Tag new york

housing

The Paper of Record Gets Yorkville Wrong

Even the most supposedly reputable mainstream media is often less than careful in its coverage of housing issues. For example, a few weeks ago the New York Times ran an article on the Upper East Side’s Yorkville neighborhood, implying that high-rises are “erasing their community’s character.” The article implies that Yorkville is a quaint little brownstone neighborhood. But in fact, even the most casual perusal of real estate websites would show that Yorkville has been a high-rise area for many years. I ran a search on Streeteasy.com showing 259 for sale apartments with doormen (a feature generally found only in high- and mid-rise buildings). Only 27 of these housing units were built after 2010, which means that hundreds of high-rise units were built long ago.* So the entire story is based on falsehood. Moreover, even if Yorkville’s towers were new, I am not sure that its pre-high-rise character is particularly unique. To me Yorkville’s tenements look just like similar tenements elsewhere in Manhattan. If you can’t trust what the Times says about the Upper East Side, how can you trust what it says about climate change or Washington politics? *I did not search for-rent apartments because Streeteasy’s software does not allow users to separate for-rent units by age.

Michael Lewyn
August 27, 2019

housing, Uncategorized

New York State’s Property Tax Cap

One reason for California’s high housing costs might be Proposition 13. This law, passed by referendum in the 1970s, may discourage housing production in two significant ways. First, under Proposition 13, all housing- even vacant land- is taxed at its original purchase price rather than its current value. By artificially capping taxes on vacant land, this part of Proposition 13 ensures that a landowner does not suffer as much from keeping land vacant as it would under another tax system. Second, by reducing local property taxes, Proposition 13 forced municipalities to rely on other sources of revenue, such as sales taxes. Because retail shops bring in more sales tax revenue than residential uses, this law gave California towns an incentive to favor the former. * New York’s Gov. Cuomo has recently proposed a tax cut that buys popularity for state lawmakers on the backs of municipalities. In 2011, the state passed a law to limit local governments’ property tax increases to 2 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower. This cap was originally temporary, but Cuomo now proposes to make it permanent. A bill implementing Cuomo’s proposal was recently passed by the State Senate, but has yet to be voted on by the State Assembly. Historically, the cap has not included high-cost New York City, but that may change. If the cap does include New York City, will it have the same results as Proposition 13? Probably not, for two reasons. First, the tax cap, unlike Proposition 13, does not artificially favor property purchased long ago, and thus does not discourage people from selling their property. Second, New York State has to consent to sales tax increases, so municipalities don’t have as much of an incentive as their California counterparts to favor land uses that bring in lots […]

Michael Lewyn
January 31, 2019

history, planning, Urban[ism] Legends, Zoning

Is Zoning Popular? Reevaluating the Evidence

In my regular discussions of U.S. zoning, I often hear a defense that goes something like this: “You may have concerns about zoning, but it sure is popular with the American people. After all, every state has approved of zoning and virtually every city in the country has implemented zoning.” One of two implications might be drawn from this defense of Euclidean zoning: First, perhaps conventional zoning critics are missing some redeeming benefit that obviates its many costs. Second, like it or not, we live in a democratic country and zoning as it exists today is evidently the will of the people and thus deserves your respect. The first possible interpretation is vague and unsatisfying. The second possible interpretation, however, is what I take to really be at the heart of this defense. After all, Americans love to make “love it or leave it” arguments when they’re in the temporary majority on a policy. But is Euclidean zoning actually popular? The evidence for any kind of mass support for zoning in the early days is surprisingly weak. Despite the revolutionary impact that zoning would have on how cities operate, many cities quietly adopted zoning through administrative means. Occasionally city councils would design and adopt zoning regimes on their own, but often they would simply authorize the local executive to establish and staff a zoning commission. Houston was among the only major U.S. city to put zoning to a public vote—a surefire way to gauge popularity, if it were there—and it was rejected in all five referendums. In the most recent referendum in 1995, low-income and minority residents voted overwhelmingly against zoning. Houston lacks zoning to this day. Meanwhile, the major proponents of early zoning programs in cities like New York and Chicago were business groups and elite philanthropists. Where votes were […]

