> New York’s zoning rules were intended to create less cramped quarters, but they also have consequences for the number of aggregate apartments in the city. Such limitations can quickly decrease the supply of housing, and most likely drive up rents. If every tenement in the city were reconfigured in these ways, they would be less crowded, but there would also be fewer apartments to go around.
Another part of the article says almost 3/4 of the square footage in Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930. I'm not sure how these regulations are supposed to have anything but a profound effect on rents. I can understand that people want to preserve aesthetics, but at what cost?
There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws.
These regulations are the results of social evolution, and explain why it's so hard to be a young adult today, across all industrialized societies.
I believe that the saying "The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation blows it" applies to societies as well as families. Current policy makers have no idea about the cost at which today's societies were built, and take for granted what they've been given and squander it. NIMBY laws are absolutely an example as the cherished old buildings were built in a different type of political climate and could not be built today, ironically.
"The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation blows it."
Digression:
Interestingly, this adage about hereditary rule is one of the loan phrases brought back after the First and Second Anglo-Afghan wars. Primarily these were from the language of the ruling Pathans (as we would call them Pashtuns.)
The original Pashto, more literally translated:
"The grandfather was born in a tent. He remembers living in a tent. He will lead the people well.
The father was born in a tent. He remembers both living in a tent, and living in a palace. He will lead the people well.
The son was born in a palace. He has never lived in a tent. He will not lead the people at all."
There are several of these Afghan sayings, from both the Pashtunwali and folk-wisdom, that the British officers brought back home. The most well-known of these most don't realize is an Pashto loan phrase at all:
That doesn't necessarily contradict the proverb. It's saying that somebody who starts out poor and then rises is still likely to have descendants who are poor. That is actually a statement that social classes are sticky.
Gloria Vanderbilt has an estimated $200 million, so I wouldn't say the Vanderbilts lost it all. Rather than 3 generations shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, it's more like 5 generations from America's richest to merely very rich.
Alfred Vanderbilt was less fortunate. He decided not to take the Titanic at the last minute, but 3 years later was on the Lusitania when it was torpedoed. Despite not knowing how to swim, he gave his life jacket to a young mother and died. (This is an interesting counterpoint to yesterday's article "Does power really corrupt" about how the rich are less caring.)
Alternatively, 7 centuries without new lasting wealth / dynasty's. Clearly, some groups understand how to maintain wealth, but for most newly wealthy it's easy come easy go.
On that time scale, I'm guessing IQ differences would come into play.
I'd be fascinated if they did a study on whether noble lineage predicts intellectual performance.
As a piece of side-data, Jews have, for many centuries, been above-average in wealth, and it's well-understood now that they're also above average in IQ. They've also long been discriminated against and sometimes massacred. Even in Nazi Germany, where Jews were openly hated, they remained wealthy. Even after WW2, when their families had been butchered and their homes destroyed and their things stolen, they quickly became wealthy again within a few decades.
In this case, it seems the Jewish IQ advantage consistently weighs more in their favor than their social disadvantages weight against them.
It's mostly a culture of investing in education for their children and working both smart and hard in business. Plus, there were tons of piss-poor jews in the US and elsewhere and tons still are.
It's quite a stretch to know that one group has a higher average IQ (by ~10 points) and yet still insist that there is some other explanation for why they are economically successful in every society.
I mean seriously. Question is there: Why are Jews wealthy? Answer is there: 110IQ. These are obviously the fixed cause and effect; everything else (e.g. culture of intellectual achievement) is just the fuzzy link between them.
>* It's quite a stretch to know that one group has a higher average IQ (by ~10 points) and yet still insist that there is some other explanation for why they are economically successful in every society.*
Actually, you probably just confuse cause and effect. Why do the jews have higher IQs? Answer: because they are wealthy, so their offspring have had the benefit of better nutrition, better early care, etc, and better selection of healthy and intelligent prospective partners. Tons of hereditary and environmental factors come into play just by being wealthy.
Not to mention that not all -- or even the majority-- of jews are wealthy, nor are all successful. These claims are mostly the province of stereotype, not to say racism.
I sincerely doubt that it's genetic. There just simply wasn't enough population isolation to generate that level of genetic variation over the timescale involved (even a couple kiloyears isn't that long in evolutionary terms.)
