Manhattan in the next 10-15 years

Yup

I'm moving to C0lumbia C0unty.

link me something re your claim that poor latinos elect low quality representatives.

or is this just sorta obvious to you?

Check out what kind of representatives Bronx sends to Congress. One not only corrupt pretending he was running a non-profit linked to a hospital just to put $ in his pocket but also guilty of domestic violence. The other one had to check in the dictionary the difference between trillions and billions during the TARP discussions in Congress.

> or is this just sorta obvious to you?

once you learn that 40% of latinos drop-out from high-school it becomes understandable that they cannot really tell who is prepared for office and who isn't.

Are they the ones that voted for George W?

NYC will be just fine. I don't think you are genuinely looking for an answer, just an opportunity to share your uninformed belief. Many voting districts are guilty of electing sub par representatives and race/class/religion/ etc are not factors.

>Are they the ones that voted for George W?

I suspect you didn't vote for George W.

Well, the way things are going, Manhattan 15 years from now will have NO middle or lower class whatsoever; it'll just be a landing pad for the world's uber-rich, like the Hamptons.

For middle-class households Manhattan peaked, in all ways except perhaps safety, a couple of decades ago.

>>>NYCMatt is 100% correct.

New York will be an ultra-rich vertical suburb. Workers will commute in to take care of their spoiled clientele. A cross between "Elysium" and life in the rich Arab countries.

Bloomberg has said that "New York is a luxury brand" and he's right.

> For middle-class households Manhattan peaked, in all ways except perhaps safety, a couple of decades ago.

wasn't Manhattan in total decline 2 decades ago? the area where we live now looked like Fallujah 2 decades ago. came back to live in great part thanks to the biggest housing bubble in US history.

> Bloomberg has said that "New York is a luxury brand" and he's right.

he meant Manhattan. Staten Island, Queens and the Bronx ... you think of them as a "luxury brand"?

> came back to live in great part thanks to the biggest housing bubble in US history.

No, they came back because of planning and leadership, crime reduction, improving economy from the lows of the Gulf War, global economic trends including wealth concentration and the ability to market Manhattan as a lux product, weakening of certain elements of the social safety net or entitlements, turning around (or at least ending the trend) of Fortune 500 businesses HQs leaving NYC, what else?...

aboutready
about 10 hours ago
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For middle-class households Manhattan peaked, in all ways except perhaps safety, a couple of decades ago.

Of course you have played a personal, if indirect role in making things more difficult for the middle class in Manhattan.

No, your dates are wrong. In the mid-90s New Yorkers had both low home prices and a rapidly improving quality of life, including, for the middle class at least, an increase in the quality of certain public elementary schools. I left NYC in 1990, when it was a crack-ridden hellhole. It had changed tremendously by the time I returned in 1994, but apartments remained cheap until the late 90s.

Troll.

Indeed you are Aboutready, but the kind who had actual negative impact on others' real life.

> I left NYC in 1990, when it was a crack-ridden hellhole. It had changed tremendously by the time I returned in 1994, but apartments remained cheap until the late 90s.

but your dates imply that Dinkins cleaned up the city, not Giuliani like everybody claims.

No, I think it was more a Clinton thing. On a macro-level the economy was doing much better, but the free money hadn't yet started. And on a local level, a lot of the crack-related gangs/ crimes had burnt out and/or resulted in prison.

Giuliani was just an opportunistic ass.

>Giuliani was just an opportunistic ass.

I know someone else who is an opportunistic ass.

giuliani was simply awful.

his "success" was all about his luck stepping into office at a time when the NYC economy bottomed, bounced and took off--after being decimated by the 87 crash, a 40% crap-out in both residential and comm'l RE values. elected in 1994, he inherited economic turnaround cycle that he had nothing to do with architecting.

easy to look good on crime and all else when one accidentally presides of one of the biggest economic booms in the history of the city. and he spent much of the surplus proceeds buying loyalty form the whole spectrum of interest groups.

broken windows?? broken record--the entire country has experienced a huge decline in crime since 1990--with better results (and less rigging of compstat numbers) for many cities which embraced the exact opposite approach to policing of broken windows: community policing, NOT stop, frisk and arrest poor people for petty marijuana possession.

Giuliani is a fraud--read about his shutdown of efforts to improve the city's first-responder radio communications systems in the 90's--an idiotic political maneuver which caused the death of many in WTC buildings on 9/11.

Giuliani is a piece of shlt poser.

once the upstate water shed is poisoned by a sloppy fracking energy grab it's going to be a buyers market Detroit style.

