
What Happened to the West Village? - kwindla
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/10/09/what-happened-to-the-west-village/
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imgabe
Ultimately the people who buy up housing in major cities as a place to park
money are going to end up shooting themselves in the foot.

Parking a few million dollars in a Manhattan apartment is desirable because
it's unlikely to lose value and you can actually use it when you visit. But if
all the apartments are owned by people who mostly don't live there and only
visit a few times a year, the thing that made them valuable - being located in
a desirable, dynamic city where lots of people live and work, is no longer
going to be true and they're going to lose value.

Cities should implement punitively high property taxes on any homes or
apartments that are not used as a primary residence, either by the owner or a
tenant.

~~~
setr
So... It's a self-correcting problem that will naturally find some
equilibrium? The price goes up, it becomes worth using as a bank, but
eventually bank usage leads to price reduction and thus not as valuable as a
bank.

I'm not clear how you conclude regulation is needed; self-regulating systems
are exactly where gov intervention is not required.

~~~
imgabe
You're missing the part where the correction involves the economic collapse of
a major city.

~~~
yathern
I don't know if 'desirable neighborhood becomes less desirable because of
over-gentrification' is necessarily 'economic collapse of a major city'.

~~~
imgabe
Even if it doesn't take out the whole city because no one can afford to live
there, the people governing the city have a duty to represent the interests of
the people who live there.

Generally (well, tautologically), people are interested in living in desirable
areas. What is the benefit to the citizens of the city of allowing homes in
those areas to be used as investment vehicles for wealthy foreigners? Why
should they care at all about the interests of people who aren't going to live
there?

Prioritize people who actually live there and if some billionaire who lives
somewhere else absolutely must have a pied-a-terre, they can pay 20% or 50% or
however much of the value of the home each year for the privilege.

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MisterTea
I used to hang out in the village from around 96 or so to the late 00's. The
place was packed with all sorts of people visiting the numerous quirky shops,
many of which lined 8th st. Punks, metal heads (me included), hip hop,
skaters, artsy and bohemian types, tourists, from high school kids to elderly.
There was real life there. Record stores, book stores, comic book shops,
clothing and fabric shops, collectibles, gaming, etc. We'd go to bleecker bobs
and go to this grugy dude in the back and order black metal imports.
Generation records always had tons of vinyl and they had a great band tee
shirt collection. The chess shop was few doors down and one friend was a
frequent player.

Over the summer I took the train in to walk around the village and was
heartbroken. Half the stores along 8th st are indeed boarded up. Shops I was
familiar with were gone. The eerie part that struck me was how empty village
was. Sure there were people walking around but not the hustle and bustle of
all walks of life prowling the shops.

It's been sanitized. And thats whats happening. The white glove suburbanites
are doing their damndest to scrub away New York City's "dirty" history so they
can live in/visit their septic utopia devoid of unsightly things and people.
And the same thing happened to Williamsburg too. They killed my home and I
increasingly feel like a stranger in my own city.

~~~
jonahbenton
Has nothing to do with sanitization, frankly.

It has everything to do with exploding rents, which themselves are due to the
consolidation of commercial (and residental) ownership, changes in yield
expectations from real estate, changes in global capital availability, and the
benefits that accrue to owners at scale when property lies vacant.

And the complete lack of energy or imagination from De Blasio.

I have personally seen commercial rents rise by 10x in some extreme cases,
from contract to contract, with 2x-4x being more common. When demand isn't
there at those prices capital rich owners often can wait and take paper
"losses" while the neighborhood takes real losses.

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momokoko
Cities are becoming expensive for two main reasons. People with unlimited
funds buy them up because its an investment you can actually use, and dual
income couples cannot move to smaller places where it is possible that only
one of the two can get a well paying job in their chosen profession.

The internet has created an environment where it is incredibly easy for
landlords to find tenants and dramatically decrease the cost of tenant churn
for them. This allows them to raise rents much more aggressively, and quickly,
than they could have done in the past.

~~~
barry-cotter
Cities are becoming more expensive because of zoning. If you build enough
housing that demand equals supply prices will be stable. Tokyo’s population
has gone up 50% over the last two decades and property prices and rents are
basically flat because they’ve built more housing.