In the early twentieth century, the world also marveled at Jewish athletes. That isn't exactly the stereotype anymore.
If you perform even a casual examination of
Ashkenazi Jewish culture in the United States (if such a monolithic group could be said to exist), you'd see a few fairly common elements: bilingual study from an early age, a strong focus on education as the path to wealth, strong family ties creating a social safety net, kin-group contributions both tangible and intangible, and among the wealthy, all the factors that go along with having wealthy parents.
Wealth confers a bevy of physical advantage: early childhood nutrition, sanitary living conditions, and a stable family environment all come to mind.
Finally wealth conveys a package of invisible advantages: better parenting strategies, more parental involvement, intellectual confidence, social belonging, really an entirely different series of mental models for understanding and navigating the world.
People underestimate exactly how much parents' shape their children's destiny. Data from admissions programs, studied during ththe affirmative action and legacy admissions arguments, demonstrates the single most powerful predictor of a student's likelihood of finishing undergraduate education isn't GPA, SAT, or high school institution; it's the level of education completed by their parents.
The point is that it is very difficult to disentangle the effects of any combination of wealth, genetics, epigenetics, and a particular culture, especially compounded over generations.
No, the study shows that similar families are rich today as back then. It does not say what happened in between. It could well be that these families lost and regain their fortunes multiple times.
Strictly speaking, the aphorism relates to the nouveau-riche. Old money may have other aspects of social entrenchment to wealth, which is only disrupted by major social disasters like World War I or the Black Plague.
Life is more complicated then Keynes at places.
SARDAR title is bestowed after 5 generations for example in PUNJAB regarldess of what 3 of them did with their money.
It's really not some crazy idea. I'm sure you've heard
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel,"
And this precisely defines the reason for the existence of institutions, which can continue the execution of a set of values longer than a single lifespan of a human. A well designed institution can continue to amass wealth and power throughout its multi-generational existence.
I'm fascinated by this topic. How do the legacy-type families do it? I'm talking your Kennedies, your Bushes, etc. Preserving wealth and power for generations?
"Joseph P. Kennedy’s choice to place his fortune in trusts is possibly the single most critical reason why the family wealth is still around today. The most obvious benefit was to protect the fortune from the prying fingers of ne’er-do-well heirs, said Laurence Leamer, who wrote three Kennedy biographies. Trusts often prevent beneficiaries from tapping more than 10 percent of principal, said Rick Kruse, principal at Kruse and Crawford, which offers estate management advice.
The trusts also protect the family assets from another set of prying fingers: Uncle Sam’s. By holding assets in so called “dynasty trusts,” which are passed from heir to heir for decades, if not longer, the Kennedy family fortune is largely insulated from the estate tax, Kruse said. Handled correctly, a dynasty trust could potentially maintain an un-taxable fortune indefinitely. The oldest Kennedy trust on record dates back to 1936."
The same way "legacy type" universities, or "legacy type" companies do it. An institution is a set of processes, governing rules, and feedback mechanisms which serve to reinforce the core mission. Individual (fallible) control is ceded to the rules and processes in exchange for ensured existence.
Harvard University is a good example of a durable institution, look at how its bylaws and processes protect its mission, but more importantly how its feedback mechanisms try to identify and purge potential threats to the institution. In a lot of ways it is similar to programming, only with people who can be modeled as unreliable computers which don't always follow their instructions. So you need interconnected missions of individuals to support the institution's mission. At some point if you have enough individuals who are off script the institution will fail, but with clever process and incentive one can minimize that risk.
Many urban building typologies are effectively illegal in nearly all of the country (but not Manhattan below 110th Street) due to parking minima, even in supposedly-unzoned Houston.
One of my great hopes for autonomous vehicles is that they will finally break the political logjam where existing neighborhood residents demand new housing/businesses in mostly parking-free neighborhoods require offstreet parking to preserve their own access to street parking. (And that bike lanes/pedestrian space/etc that require taking back some of the land that car owners usurped at midcentury become possible.)
For dense city cores I'd prefer parking at the edges (part of the city) and forms of people movers (think caves of steel / tomorrow land belts).
For other places I agree that eliminating street parking is ideal, but believe that more underground/in-building parking is necessary, with enough space for useful vehicles to park safely.
