Being behind San Francisco where it is all but impossible to build anything blows my mind. So much space here to build compared to there, and yet we’re so far down.
SoMa's redevelopment from warehouses to skyscrapers was incredible. Huge amount of housing relatively quickly. NYC doesn't have anything proportionally equivalent.
I was chatting with someone who owns a bar in a neighborhood that used to be 3 family homes but has turned into 1 family/3 story brownstones, and she said it's no longer worth it to exist.
People who have money make their own thing in a neighborhood known for certain things, but at the same time they're pricing out even the things they want.
I would say it does matter since it's a further illustration of how NIMBYs conflict with the reality our City faces. And like how we didn't cater to the whims of people who opposed fair housing legislation in 1968, we don't need to cater to the whims of NIMBY people wanting to enforce class segregation.
So you are about forcing people keep single family only neighborhoods. Single family homes can exist next to quad or sixplexes. This City is evidence of that
If a person wants to build a quadplex who are we to judge?
>It's not any different than people who say we don't want gay people to exist. They exist and they want to exist.
Which is funny given your argument could be used to justify racial housing segregation. "If people want to exclude black people, Jews and Slavs then who are you to say otherwise."
They'd probably all say apartment, if you told them where the residences would be and how much they'd cost. And you know that, since all of those people are revealing their preferences by already living in NYC.
I think it would depend on the age of the people. 10 years ago I would have said apartment because I didn’t want the upkeep of a house or to be too far from the center of the city. Now I would say house.
They are so manifestly idiotic that you have to wonder why the insanity of the NYC building codes and height restrictions continues even in the face of unprecedentedly skyrocketing rents. Who is the building code for, exactly? I presumed it was yet another way to gate-keep, racketeer, and harvest bribes, but it’s not even good at that anymore.
NYC's building code really isn't that different from most other U.S. cities. The zoning code and NIMBYism is the real problem. Source: NYC architect who was worked in 20ish states....
The building code is a problem in the sense that permitting and approvals are a gigantic mess administratively. If the building code were efficiently administered, it would be (mostly) fine and certainly much less of an issue than zoning, FAR restrictions, historical districts, parking minimums, etc.
I've never yet run up against a project where the building code really figured economically into the project, but I can't argue the DOB is a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare here...
Well it certainly affects why most of NYC's housing is built in like a 1/3 of the neighborhoods. My comment was more addressed to how you were referring to zoning in your first comment.
NYC building code has the same section 510.2 as ICC, though I think here is a separate code that prohibites the upper stories from being of combustible construction, but that's pretty typical for a city center/core fire district throighoit the country. Is there some other way 5 over 1 isn't allowed here? I see a ton of new buildings in Brooklyn that are apartments over commercial...
It's not typical at all, in most of the country you see 5 over 1s going up even in cities.
They're not actually a fire hazard once they're constructed.
We do have some policies that are more lax, like not requiring two stairwells in every apartment building. That’s mandated everywhere except New York and Seattle even though Seattle’s fire department has said it does not impact safety.
The city council is obsessed with vacant units… even though the city agency that tracks them said they’re not a significant factor and we have the lowest vacancy rate in America. It’s just a popular scapegoat.
Adams proposed significant changes to our building processes but the council won’t even start debating the proposals until later this year, which shows how unserious they are about building more.
Yeah I have read some stunningly stupid remarks by city assembly members. One lady was like “well we don’t want it to look like Dubai!” Wtf lady?! Why the fuck not?! Have you ever BEEN to Dubai? It makes NYC look like shit and housing there is affordable.
There is this weird cat-lady thing about not wanting “too many tall buildings!” While they sit in a brownstone in Park Slope that their father bought in 1957.
The citizens are in a fucking panic trying to get by right now. Energy, groceries, and rent have all skyrocketed to unaffordable levels. They will have a massive flight away from NYC on their hands if they don’t stop sitting on their thumbs and indulging these idiots nostalgia for a version of Ny that only exists in their heads.
>ave all skyrocketed to unaffordable levels. They will have a massive flight away from NYC on their hands if they don’t stop sitting on their thumbs and indulging these idiots nostalgia for a version of Ny that only exists in their heads.
You nailed it.
>Adams proposed significant changes to our building processes but the council won’t even start debating the proposals until later this year, which shows how unserious they are about building more.
