is New York City dead?

Seems fun

didn't realize you'd moved to queens

I'm loling at the thought that it was just someone singing along to T-Rex.

311 is a joke

Picturing an extremely short-armed dude fucking now, thx

Jesse Ventura's character in predator refers to himself as a sexual tyrannosaurus

yikes
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/nyregion/brooklyn-woman-dismembered-body-shopping-cart.html

https://nypost.com/2022/03/03/nyc-sees-deadliest-february-for-car-crashes-as-red-light-running-spikes/

https://i.imgur.com/kISETnL.png
The fuck?
Some jerkoff politician is getting a new wing on his house with blood money from people dying

Has anyone seen a good explanation for why NYC rents are still so high? I just saw that offices are still only at like 30% capacity, so you’d get the impression that a lot of office workers would be leaving or would have left the city altogether.

Not even “still” so high. Skyrocketing.

Right. Like how can it be that there’s no change in demand for NYC apartments?

Or increased demand

my yuppie landlords (there was a nytimes "the hunt" quiddities piece about them buying the building i live in) are moving and want to rent their unit--a 1br lightly renovated in a highly joanna gainesish way--for $3300! in RIDGEWOOD!

Office workers left the city when the pandemic started. A lot of them probably moved back. Happy to not have to work/commute in manhattan, but still happy to live in the outer boroughs, and manhattan. It's all the office buildings in manhattan that are empty. They need to start converting them to apartments.

"a 1br lightly renovated in a highly joanna gainesish way--for $3300! in RIDGEWOOD!"

I've gotten used to saying this over and over again for the last 20 years when it comes to NYC rents/neighborhoods further and further out becoming expensive, but holy fucking shit.

Giant investment firms/hedge funds still own almost all property and would rather let apartments go empty than lower the rent. (They can stomach years of losses - hell, it's already baked into the tax code so they can write it off as soon as they own the building.) There is my conspiracy theory.

That theory at least seems to make sense to my untrained mind

Making New York Possible, is his banner title - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CashJordan

Damn, sry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW0mFzaMOto

Giant investment firms/hedge funds still own almost all property and would rather let apartments go empty than lower the rent. (They can stomach years of losses - hell, it's already baked into the tax code so they can write it off as soon as they own the building.) There is my conspiracy theory.

― Nhex, Tuesday, March 22, 2022 8:55 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've heard vague explanations about how lowering the rent can also impact the commercial mortgages underlying these properties (I guess so long as you "could" rent it for x, the property can be valued based on that, but once you accept a lower rent, that can trigger provisions requiring additional collateral or something like that but tbh I'm talking out of my ass and don't know how it works).

still, after 2008, landlords did wind up having to lower rent for a while. I think you can only do these things for so long before it catches up with you.

Are landlords still offering a lot of "incentives" like "three months free rent" and stuff like that? That's usually a sign of landlords trying to keep rents looking artificially high. If they're not doing that, then not so much.

Reports are also showing very low vacancy rates, although IDK how that's calculated and whether it can be monkeyed with.

I'm always looking for houses near my apt, which is a very middle class not particularly trendy part of NYC. A house is for sale 2 doors down from my apartment. It is a 2332 sq ft 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom. Price? $939,000

oh they just added pictures! Looks like maybe they used to have 2 bathrooms but one of them doesn't work? If this was a LOT cheaper I'd buy it and gut it.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3941-55th-St-Flushing-NY-11377/31956467_zpid/?

does it come with the goose

you could rent out the shed for $3000/month

A little hard to believe that cramped-up looking house is over 2300 sf.

including all the floors?

just looks like a living floor and a bedroom floor to me. Basements and attics usually don't count toward sf.

Yeah I don't see how those floors could be 1,100 sf each. I think they're cheating and counting the basement - note that the "total structure area" and "total interior livable area" are both 2,332 sf.

My partner and I are talking a lot about leaving the city these days. Big mix of reasons, but an important one is totally "what's ultimately possible for us, housing/neighborhood-wise?" The universe of people who can even think about buying million-dollar houses is so so so removed from our experience. At the moment we just feel fortunate that we've landed on a railroad we can afford, in a building we like, with a landlady who grew up in the building, still lives downstairs, and keeps everything really shipshape.

Right. Like how can it be that there’s no change in demand for NYC apartments?

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, March 22, 2022 8:39 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is what happens when the population grows by 12% over 20 years and the number of housing units grows by 8%. 2020 was an aberration. my wife and i spent a lot of 2020 talking about how we would move back and rent in like tribeca or nolita without breaking a sweat. no more.

the hip thing to do in ridgewood right now is to buy a house in glendale, just east of here. glendale is a benighted trumpy neighborhood of single family houses with shared driveways and 15-minute-minimum walks to the train. fixer-uppers are listed at 850k and go for more.

xpost right. also, that 8% has to be very disproportionately comprised of:

(A) super super super-high-end units in a comparatively small number of ultra-luxury skyscrapers for the 1% of the 1%
(B) super high-end units in a larger number of still quite fancy skyscrapers, and/or high-design mid-rise buildings
(C) not-all-that-nice units in a mushrooming number of badly-built, boxy mid-rise units, which are marketed as "luxury" anyway. despite bad construction and dubious, unlivable floor plans, these can be easily rented to 25-year-old graphic designers who will accept $1000+ for a room just big enough to hold a bed, in order to hold down a job which will barely allow them to keep up with that rent and with massive student loan payments, in the name of "experience" and "opportunity."

at the same time, large numbers of adequate or great units in older buildings are being lost to rapid gentrification ---- typically being renovated to the look, feel, and floorplans of category C, in order to pack in more people and bump up the rents on each of them. so tons of viable housing stock has effectively been disappearing or going up in price. i would not be surprised if someone did a comprehensive study of the city's pool of working- and middle-class housing and found that more was lost in the 2010s than the 1970s.

