Seize it. We have a housing crisis, we have a homelessness crisis, and conservatives are constantly whining about “the homeless problem.” So let’s solve it. This is what eminent domain is for - to address public crises.
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That would have been a very good idea at any point from 2008-2023, back when there were a lot of unemployed and underemployed people who would have loved to work building housing and other needed public projects, or the tools necessary to enable the same.
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It still is. There is a lot of empty housing and a lot of people who need housing. Put those two things together. It’s not that complicated.
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Except in this case, there’s not even starting with that. I think it’s some cargo cult thinking, where they’re looking at New York and asking, “What does New York have that we don’t… that we could remedy without spending any money and in fact will get paid to put up? That’s right - electronic billboards! Finally, we’ll look like a real city!”
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speaking of art and culture, the Detroit Institute of Art is one of the best museums I’ve ever been to. on par with what’s in Chicago and NY.
I went to Chicago for a week in early 00s and loved it. NY was good, but I liked Chi better.
my biggest problem with all 3 cities is the winters are unacceptable to me. but aside from that I wanted to move to Chi.
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it’s like when I went to Atlanta’s High Museum the first time. the traveling exhibits were great but the permanent collection was " … that’s… IT?" despite having a fairly vibrant artist scene in Atlanta. they had just bought a small and pretty wack Picasso they were so proud of, instead of buying a hundred cool things to actually fill out the collection with that money. they could’ve probably bought several hundred by our good but unknown artists at that price.
to be fair, they’ve expanded and gotten much better over the ensuing years.
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In this case, I feel like the analogy for the city is, “You know what Art Museums have? Gift shops. We should build a gift shop - we don’t need the actual museum bit.” Over and over again, there’s something the city wants, but what they build is something that has some superficial connection to the thing they want, rather than working towards the thing itself (which would require complicated long-term thinking, planning and spending). Also a lot of interest in “looking the part” (the city has had numerous people in city government who came from back East, and decided that San Jose should look like their notion of a real California city - by planting a lot of palm trees, that aren’t remotely native to the area).
(San Jose’s non-metaphorical Art Museum, on the other hand, is smallish, but pretty decent, though. The permanent collection smartly has a lot of California/Bay Area artists.)
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Geography and zoning make it a lot more complicated than it otherwise needs to be. Yes, nationwide, there are about 144M homes and 132M households, but the existence of empty houses a half hour outside Pittsburgh doesn’t help the person with no savings scraping by in NY (often illegally because the law doesn’t allow 4 or more unrelated people to live together there) who may have lots of local ties that make moving harder. if they have a partner, moving requires going somewhere they can both find jobs in their fields, or else one of them giving up their career, which means moving to smaller cities or towns where the cheap and empty homes generally are is right out.
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I grew up in San Jose when the Santa Clara Valley was known not for silcon but for fruit trees. [“Prune Capital of the World,” no kidding.] Spent decades in San Francisco & a handful of years in Brooklyn. I’d still rather be in Oakland than any of them.
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There are tens of thousands of rent-controlled apartments sitting vacant in NYC too. Not to mention all the other countless vacant units owned by people who treat property as a kind of financial investment rather than, you know, a place to live.
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This. And should we put money on how many VRBOs and AirBnBs? 10,000? 50,000?
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Actually I’m from Toronto 
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On the internet, no one knows…
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Definitely! This is a natural and entirely foreseeable consequence of trying to use NYC’s rent control approach, the way they’ve historically implemented it, as a way to improve housing affordability. Cap both prices (rent control) and supply (zoning and other related restrictions), and sellers either won’t sell or will provide a sub-par product. It doesn’t mean housing in Manhattan would otherwise be cheap, by any means. But it means either more people could get to live in the city who are willing to pay market rate, or housing could be cheaper on average, both of which would be a net gain for society.
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