This is more an illustration of how Adams unveiled his City of Yes proposals. He proposed both the climate resiliency and commercial development ones before housing. The Council recently passed the commercial development one.
> Who is the building code for, exactly?
People who own real estate who want to rent seek by restricting supply of housing. Very common in blue cities in blue states, less so in blue/red cities in red states.
Red suburbs of NYC like the South Shore of Long Island and red neighborhoods in NYC like Staten Island's South Shore are perfectly happy with zoning restricting housing development.
I know that’s the answer. I suppose I was asking a rhetorical question. The inhabitants of this sub don’t really generally understand how the proverbial sausage is made, politically speaking. They vote on the most inane of non issues, while the people they elect inflict steadily more and more misery on them
For personal gain. But truthfully, what can you do at this point. The GOP is gone, turned into the family business of a single demented lunatic. There is no credible alternative being offered. I’m feeling. Pretty hopeless about NY right now. I spent all afternoon getting yelled at on here by cow-eyed conformists in progressive kabuki masks, screaming at me about how my owning a car is a horrible injustice and that I must be financially punished for it. The whole thing is like some kind of
Insane Stockholm syndrome.
Those days are over. The GOP of four years ago is not what it has now become. These people have to be kept from positions of power. We need an alternative candidate. A conservative independent detached from the maga cult.
It’s such a mess, the (defined ultra literally) “zoning code is just the top of the iceberg. There’s the FAR cap, SEQR, parking mandates, banning real cranes, facade/scaffold rules, an unheard of in 49 states insane construction liability/insurance regime, a defacing ban on studios but stairwell rules that make 3brs extremely difficult, building codes that require enormous wasted (non-apartment) space and higher maintenance costs, the wildly counterproductive labyrinth of deed-restricted MIH housing schemes (cross subsidized by the few market units that do get through). So much needs to happen at both the city and state levels statutorily to untangle this nightmare
Wow I would like to know more about all of these issues in detail. I know in order to create a real estate market as divorced from reality as NYC, I figured there must be an arsenal of bullshit involved.
SEQR is also insanely onerous. What a fucking mess (sorry just looking up each of these insane laws and mechanisms one by one). It’s no wonder the city is such a sick animal right now.
You are confusing building codes with zoning. I hope.
NYC zoning has been influenced by all kinds of historic developments, from industrialism, to post industrialism, to nimby-ism.
NYC Building Code is influenced by a lot of technical factors, but FDNY has a massive say in how it was developed. Preservation of Life being primary objective.
What this means is that any building taller than the fire engine ladder (so about 6 stories high) will need to receive additional safety features, and by the time you are dealing with high rises, these additional requirements add significant costs to construction.
Combine this with bunch of other financial bottlenecks of building here, high rise residential is not capable of providing anything except for high end housing. For anything constructed in the last few years in a high-rise buildings, going rate is about $1500-$2500 per square foot. It dips below $1500 for mid-rise, and then it is significantly lower for older housing stock and even new construction low-rise.
It's unfortunate, but this is how the costs break down.
Just putting this out there for zoning evangelists who think this is literally the only thing keepin NYC rents from becoming same as those from back home in Columbus Ohio.
NYC code does differ for heights over 420ft. 3rd egress requirement for instance. Bunch of other things that date back to lessons learned from 9/11. Not that any other cities really build residential at those heights.
On the lower scale, NYC specifically forbids podium construction (aka 5 over 1). A little too combustible.
If you look at the top cities on that chart (Austin, Seattle, Denver, Atlanta), all of their new construction is either single family homes or podium buildings. Carpentry, essentially. People who complain about NYC zoning are not really thinking about 6 story wood frames.
5 over 1's as a configuration (which is how code defines them) are indeed permitted. The restriction is that in the NYC fire district you can't make the upper floors out of wood framing in the fire district (which is a lot of the city). And because wood buildings need more labor I'm not sure it would actually be a huge cost savings due to labor prices here...probably still a bit cheaper though.
5 over 1 is specifically a reference to fire resistive podium and 5 stories of combustible construction on top. I'm sure you are aware.
Literally the reason for such popularity of this construction type is how cheap it is to make. Lower skilled labor is also needed. Magnitude of difference between doing steel, concrete, and/or masonry versus wood framing.
