you wouldn’t say that if you saw my house . put it this way, property values on my street aren’t going up because of my household.
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Well, yeah. Otherwise people might start squatting- And if there’s anything we hate in this country, it’s people having something they didn’t pay for. See also: Grocers putting poison in their own dumpsters to prevent people from taking anything they’ve already thrown out; Staples refusing to give away their empty paper boxes (thousands of them from the print center) because they sell cardboard file boxes.
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It reminds me of the small towns that have given up on maintaining paved roads and are turning them back into gravel ones – something I only saw before in old versions of Sim City when you didn’t give the roads enough funding.
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White folks moving out of mixed neighborhoods = bigots
White folks moving into mixed neighborhoods = gentrifiers
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What kind of weirdos do that? /s
That really is the key, though. There is a difference between moving in and changing everything and taking command and calling the cops on people simply for existing, and becoming part of an existing community. Sure, the existing community may be hostile at first, and you have to prove your intentions, but that’s because too many white people moving into more diverse neighbourhoods fall into the first category, and minorities have rightfully learned to be wary.
This has me mildly encouraged… note the line about building more permanent housing. If we can stick with it long enough to see the results (which I kind of doubt) we should see an actual drop in taxpayer costs, due to less drain on other systems (especially Health Care).
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Believe it or not, that was the bottom of the market after the crash of 88. We left Manhattan in 97 to buy in Jersey City. A JC fireman lived next door, but left for the Shore within a few years. They had bought a tiny rowhouse for $125k, sold for $250k, now it’s renovated again and on the market for $1m.
I think wishing for the that window to stay still is like wishing for the tides to stop so you don’t have to move your beach blanket. The best you’ll do is keep moving if you don’t buy. If you’ve read Outliers, you’ll know timing is everything sometimes.
I didn’t really want to say this in my previous post since I’m sure I’ll get flagged for victim blaming, but my wife is a LCSW social worker who has run NYC shelters and Medicaid based mental health clinics. A huge part of urban homelessness isn’t lack of affordable actual apartments, but a lack of flophouses like there used to be in our cities for the mentally ill and addicted. These are people not functional enough to hold an apartment, but a room in a boarding house could be afforded on their SSI or Veterans check. You can’t hold onto an apartment if you’re likely as not to decompensate, go off your meds, or just blow your whole check getting high.
I am NOT saying all homeless are crazy addicts, but enough are that it’s a significant problem that cannot be solved simply with what we would consider working class priced apartments.
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10 years to a bottom in NYC residential RE? I’ll need a citation for that one. I moved there in 1993 and the real estate market was already heating up. It only got hotter after a couple of years of Giuliani and by 1998 landlords were making the now-familiar efforts to kick out rent-controlled and stabilised tenants.
I’m sure that defeatist attitude is a convenient one to hold for developers and landlords, but it doesn’t change the fact that nothing effective is being done to keep the city from becoming what I described. The market will constantly shift outside the window (since the mid-80s usually in favour of landlords), but there are ways to stabilise it with smart zoning and rent legislation and small additions to the city sales tax. There’s just no political will, especially now that many landlords are large corporations or PE firms.
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The stagnant market cause inflation losses till 97. I like to tell people I made one great deal in my life that changed my fortunes.
http://www.jparsons.net/housingbubble/new_york.html
SRO hotels (the successors to 19th century rooming houses) were eliminated because they were slums – dirty, vermin infested, small and cramped. The problem is that for a long time they weren’t replaced with a better equivalent (this also happened in downtown L.A.). Here’s a good podcast documentary on one of the last ones in the Bowery:
“Better SROs” are here now, but they’re pricey co-living spaces like WeLive that serve trustafarians and young techies and digital nomads rather than addicts and the mentally ill.
Actual flophouses never left NYC, as the raids on cubicle/bunkbed/shift-sleeping flops in Chinatown have demonstrated for years. They never existed to serve addicts and mentally ill people but rather to exploit undocumented workers:
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Thanks for the chart. I would note that 10 years of stagnation != a precipitous and on-going 10-year fall to the bottom in property values, even with inflation losses. 1988-91 was very hairy, but 1991-1998 was a flat bottom. During that last period the overall economy was heating up but, from the tenant’s point of view, rents rose from year to year at a reasonable, steady and predictable rate. That’s the balance that might be needed, which would imply that that property values will have to stay relatively flat. An increased supply of housing stock is the most obvious way of making that happen, and if that increased supply emphasises affordable rentals (rather than luxury condos) all the better.
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Yes, it is true they were awful by middle class standards. But taking away someone’s squalid SRO and putting them on the street is not virtuous no matter how high minded and well meant. Jane Jacobs also wrote about what a disaster moving the poor from rowhouse slums to projects was. People living on the edge know it can always get worse, and half the time it’s made worse by well meant people. I listened to that one, and the one about the failed Corbu influenced housing projects in the Netherlands
I said bottom, not what kind. 97 was the bottom of inflation adjusted prices, then they rose. People were freaking out in 97, we were shown properties by a guy who invested in JC with a group of friends and they were bugging out at the losses. We saw a 6 family they had for $190k, now each unit is worth twice that.
They were awful by public health standards for humans. That’s why they were shut down.
I agree. There were other options between those two. Like less squalid but still affordable SROs.
Jacobs wasn’t cheering the rowhouse slums and calling for a return to them, she was criticising the public housing projects which were designed by architects like Corb who seemed to hate human beings and their needs (the Bjilmer projects you mention were a prime example). When the modernist high-rise projects were demolished they were replaced with public housing the design of which emphasised Jacobs’ more humanistic values.
Glad the chart clarified what kind it was: not a 10-year precipitous drop to a bottom but a 2-year drop followed by an 8-year long flat stagnation that hovered close to the bottom. One additional question I’d have is how that long stagnation affected property taxes during the period. If there were serious and continual hikes in the property tax rates during that time I can imagine there was reason for bugging out on the part of owners.
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It doesn’t take rate hikes to create a shitshow in those circumstances. The last revaluation had been at the market peak in 88, now people not sophisticated about tax appeals were paying on assessments far above what they were actually worth. The tax situation for the gentrifiers actually flip-flops several times over the next decades, culminating in a doubling or tripling this year for many, but that’s a long story…
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Which is why evidence-based homelessness strategies usually involve an element of completely free housing. Not subsidised rent, state-owned housing. Plus some accomodation with intensive medical/social support on site for those who struggle with basic self-care.
As was mentioned in the OP. That’s what they mean by “unconditional housing” and “housing first”.
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That just sounds like landlords who dropped the ball. Could one who actually understood his business make a successful tax appeal during that period or would the city always say no?
Over the next several decades I’d imagine so – that’s a long stretch in any context.
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I’m not talking about landlords but homeowners, many of them immigrants. If no one tells you that you can appeal and how, how do you know? There’s a huge amount of obfuscation and opacity in this game, where your official assessment was around 1/4 of market value and the official tax rate in excess of 7%. You need to get a lot of info to even tell that you’re overtaxed. I’m not guessing about this, this is recent history here. They didn’t do a reval for 30 years because it was political kryptonite, and the gentrified area appreciated far faster than other areas to the point where the effective city tax rate was 2.2%, the older homes in the gentrified Downtown were paying <1%, and homes in the least desirable areas were paying 3-4%.
So we replaced existing but substandard market based housing with terrific but non-existent public housing. Got it.
That’s a different topic than the one you and I have been discussing, of course. Homeowners who aren’t renting aren’t running a business and can’t be expected to know all the details.
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