Writes Vishaan Chakrabarti, "founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a New York City architecture firm, and the former director of planning for Manhattan," in "How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers" (NYT).
Click through to see visualizations of architecture projects that add housing without "substantially changing" the various locations. Some are improvements. At least one is an atrocity. I like a parking lot replaced by a mid-sized building, but loathe the low-rise apartment building stuck in the one empty lot in a neighborhood of single-family houses.
Chakrabarti's firm has identified over half a million locations for new apartments in New York City.
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71 comments:
Rent control means housing shortage.
The Greatest City in the World!
such measures would all be drops in the bucket
Drop in the buckets. Not only because it's the plural of a cliche, but if you don't add buckets, pretty soon you fill the bucket.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single drop.
A couple of things. The 'new urbanism' movement continues to get press and its purveyors an audience, but its reception is middling. It can be done well, but there has to be a willing audience, in the right location, at the right time. You cannot just foist it on an area and say- "this is the future". And in an established city with mega-history such as New York, its not a quick fix. It is a very long term project that would mostly take place after we're all gone.
New York is losing population. That is the reality. Or should I say, New York is losing legal citizen and legal immigrant population. It's illegal population is booming! So...is this just a continuation of the Roosevelt Hotel project in which you take perfectly good hotels, offices, and apartments and turn them over to the invading hordes? That'll work out well.
The office spaces are open now, because (a) people were chased out during covid, (b) the corporate tenants still in business are having a hard time getting everyone to come back to the office, (c) and they've realized they don't need everyone back into the office and they're paying way too much for way too much space. (d) So they're exiting the office spaces, leaving the buildings...in financial difficulty.
What will fix New York is a more business friendly environment (New York State and City are among the higest taxed areas in this country). And a serious boost in their approach to crime control and safety. All the architecture in the world cannot improve life if the area is not economically viable and the investments made are not protected.
…dwellings for well over a million people — homes most New Yorkers could afford…
But not a million destitute Venezuelans who dragged nothing but their tired bodies through the Darien Gap.
Who pays?
Sounds like the fascism of a mussolini or the national socialism of a Hitler
John Henry
Isn't the demand curve the most reliable axium in the dismal science? That and the largest regressive income disparity gaps occur as a result progressive political policies.
Hopefully another Trump enema will fix that 🤣
Show me one place on Earth where rent control has worked.
And who does the author propose absorb the cost to erect these buildings and create this new housing? Not to mention own and maintain?
Oh wait, I see he is "the former director of planning for Manhattan". That answers my question.
Same old, just with larger ambition. At least he disses rent control.
Rent control is a 19th century idea thoroughly debunked in the 20th century. If you force landlords to subsidize the lifestyle of ‘qualified’ applicants you remove the incentive to create more housing and less supply means higher rents…
You’re making it worse…
1 million? You’ll need a bit more for all those immigrants Biden has invited and who want to live in your sanctuary.
There are good reasons to ban, or at least discourage, the pied-a-terre. And it’s understandable that people think you can convert offices into apartments given how many warehouses have been so converted. Whatever the mix, it’s hard to believe they couldn’t add a million more units without changing the character of the city given the current state of the city as well as its history.
Rent control
Like Nixon's price controls
FDR's wag controls
Government control leads to shortages
Every
Single
Time.
The answer to government shortages is:
More government
Every
Single
Time
It's tedious
What happens when you build more affordable housing with deficit funding and then attract more poor people? Why can’t the geniuses at the NYT understand this?
Click through to see visualizations of architecture projects that add housing without "substantially changing" the various locations. Some are improvements. At least one is an atrocity. I like a parking lot replaced by a mid-sized building, but loathe the low-rise apartment building stuck in the one empty lot in a neighborhood of single-family houses.
Ann has it right. You know, Tccvhe Boston Redevelopment Authority was the one government agency in my orbit that until recently got things very right. If housing isn't affordable you need more housing so you find ways to make it within the confines of a stressed urban opportunity, but you can't wreck the character of existing neighborhoods to achieve it. Now these agencies view homeless shelters, 'affordable' density housing and rent control that destroys the fabric of neighborhoods as a feature, but it makes your tax base move to Florida...
so, "most economists" DON'T advise price controls as a way of increasing demand?
stupid economists! IF ONLY, if only THEY were as smart as the average New Yorker; who Realizes that The Way to make More of something, is to restrict the cost it can be sold for.
