HOW BAD? REAL BAD.

doctorj

SevenOneEighty wrote: ALWAYS

So do you take back the ALWAYS, or am I going to have to start ranting about our selective memory of the genocide of native peoples by Europeans from the 17th to the 20th centuries, and how the piece of land we're discussing is stolen property long before eminent domain.

escap

Escap, when was the last time you spoke with a developer and how to finance a project?

Hehe! Funny one, since that's called "my job".

Do more movie theaters make movie prices go down?
I stand by my original thoughts.

I'm amused at the pdf table you linked, as if that provides any kind of meaningful information, and will simply refer you to the average middle school econ textbook. Or try checking out ebay or craigslist some time, or just using common sense since we're talking about the intellectual equivalent of "the earth is round". Yes, more supply makes prices go down, more demand makes prices go up. It's very, very easy.

Only slightly less easy to grasp is the idea that construction costs are only a tiny portion of the equation in the real estate market, since the vast majority of units sold have been built and lived in, and thus are simply traded on the secondary market, making initial construction costs completely irrelevant.

escap

SevenOneEighty wrote:
But yes, even then, available affordable housing was ALWAYS an issue.

btw, on another note, inflation plays an important part in keeping an economy stable. When demand exceeds supply (yep, there's that tricky concept again), you have an imbalance--rising prices are the mechanism by which balance is restored. Prices rise to a point that demand levels off and order returns to the universe. Likewise, when there's a glut, prices drop so people stop making the thing, and again ying and yang are as one.

In NY, we have what you call a seriously, seriously out of whack market, with demand pouring in from all sides and supply constrained by all sorts of factors (rent control being simply the most evil one but certainly not the only one). Skyrocketing prices are God's way of saying, "Go live in Queens, Jersey, East New York, the Bronx, or somewhere else besides this one little patch of earth."

Now, if we want to facilitate all the masses who want to come and live and work in this city (and I'm all for that), we better build them some places to live. Just keeping the same amount of housing but decreeing from on high that the price of said housing will be XYZ is a sure fire way to turn that housing imbalance into a landslide.

doctorj

escap wrote:
In NY, we have what you call a seriously, seriously out of whack market,

So that's the technical name for it, eh? And here I was, in my ignorance, thinking that without non-ergodic structural adjustment for hyperbolically discounted overextensive margins, the market is suffering a punctuated Walrasian disequilbrium of value added quasi-rents.