This post makes a brief detour into NYC, since both my hometown and Los Angeles have similar policies on affordable housing. A City Journal article titled "Is There a New York Housing Crisis?" has been making the internerd rounds (originally via Martini Republic), and I stayed up late last night chatting about it with my friend Chris and marveling that the line between me-first shock-jocks like Tucker Carlson/Bill O'Reilly and the ostensibly more cerebral world of "legit" journalism and academia is such a thin, opaque one.
Conservative views, when measured out with SOME semblance of concern for humanity, can be useful as a means of keeping liberalism in check, and it's unfortunate that both sides have learned from TV that there's only everything and nothing, my way or the highway. I'm interested in good ideas, and I know that very often the best ideas are the ones that neither (or none) of the warring factions is emotionally attached to. So I tried to read "Is There a New York Housing Crisis" with an air of detachment, but then the (female) author had to get her digs in at "the dysfunctional underclass" and unwed mothers who aren't shrewd enough to find husbands to solve their financial woes. And I just felt like she rendered moot any good points she might have had and made me wanna kick her in the uterus, repeatedly.
I wasn't gonna blog about this, but I may as well.
New York's real estate market is an interesting case and shouldn't really be compared to most of the rest of the country (LA exempted, maybe). The most socially desirable part of the city, Manhattan, isn't as pricey as it is merely because of rent control -- it's because Manhattan is a relatively small and extremely narrow parcel of land with an 843-acre park in the middle of it (which is lovely, don't get me wrong). And because white-collar businesses want to be in Manhattan rather than the philistine outer boroughs with their philistine 718 area codes, they acquire scads of Wall Street and midtown office buildings that eat up yet more available land. The waterfronts (on both the East River and Hudson sides) are very valuable too, and much of it is being rezoned away from industrial use and towards "leisure." (An anti-preservationist would call for the lower-density historic brownstones of Greenwich Village and the Upper East Side to be razed for high-rises, but I think it's important for cities to have a variety of densities and differences of neighborhood character. Besides, those neighborhoods aren't exclusively brownstones; there are many beautiful, well-appointed, landmarked 8- or 9-story apartment buildings that were built between the late 19th century and the end of the '20s.)
The author, interestingly, notes that if you go into the outer boroughs, it's not difficult to find decent apartments under $1200/mo -- and it's very very true, which kinda destroys her theory that there's no middle-class housing in NYC. (I think she means "no middle class housing in Manhattan," which is her real concern for People Like Her -- all those yucky low-income minorities are free to flee for the boroughs, though.)
I also wonder about these mythical $600/mo apartments (where are they? East New York?) and whether the mojo of the free market is going to suddenly turn a $2400/mo luxury 1-bedroom into a more middle-class $900/mo 1-bedroom. Not in Manhattan. But then, this disparity isn't a problem in most parts of the boroughs. However, wealthier people can forget that if you're making $20,000 a year and struggling to eat and pay your bills, even a hundred-dollar increase in rent is a fuckin' lotta money. (And yeah, some of the hardest-working people I've known, people who want to be upwardly mobile, have needed some help on their way up. So I'm not against some sort of subsidy, as long as it's implemented smartly.)
What resonated the most with me was the high cost of upkeep of the older, more worn buildings that are harder to get up to code (or are exempt through affordable-housing variances or whatever but still need things like proper heating and insulation). Could a solution to this be a small annual maintenance fee on top of the monthly rent, which the renter would start paying upfront upon moving in? Co-op buildings have similar carrying charges that buyers pay -- the renters' maintenance fees would be affordable but would help create a sense of investment in where they live and ease the property manager's financial burden. And paying a larger sum of money once a year is easier than paying a higher rent once a month -- you have more time to set the money aside, and it eats into your usual cost-of-living a little less.
The NYC housing "crisis" is much more complicated (and less of a crisis) than the author makes it sound. The old bitties who refuse to leave their rent-controlled penthouses are all dying off anyway, and most of the housing projects and Mitchell-Lama buildings in Manhattan are up against noisy, congested highways that are long walks from the subway. Developers might be able to make some more money from the land since it's near the water, but the current residents are hardly stealing anyone's pristine country getaway.
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