"but your dates imply that Dinkins cleaned up the city, not Giuliani like everybody claims"

Crime rates started falling in pretty much all major US cities in the 90s. In NYC they fell further, but this was definitely a NATIONAL phenomenon. In fact, it was INTERNERNATIONAL, as crime rates fell over the past 20 years in virtually every OECD nation, albeit from a lower base ex-US.

In NYC in particular, crime did indeed start falling under Dinkins, and the decline continued under RG and then Bloomberg.

So people who claim Rudi had some unique ability are either lying or are stupid.

"America’s safer streets
The great crime decline continues. No one is sure why"

http://www.economist.com/node/21560870

Here is a chart of violent deaths in the US and other OECD nations. A STEEP drop across the US, and a smaller drop elsewhere. But it was almost universal.

http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2012/07/20/america-is-a-violent-country/

> So people who claim Rudi had some unique ability are either lying or are stupid.

how fascinating!

> Here is a chart of violent deaths in the US and other OECD nations. A STEEP drop across the US, and a smaller drop elsewhere. But it was almost universal.

do you know which is the age group that commits most violent crimes? i know it's men and on the younger side, but don't really know what's the median age.

Freakonomics had an episode in which they tried to explain the drop in violent crimes.. the only explanatory variable, that explain if i recall well, around 40% of the drop was the introduction of abortion. fewer young people who weren't wanted by their mother and who tend to be the ones raised the worst helped a lot.

yes, the book makes a strong case that fewer births of unwanted children into poor, uneducated families has caused a serious decline in crime. another interesting case is that the decline correlates with the decline in the amount of lead circulating in poor, uneducated, health careless americans.

impressive also is the case they make that, where the econmomy is strong, violent on-street drug-dealing declines, as kids can find work, which usually pays more than drug-dealing, and doesnt often result in death or incarceration.

giuliani had little to do with the good times he fell into as ny mayor. in fact, the good times, and times since, would have been far better without "america's mayor"--POS

excuse me--slurring POS.

Also, our prison population exploded.

prisons brimming with non-violent drug offenders, in support of our oft-for-profit "justice" industry.

shame on us. and many of these kids arent just serving time in prison and being disenfranchised from our economy--they're being rape-tortured regularly in our jails.

shame on us.

rudi, our stand-up law and order guy--he and his bff kerik!!

piaces of shlt that belong in the same toilet.

And some of the mandatory sentencing laws were found to be racially discriminatory and were overturned, retroactively, leading to the release of many during the recession. Yea us.

yikes
about 3 hours ago
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rudi, our stand-up law and order guy--he and his bff kerik!!
piaces of shlt that belong in the same toilet.

Anti Rudy, anti Kerick, pro Vick, anti elementary school teacher.
I don't see a pattern.

"once the upstate water shed is poisoned by a sloppy fracking energy grab it's going to be a buyers market Detroit style."

This is something to watch CLOSELY in the coming years.

New Yorkers had better make themselves ever-aware of this growing threat.

See, that's exactly why I never drink water.

> This is something to watch CLOSELY in the coming years.
> New Yorkers had better make themselves ever-aware of this growing threat.

which one is higher? fracking contaminating water or having allowed tons of development pretty much at 0 sea level despite global warming?

who is going to pay the cost for more frequent storms that affect many parts of Manhattan under 34th Street and Brooklyn/Queens/Staten Island close to the water?

"the cost of"

I think we will see the middle class continue to fade from Manhattan. More international buyers and more high paid executives. Manhattan will become more vibrant, with more services geared toward residents. We will see less brick and mortar type businesses. We will also see political jokes such as Anthony Weiner.

"More international buyers and more high paid executives. Manhattan will become more vibrant"

How is that "more vibrant"?

If anything, Manhattan is becoming more of a suburb.

Just the other night I went into a trendy restaurant for a late supper (9:45pm) and I was told the kitchen was already closed.

"City that never sleeps" indeed!

Vibrant does not mean economic diversity

>Just the other night I went into a trendy restaurant for a late supper (9:45pm) and I was told the kitchen was already closed.

Who determined the restaurant was "trendy"? Also, late supper, sounds like your body clock could be messed up - are you collecting the appropriate amount of triple overtime from your union bargaining?

"Vibrant does not mean economic diversity"

Actually it does.

