marquee moon
Banhammer'd
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2011
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More and more I think wealth inequality is the singular destroyer of the American way of life.
There’s a pretty strong analogy with KD and Cousins joining the Warriors. The rich keep getting richer.
Almost feel sorry for the author who lives in a rent stabilized apartment. He had his rent triple in 20 years. He is probably paying $1200 for his 2 br/2 bth apartment on the upper west side.
people outside of NYC shrug
Land banking is a major cause of rent inflation in major metropolitan cities - NYC, Seattle, and San Francisco especially. Foreign investors connected to urban development projects are especially responsible for basically laundering money this wayThere is also the problem that real estate is often used as a money cleaning scheme. Dirty money buys lavish properties, driving up prices in the market as a whole. The purchasers of course have no intention to live there, limiting housing supply. Often they don’t have any desire to rent the properties out either.
I saw it all the time in Singapore and it seems very common in NY as well.
You could write nearly that same article about London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Paris or Berlin. The global megalopolises barely belong to nations anymore, and attract huge volume of residents from all over the globe. This has created massive housing crunches and skyrocketing rent prices in all of those cities (and many others). Very, very few cities have at all been prepared for the massive shift of living situations from more rural to more urban in the past 25-30 years - and especially the shift to the megalopolises.
The answer is likely building massive amounts of affordable housing in nearly every major city - but that takes money and political commitment that very few cities have shown. The sociological factors driving people to congregate in the bigger global capitals is not going to lessen any time in the near future.