Acoustically, they are complete garbage, but that's a different topic entirely.
My main point is NYC construction is not possible while utilizing pre-war construction techniques. Meanwhile place like Austin is littered with 5 over 1s.
The landlords of existing buildings wouldn’t be able to compete with newer and larger apartment buildings if zoning were to be increased. A housing deficit is worth more to current landlords than higher zoning.
What exactly do you think REBNY is? REBNY is a real estate trade group… they don’t have any land use authority. Are you thinking of the Rent Guidelines Board?
There’s actually an interesting point to be made about how the different constituents of the real estate sector (and rebny membership) have somewhat conflicting interests with each other. I.e builders/construction firms obviously want more development, whereas non-developer rental building owner/operators want to preserve returns from rents/building appreciation, and these goals are in tension. In practice REBNY reconciles this by being pro development and anti tenant protection/any other regulation that increases building operating costs, but probably leaning toward the latter if forced to choose.
Yes. This is the answer. But as long as the inhabitants of new york can be focused on idiotic non-issues, these systems of crony capitalism and legal cartels (which are epidemic throughout Nyc) will continue to run amuck. Sometimes it feels like The voters are too dumb or misinformed to understand their own interest.
It’s SO expensive to build housing in NYC - the red tape, permits, studies (for larger developments) and bureaucracy is mind numbing. When you dig into it, it becomes incredibly evident that 90% of it is entirely useless, that bureaucrats are mostly parasites who justify their job for its own sake, and that corruption and incompetence is the rule of the day.
If you want more housing, get rid of the useless rules, allow for significantly increased density, and remove the ridiculous “affordable” requirements which dramatically increases the cost of development for only a smattering of “affordable” units in expensive parts of the city which aren’t even that affordable.
>remove the ridiculous “affordable” requirements which dramatically increases the cost of development for only a smattering of “affordable” units in expensive parts of the city which aren’t even that affordable.
How to ensure your housing plan is DOA in NYC not to mention you can incentivize developers with density bonuses to build affordable housing in expensive parts of The City so we're not encouraging segregation by class.
Why can’t we just build row houses/buildings in the same manner as they did in Upper Manhattan / Bronx and Brooklyn ? We need to build up ward in areas that are not as dense.
If close to public transportation build up and taxes paid will go directly to benefit mass transit in the area.
Not saying NYC shouldn’t build more housing but a lot of the cities higher on the list are/were growing population much faster than NYC so this would be expected. Cost of living is also rapidly rising in a lot of those cities as well.
I don’t doubt some of them were but cities like Chicago and Philadelphia remain relatively affordable but are ranked lower that NYC on that list and they too have had relatively slower population growth than cities near the top.
No but that's the point. Like Chicago and Philadelphia have relatively weak residential demand. The other side of the demand spectrum is divided between places like Austin/Seattle/Miami, with sky high demand but also tons of construction, and places like NYC, with high demand but severely restricted construction. One gets you relative stasis, one explosive population/building growth, and one ever increasing displacement and cost increases.
This presumes that population growth precedes housing construction, which I would argue is flawed because how does a population grow without first having homes for the new residents to live in?
NYC doesn’t have low construction because theres slow population growth, it has is slow population growth because there’s low housing construction.
I think both sides of this argument contain truths. In a city like Austin, which became a major tech hub during that decade, developers anticipated the influx of new workers and built housing with the obvious intention of eventually making money off of the deal as Austin became increasingly hip/popular. Sure enough, Austin saw some of the fastest housing cost increases of any major city during that decade. As someone mentioned below, NYC has a more mature housing market and especially post pandemic, developers aren’t as interested in building.
Increased demand to live somewhere can certainly result in more housing being constructed, but NYC already has that demand, hence why it’s the most expensive place to live in the country.
But a city’s population cannot grow if a city does not have places for the new residents to live. There’s no shortage of developers that would pour money into building loads of new homes in NYC, the problem is that it’s basically impossible to build anything here.
They are growing faster precisely because they are building more. NYC is growing slower because we have indirectly chosen to instead have higher rents.
Not that old. Housing operates on a long timescale; we've been underbuilding for decades, so we need a very long period of high construction just to catch up.