Why does this happen in Japan but not NYC or SF? National, not local zoning.
State level would probably work too.

~~~
sdrothrock
> property prices and rents are basically flat because they’ve built more
> housing.

> Why does this happen in Japan but not NYC or SF?

I don't think zoning is the complete answer here -- there's a lot of stuff
going on in Japan, and in Tokyo in particular, that's very different from the
US.

For example, a lot of cheaper places are tiny and have no shower or a shared
shower. I don't think a lot of Americans would be willing to deal with that,
but Japan has a public bath culture/history.

In Tokyo in particular, there's a huge amount of public transportation
options, which allow people to live farther out and commute easily (with the
commute costs being covered by work) -- that's not as simple in NYC. Imagine
living in White Plains and commuting to the heart of Tokyo every day in a
reliable, timely fashion.

Another thing is that a lot of cheaper housing in Tokyo is just old (post-war
wood construction with a veneer of modernity) or in just plain bad areas (low-
lying areas near rivers, below the water table, on reclaimed land, far from
hospitals/fire departments, etc.)

On top of all that, housing here just isn't an investment like it is in
America. Nobody's house or apartment appreciates with age.

It's not as simple as pointing at the average rent and zoning.

~~~
greggman2
Do you have any stats on apartments without baths? I know apartments with no
showers exist but I haven't seen one since 2000. I don't know how common they
still are. Prices of new apartments and houses are not that high (well,
relative to NYC, SF). Sure there are expensive places like Meguro, but I see
ads on the subways all the time for brand new 100m^2 apartments for ~$400k (I
guess that's to your point that they are further out but don't a lot of people
takes trains in to NYC from far away? I know Google offers buses from Walnut
Creek to the Google Campus. That's 50 miles which I think is further than most
of the reasonable prices places you can live in Tokyo)

Japan also has the interesting issue (like you mentioned) that buying a house
or condo is not an investment which I find fascinating. It suggests to me not
that housing prices always go up just because of "economics" but also partly
by culture and belief. People in many places take it for granted that real
estate prices go up so they go up. They expect them to go up. Japanese take
for granted that real estate prices go down. To them buying a house or an
apartment is like buying a car. After you buy it it's used car / used house
and no one wants that (well, less people want that), they want new so price
goes down on non-new stuff. If I understand correctly there are only a few
small areas of Tokyo (Meguro being one) where prices of used apartments are
going up. If you can buy the land, the land prices might go up but if you're
buying an apartment/condo you're not buying the land.

~~~
sdrothrock
> Do you have any stats on apartments without baths? I know apartments with no
> showers exist but I haven't seen one since 2000.

I dug around a bit and I can't find anything outside of some articles with
people wondering if those apartments are still worthwhile with the number of
public baths going down.

I know I've seen train ads for new ones as recently as last year -- it might
be worth mentioning that all of these apartments are inside the Yamanote,
which explains why they don't have baths... cut everything possible to keep
the rent down to something someone could normally hope to afford.

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undefined3840
Cities change...it’s the longing for days past that created the housing crisis
in SF in the name of preservation.

I’m not familiar with the exact building restrictions in West Village but I
assume there’s strict height restrictions that have been grandfathered in long
ago...I’m going to guess these restrictions is the exact reason why the ultra
wealthy can just buy up a small building and make it into a SFH, which
obviously just exacerbates the housing problems in the neighborhood.

The story touched on this a bit but also seems like every time I visit half
the stores are either closed or new because rents are so high for businesses.
The only stores that I see have staying power are the ones that look like
obvious money laundering fronts like jewelry stores. It’s this strange ghost
town for retail.

~~~
vobios
There is a section that addresses that specific point:

> The Landmarks Preservation Board protects the facades of historic buildings,
> but not their interiors. Thus landmarking led townhouses once divided into
> multiple apartments to be converted into single-family mansions for the
> incoming super-rich—serving only to further inflame the speculative energies
> that skyrocketed the prices of the buildings they preserved.