They are in the process of doing it, at least slowly.
There still needs to be some sort of delivery truck access, irregardless. Parts of downtown Chicago provide an interesting example with multi-leveled streets, the big deliveries and trash collection can be all be done out of sight.
I suspect very soon we will see a city, or multiple cities, start blocking off certain streets and then neighborhoods to non-autonomous vehicles. Maybe it will be Manhattan, maybe it will be another city. This lowers the bar for how advanced the self driving tech needs to be by a lot. You can have 100% traffic enforcement. Pedestrian deaths should almost be completely eliminated short of some very unusual edge cases.
I've recently been musing on a similar theory, but for safety regulations, redundancy, and preventable disasters, for example at nuclear power plants, or the recent example with the Washington DC subway system shutdown. Initially, there are lots of safety regulations and redundancy, and the power plant goes for a while with no accidents. Then, either the people working there fall into complacency and get lax on the safety regulations, and/or politicians or higher-ups looking to cut costs cut some of the redundancy, in either case thinking "it'll be fine, there's never been an accident". Then the inevitable happens, and suddenly there's a renewed interest in safety and redundancy. Rinse and repeat.
The implication of this is that while it might be theoretically possible to operate a nuclear power plant safely for an indefinite period, the inevitability of relaxing safety regulations after a long period of no accidents virtually guarantees an accident after a certain amount of time. I'm not sure if there's any empirical (i.e. non-anecdotal/confirmation biased) evidence to support this theory, or what could be done about it if it were true.
See also: The resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases every few generations, because parents who never experienced the disease since their generation had the vaccine decide that their kids don't need the vaccine.
I've been thinking along similar lines for many years, though with the language of externalities. For example, here's a comment of mine from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596
I haven't thought about safety like you have, but my bias is to wonder if part of the reason regulations get lax is that they first get complicated due to the influence of people motivated by their own selfish interest. Perhaps over time people add crap to regulations, which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff, and this leads to backlash? With the final sin being to forget Chesterton's Fence? That would fit with my experience.
One thought-experiment idea I had was a society governed not by rules but by unit tests for rules. That would allow any cop or citizen to globally change a rule if he found an exception that didn't violate existing tests. See the final section of http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff. Of course then the problem is that people would start gaming the tests rather than the rules. That's as far as I got.. :) These days I try not to think about the hard instance of this problem, and instead focus on an easier problem: avoiding externalities in software projects using more thorough tests. That's going a bit better.
In addition, it may be useful to have some sort of mental model of how you value your time. "Seriously, you make six figures and spend an hour a week doing some task you despise to save $5?" However, most people aren't in a position where they can directly trade in, say, an hour of commuting time for a check.
All I need now is to find the person willing to pay me $400 every night for sleeping.
Alternatively, I can slap whatever "value" I like on my time, but since I'm not the person paying me, that's just some words to make me feel good about myself. It's actually "worth" whatever I can convince someone to pay, and I can't find anyone willing to pay me for doing nothing for them.
Being stuck on a train for an hour isn't the end of the world. But taking the same train ride twice a day, 5 days a week?
I value my time highly (not because I'm some rockstar who bills $300/hr, but because I like having autonomy over my own life). Assuming I sleep 8 hrs/day, work 8 hrs/day, and spend 2 additional hrs/day doing chores like showering, cooking, random errands, working out, etc, that only leaves 6 hours of free time.
With a two hour roundtrip daily commute, that cuts my free time by 1/3 and only leaves me with 4 hours to myself. Thus I place a high premium on those 4 hours.
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I think it's absurd that 1 hr+ commuting times are pretty normal (I live in NYC, and even 2-3 hour commutes are pretty common), and I think we should be striving to reduce this wasted time by increasing density in cities, making transportation more efficient, and increasing workplace flexibility (eg. embracing remote work).
maybe I'm weird but I recently traded the density and short commute for a longer bus commute (hour each way) out to the suburbs and I actually like it better. I like having my work and home be two completely separate worlds, as well as not having to smell fermented bum pee on the suburban bus routes.
The reason those commutes are awful is not because Manhattan is unaffordable. The areas around New York City are among the least functional urban zones I've ever encountered. Total, utter, abject mismanagement of resources——and I say that as someone who used to live in Sheldon Silver's district of Manhattan. It's unreasonable to expect Manhattan to be affordable, but it's not unreasonable to expect the surrounding areas to be safe, able to operate trains, have reasonable housing, etc.