It's simple Supply and Demand.
someone's simple.. that is for sure
Converting commercial space to residential is quite economically unfeasible, despite the claims of 'solutions'. Conversion doesn't compete economically with sky scraper tear downs...
converting all vacant office towers into residential buildings, despite the expense and complexity.
i wonder if the New Yorkers that advocate this, have ANY idea of the expense and complexity involved?
Hint: Think about plumbing, and walls, and fire control
It's funny how the Progessive 'Vision for the Future' always seems to begin with ideas about the better use of other people's property.
"architecture projects that add housing without "substantially changing" the various locations."
That just depends on who will live in those projects.
"I like a parking lot replaced by a mid-sized building, but loathe the low-rise apartment building stuck in the one empty lot in a neighborhood of single-family houses."
There's that "anti-development" NIMBY sentiment the author speaks of. Listen to the experts. They know better. Be grateful he doesn't propose razing all the bourgeois single-family homes in one swoop.
Been tried many times and places. Never, ever, gotten the intended results.
But a handful of people get wealthy, so there's that.
Or you can just raise taxes and cut services until a million people leave the city, then the city won’t need that housing at all. It’s been working so far!
It’s behind a paywall so I can’t read the article to see what Althouse is complaining about. But you’d think an architect who claims to be creative could design a small apartment building — or at least a duplex — that looks enough like a single family home to fit into a neighborhood of single family homes.
Althouse:
... but loathe the low-rise apartment building stuck in the one empty lot in a neighborhood of single-family houses.
They did that in K.C. Turned into a slum building in a couple of years and took the neighborhood with it.
Go for it! Institute rent control and keep bringing millions of unvetted migrants over the border. Ban opposition politicians so there can be no checks on your best instincts! Keep printing money to fund foreign wars! This time it won't work out badly.
tim maguire,
"There are good reasons to ban, or at least discourage, the pied-a-terre. "
Go ahead and name a few.
Wondering how colonies of ants and termites handle growing populations I queried Bing Chat with GPT-4 and learned, "Ants prefer to build multiple mounds for large colonies" and "termite mounds can often be up to six feet in height."
... and ...
"The decision to start a new mound or hill is influenced by factors such as availability of food resources, colony size, environmental conditions, and presence of predators. It’s not solely dependent on the size of the current mound or hill. However, as the colony grows, it’s common for a portion of the colony to branch off and establish a new mound or hill. This is a natural part of the life cycle of these social insects."
Maybe it's time for New York City's population to "branch off and establish a new mound or hill." How about in Oswego County.
Tim said: "There are good reasons to ban, or at least discourage, the pied-a-terre."
I had to look up that term. It seems to refer to a small apartment in a city that someone outside the city would own, not as their main residence but just to have a place in town.
How would you ban them? Require that someone continuously reside there some arbitrary number of days per year? Does anybody really think that would be enforceable? It would just make scofflaws out of presumably tens of thousands of people. That, or force them to jump through hoops to try to comply with the law so as not to have to sell.
Isn't this just another form of rationing? It would be like telling people they could only own one car, or could only buy a dozen eggs per week. The combination of enforcement needed and economic inefficiencies produced should make people think more than twice about this sort of market interference.
Rent control means housing shortage.
Larry Summers, no right-winger, once said, paraphrasing, "Short of war, there's no surer way to destroy a city's housing stock than to impose rent controls."
I'd like to meet those "economists" who disagree. AOC, maybe?
"Show me one place on Earth where rent control has worked."
The article isn't promoting rent control. Look at the quote in the post title.
"There are good reasons to ban, or at least discourage, the pied-a-terre."
I think a lot of the expensive places in NYC are just not lived in at all. They are investments, left empty.
The real answer = less government all around. Of course our controllers will never, ever allow that,
https://jbs.org/video/featured/overview-of-america/?mc_cid=aab99f82ce
500K new housing units for NYC? Cool...you build 'em, Joe Biden and Gov Abbott will fill 'em!...quickly.
The writer loves certain lovely buildings in NY some of which housed relations. On the other hand he grudgingly or not so grudgingly thinks they ought to be replaced by taller new buildings to house more people. He wants them to be beautiful edifices for the middle class which they cannot given the economics building anywhere much less NY. The only beautiful residential building in NY of recent vintage s Robert Stern’s limestone 15 Central Park West. the rest of the new crop of buildings for the super rich are simply tall. Ugly. But very tall. No more Beresfords, Dakotas, San Ramos. Alas.