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semiotagonal
I guess this is what they call a "hot take", but it's simply impossible to
preserve a neighborhood's character and keep it affordable. You either have to
build the same type of residences upward (in the city), or adjacent (in the
suburbs), or have prices go through the roof, or have a period of crisis and
collapse clear everyone out.

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codingslave
Was speaking with someone recently about the city feels increasingly empty.
There are less store fronts and such for sure, but huge swaths of apartments
in NYC are investments. They may sit vacant for years on end for some Saudi
Arabian wealth fund. There are certainly reports of the dropping population,
but in other ways things feel tangible. Living in NYC you come to discover how
small of a world it is, disparate friend groups may in turn know each other,
how big is this city really? Neighborhoods feel emptier, huge parts of the
population of the city are from wealthy Chinese and foreign backgrounds (this
is not to disparage them). They don't really work jobs or have traditional
careers, but fill the city, making it seem more hollow.

~~~
crazygringo
Sorry, but I feel like you or your friend must be getting this from the media
and not from personal experience.

Manhattan is the most populated it's been since 1960. [1] And the idea that
"huge swaths" of apartments are "Saudi Arabian" investments is simply
ridiculous. Yes, there are some, in a handful of ultra-luxury buildings, that
is far less than 1% of buildings. It doesn't change the social fabric of the
city at all.

And the idea that "huge parts of the population" are "wealthy Chinese and
foreign" who "don't really work jobs"? This is so utterly and completely false
I can't even imagine how you or your friend would develop this idea. I don't
know where you're getting your information from, but it's just 100% not true
at all.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City#Manhattan)

~~~
JDiculous
Why are you dismissing his personal observations with such a condescending
attitude?

First of all it's a well documented phenomenon that NYC apartments are being
bought by wealthy foreigners to invest and/or launder money without actually
living there. As a result, these wealthy areas are eerily empty:

"In a three-block stretch of Midtown, from East 56th Street to East 59th
Street, between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, 57 percent, or 285 of 496
apartments, including co-ops and condos, are vacant at least 10 months a year.
From East 59th Street to East 63rd Street, 628 of 1,261 homes, or almost 50
percent, are vacant the majority of the time, according to data from the
Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey." [1]

The increasingly empty storefronts in Manhattan are also well-documented.
Anyone who's lived in Manhattan for multiple years has noticed this -
commercial venues shutting down, and either remaining vacant or being replaced
with Chase bank retail branches or megachains.

There are a ton of trust fund kids who don't work, noticeably more compared to
any other city I've lived in. Of course it's probably a minority, but doesn't
change the reality of it.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/realestate/pieds-terre-
ow...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/realestate/pieds-terre-owners-
dominate-some-new-york-buildings.html)

~~~
vonmoltke
> First of all it's a well documented phenomenon that NYC apartments are being
> bought by wealthy foreigners to invest and/or launder money without actually
> living there. As a result, these wealthy areas are eerily empty:

> "In a three-block stretch of Midtown, from East 56th Street to East 59th
> Street, between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, 57 percent, or 285 of 496
> apartments, including co-ops and condos, are vacant at least 10 months a
> year. From East 59th Street to East 63rd Street, 628 of 1,261 homes, or
> almost 50 percent, are vacant the majority of the time, according to data
> from the Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey."

The Times quote does not demonstrate your statement. It demonstrates that a
significant chunk of a portion of Midtown is owned by largely-absent owners.
It does not demonstrate at all that these owners are "wealthy foreigners to
invest and/or launder money without actually living there".

~~~
JDiculous
Yea, there are a million other articles that talk about wealthy foreign
Chinese investors and Russian oligarchs laundering their money through
Manhattan real estate if you're interested in learning more about that.

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ppod
The author explicitly acknowledges that the result of rent control is
nepotism. Why is someone's friend's niece a better resident of this
neighborhood than anyone else?

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viburnum
When nice places for people become too expensive, the obvious thing to do is
to make more nice places for people. In America, however, it is only legal to
make more nice places for cars.

~~~
vinay427
What does this have to do with the issue in the article? In fact, it even
mentions someone likely parking illegally, probably due to a lack of spaces.

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rasz
It might be quite eye opening to learn 2000 square foot storefront in
Manhattan starts around $10000 a month in the cheapest (ABCD) parts.