I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but New Jersey and Long Island are a toxic trash fire compared to somewhere like Tokyo. I wouldn't send my worst enemies to live in a place like Jersey City or East New York.
I have to agree. It always boggles me when I visit Manhattan and think to myself: "This is one of the richest and grandest cities in human history - so why are the public spaces so putrid?" Constantly stepping on old gum and cigarette butts...and God help you if you need to use the subway on a hot summer day.
I often feel the same way walking about San Francisco and encountering the unmistakeable stench of human excrement.
Having been to old European cities like Berlin and Rome, I was surprised at how graffiti-strewn their walls tended to be, but at least their streets were CLEAN!
Berlin is without a doubt the nicest city I have ever been to. Every time I go there, I think to myself, why couldn't the T in Boston be 10% as nice as the U/S-Bahn system? I absolutely hate cities, and I think I could possibly stomach living in Berlin.
It's a shame the US really came into its own around the time of the automobile. Once cities were designed around cars, it became impossible to dislodge. Old European cities were constrained by the distance one could reasonably travel by foot, so they were densely packed together. When I lived in Rome for a short while, every service I needed - groceries, dining, haircut, gelato - was within a 3-block radius. Pretty much the entire city was like that.
As much as we want to densify in the US, the fact is that two-lane streets with sidewalks HUGELY increase the distance between buildings and are horrible for walkability. Most of the twisty streets in Rome could fit 1 Fiat at a time.
I wish we could do that here, but we would A: have to knock down almost everything and start from scratch, and B: figure out a way for emergency services to get there and back quickly.
I agree with this. With cars came the idea that different parts of the city could be optimized for different things. Work in one place, shop in another, sleep in yet a third. But that means you have no option but to spend a lot of time traveling between these places.
Another small thing that makes a big difference: in Japan there is basically no street parking anywhere. There's a ton of small automated parking lots, and lots of car-elevator parking. When you buy a car, the police visit to confirm that you have a private parking spot. Not having the visual noise and clutter of parked cars everywhere makes it easier to keep the place clean, makes room for bicycles, etc.
If you think that Jersey City or East New York are representative of the areas around New York City, then you don't know the region well at all. Along the commuter train lines extending out of the city you will find many of the most beautiful, safest, most walkable, best-educated (with good public schools), most politically-engaged, and community-oriented towns in the country.
Yes, there is a massive disparity of wealth in New York City, and in the region generally, and that definitely has an impact on the livability of many places within the region. The suburbs of New York are among the most wealthy communities in the US, but several of NJ's cities are among the poorest; unfortunately, there is also a racial component to that disparity that must not be ignored. To really live well in the NYC area, unfortunately, you must have money, which makes living here very hard for many young people starting out. But beyond a doubt it is easier (and cheaper) to live well around New York City and still be an hour's train ride from downtown than it is in San Francisco or LA. And only in this region do you still find successful adults who don't even have a driver's license, let alone a car.
I don't know Tokyo, so I can't comment on the direct comparison you made. But I would suggest that every urban area in the world has its disadvantaged neighborhoods, and if you are comparing the wealthiest parts of the cities you have visited to the poorest parts of the NYC region, then that is not a fair comparison.
I lived in lower Manhattan for 20 years. I know the region well.
Perhaps you would consider places like Forest Hills, Queens or Bushwick, Brooklyn or Staten Island or Hoboken or Teaneck or Westchester to be the "most beautiful, safest, most walkable, best-educated (with good public schools), most politically-engaged, and community-oriented towns in the country". For me, none of those places are within even the top 200 "most beautiful, safest, most walkable, best-educated...etc." places that I've been to in America or elsewhere.
Do I have high standards? Yes. My personal opinion is that the area around NYC sets a low standard and achieves against it, and that comments like yours perpetuate the fundamental issue, which is essentially a stubborn kind of underachievement.
I was thinking more Summit, Madison, Larchmont, Bronxville, Mamaroneck, Ramsey, Ho-ho-kus, Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown, Nyack, Nanuet...and that's a pretty short list, and not including anywhere in Long Island or the 5 Boroughs.
