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    Dave Hamilton Nolan
    12/17/15 12:38pm

    “Leave New York City if you can’t afford it!” cry the free market fundamentalists. Fine. Let’s send the entire working class away from New York City. Then let’s shut down all of the stores and restaurants and warehouses and services that are staffed by the working class. The rich can kill their own meat now.

    No, they want to ship us in from the ‘burbs like serfs to manor house. The Poors can ride 3 hours on a train, scrub their toilets, feed their entitled brats and drive their Black Cars and ride three hours home. Fire them if they show up late even once.

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      SolongeFarewellDave
      12/17/15 12:41pm

      I just about crapped my pants when I realized the nice lady who works at my Walgreens commutes over 2 hours both ways to work at Walgreens.

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      Red DetachmentDave
      12/17/15 12:44pm

      This is already happening in the Bay Area, but worse. The poor bus themselves in to do their menial jobs, and the rich bus themselves out to the suburbs for their tech jobs. Weirdest fucking place I ever lived.

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    ThidrekrHamilton Nolan
    12/17/15 12:29pm

    Well, we could place restrictions on investment/non-primary residence purchases (higher taxes/interest rates?) and foreign ownership, but then we never want to say “no” to the rich.

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      prolapsedtimelapseThidrekr
      12/17/15 12:32pm

      Tax breaks on new construction is a problem, but foreign ownership is pretty minuscule as a percentage of housing stock.

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      SolongeFarewellThidrekr
      12/17/15 12:32pm

      I’m a fan of manditory occupancy. If you want to spend $10million on an apartment to use as an investment, fine by me, but you better live there 9 months of the year or rent it out for a short-term loss.

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    ARP2Hamilton Nolan
    12/17/15 12:42pm

    -We could also place a tax on the sale of luxury housing (e.g. more than $1.5M) and use that money to provide housing assistance.

    - We could adjust the standards to qualify for housing assistance so that more of the lower middle class is captured.

    - We can kick people out of affordable housing that make far more than the threshold to qualify for housing assistance (e.g. A family living in affordable housing in NY makes $200k per year)

    - We can put density requirements in place for new construction

    - we can adjust our housing assistance to be more graduated, more help for the poor, less for the middle class.

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      BDCBARP2
      12/17/15 12:49pm

      We can build big public housing towers again and give them a firehose of federal funding this time.

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      ARP2BDCB
      12/17/15 12:56pm

      Can’t tell if you’re joking, but creating a Mega-City one isn’t a viable solution. Look at Cabrini Green (I spelled it wrong in another comment) or The Robert Taylor homes. That much concentration of poor often brings crime and neglect with it. The goal is to have mixed income neighborhoods- there should be a mix of cheap, affordable, basic housing, all the way up to luxury brownstones in the same area, so that people can live near where they work.

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    thisismydisplaynameHamilton Nolan
    12/17/15 12:43pm

    I am a home care nurse living in an exceptionally expensive West coast city. I do okay now, as a single person, but if I ever have kids I will almost certainly have to leave as we couldn’t afford to live here. Nothing gets me more than when one of my affluent elderly clients says “well I worked hard to be able to live here so if you can’t afford it just leave!” Like, cool, and if I and all of my coworkers do, who the fuck do you think is going to take care of you to help you stay at home? Jesus.

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      Pending Approvalthisismydisplayname
      12/17/15 1:10pm

      easy, the next crop of bright eyed kids who want to live in a hip town will do your job. Its a cycle, they move here, work shit jobs, and move away because they can’t afford it, and 5 more people are in line to take their place.

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      MaleChimpthisismydisplayname
      12/17/15 1:40pm

      If you all leave, the supply of labor for the job you do will go down. If demand stays the same, this means people will have to pay more to get nurses to come to their homes. If people pay nurses more to come to their homes, then nurses will either find it worth commuting for the higher pay or be able to afford to live in the more expensive, close in dwellings in the city.

      You all should totally leave. Do you have a union?


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    Circle of Protection: FucksHamilton Nolan
    12/17/15 12:40pm

    Public housing is not the answer. I have never seen public housing in any city in which I’ve lived be anything but a nightmare.

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      Hamilton NolanCircle of Protection: Fucks
      12/17/15 12:57pm

      There is no serious alternative to public housing. We need to make public housing better and safer, which ultimately means spending a lot more money on public housing.

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      ARP2Circle of Protection: Fucks
      12/17/15 1:10pm

      You’re likely thinking of the massive housing projects rather than smaller units interspersed with “regular” housing. Big housing project don’t work unless you make the heavy investment to maintain them, have sufficient public safety, etc.