Or, you could build one wall in Texas.
Althouse wrote. “think a lot of the expensive places in NYC are just not lived in at all. They are investments, left empty.”
Correct as to the new ultra high rises in midtown. Historic buildings on both sides of the park, Fifth Ave, Park, are owner occupied. Co-ops not down with unoccupied investment assets.
Rent control by virtue of monopoly or welfare has the same effect.
Greetings from Los Angeles (adjacent), where the fiction that homelessness is a shortage of housing and not primarily a drug-addiction/mental-health crisis prevails, and consequently homelessness worsens.
It sounds to me like they are looking for another Donald Trump to develop the needed buildings but can't actually admit what expertise is required.
Of course the obvious solution to getting more housing constructed is to drastically reduce the barriers and needless costs that hinder new construction. That doesn't mean scrapping zoning. Stop wasting taxpayer money to shoehorn "affordable" housing into expensive neighborhoods and reduce taxes, break the control of the unions, and let the private sector do what it does best. And yes, get rid of rent controls that result in the deterioration of the existing housing stock.
"I think a lot of the expensive places in NYC are just not lived in at all. They are investments, left empty."
That, of course, is true. Billionaire's Row is a good example. But I wonder if "investment" is the right word. Buyers acquire these places to "park" money, counting on appreciation to make it all worth while. But in the meantime the monthly costs just to maintain this "investment" are staggering. The amount of the monthly condo/cooperative fee combined with the real estate tax is simply incomprehensible to us lesser mortals. These "investments" and not simply buy-and-hold strategies.
They did that in K.C. Turned into a slum building in a couple of years and took the neighborhood with it.
Dad and stepmom built a beautiful house on a hillside overlooking the river, and the minute the city approved a new multifamily development a couple blocks away, they sold and got the hell out of Portland. Everyone knew what would come next.
“The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents. We realized it was stupid and that we must change policy,” he said.
—From a news report in Journal of Commerce, quoted in Dan Seligman, “Keeping Up,” Fortune, February 27, 1989.
Look what rent control did in the Bronx
John Henry
Paging Snake Plissken.......Snake Plissken, please pick up the white courtesy telephone.
Money Manger said...
who dragged nothing but their tired bodies through the Darien Gap.
Plus overloaded trucks and trailers full of luggage.
I have no idea how they get them through the Darien Gap, or over the canal, or the Panama, Nicaragua Guatemala Mexico borders.
It's almost like they have help
John Henry
SF will start taxing housing units that are vacant over six months in a year. I think they have to be in multi-unit buildings, not AirBnB. There may be a few other restrictions. Can you imagine being taxed for not using your property?
The pied-a-terre phenomenon is in part due to NYC's excessive tax rates on higher-income people, as well as the NY state estate taxes. Many choose to make their residence elsewhere, and have to reside less than 6 months per year in NYC. The solution is not to ban the pied-a-terre, but to stop penalizing people for living there.
How would you ban them? Require that someone continuously reside there some arbitrary number of days per year
No, just make it a requirement that is the residence for tax purposes. Most high wealth indivuals would not pay the extra city and state income tax to have a vacation place in Manhatten. And if they did, it would be extra revenue for NYC.
NYC doesn't need to build housing for a million new people. It needs to get rid of about a million New Yorkers already on the tax-payer gravy train.
Property taxes in the Big Apple are High, right? Does publicly funded housing pay property tax? Do non-profits pay property tax? Schools? Hospitals? Museums? Government offices? NGOs? The UN? Churches? Anyone care to guess how much of Manhattan is owned by the Catholic Church?
Freeloaders, grifters and the aggrieved of every imaginable kind now occupy and control urban America. Urban America needs a good ass-kicking.
And nothing will get done...
Too many stakeholders who have their mutually conflicting objectives to get anything done.
"...i wonder if the New Yorkers that advocate this, have ANY idea of the expense and complexity involved?"
Most of the REALLY GOOD ideas (!!!) come from people with no experience in the subject matter... but are in positions of power.
Move the proles to the cities. Easier to control there. Recalcitrants will be reassigned to the work farms.