One thing that you will probably agree with, being as you are someone who lived for so long in lower Manhattan, is the fact that most people who live in lower Manhattan will frequently find reasons to avoid leaving the confines of Manhattan and Brooklyn whenever possible. Perhaps you don't know the region as well as you think you do?
OK, but, why do people avoid leaving the confines of Manhattan and Brooklyn?
I had a car for many years in NYC, and I mostly used it to get as far away as possible. That liminal zone outside the city is beyond depressing to me. I've never been a huge fan of suburbs (even the quiet, tree-lined ones), but huge swathes of the areas around NYC are best described as semi-abandoned, litter-strewn, century-old, razor-wired-wrapped, pigeon-shit coated blight. And the means by which one passes through these areas are broken. The highways are perpetually "under construction", yet covered in potholes. The trains are crowded, dirty, late, filled with crazy people, on fire, etc. Half the cars are being driven by people who probably don't have valid licenses, and have the common courtesy of PCP addicts. Trashcans overflowing with rats scurrying around. Piles and piles of trash bags leaking toxic fluids into the gutters and sewers. And every ten blocks or so is an "am I going to die today if I walk near here?" housing project. (Probably you won't die, but don't use your iPhone!)
I'm sorry, but it's a disgusting mess and we can and should do sooo much better. I'm not someone who wants the world to be a Connecticut country club——in fact, I would almost hate that more. I'm talking about a civilization where people carry around a reasonable amount of shame and humility and build atop the nice things that others have left behind instead of accruing sedimentary layers of ill will and misery on their own doorstep.
(For the record, even Manhattan, and definitely Brooklyn don't meet my standards either. Tokyo. That's a far bigger city in a country with a failing economy, but is clean, pleasant, and orderly in every direction.)
>Tokyo. That's a far bigger city in a country with a failing economy, but is clean, pleasant, and orderly in every direction.
The country may have a failing economy but it's also a vastly different culture to a degree that makes it hard to compare. London is probably the fairer comparison.
I'm not really going to defend Manhattan though. I lived there one summer--albeit in the 80s as a student when there was a lot worse things about it than today. But, much as I do like visiting from time to time, I'd never want to live there.
> The country may have a failing economy but it's also a vastly different culture to a degree that makes it hard to compare. London is probably the fairer comparison.
The bits of London outside Manhattan are also pretty rubbish.
Look, as a fellow 20-year New York City veteran, you can see in this city what you want to. You're clearly taking a bleak view on it. I'm sorry you've viewed so much of the city through this lens and been turned off by it. But this really speak more of your lens than intrinsic qualities of the city.
I agree with you that the educational infrastructure here is sadly lacking. And the highways.
I largely disagree with most everything else you've shared. Jersey City and East New York aren't remotely similar to each other - huge swaths of Jersey City are perfectly livable and lightyears ahead of East New York, which is notoriously one of the city's most challenged neighborhoods. Huge swaths of Jersey City are also downtrodden, but... it's an entire city. It varies up and down. East New York is just a single neighborhood.
Trashcan cleanliness is middle of the road - I've certainly seen better but I've certainly seen worse. New York is a far cleaner city than the stereotypes suggest. Some blocks are absurdly filthy. Others are pristinely taken care of and perfectly clean.
I couldn't disagree more strongly on your attitude about housing projects. They are not death zones. You're not placing your life into your hands by walking through them. You can use your iPhone walking straight through the middle of many of them and you will have zero problems of any kind. You're doing a real disservice feeding into peoples' worst paranoid fears about housing projects. Some have more problems than others. Most are filled with decent people and most are far more stable than reputations suggest. Some housing projects I'd feel uncomfortable walking through But most I wouldn't (and don't).
And so on. We could debate these perspectives forever, but I've learned quite clearly that you can take two people who live in this city for the same exact amount of time and find one who views it as a filthy godforsaken land of misery and poverty while the other sees it as an inspiring place full of passion, beauty, and inspiring and deeply giving people. Eye of the beholder is a real thing here. I won't fault your perspective but I seriously challenge the idea that it's some uniquely accurate perspective.
I, for one, couldn't imagine wanting to live in Tokyo over New York, no matter how pleasant it is (but I wouldn't mind better train service).
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, you had me laughing out loud.
