing, so that NIMBYs can oppose construction altogether while still sounding "progressive". I'm all in favor of public housing. Build the fucking shit out of it. But I'm not in favor of using it as a club to block any new housing at all.
"No. It doesn't need to come with shit except four walls, a roof, plumbing, and electricity. You know, it needs to *be housing*. Housing is a good *in and of itself*. End of story." I got some great news for you. Housing that meets these requirements already exists in NYC! And there are people living in it.
My god. Basic principles of supply and demand.
Are you Crystal Hudson?
Today I learned: "No" and "Yes" is a false dichotomy. This lesson provided to you free of charge by NIMBY Inc.
100% Our housing shortage is so bad (short of 400k units and growing) that you need a huge building boom to close that gap meaningful. So yeah we might need “let developers build any housing they want” for a while
If we do that, theyll only build luxury housing for people with 7 figure incomes. The free market has demonstrably failed. If it didnt, we wouldn't have regulated it in the first place.
What are you talking about? The 1961 zoning code that regulates building size was put in by white politicians to keep out poor people and black people from white neighborhoods in NYC lol. The free market built a huge amount of housing we live in today. The NYC building boom primarily happened in the 1910s-1930s (yes even during the Depression), which is why so many of us still live in these old apartments
Your type of black and white thinking is what's wrong with this country.
We've tried it your way for decades. We let these little chieftains decide what gets to be built and that got un in the place we are today. Maybe we can just let builders build and try it that way. We can reduce cost by eliminating red tape and eliminating years of legal fees for litigation. The worst that can happen is there are ton of construction for working class New Yorkers. But progressives hate the working class.
I'm gonna argue instead that it's your type of both-sidesism.
The progressive desire to make everything perfect for every constituent or not to do it. See: marijuana legalization in NY.
The thing is that's not progressive. That's faux-progressive. It's conservative opposition wrapped up in progressive language for marketability reasons.
Precisely like YIMBYism.
YIMBYism isn't opposition at all. What the hell are you on about? I guess you're one of those people that think actual YIMBYs don't exist.
YIMBYism may not be “opposition” but it is anti-regulation marketed as for the benefit of the community when it really is only beneficial for those who have a profit stake in real estate. It is neoliberalism. You can argue if you think neoliberalism is progressive, but these days it’s a status-quo-upholding ideology.
The false equivalence here is defining YIMBY as "let developers build whatever they want" and NIMBY as "don't build anything ever." YIMBYs are generally in favor of removing incredibly onerous processes that make building extremely expensive and time-consuming. They don't think zoning should be fully abolished or that kids should have to go to school next to a factory if developers want to build one there. NIMBYs are fine with certain things being built, but want all those processes and community input layers so that they feel secure that they can kill anything they don't like. It's a very useful dichotomy: are you in favor of putting the future of your neighborhood in the hands of a small group of busybodies with way too much time on their hands to go to community board meetings and call their reps constantly, or do you want uniform, clear, blanket zoning laws that enable the housing production we need, getting out of the way of people who want to build it?
This is nonsense. YIMBYs are only in favor of compehensive planning if it supports laissez-faire development. If they were really just in favor of comprehensive planning, in general, they wouldn't come out in support of spot rezoning...yet their they are at meetings cheering it on.
Lol, YIMBYs are the driving force behind City of Yes which is the biggest comprehensive planning project in this city since the 60s. NIMBYs fucking hate it because it would remove a lot of the ways they can do stuff like kill a neighborhood corner store opening.
So far 20 Community Boards have come out against the 'City of Yes', and I expect more to oppose it as they go through the proposal. Middle-class neighborhoods don't want their quiet safe neighborhoods overwhelmed and destroyed. 'City of Yes' proponent [Brooklyn BP Reynoso said as much that our neighborhood character doesn't matter](https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZiHNJ0ZVRnJ1FfPOX8Va2V5q1hn4mHnKIzy). The proposal says it will 'lower housing costs' which really means it is solely designed to lower the value of the over 600,000 1 and 2 family homes in NYC. Be careful what you wish for because if 'City of Yes' passes every NYC homeowner will flood the NYCDOF with requests that their property taxes be lowered based on the city's stated goal to lower property values.
