>I'm really curious about how old those stones are.

If they were quarried locally, about 450 million years old.

>First off, you're gonna claim hysterics while putting that genocide straw man on me? ok.

Check your sarcasm detector, buddy.

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>Second, yeah, I have no problem with seizing land that people are just sitting on

Well, if by "just sitting on" you mean "living in with their families," and you're still ok with it, that's a pretty shitty attitude. Not to get all hyperbolic on you or anything, but maybe we shouldn't endorse forcibly seizing people's family land given this country's history.

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>When did I ever say I'm kicking families out. Since when is a giant landlord that owns multiple buildings in nyc a "single family"?

You didn't say that, but nevertheless that's what it's going to take. Why would we seize a giant landlord's multiple densely-zoned buildings? Those are already providing plenty of housing, and demolishing them isn't likely to increase density in any meaningful fashion.

No, the only way to get the city to have enough residential units is to go out to Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx, go to the neighborhoods which are currently single-family, duplex, and triplex homes, demolish every single one of them, and replace them with 4+ story 12+ unit housing. I know you're dead set on making this entirely an "ooga booga big landlord" problem, but it isn't. Big landlords build big buildings because that's how they maximize returns. The current housing shortage is a SMALL landlord, family-owned small building problem.

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>It's naive to think this doesn't happen already. It happens by landlords anyways on a scale that is plainly ridiculous.

Sorry, WHAT happens? You need to provide a little more clarity, because the "it" here can refer to a number of different things.

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>And many times, the landlords don't even do substantional renovations or add units. They paint over shit, fix a few cabinets, add some appliances and hike the rent up by another grand a month.

What do renovations have to do with substantial new development? You're going all over the place, because I suspect what you want isn't actually affordable housing. What you want is a bright, spacious, freshly-renovated apartment with all the latest amenities, in a cool neighborhood, for 1/10th market rate.

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>You do realize that part of a state's budget comes directly from federal allocations too, correct? You know how government works right? Like, not all infrastructure spending in a state is solely financed by that state.

Yes, I actually am very well of where infrastructure spending comes from. Given that I actually showed you the math, which you seem to not have understood in the least, I would say I likely understand it a lit better than you do. For example, I understand that in FY2019 (the last year before shit hit the fan,) the federal government provided about $711 billion dollars in grants to states. Which would pay for a massive upzoning and new construction project in two major cities, while leaving zero federal dollars for any other state programs. You ready to tell people they're going to have to give up their Medicaid so that you can have a shiny, new apartment?

>Housing prices are rising sharply

Housing prices are rising sharply everywhere because we literally cannot keep up with demand. What do you want the government to do about that? Forcibly seize land and force people to build houses on it? Or would you rather we sterilize half the population to prevent demand growth?

Home prices generally go up over time, if for no other reason than inflation goes up over time, and there's absolutely no way to stop that short of extremely unpleasant solutions.

>So just do nothing then? That's your solution?

No, it's not. I've outlined several solutions throughout this thread. Some are temporary stop-gaps. Others are actual solutions. But the only long-term solution is to build more housing (probably outside the city) and increase wages. That's it. It's not magic, and it's the only thing that'll really work. Supplement that with subsidization for people incapable of working, and you're done. BUT that might mean that you live in Poughkeepsie and have an hour and 45 minute commute into the city. Which, frankly, you can already do.

>Do you know how much we spent on the Iraq war alone?

Yeah. About two trillion dollars direct by the federal government. What I don't understand is how you think federal spending has any bearing on state and city spending.

But even assuming that this comparison made sense, let's say you wanted to build some apartments in NYC. We'll assume that the average zoning district in NYC is R6, and we use the smallest possible minimum lot size as a proxy for average apartment land cost. So that's 1,700 square feet, of which at least 40% has to be open space, leaving us with a building of 1020 square feet. That allows you to build about 1.5 units of housing per zoning regulations at a land cost of about $78,000 per unit.

NYC is (conservatively) short 1,000,000 units. That's about $8 billion JUST in land cost. Even if we upzone like crazy, and can cut that in half, we're talking $4 billion in current land cost. And if the city actually tried to do this, the land cost would go up significantly due to supply and demand pressure.

The actual building is going to cost about $350 per square foot. At 1.5 units per 1020 square feet, we're talking about an extra $240,000 per unit. So now we're at $316,000 in costs per unit, or 1/3rd of a trillion dollars, and that's being extremely conservative. Even if you assume the federal government pays for all or part of it, that solves one small problem in one small corner of the country while doing nothing to address everywhere else. And if you take this model and sissy it throughout the US, that $300 billion turns into $30 trillion easy, which is about double the annual US federal budget.