Move the proles to the cities. Easier to control there. Recalcitrants will be reassigned to the work farms.
I vote for corrugated shipping containers cut up and rusting in the middle of Central Park.
It's all the morons in NY deserve for voting for an idiot mayor.
I frequently read that it is not economically feasible to convert commercial office space into residential property. If that is so, how have they overcome that here in Richmond? Most of the old tobacco warehouses in the city have been converted to upscale apartments. They're also doing it to a number of office buildings.
What's the impediment in NYC? Higher construction and labor costs? Perhaps it's just an excuse to put the blame on evil property developers and capitalism.
'I think a lot of the expensive places in NYC are just not lived in at all. They are investments, left empty.'
Yes, and also a way to 'park' money.
If you are a Russian oligarch or a big-shot Chinese industrialist, you want a place to park money away from the hands of your government.
You might actually make money, but even if you don't, you won't lose it all.
Kind of like expensive art, but I think that is mostly money-laundering...
Or, you could build one wall in Texas
That would place an excesive burden on the foreign grift, domestic labor arbitrage, friends with "benefits", redistributive change profits, and democratic gerrymandering.
(seems off topic, but Really isn't..)
Buyers acquire these places to "park" money..
What's going to happen to diamonds as standard crime currency if/when synthetic diamonds actually come though?
I'm not so much thinking about traceability (though there IS that), as prices plummeting.
if that does happen, WHERE crime people keep their riches? Manhattan buildings seem Pretty Public.
'Most of the old tobacco warehouses in the city have been converted to upscale apartments. They're also doing it to a number of office buildings.'
Warehouses are mostly empty structures that can be fitted with walls, plumbing, electrical, etc.
Now try doing this in a 75-story building with existing walls, existing plumbing, and existing electrical that must all be taken out and replaced.
Gilbar, artificial diamonds already have low cost to manufacture. Diamonds are a mug's game now, one pays the market price solely because of buyer desire, not availability of supply.
Housing price depends on location, in large part, because of building code requirements and zoning requirements and buyer willingness to pay a premium for premium locations. A builder certainly can build a small inexpensive house, if allowed by a city, in a downtown filled with luxury condo towers, but it makes no business sense to do so. Unless the sales price is then controlled by government fiat, the house's price will climb immediately to meet demand for that location (and a cheap house in a prime downtown location likely will be torn down and replaced with a condo highrise).
Inexpensive housing can be built readily and inexpensively, structures that are soundly built of good materials, in non-premium locations for people who want inexpensive housing. That used to be understood.
Vancouver BC is a study in unoccupied investment residential housing. Chinese flight money. Ride into town of an evening from the airport and you will see dark hi rise residential buildings. Vancouver has a new tax on unoccupied housing.
There are some locations -- Manhattan and pre-coronavirus San Francisco come to mind -- where adding a million more units might drop prices somewhat, but the price drop would probably just attract more wealthy people from outside who want a pied-a-terre. I don't think supply and demand in these sorts of locales would intersect at an "affordable" price for the natives until new construction renders the place so congested that it loses its appeal. Or crime comes back up. Or the sewage system explodes or something.
For my part, if prices in Manhattan dropped by 25%, I might start looking for a pied-a-terre again, or go half and half with a friend or relative. The value proposition isn't there right now, but with a significant price drop it could be. People like me, and far richer people from China or Latin America, would just squeeze the natives out again. And I think the natives are well aware of this dynamic, which is why they prefer solutions like rent control that can be controlled to their advantage through the political process.
The elephant in the room here is that the demand for housing in New York City is skewed. New York City is the place where many young adults go in order to make it in a variety of industries - theater, finance, fashion, etc. - because there is really no other ready options to pursue those careers. So, you end up with a lot of people that require housing, most of which have no money and a large percentage of which will fail in their desired careers. They warp the housing market in such a way that would not be an issue for, say, Kansas City. Under normal circumstances, these people would either move to a different city or out in the suburbs, places that they could potentially afford, but there is no other city and the suburbs are too far away for someone who cannot afford a car, not to mention the massive tolls.
If you added room for a million more New Yorkers, would that actually address this unique situation?
There's also the matter that New York City is mostly on islands, which makes everything more expensive since there are a very limited number of ways to get goods into the city. If you can fit in a million new residents, how are you going to feed them without making hamburgers $40?