Obama Says Income Gap Is Fraying U.S. Social Fabric

“If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested,” President Obama said in an interview last week in Galesburg, Ill. “Everybody feels as if we’re rolling in the same direction.” STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES
By JACKIE CALMES and MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Last Updated: 4:04 PM ET
GALESBURG, Ill. — In a week when he tried to focus attention on the struggles of the middle class, President Obama said in an interview that he was worried that years of widening income inequality and the lingering effects of the financial crisis had frayed the country’s social fabric and undermined Americans’ belief in opportunity.

Upward mobility, Mr. Obama said in a 40-minute interview with The New York Times, “was part and parcel of who we were as Americans.”

“And that’s what’s been eroding over the last 20, 30 years, well before the financial crisis,” he added.

“If we don’t do anything, then growth will be slower than it should be. Unemployment will not go down as fast as it should. Income inequality will continue to rise,” he said. “That’s not a future that we should accept.”

A few days after the acquittal in the Trayvon Martin case prompted him to speak about being a black man in America, Mr. Obama said the country’s struggle over race would not be eased until the political process in Washington began addressing the fear of many people that financial stability is unattainable.

“Racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse, because people will feel as if they’ve got to compete with some other group to get scraps from a shrinking pot,” Mr. Obama said. “If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested. Everybody feels as if we’re rolling in the same direction.”

Mr. Obama, who this fall will choose a new chairman of the Federal Reserve to share economic stewardship, expressed confidence that the trends could be reversed with the right policies.

The economy is “far stronger” than four years ago, he said, yet many people who write to him still do not feel secure about their future, even as their current situation recovers.

“That’s what people sense,” he said. “That’s why people are anxious. That’s why people are frustrated.”

During much of the interview, Mr. Obama was philosophical about historical and economic forces that he said were tearing at communities across the country. He noted at one point that he has in the Oval Office a framed copy of the original program from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 50 years ago, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

He uses it, he said, to remind people “that was a march for jobs and justice; that there was a massive economic component to that. When you think about the coalition that brought about civil rights, it wasn’t just folks who believed in racial equality. It was people who believed in working folks having a fair shot.”

For decades after, Mr. Obama said, in places like Galesburg people “who wanted to find a job — they could go get a job.”

“They could go get it at the Maytag plant,” he said. “They could go get it with the railroad. It might be hard work, it might be tough work, but they could buy a house with it.”

Without a shift in Washington to encourage growth over “damaging” austerity, he added, not only would the middle class shrink, but in turn, contentious issues like trade, climate change and immigration could become harder to address.

Striking a feisty note at times, he vowed not to be cowed by his Republican adversaries in Congress and said he was willing to stretch the limits of his powers to change the direction of the debate in Washington.

“I will seize any opportunity I can find to work with Congress to strengthen the middle class, improve their prospects, improve their security,” Mr. Obama said. But he added, “I’m not just going to sit back if the only message from some of these folks is no on everything, and sit around and twiddle my thumbs for the next 1,200 days.”

Addressing for the first time one of his most anticipated decisions, Mr. Obama said he had narrowed his choice to succeed Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve to “some extraordinary candidates.” With current fiscal policy measurably slowing the recovery, many in business and finance have looked to the Fed to continue its expansionary monetary policies to offset the drag.

Mr. Obama said he wanted someone who would not just work abstractly to keep inflation in check and ensure stability in the markets. “The idea is to promote those things in service of the lives of ordinary Americans getting better,” he said. “I want a Fed chairman that can step back and look at that objectively and say, Let’s make sure that we’re growing the economy.”

The leading Fed candidates are believed to be Lawrence H. Summers, Mr. Obama’s former White House economic adviser and President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, and Janet Yellen, the current Fed vice chairwoman and another former Clinton official. The president said he would announce his choice “over the next several months.”

More clearly than he did in three speeches on the economy last week — the next is scheduled for Tuesday in Chattanooga, Tenn. — Mr. Obama in the interview called for an end to the emphasis on budget austerity that Republicans ushered in when they captured control of the House in November 2010.

The priority, he said, should be spending for infrastructure, education, clean energy, science, research and other domestic initiatives of the sort he twice campaigned on.

“I want to make sure that all of us in Washington are investing as much time, as much energy, as much debate on how we grow the economy and grow the middle class as we’ve spent over the last two to three years arguing about how we reduce the deficits,” Mr. Obama said. He called for a shift “away from what I think has been a damaging framework in Washington.”

The president did not say what his legislative strategy would be. Even as he spoke, House Republicans were pushing measures in the opposite direction: to continue into the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 the indiscriminate across-the-board spending reductions — known as sequestration — that Mr. Obama opposes, and to cut his priorities deeper still.