However, there's something you're missing: just how dynamic this city is. And I'm afraid part of that is the Manhattan bubble that makes it hard to see what goes on outside of there.
Namely, you mentioned a list of neighborhoods earlier that matched the litter-strewn image you alliterated to here. It's true that many are shitholes from an aesthetic perspective. Some of the local neighborhoods also have your common element of suspicious, aggressive people who seem to pay no mind to tossing litter, etc. And Brooklyn drivers seem to have this 'Neglectful Psychopath' sort of persona. And teenagers ride around on dirtbikes, shuffling zombies yell and moan in line in front of the methadone clinics, etc. We can continue forever painting these sorts of images.
But these places were neglected for so long, with a poverty rate so high. Meanwhile there's a breakneck pace of change. You didn't mention Cobble Hill, which was a shithole, or Fort Greene, which was a bang-bang shithole recently, nor Prospect Heights before Barclays Center, unrecognizable and cheap a decade ago, nor (let's keep going backwards), Williamsburg with its empty Bedford Ave (as little as the early 00's there was little of what there is today, as I recall going there for music lessons). Let's keep going backwards: the East Village was a litter-strewn shithole where you had to walk in the middle of the street to avoid getting mugged (Alphabet City, I'm talking about), now you have multi-million dollar condos going up between aves B and C! Let's keep going backwards: Soho, and even Greenwhich Village?
This city changes, and that's one of the themes of the article we're referencing. Some of the areas in Brooklyn making a comeback were once where the wealthy specifically lived (some of most beautiful, custom-stoneworked brownstones are around Putnam and Hancock in southeast Bed Stuy where investment bankers are now moving). Now that the city's attracting so many residents, there's outward pressure to expand and finite supply of housing in which to do so.
Bushwick will never be a Connecticut Country Club (unfortunately, because then I wouldn't have to avoid walking on dog poop all the time). But it's becoming more and more an area like the affluent parts of Brooklyn (slowly but surely), which themselves have met or exceeded your comfortable little corners of lower Manhattan (where I also lived 10 years). Even places with 40% poverty rates have condos going up and NYU grads moving there.
In fact, the pace of change is so breakneck that DeBlasio got elected on a platform to protect those most affected by the change. And that's a constant theme of the City Council too. Demand is so high, the demand is pushing these 'shitty' areas to improve. Gentrification is a topic on people's minds and a source of arguments all day, every day here.
I'm going long on your detested outer boroughs: I've bought a place. And yes, in the meanwhile I have to clean up the garbage of my neighbors as it floats into my yard.
Gentrification is a topic on people's minds and a source of arguments all day, every day here.
I grew up in the East Village in the 1960s. One of my favorite memories of Tompkins Square Park, when I returned for a visit in about 1980, was graffiti that read "stop the gentrification of the Lower East Side". So gentrification is a process that has been ongoing in NYC for many many years.
I'm going long on your detested outer boroughs: I've bought a place.
I'm with you in terms of where to live. I'm raising a couple of kids in a suburb of Portland Oregon, and it's infinitely nicer than the East Village of the 1960s. And, for kids, it's probably much nicer than the East Village of today (but I don't know for sure since I only return about once a decade).
There are so many attractions of living in Manhattan. But there are so many downsides. E.g. your neighboring apartments' cockroaches become your cockroaches. Their mice become your mice. The single 15A electrical circuit that powers your entire apartment is inadequate. The Hare Krishnas waking you up when they walk down the middle of the street, chanting at 4 AM. The week-long non-stop fireworks around the 4th of July. Etc.
Well, it sounds like you are part of the solution, and that's the only way it will ever get fixed. When we say that a place has been neglected, the people who live there are ultimately to blame. A civil society is a bottom-up effort, not top-down.
You cherry picked the one Metro North line that's not a total hellhole. Median Rent in Mamaroneck is $4700/month, Median house sale price is over a million. It's 27 miles from Grand Central and you will spend 2+ hours a day getting there and back minimum.
Even Connecticut has gone nuts. Once you get past Greenwich it's a (literal) train wreck all the way to Boston.
I purposely named towns on four separate rail lines, and there are probably two or three dozen more communities with a similar profile in the region that are similarly well-connected by rail. Yes, Mamaroneck is one of the more expensive communities I named; for what it's worth, though, Mamaroneck is 36 minutes from Grand Central by train (which is one reason it is more expensive). Other places are much less expensive, although you may be on the train for an hour or so before you get to where you are going in the city.