Plus, your plan requires us to forcibly kick people out of their family homes to make room for other people, which is a truly shitty thing to do.

One possible way around this is a combination of the Austrian system with the Athenian antiparochi system: the city partners with developers to go to low-density homeowners and say "you give us your land to develop, we build multifamily housing on it, in return you get a couple of units in the new building to do with what you want, some of the units are market rate, and half are subsidized housing, and we'll also upzone the property to make sure the developer has enough profit motive to handle the building." Combine that with a gradual upzoning of neighborhoods from the center out and within a decade or two, we might get to a point where supply meets demand.

In the meantime, we should continue fighting for a living wage. And, if you want cheap rent, you may just have to live outside the city, because unfortunately there are not enough units for everyone that wants one, and the only fair way of dividing resources when demand exceeds supply is to price some people out. Because no matter how good it may feel, hysterics on Reddit don't actually stove anything.

It's about half of all subsidized units, and has been in major drawdown mode for a while, shifting more units from government-owned to private-owned-but-regulated.

Their biggest advantage when it comes to housing prices is the ability to grow outwards. The city is essentially surrounded entirely by farmland, and as their population grew they were able to easily build new developments on what was formerly empty fields on the outskirts of the city. This is where a lot of the subsidized units come from - relatively recent new development undertaken as a public/private partnership.

NYC is not only incredibly densely populated (about 3x Vienna) but that population density extends out throughout the immediate metro area. For NYC to replicate it would require either deploying large swaths of small homes in the outer borroughs and converting them to midrises (which will cost billions upon billions of dollars and piss off a ton of long-time New Yorkers,) OR start building city-subsidized units in Duchess County and out near Dover, NJ.

Most of Austria's social housing stock isn't owned by the government, but rather by private companies who operate a landlords within a tightly regulated system. It's no different than NYC's affordable housing lottery, albeit with a larger percentage of new units being allocated and better regulation. But it's not remotely accurate to say "the government owns the housing." Private landlords own the housing. They just lease it under the government's watch.

Not-for profit housing and non-market housing is a thing, but the degrees of success it's used to across the world are "low." Every major city around the world is currently experiencing an affordability crisis (except Tokyo and some other large Japanese cities, but that's a while separate thing.) No one's got it worked out yet.

Personally, I would prefer that rather than handing control of all housing units to the people who did such a great job with the projects, we just fix our renting rules to be more equitable. Things like income-based rent regulations, first-come/first-served requirements in leasing, better tenant protections and maintenance requirements, more rent stabilization with fewer loopholes, limits on number of rental units owned, etc.

From a public policy perspective, I would much rather see a system that creates thousands of small landlords who have essentially built themselves a job than have that money to what would have to be a massive new program.

Right, so the issue isn't "landlords," per se. The issue is predatory behavior and unaffordable rents. Banning landlords might solve the predatory behavior issue (although, considering the number of scandals NYC's affordable housing lottery has had, I wouldn't be quite so sure.) But it definitely wouldn't solve the affordability crisis, because there are simply not enough units for everyone that wants one, and the prices that people think are "affordable" are hilariously low. Like, not remotely realistic virtually anywhere in the country, let alone in the unofficial capital of the world.

As for banks leeching money, I genuinely don't know what you mean. Are you saying you should be able to get a long-term loan without paying interest?

I mean, asshole landlords aside, who else would you rent apartments from? And if you say "everyone just buys their own," well... that's a really good idea for screwing over recent immigrants and the unbanked who can't qualify for a mortgage, plus all the petite that wouldn't be able to afford to buy even it prices fell by half.

>What should happen if a police officer steps outside of their legally-restrained role which unfortunately exists in a fast-paced, high-tension environment with a lot of grey areas and "he said, she said."

What SHOULD happen is that even the slightest possible hint of impropriety is met immediately with strict discipline, because any organization that has a state-sanctioned right to use force against human beings has to be held to the highest possible standard.

Police officers should have it drilled into their heads that every action is held to scrutiny and judged, and should be constantly reminded that they serve the public and not the other way around.

Well, maybe if Albany didn't keep stealing all the cash out of the till and then acting like we were the entitled ones when we asked to keep our money local, we wouldn't be having these issues.

NYC and it's immediate suburbs basically keep the state afloat.

That's how bonuses work literally everywhere — the withholding is ALWAYS significantly higher than the rate you end up paying.