Republicans are also threatening to block an increase in the government’s borrowing limit — an action that must be taken by perhaps November to avoid financial crisis — unless Congress withholds money for his health care law.

Mr. Obama all but dared Republicans to challenge his executive actions, including his decision three weeks ago to delay until 2015 the health care law’s mandate that large employers provide insurance or pay fines. Republicans and some legal scholars questioned whether he had the legal authority to unilaterally change the law.

The delay in the employer mandate, which mostly affects large businesses that already insure workers but are worried about federal reporting requirements, was “the kind of routine modifications or tweaks to a large program that’s starting off that in normal times in a normal political atmosphere would draw a yawn from everybody,” Mr. Obama said.

“If Congress thinks that what I’ve done is inappropriate or wrong in some fashion, they’re free to make that case,” he said. “But there’s not an action that I take that you don’t have some folks in Congress who say that I’m usurping my authority. Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency.”

The president’s latest campaign for his agenda began as national polls last week showed a dip in his public support. The declines were even greater for Congress and Republicans in particular, in their already record-low ratings.

Mr. Obama said he would push ahead with a series of speeches that lay out his agenda ahead of the fights this fall with Congress. “If once a week I’m not talking about jobs, the economy, and the middle class,” he said, “then all matter of distraction fills the void.”

IT’S THE ECONOMY
The Perverse Effects of Rent Regulation

ILLUSTRATION BY JASPER RIETMAN
By ADAM DAVIDSON
Last Updated: Jul. 23, 5:00 AM ET

For Alejandro Suarez, the change in the East Village is easily visible on the shelves of the bodega where he has worked for seven years. On the corner of East 12th Street and Avenue A, the store used to be at the borderline between the richer people to the West and the poorer people to the East. When Suarez started, he sold lots of beans and rice to the Hispanic people who lived on the block. But Goya products are now crammed on a tiny shelf way in the back, while up front, there’s a huge and growing selection of organic produce, vegetarian sandwiches and high-end energy bars.

The East Village and the broader Lower East Side make up one of the most economically integrated parts of the city. It is one of the last places where the fairly rich and the very poor live on the same blocks and shop in the same bodegas. But the area is steadily becoming more like most of Manhattan: dominated by those with high incomes paying seemingly absurd rents, while the poor either leave or stay in government housing on the periphery. While older affordable housing is reaching the end of its life cycle, new affordable housing’s major source of public funding — Congress — is planning comprehensive tax-and-spending reform. This could pose an existential threat to New York’s regulatory efforts to keep Manhattan affordable for the poor.

So what would happen if Manhattan were completely free of rent regulations and other forms of housing subsidies? According to several housing analysts, it would quickly become an island occupied solely by middle class and rich people. Christopher Mayer, a housing economist at Columbia Business School, imagines tens of thousands of professionals, currently scared away by insane rents, moving in from Brooklyn, Queens and Hoboken — even Philadelphia and Chicago. “Poor people would be priced out of Manhattan,” he says. “Period.” But an East Village where nobody makes less than $90,000 a year might actually damage the city’s long-term prospects.

Manhattan has had an outsize impact on the world’s culture and economy in large part because of its economic diversity. Home to broke writers and wealthy publishers, starving painters and well-heeled collectors, unproven fashion newcomers and the established houses, and countless other symbiotic pairings, Manhattan has been a place where unlikely ideas can build an audience and, sometimes, dominate the mainstream. For 200 years, the East Village has served as an initial toehold into this chaotic mess. But rent regulation may not be helping keep it diverse.

Rent control first appeared in the 1940s, when soldiers returned to the city seeking apartments for their new families, causing rents to rise drastically. Since then, countless housing programs have been created at local, state and federal levels, but the biggest housing intervention in New York today is rent stabilization: a slightly more flexible version of rent control, in which a city board of experts annually determines how much more landlords can charge their tenants.

The problem, though, is that these programs actually make the city much less affordable for those unlucky enough not to live in a rent-regulated apartment, Mayer says. The absurdity of New York City’s housing market has become a standard part of many Econ 101 courses, because it is such a clear example of public policy that achieves the near opposite of its goals. There are, effectively, two rental markets in Manhattan. Roughly half the apartments are under rent regulation, public housing or some other government program. That leaves everyone else to compete for the half with rents determined by the market. Mayer points out that most housing programs tie government support to an apartment unit, not a person. “That is completely nuts,” he says. It creates enormous incentive for people to stay in apartments that no longer fit their needs, because they have had kids or their kids have left or their job has moved farther away. This inertia is a key factor in New York’s housing shortage. One East Village real estate agent told me that only 20 to 30 units are available in the entire area any given month.