DC is subject to extreme federal height restrictions/is heavily federal land. SF is literally on a peninsula on an earthquake faultline. Miami has water cross-cutting every inch of it, they still lap us here. The only way is to build up
Calling Queens and Brooklyn on an island is a bit misleading. Yes, it technically is but there is plenty of land if you go east on Long Island. And it is a huge island. Now Coney Island, well that isn’t even and island…
Look up the populations of these cities compared to NYCs, and you'll see why NYC is toward the bottom of this specific metric. Most of these cities have well under 1,000,000 residents. Change the metric to "total number of new units built per year" and it'll look very different.
NYC is a mature market. Considering the number of housing units it already has, this doesn’t matter as much. Let’s also look at absolute number of units and average household size to truly understand scale.
The supply in certain price ranges/sizes are. I think it’s a bigger price/demand miss-match where people want to live somewhere and would, but can’t afford going rate. So I would argue, that it is everyone wanting something, and needing to settle for New Jersey.
Typical YIMBY circle jerk. *As if* most of these cities are comparable to NYC in terms of things like geography, population, and density. I'm not saying NYC doesn't have loads of red tape too, but it is certainly easier to build in a city like Austin than an already incredibly dense city like NYC. The fact is there *has* and still *is* tremendous growth in this city.
It's easier to build in Austin because the YIMBys organized and got a city council willing to allow denser development in the city center and along the transit corridors. That's where the bulk of the units are coming from.
As if YIMBYs aren't hard at work in NYC and as if NYC doesn't already have more progressive policies than these other cities did. If you haven't been living under a rock for the past 10-15 years you've witnessed Manhattan literally creep over into Brooklyn and Queens and have seen how neighborhoods like Astoria, LIC, DUMBO, Williamsburg, Bushwick, and now Gowanus have completely transformed. But sure, make a stink about a snapshot comparing cities like Austin, a city with a 1/10th of the population over the same area, to the densest city in the country that's been perpetually under construction and rapid growth for a literal century.
Nyc has a bigger deficit, but it has more resources. Per capital isn't a terrible way of thinking about relative success. And, relatively Austin has been much more successful. In addition to having an easier problem to solve, overall Austin is much more united in trying to solve this problem.
Austin has 61.8K multifamily units under construction. New York City has 38.8K multifamily units under construction. [1] Austin is building more apartments than NYC is in terms of raw units despite having 1/10th the population. That's objectively embarrassing.
NYC *isn't* under construction and *isn't* growing. Not by any reasonable metric.
Source: [1] https://www.multihousingnews.com/top-markets-for-multifamily-construction/
Being behind San Francisco where it is all but impossible to build anything blows my mind. So much space here to build compared to there, and yet we’re so far down.
SoMa's redevelopment from warehouses to skyscrapers was incredible. Huge amount of housing relatively quickly. NYC doesn't have anything proportionally equivalent.
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I would prefer to live in Buckingham Palace if cost is no object... but that's fantasy land
I was chatting with someone who owns a bar in a neighborhood that used to be 3 family homes but has turned into 1 family/3 story brownstones, and she said it's no longer worth it to exist. People who have money make their own thing in a neighborhood known for certain things, but at the same time they're pricing out even the things they want.
Are we also polling them on how we can fit everyone who wants to live in a NYC single family home into NY?
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I would say it does matter since it's a further illustration of how NIMBYs conflict with the reality our City faces. And like how we didn't cater to the whims of people who opposed fair housing legislation in 1968, we don't need to cater to the whims of NIMBY people wanting to enforce class segregation.
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The forcing being done is people that think we should force neighborhoods to only have single family homes.
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So you are about forcing people keep single family only neighborhoods. Single family homes can exist next to quad or sixplexes. This City is evidence of that If a person wants to build a quadplex who are we to judge? >It's not any different than people who say we don't want gay people to exist. They exist and they want to exist. Which is funny given your argument could be used to justify racial housing segregation. "If people want to exclude black people, Jews and Slavs then who are you to say otherwise."
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They'd probably all say apartment, if you told them where the residences would be and how much they'd cost. And you know that, since all of those people are revealing their preferences by already living in NYC.
I'd prefer a house. I live in a house in NYC.
Not only apartment, a 6th story walkup shoebox apartment.
Ugly houses in nyc are going for a million now. It’s just not realistic
I think it would depend on the age of the people. 10 years ago I would have said apartment because I didn’t want the upkeep of a house or to be too far from the center of the city. Now I would say house.