That's not what Ranked Choice Voting gets you, though. What if gets you is the same "least of all evils" candidate, except with extra steps and less chance of getting someone you really like. It's a system that mostly keeps you from getting anyone truly terrible at the expense of also preventing you from getting anyone truly great.

Sorry, you're going to have to elaborate: accurate at determining what, exactly? "Accurate" without context is a meaningless descriptor. I will agree that it's the most accurate way to identify the one person out of a group that is the least disliked save least offensive to the most people. Personally, I think regressing to mediocrity isn't great for any political system.

You think you want it, until Ranked Choice gets you Mayor Adams and you lose all faith in humanity.

I've always thought he looked like Darkest Timeline Mateo, from Superstore.

No, if a human traffickers tells you to make up a story, it's not on you, because the important thing about human trafficking is that it's involuntary.

>There’s a whole cottage industry for asylum coaching.

Yes, it's called "immigration law." Do you also call criminal lawyers "crime coaching?"

>It is actual or fear of persecution.

Eh, sort of but not really. But close enough. My point, though, isn't that all of these people are fleeing persecution. My point is that they are not defrauding the system, they just fail to understand a nuanced and technical but if administrative law. Making a mistake isn't the same thing as fraud.

>It’s not statistically possible for this increase in asylum seekers to actually be victims of persecution.

This is just completely incorrect, as there are tons of things that can happen that increase the number of valid asylum seekers. And, in fact, we've actually seen several of those things happen in the last couple of years: Venezuela's economic collapse which led to protests and then a serious crackdown on protesters and activists, El Salvador's dudebro president going to war against the press and political opposition, political violence in Brazil (though hopefully that's calming down now.)

And this is validated because the makeup of refugees has actually shifted — a lot of the ones involved in the current migration waves are Venezuelan and El Salvadorian.

>But why would you increase funding for something, where there is known rampant fraud and create a feedback loop?

Because despite your repeated and entirely unfounded claims, there is not rampant fraud in the asylum program. And what fraud is present tends to come not from the poor folks fleeing economic and climate disaster in Central and South America on foot, but rather from the relatively wealthy immigrants who fly in to major airports and use the asylum system to get around the broken immigration system.

Or to put it another way, how "fraudulent" do you think a refugee's story is if they spend months literally walking through the jungle along one of the most dangerous human migratory pathways in the world in order to get asylum? Their claim may ultimately get rejected because the asylum system is also horribly broken (I know, I went through it!) but the fact that they get denied on a technically does not change the fact that they are fleeing something so terrible that they are willing to risk a horrible death over thousands of miles of grueling terrain to escape it. And it's our responsibility to help them because at the end of the day, Latin America is largely in the state it's in because the US fucked it badly and repeatedly over the last 100 years.

>They made an asylum claim and there is a backlog because of the surge of fraudulent and ineligible claims.

No, there's been a backlog because the asylum adjudication system has been intentionally and systematically underfunded by Republicans for decades, while a series of geopolitical events have increased recent refugee migration. Not because there's a "surge of fraudulent and ineligible claims."

But regardless of what kind of idiotic, ignorant opinion you might have on the validity of anyone's asylum claim, the law is extremely clear — asylum seekers are in the country legally, explicitly so, until such a time as they are officially ruled to not have a valid claim. Period.

That was a very short sentence that should have been relatively easy to parse even for the mouth-breathiest of mouth-breathers. Every one of these bussed migrants is here legally.

Maybe learn what the law actually is and what's happening before mouthing off like a cretin?

They do enforce the law — these are all legal migrants who are in the US legally.

>It’s not altogether great for the bird:

Is worrying about the (very short term) health problems of a bird that is being raised specifically to be murdered really that important?

By the time the force-feeding starts, most farm fowl only have a week to a month of life left.

Hochul may not be the best governor ever, but Eric Adams can go eat every single giant bag of dicks in existence, and then have DeSantis fly up more giant bags of dicks, and eat those, too.

All employment agencies are covered by this law regardless of how many people they place or where or how.

Who would act occupied any time he saw a black person looking for a ride?

And made sure he took a couple of extra turns when he got tourists?

And would "accidentally" turn the meter on during a flat fare ride?

And cleaned his car once a month if that?

And would refuse to take people to three outer boroughs?

Now, maybe your uncle was the one decent cabbie in the city. Maybe he really was an honest, great dude. But that doesn't change the fact that before Uber, taking a cab fucking sucked, because the entire industry was a racket with zero accountability and no fucks to give.