"The Greatest City in the World!"
Yes! It is! (Former resident for 40 years.) I'll always miss it.
Rent control works. The only people who dislike it are:
1) Landlords
2) Greedheads
3) Economists
If you're an average person stop listening to "Smart people" who tell you "rent control doesn't work". They're the same people who tell you "Free trade always bring propserity" and "We should get rid of the miniumum wage" and "Immigration is always good".
Don't be a sucker. Rent control only does one bad thing: It doesn't encourage massive building of new apartments. But if demand continues to exceed supply than building more wont make the apartements cheaper. It will just mean more people.
And if you can't build more buildings because of geography or the quality of life, then having rent control wont' hurt supply. It will just help the tenants.
As for the article: Why should NYC have anymore people? Its a great big country. And there's nothing special about Queens or the Bronx. We should stop immigration. And then we wouldn't need to build more buildings.
Rent control works. The only people who dislike it are:
1) Landlords
2) Greedheads
3) Economists
If you're an average person stop listening to "Smart people" who tell you "rent control doesn't work". They're the same people who tell you "Free trade always bring propserity" and "We should get rid of the miniumum wage" and "Immigration is always good".
Don't be a sucker. Rent control only does one bad thing: It doesn't encourage massive building of new apartments. But if demand continues to exceed supply than building more wont make the apartements cheaper. It will just mean more people.
And if you can't build more buildings because of geography or the quality of life, then having rent control wont' hurt supply. It will just help the tenants.
As for the article: Why should NYC have anymore people? Its a great big country. And there's nothing special about Queens or the Bronx. We should stop immigration. And then we wouldn't need to build more buildings.
NYC the greatest city in the world.
LOL. You gotta be kidding me. I've been to lots of great cities. And I'd choose Paris, Rome, Barcelona, and Vienna over NYC, any day of the week. And I've met very Chinese Americans who would rather live in NYC over Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai.
'Rent control works. The only people who dislike it are:'
...people who aren't fucking communists.
'NYC the greatest city in the world.'
Said someone who has never travelled.
Maybe true 60 or 70 years ago, but not so much lately...
"Converting commercial space to residential is quite economically unfeasible, despite the claims of 'solutions'. Conversion doesn't compete economically with sky scraper tear downs..."
And people who can afford expensive condos want a place to park and home charge their Teslas. The conversion would require floors of parking. Look around your 80 story office building. When it gets divided up, who gets the outdoor patio, who gets the windows. Offices are not designed to have connected space next to windows, they are open. Condos are designed to put usable space on the outside wall. The space above the ceiling is the ductwork for hvac, it does not work for condos, your neighbors noise will be piped into your bedroom.
NYC's population has pretty consistently hovered around 8 million since the 1950s, plus or minus a couple of hundred thousand, depending on the decade.
The only exception was a big drop in the 70s, when NYC lost around 800k people to reach 7 million, but then the population bounced back to 8 million by 2000.
Supposedly, it's now around 8.5 million, and the NYC gov't projects it will have 9 million by 2040, though that sounds a little self-serving to me.
For as long as I've been paying attention (35-40 years?), NYC supposedly has been suffering from housing crises of one form or another, yet its population is not dramatically different than it was seventy years ago. I also don't think you'll find many people old enough to know who will say that it is a more attractive place to live today than it was ten years ago, never mind that it is better than it was in the Giuliani/Bloomberg years.
In other words, there may be a housing crisis, but solving it is not a matter of simply building some new units. It just doesn't add up. I am sure, however, that Mr. Chakrabarti and his colleagues at City Hall and connected developers will benefit nicely from his proposals.
Temujin wrote, "The 'new urbanism' movement continues to get press and its purveyors an audience, but its reception is middling."
Perhaps that is because the "press" and its customers live and work in old urbanises?
These sorts of grand plans are almost never accompanied by hard numbers of dollars required and where they will come from. Or the jobs. Or the people.
The outlook going forward is that economic growth will continue at a moderate pace, below the strong growth trajectory in the years before the pandemic. Fiscally, tax revenues are projected to exceed currently budgeted projections, but will not be sufficient to close the budget gaps the City is facing, given increasing costs for City personnel, chronic underbudgeting, shelter for asylum seekers without sufficient Federal support, and the expiration of Federal pandemic stimulus.
Annual State of the City’s Economy and Finances
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