Nolan Gray
January 25, 2018
1 Comment

housing, NIMBYism, planning

(Not So) Infinite Demand

In a recent blog post, Julia Galef has generated a fairly comprehensive list of pro-housing arguments and counterarguments to those arguments. She gives the most detailed consideration to the “infinite demand” argument- in her words, “So even if SF adds a lot of additional housing, prices will still rise almost as quickly as they would have anyway, as long as demand to live here continues to soar. This view is mainly based on examples of other desirable cities, like New York or Singapore, which have built new housing at a faster rate than SF but nevertheless saw steep increases in price.” To which I respond: New York? Really? New York is only pro-housing when compared to San Francisco- which is a bit like saying Iran is a libertarian paradise compared to the Islamic State. In fact, New York has built housing at a glacial pace. Between 1960 and 1976, the number of new housing units completed per year ranged from just over 14,000 to over 60,000, and exceeded 20,000 in all but four years. In the almost forty years since 1976, the number of new units exceeded 20,000 in only four years (2006-10) and was above 14,000 for only ten years (1989, 2002, 2004-10, 2015). Meanwhile, demand for housing has increased: between 2006 and 2014 alone, the citywide renter population grew by 600,000. A better example of a “desirable city” would be a city where both the population and the housing supply is growing at a rapid rate- Raleigh, for example, or Las Vegas. These cities are much cheaper than New York or San Francisco.* Another example of a cheap, permissive city is Tokyo. But the post suggests Tokyo may not have grown as fast as American cities. In fact, Tokyo’s regional population grew by 17 percent since 1990- from 32.5 million […]

housing, Policy

The “Foreign Buyers” Argument

A common argument against new housing supply is that in high-cost cities such as New York, demand from foreign buyers is so overwhelming as to make new supply irrelevant. A recent study (available here) by two business school professors suggests otherwise. The study does show more foreign involvement in the NYC market than I expected: just over 13 percent of Manhattan buyers, and 5 percent of all regional buyers, come from outside metropolitan New York. Even this share is less than in some lower-cost markets: the study notes that 17 percent of Las Vegas buyers are from outside the city. However, the impact of “out of town” buyers is pretty small: the authors conclude that out-of-town buyers “cause an increase in house prices of 1.1% and an 39 increase in rents by 1.6% in both zones.”

Economics, housing, Policy

Are Billionaires To Blame?

One common argument I have read in various places is that the high rent of New York and other large cities is a result of globalization and inequality (English translation: rich foreigners). According to this theory, rich people have created a surge of demand so overwhelming that no amount of construction could possibly meet it. It seems that if this argument were true, rent would be growing most rapidly in rich neighborhoods full of super-expensive skyscrapers, such as New York’s Upper East and West Sides. This week, NYU’s Furman Center helpfully came out with its latest report on housing in New York City. Page 6 of the report reveals that between 1990 and 2014, rent in the Upper East Side rose by 23 percent- about the same as the citywide average. Upper West Side rent rose by 38 percent- more than the citywide average, but less than ten of the city’s 50-odd other neighborhood clusters, including not only hipstery Greenpoint, but also not-so-nice areas like East Harlem. So this bit of data, although not conclusive, seems inconsistent with the “rich foreigners” theory.

Michael Lewyn
May 12, 2016

housing

So Much For The Foreign Oligarchs

One common argument against new housing in high-cost cities is that the rise of global capitalism makes demand for urban housing essentially unlimited: if new apartments in Manhattan or San Francisco are built, they will be taken over by foreign billionaires in quest of American real estate, who will use the apartments as banks rather than actually living in them or renting them out. It seems to me that this argument would be more likely to be true if a huge percentage of New York’s housing was used by foreign billionaires. But a recent article in Politico New York suggests otherwise. The article says that 89,000 New York apartments are owned by absentee owners (many of whom presumably rent them out). However, most of these apartments are not owned by Russian oligarchs or other global capitalists; for example, the co-op unit I rented a few years ago in Forest Hills (market value around $300K) was owned not by a foreign oligarch, but by the building’s former super. Presumably, the condos and houses likely to be owned by wealthy foreigners are the most expensive ones. So how many of these units were worth $5 million or more. Only 1554- a drop in the bucket in a city of 8 million people. And how many of the units were worth over $25 million? Only 445. So super-rich absentee owners are few and far between, and thus probably do not affect housing supply very much.

