Tell me how you want to reinvent taxes and rent control, without knowing that you want to reinvent taxes and rent control.
> I’m really frustrated by these incoming renters too.
You are passing judgment to all these different groups of people, without any shred of fundamental principle to justify why they need to act the way you want.
They don't owe anything to you or the city. Stop complaining like a spoiled child.
Of course not. And I don’t owe them anything either. By the same terms of your argument there’s no reason I should be satisfied with just letting them do what they want when it affects me directly since you’re stating that I should not try to do anything that affects them directly. I have my desires, which requires placing demands on their behavior since they are ignorant of the conditions of other human beings, act entirely selfishly and in a vacuum, and ruin things for the rest of us.
The fundamental principle is that people that are short-term renters disrupt communities in negative ways by having economic effects that harm long-term residents and ultimately break the existing community. I’m passing judgement on them because I witnessed the mass exodus that happened in 2020 and I witnessed all the struggle those who stayed had to endure and I witnessed the mass return of people that fled to “safer” spaces come back as though nothing happened and absolutely screw over everyone that stayed.
You must not have ever been subject to gentrification. You’ve got a real empathetic heart. I’m not “complaining” I’m trying to speak to the problem and suggest that existing solutions clearly are not enough. If anything is childish it’s your post, which tries to effectively say “we tried everything, there’s no possible other solution” and “in spite of the insane number of problems currently evident in our economics capitalism is fine and people should be able to manipulate the market without bound”. Your post has effectively no intellectual content. Being upset about something, evoking an opinion, and trying to advocate that we need a solution that will not only benefit myself but also the thousands of others affected by insane rent costs is not “acting like a spoiled child”, in my opinion. Do I have that solution? No, of course not. I’m not qualified. But if we restricted commentary on hacker news to professionally qualified individuals this thread would have close to 0 comments.
I don’t think I’m the child here.
Unless someone straight up breached their contract to evict and give "your" apartment to someone else, you were not affected "directly" by anything.
> I have my desires, which requires placing demands on their behavior
Desires? Is this really the word that you want to use? The more you write, the more you are displaying your sense of entitlement.
> (your post) which tries to effectively say “we tried everything, there’s no possible other solution”
There is absolutely no point where I said anything like that. Please stop assuming things. If you want to restart the conversation around that, by all means let's do it. But if you want to argue by baseless statements, I'm not your person.
My rent increased significantly for no reason other than a shift in market rates. I struggle to see how this does not count as being directly effected.
Yes. Desires. People have them. Usually they dictate behaviors. It’s why people move to New York. It’s why you’re quoting my comments and writing replies—you want to show me that you’re “smarter” and that my dissatisfactions are illegitimate and you think a great way to do so is to write targeted quips that take one or two lines of text out of context, but unfortunately you’re not succeeding. It’s clear you have no interest in actual persuasion or discussion—if you do, I highly recommend taking a few writing or debate classes, maybe brushing up on what it means to empathize, learn about logos/ethos/pathos, read some philosophy, things like that.
When this is your first statement following your attempted "apology", how can anyone be interested in continuing with the conversation?
> You seem to want your interlocutor to follow all the polite rules of discussion while abandoning them all yourself.
It's not about "politeness". It's about honesty. I'd rather have a honest-but-dry conversation than a pleasantly-dishonest one.
> your position (which you haven’t actually ever elaborated)
My position (if it couldn't even be called that) is that NYC is a victim of its own (relative) success compared to all the other cities in the US. The best way to get NYC to become more affordable would be to rescue other cities. There are just too many people with too much money chasing not enough houses in urban areas that are desirable, so of course the prices will go up in the places that are.
Rent control is not going to solve this. It's only going to create a privileged class that is going to cling on to their old leases. Landlords will have zero incentive to invest. Developers will have less incentive to build, and then only the existing stock will continue to be around.
It's supply that needs to be fixed. Also, it may seem counter-intuitive at first, but to fix cities in North America you need to get rid of suburbia.
I think NYC’s location is one of the difficulties involved with such a plan. NYC is partly desirable because its locality makes it an easy hub for travel to and from Europe. You can make other cities attractive by other means, but it will be hard to beat this and the entrenchment of current residents and businesses.
The idea of eliminating suburbs to fix supply is interesting. I do think that could be beneficial, but at the same time, that also would require regulations or policies that push development away from suburbs and into cities. Either way you’ll need some kind of regulatory intervention.
The question is whether or not supply increase is sufficient to alter the market, I’m skeptical of such a claim because new residential developments crop up in NYC all the time but it doesn’t seem to help drive down rates at all. Furthermore, NYC’s population for the decade had its peak in 2016, yet prices then were more affordable[1]. Maybe there’s data that shows there’s an extreme influx of individuals now and the population in NYC surpassed this number in 2022, but I’d be surprised if that were the case esp. when you factor in new building developments that occurred in the meantime. I don’t think it boils down to a simple supply problem. It may be due to the fact that brokerages are snatching up properties and charging more than individual landlords, it may be a side effect of inflation, it may be predatory profit seeking after the pandemic. I don’t know, but I don’t think merely throwing up a bunch of new buildings will necessarily fix things, and as I mentioned before, we need to consider the other negative consequences of such a plan (density, the consequent environmental impacts etc.)
[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-l...
I misspoke. By "getting rid of suburbia", I mean getting rid of American-style, car-centric suburban development. You'll absolutely want to have development in the suburbs.
And to do that, you don't need a lot of changes in regulations. Surely, you'll have to fight with NIMBYs, but these changes do not require massive regulations:
- Upzoning all R1 zones, and abolish Euclidian Zone. Just by getting rid of exclusive single-family zones that are so prevalent in the US, and start allowing multi-family townhouses, mixed-use areas, you could recover basically every city that is not part of coastal metro area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
- Transit-oriented development. City Beautiful has a great video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYsqWIGyRVk
Many of these landlords are up charging on properties that have not been materially improved at all, because, as I said, people are making dumb decisions to live where they want to, so they can arbitrarily increase the price up to the limit of what someone will pay. This is great for landlords since they can double their money without doing any work.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m really frustrated by these incoming renters too. A lot of these people fled and abandoned the city like complete cowards when the pandemic hit and suddenly they want to return while they left the responsibility of keeping the city going on all the rest of us that are actual residents that stayed. These semi-nomadic people are just as bad as the landlords and want to live somewhere only so long as it benefits them—they have no allegiance to a community. This, in conjunction with land owners behavior creates disastrous effects for actual long-term residents who invest in the local communities and don’t run away the second things get hard.