Pointless But It Does My Head In

[Leo]

But that graphic is useless cos it doesn't tell you what the rent is for - does $5000 in Tribeca get you a room or a mansion or something in-between?

stats by bed count in the full report: http://blog.livelovely.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/FINAL-LOVELY-RENTAL-MARKET-REPORT-Q2-2014.pdf

 

[IdleRich]

So... if I read the bed count thing correctly then it says that for the first quarter, the median price for a one bed flat was something like $2850 for the quarter. Which is I guess $950 per month - say £600. But that's not broken down by area - and the area one isn't broken down by bed so neither really tells you the price you could expect to pay if you rented a flat in a given area does it - or am I missing something?

 

[Mr. Tea]

The thing that Does My Head In the most about these posts is the existence of a neighbourhood called 'Tribeca'.

 

[IdleRich]

It's the Triangle Below Canal Street isn't it?

 

[Leo]

So... if I read the bed count thing correctly then it says that for the first quarter, the median price for a one bed flat was something like $2850 for the quarter. Which is I guess $950 per month - say £600. But that's not broken down by area - and the area one isn't broken down by bed so neither really tells you the price you could expect to pay if you rented a flat in a given area does it - or am I missing something?

no, it's $2850 per month. the numbers are a median taken during the first quarter.

 

[Leo]

It's the Triangle Below Canal Street isn't it?

yup.

like our SoHo is South of Houston St.

 

[trza]

Kinda painting with a broad brush, describing a city with eight million people in it, a hub for global capital, by rent in a handful of neighborhoods.

 

[Leo]

Kinda painting with a broad brush, describing a city with eight million people in it, a hub for global capital, by rent in a handful of neighborhoods.

this is a pretty comprehensive list of neighborhoods in the city, not all but most of them actually.

 

[Leo]

yup.

like our SoHo is South of Houston St.

Real estate developers looking to rebrand a boring or crappy neighborhood have come up with some pretty bad names like NoLita (North of Little Italy), but you've gotta love DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).

 

[IdleRich]

Oh ok - £1800, sounds more like it. But that is for the whole of NY not for a particular area right? Either way I guess it's a lot of money if you're an artist or something.
I'm on holiday in Lisbon at the moment and it's so cheap compared to London in pretty much every way - I wonder how long this kind of fashion thing that keeps London and Paris and NY getting more expensive while Lisbon and... I dunno, almost everywhere else getting cheaper can last. Surely there must come some kind of point where it becomes unsustainable.
Because I'm lucky enough to own a flat in London I've slowly realised that I could rent it out and move to almost anywhere in the world and live on the difference. How can that be?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Real estate developers looking to rebrand a boring or crappy neighborhood have come up with some pretty bad names like NoLita (North of Little Italy), but you've gotta love DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).

"NoLita" sounds like an anti-paedo slogan. Possibly one Chris Morris might have tricked an aging pop star into saying on TV.

Though London's not immune from this sort of bollocks either, of course. There was a pathetic attempt to rebrand Fitzrovia (north of our Soho) "Noho" a while back, but it never really caught on. Then there's the estate-agents' favourite ploy of appending "Village" to the names of neighbourhoods to give the impression that it's the kind of place where everyone knows each other, there's a century-old butcher's shop run by a jolly, red-faced fellow and kids play football in quiet, leafy streets - when in fact it's actually just another nondescript part of an increasingly homogenized city where people do most of their shopping in Tesco Metro and probably wouldn't recognize their next-door neighbour if they passed them in the street.

There's also the tendency to deliberately mispronounce areas to give them air of mystique, as in "Cla'am" for "Clapham" or "St. Reatham" for "Streatham", but this is mainly done for a joke.

 

[Leo]

Oh ok - £1800, sounds more like it. But that is for the whole of NY not for a particular area right?

yes, but there are still some really crappy neighborhoods that bring the average down. difficult to find a one-bedroom in any halfway decent neighborhood for under $2,000/month.

The reason I hear about NYC's crazy prices is the global demand. it's not just people in the NYC metro area looking for housing here, or even people in the Northeast US. It's people from all over the world who want to come here, and they are either rich or willing to pay ridiculous prices for a few years, get their professional experience or their "Sex in the City"-style big-city thrills (whatever reason they came), and then move away. Lots of coming and going here, I know someone who owns an apartment in the east village that she rents out and it's rare that tenants stay for more than a couple of years.

Living in NYC is seen by many as an investment: silly spending in the short term while they are here but pays off in the long run after they've moved elsewhere. Perhaps London and Paris are in a similar situation.