This might be acceptable if all the rent-controlled and rent-stabilized units were inhabited by the poor people the programs were designed to help and if most poor people lived in rent-regulated units. But according to data from N.Y.U.’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, a majority of people in rent-regulated Manhattan apartments make far above the poverty level.

Interestingly, advocates for continued rent regulation and those who oppose it largely agree on what would happen if the programs were eliminated. It would be win-win-lose: great for landlords and the middle class and awful for people who benefit today. Mayer walked me through a likely result. Many of the people receiving some sort of government subsidy would have to leave their apartments, probably for the outer boroughs. The landlords of those units would invest in upgrades and charge higher rents. At the same time, the subset of apartments that had been market rate would see their rents fall, because there would be, suddenly, twice as many apartments in the market.

For Mayer, as for many economists, this is proof that rent regulation is an incredibly expensive program, preventing billions of dollars of development. It also creates an odd lotterylike system in which those who are lucky enough to have a rent-regulated apartment can live in the best parts of the city for next to nothing and everyone else is shunted aside. Eliminating rent regulation would be such a huge windfall for landlords, Mayer says, that he could imagine a sort of grand bargain. The programs go away, but landlords have to pay higher property taxes. The extra city revenue could go to a fund to help poor people afford market-rate apartments. In theory, this could be designed to make the shift win-win-win. The city could stay socioeconomically diverse without any six-bedroom apartments renting for $225.

Vicki Been, the director of N.Y.U.’s Furman Center, says most rent-regulation advocates acknowledge some of Mayer’s criticisms but want to keep the programs anyway. “We can’t just say, ‘Let’s get rid of rent regulations and replace them with the optimal system,’ ” she says. “The political forces that would get rid of rent regulation would not be the forces looking for optimal legislation.” It would be landlords and developers. In the political battles that define New York’s real estate market, she says, the poor rarely come out ahead. And rent regulation — however inefficiently — does help many poor people.

Rent regulation is very likely to go away, eventually, even without any explicit effort to kill it. Some 231,000 units have been deregulated over the last 30 years. Every year, thousands more leave the program or are torn down, replaced by new condo buildings serving the wealthy. The number of market-rate units has been going up more quickly lately, and the pace will, most likely, only increase. Barring some unlikely shift in the economy or policy, Manhattan will have fewer and fewer poor people each year and almost none whatsoever in a few decades. What happens if all the rich people are on one island and the poor but creative are somewhere else? It might just destroy the strange admixture that makes Manhattan so appealing in the first place.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Manhattan has a bifurcated market for rental apartments.

2. Deregulation would help the middle class.

3. But it would get rid of all the poor people.

4. Manhattan could stagnate either way.

The Vibrant scene COMES from economic diversity (and other kinds of diversity too) but one does not equal the other.

Vibrations come from a retard repeatedly banging his head against the wall.

You should know.

Yes, I have observed this phenomenon in Jason.

beating a dead horse.

columbiacounty
about 11 hours ago
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beating a dead horse.

You guys do that in addition to cow tipping?

I've found that most people who are not from cow-tipping areas have never heard of the concept. Where are you from, hb? How many cows have you tipped over? Me, not a one.

>I've found that most people who are not from cow-tipping areas have never heard of the concept.

How did you find this out? From your 5 jobs in law firms?

>Me, not a one.

Here in New York, you don't need to add the 'a' to the middle of that sentence.

Where in ny?

New York City

Where?

You didn't answer the question. How many cows have you tipped over?

aboutready
about 8 hours ago
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You didn't answer the question. How many cows have you tipped over?

None. I would never be malicious to an animal.

"In NYC they fell further, but this was definitely a NATIONAL phenomenon."
"So people who claim Rudi had some unique ability are either lying or are stupid."

Or just have actual facts at hand.

30% of the NATIONAL decrease in crime came from NYC.
We beat the crap out of the rest of the country, and became the safest large city.

So, which is it, lying or stupid?

We did not beat the crap out of the rest of the country. Out murder and beating the crap out of people rates have declined dramatically.

We've done well. Most of the violence has been in places like Pittsburgh, or Spokane, or Oklahoma, not in NYC.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pa-woman-attack-racially-motivated-article-1.1439406

For once I agree with NYCMatt on ever point. I believe his prediction for the next 15 years is spot on. That is why I ultimately decided to stay in California. Still, even with all the negative changes, NYC is the greatest city in the world. Enjoy it now, all, before you can't afford to stay. And MY prediction is that day will come before you know it.