city news

When prices are driven up that high it can only be sustained when there is a corresponding benefit and source of income: lots of customers.

When the customers fall away, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards, and it will be difficult if not impossible to rebuild it in a reasonable amount of time. I think instead it will become a very large ghost town.

Things tend to stabilize. If rents come down, more people and businesses will stay.

I wish San Francisco would get less dense.

Some of our favorite restaurants are surviving on outdoor dining and take-out. The Old Clam House is still closed! We miss those old clams.

Rents usually do not come down, because rents are some static percentage of property value (at least for commercial real estate).

Bringing rents down would bring the book value of the property down, which would bring the holding company in trouble either with its shareholders or with the bank.

Often the owners prefer keeping it unoccupied over bringing down the rent to at least get someone to bring some income to them, due to the above reason.

It requires a complete collapse to finally overcome that. And the Covid situation might well bring that collapse for cities like New York.

Human systems tend to be overdamped, with occasional boom/bust episodes, but average gooey dynamics. Big cities don't collapse, they just get a bit better or worse.

Some people love New York for some reason.

Nah, not unless DeBlasio persists in trying to turn it into a third world s**thole the way Lindsay did in the '60s. He's already destroyed

However the property sector will get deleveraged so that rents can go down to the market level.

Not so long ago, NYC was a place where you could raise a family on one income. Maybe we'll get back there, who knows?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I've spent maybe 3 months of my life in NYC, and that's more than enough. Some people get high on being around lots of other people and museums and operas and stuff, which is part of the positive feedback that packs cities. They call it "vibrant" but I call it something else.

The other positive feedback is concentrating tech of some sort, stock markets or electronic design or coding. That may be diluted by remote work. Bandwidth may change cities.

My neighbored is being distorted by a Google bus stop that's flooding the neighorhood with way-overpaid software engineers. They spend the day at home now with their wives who also work remotely. We hear the occasional screaming and thrown-object impacts.

I wouldn't be able to live in Manhattan or inner Brooklyn either. There are some nice parts of the Bronx and Queens. (Staten Island is sort of terra incognita to me.)

I lived in apartments for about eight years of my life, about half of that in married students' quarters (Escondido Village). I don't miss it. A half acre and nice neighbours make a lot of difference to the quality of life.

It's nice to have NYC nearby, though, at least in more normal conditions. When I was still Episcopalian, I used to go to St. Thomas' Fifth Avenue, which I think one of the most beautiful churches in the world. The sung High Mass with their famous choir was not a thing to be missed. Then we'd go out for Sunday brunch, which is a great NYC institution.

That would be good. Unfortunately it's dispersing a lot of people from cities into areas with lower population density, which they may vote to turn into s**tholes as well. (Hopefully not.)

Sorry to hear that.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Oh, it's not really bad. They are nice people, taken in small doses.

Mo and I express discontent as quiet sullenness, which is easier on the drywall.

The problem is that the main reason to love it has been largely suspended due to the pandemic, and then people start moving away and those that remain start to see reasons to hate it. Thus those that can afford it more and more move away, and the general standard of living drops. That will mean that it becomes more and more difficult to make enough money to live in such an expensive city for an ever larger percentage of the inhabitants.

I think in a generic city it would work as you describe, but in an overhyped and financially pumped-up city like New York it can only lead to a total collapse and rebuild.

Just let nature takes its course and don't try to force anything.