Michael Lewyn
April 12, 2016

Uncategorized

Friday links

1. Miller-McCune (what a bad name for a magazine) has an article about a possible VMT tax, and points out that more fuel-efficient vehicles will lead to less gas tax revenue. 2. Streetsblog has an extremely unflattering profile of Republican nominee for NY Governor Carl Paladino. He made a name for himself politically by detolling a major highway near where he was a real estate developer, and has continued to oppose new tolling projects throughout the state. He’s promising to cut the gas tax rate, and apparently once said, “It’s time we started looking at parking as a public service.” I should note that his Democratic opponent Andrew Cuomo ain’t no slouch when it comes to encouraging sprawl – Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice fingered his tenure as HUD Secretary as one of the “starting points for the mortgage meltdown.” 3. Paul Barter at Reinventing Parking has a guest post about parking reform in Bogotá that was concurrent with their much-vaunted TransMilenio BRT system, and he promises us more about it in the future. 4. Quoteth the Los Angeles Times: “At least 120 municipalities [in California] — nearly one in three with active redevelopment agencies — spent a combined $700 million in housing funds from 2000 to 2008 without constructing a single new unit, the newspaper’s analysis of state data shows. Nor did most of them add to the housing stock by rehabilitating existing units.” 5. Vancouver learns the hard way that luxury public housing is a bad idea. You could call it inclusionary zoning at its finest.

Stephen Smith
October 8, 2010
2 Comments

sprawl

Neighborhood Walkability Scores

A recent Wall Street Journal blog post refers to a website called Walk Score. Walk Score will let you know the walkability of a neighborhood based on the address you type in. The site also features ranking of cities and neighborhoods. Here are the city rankings: 1. San Francisco, CA 2. New York, NY 3. Boston, MA 4. Chicago, IL 5. Philadelphia, PA 6. Seattle, WA 7. Washington D.C. 8. Long Beach, CA 9. Los Angeles, CA 10.Portland, OR I assume San Francisco beat New York, because New York City includes the less walkable areas such as Staten Island. I can brag that I have lived in 3 of the top 4 most walkable cities: New York, Chicago, and Boston. (although I actually lived right accross the river in Cambridge, which I think still counts) I was also pleasantly surprised at how many of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods ranked above 90. How It Works Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking. What does my score mean? Your Walk Score is a number between 0 and 100. Here are general guidelines for interpreting your score: 90–100 = Walkers’ Paradise: Most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car. 70–89 = Very Walkable: It’s possible to get by without owning a car. 50–69 = Somewhat Walkable: Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a bike, public transportation, or car. 25–49 = Car-Dependent: Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must. 0–24 = […]

Adam Hengels
July 19, 2008
6 Comments

corruption, rent control

NY Gov. Patterson’s Rent-Stabilized Apartment in Harlem

NY Sun: Paterson Pays A Stabilized Rate of Rent The governor of New York pays about $1,250 a month for a two-bedroom, rent-stabilized apartment in central Harlem, even while owning a home upstate in Guilderland and having unfettered access to the 40-room Governor’s Mansion in Albany. Governor Paterson and his wife, Michelle, made about $270,000 last year, according to their tax returns. This is a classic example of hoarding. He should be ashamed of his Lenox Terrace apartment that someone would gladly pay market rate to rent, but seems to think it’s ok. Can’t we at least deregulate apartments when the inhabitant can afford to live in a market-rate apartment? I hope the media pays attention to this, and properly scrutinizes the dark-side of rent regulation.