44+ minutes at morning rush now. Buying a million dollar property then watching your commute times increase 10% every few years is another joy of living in the area.
The areas surrounding Manhattan are very safe (especially by American urban standards) and the MTA is an reasonably capable railroad operator. It's terrible at capital projects, however.
The MTA is a pretty horrible railroad operator. It goes far beyond being bad at capital projects. They're not good at day to day operation of a railroad (look at the % of trains that are deadheaded). They're not good at labor relations. There is insane intra-organization disfunction between MetroNorth and LIRR.
Worst of all, they're seemingly getting worse at safety.
I believe a large part of the problem is that the MTA is actually funded/managed by Albany instead of NYC, even though it only serves NYC. That makes 0 sense. I also think it's time to eliminate the distinction between the LIRR and MetroNorth.
> I believe a large part of the problem is that the MTA is actually funded/managed by Albany instead of NYC, even though it only serves NYC. That makes 0 sense. I also think it's time to eliminate the distinction between the LIRR and MetroNorth.
Brief storytime about the MTA. When the subways were built from the 00s through the 20s, some of the lines were owned by private operators, specifically the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) and BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit), and some were owned by the city: the IND (the INDepdent Subway System).
Then, then depression hit. Fares were pegged at 5 cents. All the private companies were bought by the city. The MTA was formed. Now, by the early 50s, the MTA controls the entire subway system.
Around this time, Robert Moses works to convert NYC to a fully car-based city. Subway ridership declines. The elevated lines are torn down, streetcar service halted. The MTA goes bankrupt in the 1970s. They're bailed out/bought up by Albany, thus leading to the current system where Albany controls the MTA.
I agree that control of the MTA should go back to the city, but good luck getting Cuomo to give it up.
> They're not good at labor relations
Indeed, yet the labor unions are also part of why the operating costs are so high. Each active subway train requires two human employees according to union policies. On lines with CBTC installed, no humans are technically required. The unions also fight against automation improvements such as this that could dramatically improve capacity and cut costs.
> There is insane intra-organization disfunction between MetroNorth and LIRR.
Not to mention NJ Transit, the PATH, and, forward-looking, DeBlasio's proposed waterfront light rail (which would be operated by another authority entirely).
Fascinating. Robert Moses and his car-heavy vision of the future was a seriously misguided effort. My guess is that a lot of the current squalor around the city leads back to his desk, too.
If you are looking for an excellent book about what Robert Moses did for/to New York, I would recommend the Power Broker by Robert Caro (who is also known for his (ongoing) definitive biography of Lyndon Johnson):
As well as a raging racist. Not just a firehose and attack dog racist, but full on these people in these neighbourhoods do not exist in my mind, racist.
> MTA is actually funded/managed by Albany instead of NYC
The MTA board has six members appointed by the governor, four appointed by the mayor, and 1 each appointed by the county executives of Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester. There's also four members appointed by the county executives of Dutchess, Orange, Rockland, and Putnam but they all share one vote. The funding situation is even more complicated.
I remember on reddit when a Swedish guy started randomly looking at Google street views in northern Indiana, and was remarking how the occupied properties look like they were abandoned, and how often guns were brandished at the Google StreetView car. The houses looked exactly the same as those within a 10-minute drive from my house in a major American metro area.
A big part of it is how young American cities are. Many European cities are celebrating 800 or 1000-year anniversaries. Many American cities are celebrating 100 or 150-year anniversaries.
Well, the public transit in SD is terrible. There is the "trolley", which basically a toy serving the downtown, and a bus system where most of the routes stop at 7pm and don't run on weekends at all. I recently moved back to the Washington DC area after living for some years in SD and despite the troubles of the Metro, it is 1000x better than the SD situation.
"Another part of the article says almost 3/4 of the square footage in Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930"
That isn't exactly unexpected when pretty much every factor in construction says that it gets harder to build the more developed an area is. Comparing pictures shows that plenty of high buildings has been built since then. [0] [1]
"I can understand that people want to preserve aesthetics, but at what cost?"
Politically motivated zoning rules isn't first and foremost about aesthetics, it's about preserving property values (at the high end) and not being squeezed out (at the low end).
