Re:How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M
by dionidium on Friday March 18, 2022 @07:30PM
(#30728989)
What we're seeing is a return to the long-term trend. Vacancies in Manhattan have hovered around 2% for a long time.
See: https://www.millersamuel.com/files/2022/02/Feb22QNSrent-nyVA...
Re:How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M
by Retric on Saturday March 19, 2022 @12:34AM
(#30731059)
Which shows how important a seemingly small number of long term unoccupied apartments are.
Another way of looking at 2% vacancy is over 20 years an apartment is vacant less than 5 months. People move, die, go to prison etc, so there is some inherent friction represented in a 98% occupancy rate. Dropping to 1% long term takes more than just higher demand it would require increases in transaction efficiency.
Re:How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M
by chii on Saturday March 19, 2022 @02:13AM
(#30731578)
the air rights are a bit of a red herring, because if the people in the city chooses to, they can easily abolish air rights, and allow buildings that previously sold their air rights to build it again!
And a couple of tall buildings in manhattan isn't gonna be making any difference. The difference would come from building denser everywhere.
One clear the example of the outsized impact is these buildings bought up air rights from multiple properties. So, they reduced the legally available space. When the city makes space for ~100,000 apartments and actually gets less than 1/10th that it’s a problem.
Another is the extreme cost of the associated tax breaks for affordable housing for minimal gain. The city set the tax break based on price while the number of affordable houses was based on the number of apartments. A seemingly obvious problem looking back, but still a problem for city residents.