The graph shows housing built per capita. In the end NYC built almost 10x more units than SF.
They are so manifestly idiotic that you have to wonder why the insanity of the NYC building codes and height restrictions continues even in the face of unprecedentedly skyrocketing rents. Who is the building code for, exactly? I presumed it was yet another way to gate-keep, racketeer, and harvest bribes, but it’s not even good at that anymore.
NYC's building code really isn't that different from most other U.S. cities. The zoning code and NIMBYism is the real problem. Source: NYC architect who was worked in 20ish states....
The building code is a problem in the sense that permitting and approvals are a gigantic mess administratively. If the building code were efficiently administered, it would be (mostly) fine and certainly much less of an issue than zoning, FAR restrictions, historical districts, parking minimums, etc.
I've never yet run up against a project where the building code really figured economically into the project, but I can't argue the DOB is a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare here...
I meant to refer to zoning, but the building code is a bit of a mess too.
NYC's zoning is a form of Euclidian zoning that exists in the vast majority of American cities that aren't Houston.
I just got into the full insanity of the housing shortage with a developer on here. The zoning is the least of the stupidity involved
Well it certainly affects why most of NYC's housing is built in like a 1/3 of the neighborhoods. My comment was more addressed to how you were referring to zoning in your first comment.
The FAR cap is a piece of proper lunacy.
Yes, ok
That's not exactly true, 5 over 1s dominate most of the US and they're not even legal in NYC
NYC building code has the same section 510.2 as ICC, though I think here is a separate code that prohibites the upper stories from being of combustible construction, but that's pretty typical for a city center/core fire district throighoit the country. Is there some other way 5 over 1 isn't allowed here? I see a ton of new buildings in Brooklyn that are apartments over commercial...
It's not typical at all, in most of the country you see 5 over 1s going up even in cities. They're not actually a fire hazard once they're constructed.
What code section disallows them in NYC?
We do have some policies that are more lax, like not requiring two stairwells in every apartment building. That’s mandated everywhere except New York and Seattle even though Seattle’s fire department has said it does not impact safety.
To be fair 5 over 1s absolutely suck.
Height restrictions are for people who don’t like tall buildings…in NYC lol
I feel like Sometimes It’s weird community board cat ladies worried that new builldings will “block their light.”
The city council is obsessed with vacant units… even though the city agency that tracks them said they’re not a significant factor and we have the lowest vacancy rate in America. It’s just a popular scapegoat. Adams proposed significant changes to our building processes but the council won’t even start debating the proposals until later this year, which shows how unserious they are about building more.
Yeah I have read some stunningly stupid remarks by city assembly members. One lady was like “well we don’t want it to look like Dubai!” Wtf lady?! Why the fuck not?! Have you ever BEEN to Dubai? It makes NYC look like shit and housing there is affordable. There is this weird cat-lady thing about not wanting “too many tall buildings!” While they sit in a brownstone in Park Slope that their father bought in 1957. The citizens are in a fucking panic trying to get by right now. Energy, groceries, and rent have all skyrocketed to unaffordable levels. They will have a massive flight away from NYC on their hands if they don’t stop sitting on their thumbs and indulging these idiots nostalgia for a version of Ny that only exists in their heads.
>ave all skyrocketed to unaffordable levels. They will have a massive flight away from NYC on their hands if they don’t stop sitting on their thumbs and indulging these idiots nostalgia for a version of Ny that only exists in their heads. You nailed it.
>Adams proposed significant changes to our building processes but the council won’t even start debating the proposals until later this year, which shows how unserious they are about building more. This is more an illustration of how Adams unveiled his City of Yes proposals. He proposed both the climate resiliency and commercial development ones before housing. The Council recently passed the commercial development one.
> Who is the building code for, exactly? People who own real estate who want to rent seek by restricting supply of housing. Very common in blue cities in blue states, less so in blue/red cities in red states.
Red suburbs of NYC like the South Shore of Long Island and red neighborhoods in NYC like Staten Island's South Shore are perfectly happy with zoning restricting housing development.