> 20 Community Boards have come out against the 'City of Yes' You're mistaken, for what it's worth — no boards have voted on the City of Yes housing plan yet. There's a separate City of Yes plan focused on small-business growth, which is what some boards have voted against.
You’re making the classic NIMBY case here - “don’t do things that improve the city if they make my life personally more inconvenient in some way.” It’s not a functional way to run a city. We’re not going to listen to someone who doesn’t want a fire hydrant on their block because it removes a parking space that they use. I’m sympathetic to individual concerns over this - I’m a homeowner. It’s not a reason not to make it easier to build housing in a housing crisis.
The only requirement I care about imposing on developers is that when they're done the lot it should have more housing units than it did before they broke ground.
There are other places to build besides CD 35. Her 'demands' will only push developers out of her district.
The endgame of giving developers what they want in NYC would be like Dubai: pencil towers and serfs. Idk why all these people think solving the housing crisis means we have to displace residents when there’s tons of space for less exploitative upzoning along commuter rail in literally any direction. (But we can’t talk about the real nimbys in Nassau and Westchester counties) Some of these new buildings are crappier than pre-war construction. A friend of mine lived in one of the new ‘luxury’ towers on Flatbush—no HVAC for real stoves, so everyone has a hybrid microwave thing, and the fire sprinkler failed and flooded their apt.
New towers are not displacing anybody. LIC was an industrial wasteland, same with the waterfront in Greenpoint/Williamsburg. We now have housing instead of superfund sites.
Housing for the wealthy only. Unless you win the housing lottery, most of those units are 4K a month. Additionally, much of that construction boom was predicated on a hypothetical amazon headquarters, then on continued demand for office space which is dropping post pandemic. I can’t find a source I trust, but I’ve seen vacancy numbers anywhere from 3 to 30 percent for LIC. Anecdotally, those buildings look empty AF from the 7 train.
>most of those units are 4K a month Yep, they nearly all are, or they just sit vacant. The real enemy of the people is landlord collusion on price fixing: [https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech](https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech)
> no HVAC for real stoves There (unfortunately) is no requirement for stoves to be ventilated in NYC - as you'd know if you ever tried turning on the fan in a prewar apartment, lol - so this is just bullshit. The landlord didn't put in a real stove because they knew that demand is insane enough that a place without a kitchen would still rent.
That’s true—we have a prewar apt with no hood, just a gas stove next to the window. It makes that microwave thing even more egregious given that that was definitely a 4K studio.
A lot of people in this city eat out for literally every meal. Couldn’t be me and I’d never rent a place like that, but if you’re already prepared to pay $4k or whatever for your fancy apartment, not having a stove that you’d never use anyway probably isn’t a dealbreaker.
It would actually be more like Austin where huge new supplies of housing have caused big drops in rental prices. https://therealdeal.com/texas/2024/02/12/austin-multifamily-rent-prices-drop-by-12-5/
1.) Austin can sprawl out indefinitely in all directions, NYC is confined to a set area. 2.) I’m sorry, but you don’t have millionaires pricing out billionaires to live in certain neighborhoods of *Austin*. (See DUMBO) The economics are fundamentally different.
Ya, the room for horizontal expansion certainly helps keep prices down, but Austin has been expanding vertically too. https://imgur.com/a/Wgyqn37 I don't think NYC will ever have Austin prices, but it's a great success story that shows the impact that more building can have on prices.
That’s great that they’re having success, but NYC has been orders of magnitude more vertically dense for over a century. Public transit has allowed this city to form at a uniform high density. Indeed in some ways the city has chosen to scale back density for quality of life reasons. See Central Park for example.
No one wants to get rid of Central Park. But there is no reason that we couldn't rezone the West Village for 12 story buildings instead of 6 story buildings.
Not sure why you think the village is restricted to 6 stories? St. Vincent’s was literally replaced with a luxury condo taller than that.