Yeah, I know some "hipsters" (non-pejorative use) i.e. RISD art school folks who work in animation or whatever, designers and such, who've made the move to Glendale. Recently recommended it to someone looking to move back to NYC from Boston and who misses Brooklyn. Personally as someone who's lived in Woodside for 15+ years, I'm more a fan of these neighborhoods further north. Feel less beholden to Brooklyn. Until recently there were deals in parts of Woodside and Sunnyside, at least cheaper than parts of north brooklyn. Better deals may be found a bit further west in Elmhurst and Corona.

I've assumed Glendale would be going that way for a number of years now due to the presence of Finback Brewery.

xxxp, definitely. truly new units are bigger (people want more space), and that means not only are there less of them being built, but they "have" to be more expensive to pencil out (which raises rents). at the same time as being bigger, new units also have fewer bedrooms per sq ft (are you a family? sorry!), which also places pressure on rentals. and at the same time as that!, old units are being merged, which also raises average rents.

i mean the problem is not terrible relative to the west coast, but it's pretty bad!

i haven't lived in new york for 15 years and whenever i daydream about moving back i realize i would have to learn entirely new neighborhoods from scratch. because the ones i lived in and hung out in are just totally out of my reach now. maybe it's always this way? i sort of mourn that. it's a life that has passed out of possibility.

Forest Hills, where we lived for 8 years, doesn't seem like it ever goes completely crazy. It's one of the few places that just sort of stays middle to professional class, where the bargain is you get an affordable-by-city-standards life and an ok standard of living if you're just willing to tolerate being somewhere kinda boring.

if i ever get priced out of astoria (has yet to happen, fingers crossed) deep queens is my destination (assuming it's still affordable). i love forest hills

colonize staten island

I just find Forest Hills too boring compared my precious Woodside and Sunnyside. But this is talk for the Queens thread I guess.

there's some nice places in that part of forest hills just north of metropolitan by eddie's sweet shop--not fh gardens, but a few streets of single families with decent yards in nice condition. still a million bucks a pop.

the glendale thing is like... ridgewood is as non-urban as we're willing to go while paying these wild prices. next step is probably a co-op in jackson heights or out of nyc entirely.

compared to Forest Hills, which is so much further out, the stretch of Sunnyside-Woodside-Jackson Heights just has so much more to offer, food-wise at least. I guess that's how I judge everything.

It's def more boring foodwise. No question. Our group of friends there had a running joke about restaurants being "Forest Hills Good" vs actually good.

That said, when we left a couple of years ago there was a sort of spillover from Flushing starting to happen and we had gotten a few legit dumpling and noodle shops and such.

Jersey City Heights used to be a place to escape to but not sure if it's still as affordable as it used to be vs. deeper into BK/Queens etc.

there's some nice places in that part of forest hills just north of metropolitan by eddie's sweet shop--not fh gardens, but a few streets of single families with decent yards in nice condition. still a million bucks a pop.

the glendale thing is like... ridgewood is as non-urban as we're willing to go while paying these wild prices. next step is probably a co-op in jackson heights or out of nyc entirely.

― adam, Tuesday, March 22, 2022 1:25 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I def feel like there's a point at which you're just kind of in the suburbs anyway and might as well be in the suburbs. I guess parts of glendale are walkable to interesting parts of ridgewood at least, but transit access is generally not great and I don't find the area too charming. The areas I really don't get are the ones further out in Queens that don't even really have subways, they just kind of feel like shitty overpriced suburbs.

at least they're note technically long island! I have friends in douglaston.

Jersey City is beyond insane now. Sister's lived at Grove st stop for 20+ years and has to get out. It's like Brooklyn and Hoboken on steroids.

Yeah, we lived by the Grove stop years ago (circa 2003-2008). I went back recently to meet with friends for drinks, and that exactly. It was like the explosive development of Williamsburg with a vibe closer to Hoboken. I have to assume JC Heights got substantially more expensive as a result of the spillover. Back then we had a handful of friends who all moved to the Heights when it was cheap (I want to say you could get a good house for like $250-300k?). Good on them.

the 7 train is the undisputed best train in terms of good food availability, any of those neighborhoods are your best bet for livable NYC neighborhoods now imo.

ridgewood is boring but we have a nice community here of fellow yupster parents.

the deep queens no-train hoods are full of weird and fascinating stuff. douglaston is nice, love alley pond park. bayside is super nice, lots of great food along bell blvd, plus there's a LIRR stop. floral park has mumbai xpress, home of the best grilled cheese sandwich in nyc.