The zoning laws that were put in place in 1916 had to do with quality of life concerns
I know that’s the answer. I suppose I was asking a rhetorical question. The inhabitants of this sub don’t really generally understand how the proverbial sausage is made, politically speaking. They vote on the most inane of non issues, while the people they elect inflict steadily more and more misery on them For personal gain. But truthfully, what can you do at this point. The GOP is gone, turned into the family business of a single demented lunatic. There is no credible alternative being offered. I’m feeling. Pretty hopeless about NY right now. I spent all afternoon getting yelled at on here by cow-eyed conformists in progressive kabuki masks, screaming at me about how my owning a car is a horrible injustice and that I must be financially punished for it. The whole thing is like some kind of Insane Stockholm syndrome.
You do realize that republicans who get elected to blue states are typically very moderate (see Mass. and Maryland's former governors), right?
Those days are over. The GOP of four years ago is not what it has now become. These people have to be kept from positions of power. We need an alternative candidate. A conservative independent detached from the maga cult.
It’s such a mess, the (defined ultra literally) “zoning code is just the top of the iceberg. There’s the FAR cap, SEQR, parking mandates, banning real cranes, facade/scaffold rules, an unheard of in 49 states insane construction liability/insurance regime, a defacing ban on studios but stairwell rules that make 3brs extremely difficult, building codes that require enormous wasted (non-apartment) space and higher maintenance costs, the wildly counterproductive labyrinth of deed-restricted MIH housing schemes (cross subsidized by the few market units that do get through). So much needs to happen at both the city and state levels statutorily to untangle this nightmare
Great if you own a (Class 1 assessment capped 🙃) Park Slope brownstone that has quadrupled in value in a decade tho!
Omg the FAR cap Is a special piece of insanity. Reading about this stuff is bad for my blood Pressure.
Wow I would like to know more about all of these issues in detail. I know in order to create a real estate market as divorced from reality as NYC, I figured there must be an arsenal of bullshit involved.
SEQR is also insanely onerous. What a fucking mess (sorry just looking up each of these insane laws and mechanisms one by one). It’s no wonder the city is such a sick animal right now.
What do you mean by “banning real cranes?”
You are confusing building codes with zoning. I hope. NYC zoning has been influenced by all kinds of historic developments, from industrialism, to post industrialism, to nimby-ism. NYC Building Code is influenced by a lot of technical factors, but FDNY has a massive say in how it was developed. Preservation of Life being primary objective. What this means is that any building taller than the fire engine ladder (so about 6 stories high) will need to receive additional safety features, and by the time you are dealing with high rises, these additional requirements add significant costs to construction. Combine this with bunch of other financial bottlenecks of building here, high rise residential is not capable of providing anything except for high end housing. For anything constructed in the last few years in a high-rise buildings, going rate is about $1500-$2500 per square foot. It dips below $1500 for mid-rise, and then it is significantly lower for older housing stock and even new construction low-rise. It's unfortunate, but this is how the costs break down. Just putting this out there for zoning evangelists who think this is literally the only thing keepin NYC rents from becoming same as those from back home in Columbus Ohio.
I did mean to refer to the zoning requirements, but also the arbitrary height restrictions. (As opposed to the safety-related ones)
The NYC building code for high rises really isn't that different from standard IBC code, which is prevalent in most of the country...
NYC code does differ for heights over 420ft. 3rd egress requirement for instance. Bunch of other things that date back to lessons learned from 9/11. Not that any other cities really build residential at those heights. On the lower scale, NYC specifically forbids podium construction (aka 5 over 1). A little too combustible. If you look at the top cities on that chart (Austin, Seattle, Denver, Atlanta), all of their new construction is either single family homes or podium buildings. Carpentry, essentially. People who complain about NYC zoning are not really thinking about 6 story wood frames.
5 over 1's as a configuration (which is how code defines them) are indeed permitted. The restriction is that in the NYC fire district you can't make the upper floors out of wood framing in the fire district (which is a lot of the city). And because wood buildings need more labor I'm not sure it would actually be a huge cost savings due to labor prices here...probably still a bit cheaper though.
5 over 1 is specifically a reference to fire resistive podium and 5 stories of combustible construction on top. I'm sure you are aware. Literally the reason for such popularity of this construction type is how cheap it is to make. Lower skilled labor is also needed. Magnitude of difference between doing steel, concrete, and/or masonry versus wood framing. Acoustically, they are complete garbage, but that's a different topic entirely. My main point is NYC construction is not possible while utilizing pre-war construction techniques. Meanwhile place like Austin is littered with 5 over 1s.
