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moobycow t1_iwqau11 wrote

Reply to comment by Ilanaspax in Paulus Hook Goldman Sachs parking lot, waiting for new residential tower construction by mwc665324

I would love someone to explain to me the mechanism by which having less houses makes them more affordable, other than, maybe, if you make a place shitty enough no one wants to live there.

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orb_king t1_iwsfrkg wrote

Lack of housing is not the problem. Lack of affordable housing is the problem. All these towers use the same one or two companies to determine what rents should be…and guess which direction those algorithms all point to, over and over? They are literally colluding on prices, adding more units won’t lower the price. That market can stay irrational longer than any of us can stay solvent, as the saying goes. (For the curious, this is a good place to begin understanding how bad this problem is: https://www.propublica.org/article/why-rent-is-so-high )

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Ilanaspax t1_iwqcb6e wrote

I know it’s hard to imagine - but plenty of people lived here before Fulop sold out the town to developers and were totally fine with not having a sweet green and a bunch of shitty restaurants on Newark Ave in exchange for affordable rent.

They made a MAKE IT YOURS JC campaign and then it’s shocked pikachu face when the entire city gets steamrolled by development. The goal was always high rents and pricing long time residents out. That’s why it’s so funny to see the rubes on here pretending more luxury housing is the solution instead of the cause. You have to be incredibly naive or a real estate shill to think more luxury housing is going to make anything more affordable when they all work together to artificially inflate rents.

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moobycow t1_iwqhe6t wrote

If JC didn't build these places, where do you expect the people who now live here would live instead? Development showed up because they were filling up brownstones in Paulus Hook and VVP. I mean look at the prices in The Heights, they haven't built any fancy highrises there.

If the country built enough houses in places people wanted to live we wouldn't have to worry about this crap. In the past, believe it or not, cities had room for both rich people and poor people. Then we passed a bunch of zoning reforms, stopped building and now the cities fill up with rich people and people blame the development. As if the people with $1m homes that used to house factory workers wouldn't be in something else if it existed.

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Ilanaspax t1_iwr1co6 wrote

Again...if people wanted to live here so badly why would they need to offer abatements and make an entire campaign to encourage development 10 - 15 years ago? This was all planned.

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down_up__left_right t1_iwqld58 wrote

The problem here is that you think new construction is the reason people have and are still moving to Jersey City.

The real reason most people have and are still moving to Jersey City is because it’s right next to one of the biggest job centers in the entire country.

People would have come and will still come even if the housing stock is not increased.

Turning a parking lot into hundreds of homes means hundreds of people not trying to rent or buy existing homes.

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Ilanaspax t1_iwr1qt4 wrote

Wow so I guess we didn't need those tax abatements handed out like candy back in the day to encourage development then if Jersey City was so enticing on its own?

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moobycow t1_iwr4kvj wrote

Probably not, but then the prices of the existing stock would have had to gone up more before the projects penciled out.

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