Living costs were out of control and people lived 8 to a room in extremely unsafe tenements but the upside is the city's housing and transportation infrastructure was built for a capacity it still has not yet claimed back today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor...
I hadn't realized NYC's population as a whole was only up 300,000 since 1950, either. Maybe most interesting, the 2 boroughs that gained population are larger (combined) than the 3 that lost it, and even today Queens and Staten Island have the lowest population density. The metro area has grown massively, but for the city proper it looks like not only has growth been slow, it's been steadily evening out density.
I wonder how this has played out elsewhere; are there patterns of outcome (and relative unhappiness cause) for population spikes/declines and for lower, prolonged levels of excess demand?
Seattle lawmakers talked about how Amazon took up 20% of the city's office space. That was 45,000 workers in a city of 730,000 (6%), and a metro area of 3,800,000. NYC was looking at 25,000 Amazon employees against a city population of 8,600,000 (0.02%), and a metro population of 20,300,000. This claim looks similarly awful. NYC and Seattle have surprisingly similar average salaries ($69K), but the relative impact of 25k workers earning double that is 1%-5% as large in NYC. Manhattan is already the highest-earning county in the entire nation, so much so that adding Amazon employees there would bring down the average salary!
If anything, what I find wildest is that NYC has kept its housing prices halfway sane. It's wrapped around a river and a bay, half on an island, in the middle of an area so urbanized it inspired the word 'megalopolis'. A huge fraction of its development is pre-automotive, so transport in and out ranges from 'tricky' to 'crisis'. It has the highest-earning county in the country, which is also one of the highest wealth-throughput areas in the world.
And so the median house price there is... perhaps 20% higher than Seattle's, despite 4x the population density? Manhattan prices are at the same income multiple as Seattle and the rest of NYC? What the heck? It's not that people don't know Seattle housing prices are excessive, and the boom is pretty recent, but I don't understand why it's viewed as a narrow issue of wages and population growth. Whatever raised those prices, they still point to something seriously wrong with the way things are functioning now.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/07/seattle-l...