Isn’t there something between your extremes though? The city could easily require a certain density level for new residential buildings and/or grand much larger tracts of land to builders. If you stick enough housing units, the prices will go down.
Isn’t there something between your extremes though? The city could easily require a certain density level for new residential buildings and/or grand much larger tracts of land to builders. If you stick enough housing units, the prices will go down.
Why? They could easily build more units that would be bought by speculators instead of residents. They could be rented by wealthier people.
I've always liked the argument "I'm poor as ballsacks but I deserve to live wherever the F I want."
And for housing, the studies show that simply increasing supply does not reduce price like most commodities.
We started with:
and now we'reat
So, in a neighborhood with over 200,000 people, there are 12 units for less than $3,300, which would be 40% of a household's income at ~$100k annually. With NYC's $15 minimum wage, three minimum wage earners in one household would not make enough for those units if they aimed to keep housing costs (and this doesn't include utilities) below 40%, which is well over the prescribed financially health amount, but we're allowing for reduced transit costs. And yet they would make far too much to be considered for public or subsidized affordable housing (link: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/renters/what-is-affordable-housing.page).
The question is not whether a working class family can live in the Upper West Side -- they can't -- but whether we are okay with a housing system where a working class family cannot live in the UWS.
And while I may be off on the fact that new construction in Manhattan is not replacing tear-downs of existing housing (like it is in Brooklyn), it does not change the fact that new construction is almost exclusively luxury, as a rational developer will build in the existing market.
Life Plan: Live in Passaic and commute into Manhattan to take care of DaDeacs' dogs at elevated prices. Cha-Ching ! Buy new cars and shore house.