> New York is the city that can’t, in the state that can’t. It treats a three-station subway expansion as a generational project. It clings to its way of doing things in face of obvious evidence that this way does not work; when it wants to do something different, it privatizes the state to consultants and huge design-build contractors, which has consistently raised costs wherever it is implemented. It’s not even aware of how success looks. Its leadership is rather like a Russian general who, seeing the army throw countless soldiers to take individual blocks of Bakhmut, population 70,000, insists things are going great and there is no need for anyone to learn anything about NATO standards, before ordering another wave of assault.

1. It’s an initial estimate that is all but guaranteed to grow
2. There’s no auditing, so we’re left in the dark as to how exactly that money will be spent.

The New York Times writes:

> The estimated $500 million in capital spending would also go toward creating dedicated bus lanes along 31st Street and 19th Avenue in Queens and making the Astoria-Ditmars Blvd. station on the N and W lines accessible to people with disabilities, the Port Authority said. Some of that money could also be spent to create a mile-long lane exclusive to buses on the northbound Brooklyn-Queens Expressway between Northern Boulevard and Astoria Boulevard, the Port Authority said.

Alon responds:

> To be very clear, it does not cost $500 million to make a station wheelchair-accessible. In New York, the average cost is around $70 million in 2021 dollars, with extensive contingency, planned by people who’d rather promise 70 and deliver 65 than promise 10 and deliver 12. In Madrid, the cost is around 10 million euros per station, with four elevators (the required minimum is three), and in Milan, shallow three-elevator station retrofits are around 2 million per station. Transfer stations cost more, proportionately to the number of lines served, but Astoria-Ditmars is not a transfer station and has no such excuse. So where is the other $430 million going?

> The answer cannot just be bus lanes on 31st Street (on which the Astoria Line runs) or 19th Avenue (the industrial road the indicated extension on the map would run on). Bus lanes do not cost $430 million at this scale. They don’t normally cost anything – red paint and “bus only” markings are a rounding error, and bus shelter is $80,000 per stop with Californian cost control (to put things in perspective, I heard a $10,000-15,000 quote, in 2020 dollars, from a smaller American city).

And on the exhorbitant estimates used to dismiss a subway line extension:

> The panel realized that the best option is an extension of the subway. Such an extension would be about 4.7 km long and around one third underground, or potentially around 5 km and entirely above-ground if for some reason tunneling under airport grounds were cost-prohibitive. This does not cost $7 billion, not even in New York. We know this, because Second Avenue Subway phase 1 was, in today’s money, around $2.2 billion per km, and phase 2 is perhaps a little more. There are standard subway : elevated cost ratios out there; the ones that emerge from our database tend to be toward the higher end perhaps, but still consistent with a ratio of about 2.5.

> Overall, this is in theory pretty close to $7 billion for a one-third underground extension from Astoria to the airport. But in practice, the tunneling environment in question is massively easier than both phases of Second Avenue Subway – there’s plenty of space for cut-and-cover boxes in front of the terminal, a more controllable utilities environment, and not much development in the way of the elevated sections, which are mostly in an industrial zone to be redeveloped.

Love the streets that are possible when zoning doesn’t ban mixed-use.

There in fact was a huge drop in rental prices associated with the pandemic that was widely reported on. A massive drop in demand resulted in lower rents, just as the “tHeOrY” would predict. And as the pandemic abated and the city became desirable again, rents returned to their previous highs. Again, as the “tHeOrY” of market forces would predict.

Sure, one solution to the rent problem is to make the city very undesirable, reducing demand. That’s not a very good solution, however.

A much better solution is to simply allow supply to grow. It doesn’t even require a big plan. Just upzone the whole city. Easy shit like rezoning LIC from industrial use to high density residential. It makes everyone better off.

You’ve got cause and effect backwards.

The easy-to-see process, when you look at the numbers, is that population and job growth in cities has outpaced new housing for decades.

https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/report-growth-in-nycs-housing-stock-is-outpaced-by-growth-in-adult-populati

> although the housing stock grew by about 8% between 2000 and the end of 2016, the adult population grew by almost 11%, and adult-only households made up almost 71% of all the households in the city in 2016. The number of jobs in the city grew by more than 16% during that time period. The growth in both the number of adults and the number of jobs signals increasing demand for housing

> new supply in the city is not growing fast enough to adequately moderate the pressures on rent and housing prices created by increasing demand. Household size has increased, and more renter households are living in severely overcrowded units; the city’s vacancy rate remains very low; and the share of recently available housing units in the city affordable to low- and moderate-income households has fallen significantly since 2000. The report also highlights a mismatch between incomes and the cost of housing units on the market. Median monthly rents have risen in real dollars by about $300 since 2000, at the same time that the median income of a renter household has only increased by $145 per month

https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/1/5/22869518/housing-trends-to-watch-for-the-future-of-nyc

> The number of housing units grew by 7% in the past decade, even while New York City’s adult population grew by 10%

> And in the past 10 years, the city added fewer apartments and houses than it had the decade before

> The number of new unit permits fell as well –– while the coronavirus pandemic and the temporary construction halts had an impact too, leading to a decline in the completions and permits in 2020 from the year before.

Seriously. “Luxury” almost always means “new counters and if your lucky an in unit washer/dryer”

A great way to make it less profitable would be to let people build more apartments.

Rent control is one of the few ideas with near universal agreement among economists: it doesn’t work. It stifles new development, reduces quality of existing homes, reduces city tax revenue, makes it harder for people to move, causes shortages, and doesn't even keep prices down.

https://www.nmhc.org/news/articles/the-high-cost-of-rent-control/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/15/comeback-rent-control-just-time-make-housing-shortages-worse/

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-18/yup-rent-control-does-more-harm-than-good

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/09/19/rent-control-will-make-housing-shortages-worse

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

What a disaster of a process. I love to see more housing, but a years-long negotiation over a few percent of "affordable" housing is precisely the reason rents keep going up.

We need dozens of projects like this going up in every neighborhood every year just to match population and job growth, requiring each new housing project to get the blessing of the local council member has proven time and time again to slow development and raise rents.

We need comprehensive zoning and building regulation reform to enable serious growth in a way that will actually make a difference to all of our working and middle class neighbors, not just the lucky few who happen to win the housing lottery.

The problem is the extreme cost of operating in NYC.

That is a problem we can fix. Chiefly by reducing rents. Not by mandating lower rents, but by losening zoning and building regulations. We need dramatically more mixed-use space to allow more people to open small businesses in their neighborhoods.

This particular policy has the added benefit of growing the population of the city, expanding the customer base for these small businesses. We need, like, millions of additional people living in this city and we need even more new apartments to not just house them, but give us all more housing choice to drive rents down.

This follows the rules from a few years back limiting the construction of hotels.

AirBNB is a scourge only in that it shows in stark reality the cost of our housing shortage.

A healthy housing market would be able to support short term rentals like bed and breakfasts without breaking a sweat, and the added tourism revenue would be a boon for the local economy.

The amount of new housing has trailed population growth for decades. No, there is not plenty of new housing.

Could use a wider sidewalk