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah, a lot of London is owned by Quatar (the state I think rather than its people) and rich Chinese, Arab and Russian individuals. This inflates the market above what it would otherwise be of course.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yeah, a lot of London is owned by Quatar (the state I think rather than its people) and rich Chinese, Arab and Russian individuals. This inflates the market above what it would otherwise be of course.

And a surprising amount of land right in the centre is owned by Oxford and Cambridge unis or their constituent colleges, Eton College and places like that, probably the Church of England too.

But yeah, ultrawealthy foreigners are having a huge impact on the cost of land and housing and the cost of living generally. Recently a lot of new property in central London is being bought and simply left empty as an investment, it's fucking nuts. The government's shitty idea of banning any new immigrants with a net worth below some threshold is going to be completely counterproductive from the POV of the economic welfare of ordinary people living here already - poor people get jobs, start small business and work hard (and pay taxes) because they have to - really it'd make far more sense to ban anyone coming here who's worth more than a certain amount. Super-rich immigrants pay fuck all tax and probably don't even spend that much money here, apart from on property, thus screwing the market up for anyone who's not a multi-millionaire.

 

[Leo]

hence the arrival of the "poor door":

Fancy Upper West Side Building Will Have a Separate Door for Poor People

New York City moved just a little closer to all-out class warfare over the weekend, when the Department of Housing Preservation and Development approved a plan for an Upper West Side condo building with a separate door for the poorer people who are being allowed to live there. Extell Development, the company building the 33-story luxury complex at 40 Riverside Drive, proposed the controversial arrangement last year as part of its application for the Inclusionary Housing Program, which gives developers tax credits and other perks in exchange for creating some affordable units alongside their less affordable ones.

When it's completed, 40 Riverside will have 219 expensive, river-facing condos to sell to people who are in a position to buy them and 55 street-facing places to rent to sad sacks who earn 60 percent or less than the median income. "Because Extell considers the affordable segment to be legally separate from the rest of the building, it says it is required to have different entrances," Think Progress explains. Plus, it will spare all the residents from the terrible awkwardness of regularly encountering people whose lifestyles differ from theirs, or something.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are already a number of "mixed-income" buildings with so-called "poor doors" throughout New York City, though there might not be many more in the future. The New York Post reports that, following the outcry over 40 Riverside, "Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer vowed to reject future developments with separate entrances." Meanwhile, renters of these affordable apartments can make their second-class status feel a little more fun by pretending that they're living in an episode of Downton Abbey.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/07/building-will-have-a-separate-door-for-poor.html

 

[IdleRich]

I've never seen it personally but apparently we have that here too. My friend was talking about it the other day, apparently the argument is that the rich door has a concierge and the rich people are paying for that but the poor door doesn't and so if you live in the pleb flats you avoid that payment. Hmmm.

 

[Patrick Swayze]

the guardian had a few articles about "poor doors" recently + boris ruled out banning them whereas I think the NY mayor is trying to take steps to prevent their use (?)

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/25/poor-doors-segregation-london-flats

 

[Mr. Tea]

I've never seen it personally but apparently we have that here too. My friend was talking about it the other day, apparently the argument is that the rich door has a concierge and the rich people are paying for that but the poor door doesn't and so if you live in the pleb flats you avoid that payment. Hmmm.

Yeah it's quite widespread in London I think.

I don't see how it would cost that much more to have a fancy entrance that everyone could use (oo-err) rather than reserving it for some (most?) of the residents. Maybe the carpets would need to be cleaned slightly more often, I dunno. Even if it did cost a tiny bit extra, surely that could be built into the higher fees paid by the richer people in the swanky apartments?

Then again, it's amazing how sensitive some very rich people are about paying even very small sums of money for something that doesn't benefit them directly.

 

[trza]

Its common in tons of architecture dating back thousands of years. Having buildings without separate entrances for rich and poor may be the exception.

 

[Leo]

Its common in tons of architecture dating back thousands of years. Having buildings without separate entrances for rich and poor may be the exception.

lots of nice old buildings have separate entrances for the help (servants, deliveries, etc.) but i think it's a new thing to have separate entrances for subsegments of paying residents.

the richer apartment owners in these new buildings argue that their monthly maintenance fees of a few thousand dollars a month pays for the doorman (as well as pool, gym, rooftop deck, etc.), and renters who don't pay that hefty monthly maintenance fee shouldn't benefit from having those services. In a way it makes sense, but still comes off as classist/elitist.