• tal@lemmy.today
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    27 days ago

    I wouldn’t be very enthusiastic about him myself, but I don’t live in New York City, and people there can vote for whatever makes them happy.

    I do think that New York City residents have some very legitimate concerns about cost of living, but that — as in California — a lot of those actually stem from restrictive rules on housing construction, which produces an artificial shortage in housing. Housing costs eating up income is the bulk of the root problem to address, not grocery prices or what-have-you. And that happens when one blocks the construction of housing.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/308387/

    https://archive.ph/jRQIm (bypassing paywall for above article)

    https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/New-York

    • New York is 10.2% more expensive than Seattle (excluding rent).

    • Rent in New York is, on average, 58.7% higher than in Seattle.

    • New York has 1st Most Expensive 1 Bedroom Apartment in City Centre in the World (out of 381 cities) for New York, NY

    Distribution of expenses per month for New York City: 43.1% rent

    Normally, a personal finance rule of thumb is to keep housing costs below 30% of income.

    What New York City needs is to unchain developers to the point that they can build housing. A lot more housing. That will make NYC more affordable for its residents. That will also cause people with condos and such to see their house values decline, which they probably won’t like, but we got here through a long-running situation where there wasn’t enough housing. There’s not a way out of that without disruption.