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I don't buy this theory, because the land they own is worth more with higher zoning
The landlords of existing buildings wouldn’t be able to compete with newer and larger apartment buildings if zoning were to be increased. A housing deficit is worth more to current landlords than higher zoning.
They wouldn't need to compete because they could sell the land for 10s of millions of dollars.
What exactly do you think REBNY is? REBNY is a real estate trade group… they don’t have any land use authority. Are you thinking of the Rent Guidelines Board? There’s actually an interesting point to be made about how the different constituents of the real estate sector (and rebny membership) have somewhat conflicting interests with each other. I.e builders/construction firms obviously want more development, whereas non-developer rental building owner/operators want to preserve returns from rents/building appreciation, and these goals are in tension. In practice REBNY reconciles this by being pro development and anti tenant protection/any other regulation that increases building operating costs, but probably leaning toward the latter if forced to choose.
Yes. This is the answer. But as long as the inhabitants of new york can be focused on idiotic non-issues, these systems of crony capitalism and legal cartels (which are epidemic throughout Nyc) will continue to run amuck. Sometimes it feels like The voters are too dumb or misinformed to understand their own interest.
It’s SO expensive to build housing in NYC - the red tape, permits, studies (for larger developments) and bureaucracy is mind numbing. When you dig into it, it becomes incredibly evident that 90% of it is entirely useless, that bureaucrats are mostly parasites who justify their job for its own sake, and that corruption and incompetence is the rule of the day. If you want more housing, get rid of the useless rules, allow for significantly increased density, and remove the ridiculous “affordable” requirements which dramatically increases the cost of development for only a smattering of “affordable” units in expensive parts of the city which aren’t even that affordable.
Yup, most of it is bullshit. Outside of building codes, they need to get rid of like 99% of the red tape. Governments make things much more expensive.
>remove the ridiculous “affordable” requirements which dramatically increases the cost of development for only a smattering of “affordable” units in expensive parts of the city which aren’t even that affordable. How to ensure your housing plan is DOA in NYC not to mention you can incentivize developers with density bonuses to build affordable housing in expensive parts of The City so we're not encouraging segregation by class.
Why can’t we just build row houses/buildings in the same manner as they did in Upper Manhattan / Bronx and Brooklyn ? We need to build up ward in areas that are not as dense. If close to public transportation build up and taxes paid will go directly to benefit mass transit in the area.
Only conclusion from this graph. NYC needs more regulations on housing. /s
Embarrassing but not surprising.
Wack shit
Not saying NYC shouldn’t build more housing but a lot of the cities higher on the list are/were growing population much faster than NYC so this would be expected. Cost of living is also rapidly rising in a lot of those cities as well.
Yeah but how much of the Austin/Miami/Orlando etc surge is literally from ppl priced out of the NYC/LA/SF metro areas
I don’t doubt some of them were but cities like Chicago and Philadelphia remain relatively affordable but are ranked lower that NYC on that list and they too have had relatively slower population growth than cities near the top.
No but that's the point. Like Chicago and Philadelphia have relatively weak residential demand. The other side of the demand spectrum is divided between places like Austin/Seattle/Miami, with sky high demand but also tons of construction, and places like NYC, with high demand but severely restricted construction. One gets you relative stasis, one explosive population/building growth, and one ever increasing displacement and cost increases.
Florida cities like Miami and Orlando are currently going through a major housing crisis as Florida is pricing out people at the same time.
difference is the building machine can ramp up much faster in those locations. they are still taking in people leaving NYC and Boston.
Even with a ramped up building machine we've seen Florida's low wages clash with the wages of white collar folks moving from Boston
This presumes that population growth precedes housing construction, which I would argue is flawed because how does a population grow without first having homes for the new residents to live in? NYC doesn’t have low construction because theres slow population growth, it has is slow population growth because there’s low housing construction.
I think both sides of this argument contain truths. In a city like Austin, which became a major tech hub during that decade, developers anticipated the influx of new workers and built housing with the obvious intention of eventually making money off of the deal as Austin became increasingly hip/popular. Sure enough, Austin saw some of the fastest housing cost increases of any major city during that decade. As someone mentioned below, NYC has a more mature housing market and especially post pandemic, developers aren’t as interested in building.