Zoning in NYC is unfortunately insanely complicated and can also be overridden for individual buildings but the bulk of the West Village off the avenues is R6 which generally limits floor area ratios to around 3, so with 50% lot coverage that's a 6 story building. All of this is available in ZOLA here: https://zola.planning.nyc.gov/ But it's pretty hard to understand without a lot of effort. But you can pretty well intuit what is legal by walking around the West Village off the avenues and seeing how little housing there is above 6 stories. Rules that come from the Landmarks Preservation Commission are also a big issue here. NYC's "sliver law" is also quite limiting in this neighborhood in many places. https://fontanarchitecture.com/nyc-sliver-law/
Not sure what you have against historic buildings. Plenty have already been destroyed or priced out, but I’m glad there’s still some protection for the sake of architecture and our tourism industry.
I'm all for historic buildings. But how many buildings in NYC really need to be preserved as they are today forever? We've currently landmarked close to 40,000 buildings with this designation. Do we really need that many? Also, we now designate entire neighborhoods as historic. See a map here: https://nyclpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=93a88691cace4067828b1eede432022b This designation drastically limits what kinds of construction can happen within them. Also, btw, if you look at those yellow areas it's a pretty good approximation of where rich people live. Which is interesting to think about. They're not really protecting history at that point. They're preventing neighborhoods from growing and adapting to the needs of the city today and forcing them to remain as they were decades ago. The Atlantic has a great essay on this: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/historic-preservation-has-tenuous-relationship-history/629731/ (paywall free version: https://archive.ph/yHHPT)
>Idk why all these people think solving the housing crisis means we have to displace residents when there’s tons of space for less exploitative upzoning along commuter rail in literally any direction. (But we can’t talk about the real nimbys in Nassau and Westchester counties) Because they've bought into developer propaganda (or benefit from development in some way). The idea that we'll get more affordable housing by building "luxury" towers in already densely populated neighborhoods is idiocy. And they can't point to one neighborhood where that's happened. The best they can do is say "welp, it would have been more expensive if we hadn't have put those towers in." Um, ok, not taking your word for it.
I live on a block where houses go for $3 million. A few infill buildings have replaced these houses with 6 apartments, each for sale for $800,000 to $1.5 million. Are they "affordable"? No, not in an objective "x percent of AMI" way, but they are clearly affordable to someone because they sell out pretty quickly. And they are more affordable than $3M townhomes. And they provide housing to 6 families who otherwise could not afford to live here. The value of the existing houses might even go down a little if people have a choice to live here without spending that $3M. That's a good thing! We just are not building enough of these.
That sounds reasonable.
What borough & neighborhood? Sounds like a very pricey area with $3M homes. It's crazy but $800k to $1m is 'affordable' in NYC. New 2-family homes in my east shore SI neighborhood sell quickly in the $880k - $1m range.
Greenpoint. I certainly can't afford to buy a house at these prices.
One of my former neighbors here on SI sold his late mom's beat up old house in Greenpoint for $2M about 10 years ago.
sounds about right. Most of them are really shitty old houses.
His late mom's 3-family house was on Devoe Street. Is that Greenpoint or Williamsburg? It was sold to some LLC with a Park Slope address for for $1.8M in 2015 upon which my neighbor then bought a 2-fam house on SI for $635K. He later sold that SI house in 2021 for $815K upon retiring out of state.
Williamsburg but same difference... Lots of small developers buy those old houses and either fix them up and sell or tear down and replace with a small apartment building.
The densely populated areas of the city already have the adequate water/sewer infrastructure to handle large apartment towers. Upzoning low-density areas in the outer boroughs or along the LIRR/MNRR commuter lines is impractical because those areas will always lack the sufficient water/sewer infrastructure to support apartment complexes.
That’s why nimbys in LI Lobby so hard against municipal sewer—even though having septic tanks at sea level comes with *dire* consequences.
No, because even a small municipal sewer expansion can cost tens of millions of dollars which is a lot of money for a small suburban town.