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    IAMBlastedBiggsLostBurnerHamilton Nolan
    12/17/15 12:37pm

    Perhaps the key is to admit that every socioeconomic class needs to have viable shelter, and not just those who can contribute the most to the profit margins. When you have a city like New York, in a country such as this (where everybody supposedly can 'make it'), there's no excuse to having a notable segment of the population living in conditions that would make those in third world countries look, cringe, and mutter 'sucks to be you, man'. Human beings require shelter of some sort, period, and shitholes aren't shelter. Accept that, and fucking build more places for people to live like humans.

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      RennenVerräterIAMBlastedBiggsLostBurner
      12/17/15 12:41pm

      Subterranean apodments for “the help” it is then.

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      poozoozooIAMBlastedBiggsLostBurner
      12/17/15 12:45pm

      You’ve obviously never been to the “third world.” Haiti makes Bellevue look like the Four Seasons.

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    KoolDude420Hamilton Nolan
    12/17/15 12:35pm

    I could see this pushing wages up once businesses have a hard time hiring the poors who are fleeing the city. So we are all gonna end up subsidizing the housing for low income people in some way (wages, higher prices, etc.), might as well do it directly.

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      Hamilton NolanKoolDude420
      12/17/15 12:53pm

      Cost of housing is definitely one reason wages are higher in NYC. But you still have to deal with housing for people who work in low-wage jobs/ industries that don’t offer a lot of opportunity for wage growth. When you think about this it starts to become clear that affordable housing is just one part of the larger economic equality issue, and it all has to be dealt with together.

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      audenKoolDude420
      12/17/15 1:24pm

      It has done here (San Francisco). But despite offering higher wages, small shops and restaurants are still having a hard time finding employees.

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    10" Rubber BilboHamilton Nolan
    12/17/15 12:39pm

    So you want to live in New York City.

    No, but you see I don’t: Right off the bat you’ve gone awry with me. I posted about this before but I’ll brief sum it up again here: New York is over. If you don’t work in publishing, theater or finance, there really is nothing worth going to New York for.

    -Gay and lesbian life? Attitudes are changing fast and Obergefell has cleared many obstacles.

    -Good food and coffee? Seemingly every town in America has a Starbucks and a family-run Thai place now. (EDIT: Oh and plus: I’ve been served some truly appalling meals in New York.)

    -Seamless? I’ve met New Yorkers who seem legit convinced delivery doesn’t exist outside New York. Well it does.

    -And then there’s the internet, which replaces about twenty other only-in-New-York-isms of the recent past

    In short, to all those people who say, “Well, there’s just something unquantifiable about this place” I answer, “No, it’s very quantifiable: It’s $1,500 to $3,000 extra per month, easy.”

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      SybilVimes10" Rubber Bilbo
      12/17/15 12:46pm

      “-Good food and coffee? Seemingly every town in America has a Starbucks and a family-run Thai place now.

      -Seamless? I’ve met New Yorkers who seem legit convinced delivery doesn’t exist outside New York. Well it does.”

      God damn, if I have to hear one more time about how much better the food and delivery in NYC are I’m going to lose my mind. Yes, in Boston, all that’s available for exercise is snow-shoveling and cod fishing, and then we dine on Dunkin’Donuts we have to get ourselves. That’s it. That’s all we have.

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      TeenaBurner10" Rubber Bilbo
      12/17/15 12:49pm

      Are there a lot of other American cities where a person can fully function without a car?

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    BDCBHamilton Nolan
    12/17/15 12:43pm

    But that would destroy the character of neighborhoods

    Without an increase in supply, the only solution is basically “Restrict all the housing in the city to the poor and working class people who’ve lived here forever and expect the affluent to remain outside city limits (or at least outside the places where they want to live) and subsidize this.” Much of the time I think this is the must just solution because their communities are pretty much all the poor have. But how do you make somewhere outside your tax base pay up without just federalizing local zoning and public housing?

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      GadwynllasBDCB
      12/17/15 1:23pm

      Or you accept that the character of a neighborhood is ever evolving and changing and that efforts to freeze a neighborhood in time, character or vertical height are as as damaging as they are unrealistic. The New York of the 1970’s doesn’t support the New York of today—the same way the New York of the 20’s didn’t support the New York of the 70’s.

      Housing crunches are not immediately solvable and they require long term thinking and commitment—something which most politicians abhor because success 10 years from now doesn’t help with this year’s election.

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      wittylibrarianBDCB
      12/17/15 1:30pm

      if you kick the rich out, the tax base disappears. Unless you make it that the rich who work in NYC pay for it while living in the CT suburbs, New York/Manhattan is going to end up like Detroit.

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    MizJenkinsHamilton Nolan
    12/17/15 12:53pm

    Portland just approved a measure to dedicate the hotel taxes charged on AirBnB rentals to an affordable housing fund. I’m interested to see how that turns out because it seems like a model that might be worth adopting in New York, which still hasn’t figured out how to contend with the effects of short term rentals on the housing market.

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      hitherelittleladyMizJenkins
      12/17/15 2:21pm

      That is really interesting and reasonable-sounding solution.

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