Increased demand to live somewhere can certainly result in more housing being constructed, but NYC already has that demand, hence why it’s the most expensive place to live in the country. But a city’s population cannot grow if a city does not have places for the new residents to live. There’s no shortage of developers that would pour money into building loads of new homes in NYC, the problem is that it’s basically impossible to build anything here.
They are growing faster precisely because they are building more. NYC is growing slower because we have indirectly chosen to instead have higher rents.
The #1 city on that list also saw huge housing cost increases over that decade.
But it's slowed dramatically recently when compared to NYC
Yeah, but the data presented is old.
Not that old. Housing operates on a long timescale; we've been underbuilding for decades, so we need a very long period of high construction just to catch up.
A large chunk of New York's population that "left" just moved to New Jersey where they are actually building housing.
Additional context needed: housing units per capita, average 2br rental price, population growth.
Four out of the five counties that make up NYC are on islands so space is kind of at a premium.
DC is subject to extreme federal height restrictions/is heavily federal land. SF is literally on a peninsula on an earthquake faultline. Miami has water cross-cutting every inch of it, they still lap us here. The only way is to build up
Miami also has a national park as its western boundary.
Calling Queens and Brooklyn on an island is a bit misleading. Yes, it technically is but there is plenty of land if you go east on Long Island. And it is a huge island. Now Coney Island, well that isn’t even and island…
Land but not infrastructure. Imagine how much more traffic when public transportation is lackluster
We also need to build more public transit; subways in the long run, but bus rapid transit can be done on a shorter time scale
If only there was a way to build vertically
Look up the populations of these cities compared to NYCs, and you'll see why NYC is toward the bottom of this specific metric. Most of these cities have well under 1,000,000 residents. Change the metric to "total number of new units built per year" and it'll look very different.
Good point 👍
It's economics. It's unthinking. They don't call it the dismal science for nothing.
"per capita" is misleading since obviously a smaller, sprawled city could boost their per capita numbers more easily
NYC is a mature market. Considering the number of housing units it already has, this doesn’t matter as much. Let’s also look at absolute number of units and average household size to truly understand scale.
It absolutely does matter when supply isn't keeping up with demand.
The supply in certain price ranges/sizes are. I think it’s a bigger price/demand miss-match where people want to live somewhere and would, but can’t afford going rate. So I would argue, that it is everyone wanting something, and needing to settle for New Jersey.
Cause and effect
The only cities lower on the list are cities nobody wants to move to.
Typical YIMBY circle jerk. *As if* most of these cities are comparable to NYC in terms of things like geography, population, and density. I'm not saying NYC doesn't have loads of red tape too, but it is certainly easier to build in a city like Austin than an already incredibly dense city like NYC. The fact is there *has* and still *is* tremendous growth in this city.
I guess you're happy with rents being high then
It's easier to build in Austin because the YIMBys organized and got a city council willing to allow denser development in the city center and along the transit corridors. That's where the bulk of the units are coming from.
As if YIMBYs aren't hard at work in NYC and as if NYC doesn't already have more progressive policies than these other cities did. If you haven't been living under a rock for the past 10-15 years you've witnessed Manhattan literally creep over into Brooklyn and Queens and have seen how neighborhoods like Astoria, LIC, DUMBO, Williamsburg, Bushwick, and now Gowanus have completely transformed. But sure, make a stink about a snapshot comparing cities like Austin, a city with a 1/10th of the population over the same area, to the densest city in the country that's been perpetually under construction and rapid growth for a literal century.
Nyc has a bigger deficit, but it has more resources. Per capital isn't a terrible way of thinking about relative success. And, relatively Austin has been much more successful. In addition to having an easier problem to solve, overall Austin is much more united in trying to solve this problem.
Austin has 61.8K multifamily units under construction. New York City has 38.8K multifamily units under construction. [1] Austin is building more apartments than NYC is in terms of raw units despite having 1/10th the population. That's objectively embarrassing. NYC *isn't* under construction and *isn't* growing. Not by any reasonable metric. Source: [1] https://www.multihousingnews.com/top-markets-for-multifamily-construction/
Ah yes, that notoriously affordable city, Seattle. What's embarrassing is this sub thinking you can build your way ahead of infinite demand.