>There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws.
It's partly because of NIMBY zoning laws, but I'd say it has more to do with our awful public transit system. It's bad enough trying to head downtown within Manhattan on the Lexington Ave express -- commutes from the outer boroughs can be measured in hours. There are no plans for new subway lines (excluding the 2nd Ave subway, which isn't even fully funded) and city council won't approve true bus rapid transit.
> There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws.
Why are these people so eager to work in Manhattan if working there sucks so much?
If employees refused to work in places with unacceptable commutes, employers will create other places to work.
If enough people want to "live the dream" or have some reason they Absolutely Must Work in Manhattan, all the dressage in the world won't stop it from becoming intolerable.
While capitalism tends to balance itself out, zoning laws aren't as flexible. It's a fine line between inconvenient to intolerable, as more and more people living in San Francisco are discovering.
Because an office in Manhattan gives you access to talent from the entire heavily populated (20 million) and relatively well educated NY metro area. (Which in turn grows because highly educated people are drawn there for employment opportunities. Positive feedback cycle.)
An office in SmallTown USA gives you access to the talent of the 10,000 people who live in SmallTown and an additional 10,000 people who live in the vicinity and are willing to drive 30-60 minutes to your office. And anyone who's educated and had a choice has moved to a larger city.
Sure there's in between sizes, but the population willing to commute to a suburb of NYC is also small relative to the city proper; as is the population available to a mid-size city (which may have commute time problems of its own and doesn't have the employment draw of the hugest cities).
And people may both move irrationally in search of employment and move rationally despite huge commute times (if the greater chance at a higher income outweighs the commute time for you). Or you may move based on rational principles but incorrect premises about how long you'll have to commute. Or move despite a long commute with the expectation that working in the city will give you chances to advance in your career and soon be able to afford a shorter commute.
I'm not claiming there isn't a problem, but these numbers seem odd to me. 75% of the square footage was built between 1900 and 1930. But only 40% of the buildings could not have been built today.
Is it that new buildings are roughly half the size? Or did they somehow manage to build buildings between 1900 and 1930 that could have been built today? If they could do it then, what is so hard about doing it now?
Most buildings in Manhattan are old. Many of them are larger than current zoning would allow. It is very hard to change zoning law, or the political status quo in general, in wealthy neighborhoods in Manhattan— we have accreted a process that makes change very difficult, though not as ridiculous as San Francisco.
Many new buildings in Manhattan are built in central Manhattan neighborhoods where tall buildings are legal. But new buildings built in wealthy areas of lower Manhattan can be smaller than older ones. See this rendering of 300 Lafayette Street, to be built in place of a gas station, and about half as tall as the 1920s building down the street:
https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-OA513_NYWTD0_P...
Even midtown Manhattan has zoning restrictions, which is crazy to me. People like to talk about preserving neighborhood characters -- well the neighborhood character of midtown (say 30th-50th excluding east of 3rd) is tall buildings and streets as canyons. That should be a free for all except for preserving a few key buildings and their environs (e.g. grand central).
Similarly, the telos of the LES and EV are cheap houses built as densely as possible at the time they were built to house poor immigrants. You honor that history most by allowing dense housing not by preserving ugly block after ugly block in situ.
By all means preserve Striver's Row and some of the nice block of Greenwich Village but there's no good reason to keep large parts of Manhattan static. Let Manhattan be Manhattan, if you want static move to some quaint village in Westchester.
My understanding is that in Midtown there's been a stronger appetite for building tall on the avenues vs. mid block between the avenues.
That's, as I recall, why there was the infamous chopping of 200 feet from the under-construction Nouvel Tower on West 53rd St - right smack dab in the middle of the land of skyscrapers.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, for most visitors, Manhattan is basically midtown--and they've certainly seen pictures of the financial district even if they've never gone down there. Even for a lot of residents, Manhattan effectively ends at around 100th Street or so. (I've been going to Manhattan all my life and even lived there for a summer and I've never been north of Central Park except to drive into the city and to visit The Cloisters once.)
Another part of the article says almost 3/4 of the square footage in Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930. I'm not sure how these regulations are supposed to have anything but a profound effect on rents. I can understand that people want to preserve aesthetics, but at what cost?
There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws.