I didn’t read the story. I was just playing along with what do you think is your city’s identity. 
I agree with @oldmom4896 that “finance” represents a tiny sliver of NYers. For people coming from other places, I think a bigger draw is to do art–whether theater, music, visual arts, writing, etc, artists have always been drawn to New York City.
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Well, likely not many people do fly seaplanes, though if they did, Seattle would be one of the places that they do so. And as far as a culture of costly outdoors sports, sure, that is Seattle. We have a very large group of highly paid tech professionals, and outdoors activities are one of the things they’re willing to pay for. Not suits and expensive watches, but nice athletic wear and solid hiking gear. Of course, we generally don’t boast about how much we paid for it, the bragging starts with how we only paid $20 for it at an REI garage sale, or got it at the Salvation Army.
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Can confirm 
We live outside of Portland and while it isn’t Seattle, what rich people spend money on is similar.
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Agree with Garland-- and it goes without saying that NYC has hospitals (nurses, doctors, PT’s, OT’s, all support staff); schools (teachers, paras, bus drivers), botanical gardens (landscape specialists, arborists, maintenance staff) a huge construction industry (architects, skilled trades, land use specialists) etc.
Somehow millions of people manage to stay employed without ever going NEAR the financial services industry except for paying their credit card bill, mortgage, and depositing their paycheck…
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The problem with that is it is a dying thing, the old working class areas have become gentrified too. Unless you have one of the rent controlled apartments that have been in the family for years, there is less and less of that. Working class areas like Red Hook and Astoria have gentrified, I am not even gonna talk about the lower east side (my dad must be turning over in his grave). The south Bronx, that I never thought would gentrify, has, it is incredible. Places like Fort Tryon park, that was this gem of a neighborhood that working class and people like musicians and artists lived in, has gentrified.
That was always one of the nice parts about NYC, that it was diverse, and there were working class people as well as the upper class. Now it is becoming more and more a city of the really well off, or the very poor in many ways. Once So Ho was a place where artists lived illegally in old lofts (Robert Moses kind of did something right for the wrong reason; artists could do that because there was a giant red line through the master plan of NYC until the early 70’s; they wanted to build an expressway between the Holland Tunnel/Lincoln Tunnel to tie to the east side bridges right through SOHO, building owners seeing that didn’t bother to revitalize the buildings).
Some of it still exists, the city is too big to totally turn into a forbidden city, but it is very difficult to live there with even what most would consider a good salary.
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There are many neighborhoods in Brooklyn with a zillion rent-stabilized 2-3 bedroom apartments (like mine in Bay Ridge; two bedrooms, $2300) within easy commute to lower and midtown Manhattan. Midwood and other areas of Flatbush, Sunset Park, etc. And Queens! Staten Island for sure. My father was born on the Lower East Side and grew up near St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx. When I got my first apartment in Binghamton, he said, “But [then young]mom, why do you think we moved from the Bronx?” He was delighted to see my place in Clinton Hill, then Bed Stuy. Both of those neighborhoods are now crazy-expensive but it’s certainly possible to live close enough to Manhattan without the crowds there, in safety too!
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Nice to hear Bay Ridge hasn’t gone totally nuts. So many areas have gentrified, when I saw luxury buildings in Port Morris (in the South Bronx) I was like holy cow. The irony is when my dad was growing up the grand concourse was very expensive (my dad would be 102 if alive), they used to call it Jewish 5th avenue because many doctors and other professionals, locked out of Manhattan luxury apartments because of anti semitism, lived there. I saw some of those buildings in the 70’s, when my uncles were bidding on some demolition jobs, they must have been something in the day. I heard that has gone up, some of those apartments are stunning if they have been renovated.
But how does that help young ambitious people unless they inherit those apartments from their parents?
As the tweet says, “this is the most effective anti-rent control propaganda I’ve ever seen”:
Rent stabilized isn’t the same thing as rent controlled. My oldest son moved to NYC during covid when everyone was fleeing the city. He got an amazing deal, and two years later, when his lease was up, found out the apartment was rent stabilized, so the rent could only go up 2% instead of the 10 and 20% increases the open market had. Sorry to ramble, but my point is that rent stabilized places don’t have to be handed down to family members to be available.
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My first lease began on 3/31/20. I’ve only lived here since then and many apartments have turned over since then–3 out of the 11 on my floor alone. (The building, built in 1963, has 63 apartments.)
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I e mixed feelings on rent control. I have witnessed it in different cities in Ca. At one point in Santa Monica the rent stayed controlled on the apartment so people would win the lottery if they found an apartment that had low rent. It switched at some point o being able to be brought up to market rate when someone moved out but rent increases were regulated. For the building owners costs of maintaining a building and keeping insurance have skyrocketed.
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These are taken into consideration in the amount the rent is allowed to increase year by year. And capital improvement projects done by the landlord are pro-rated and added to rent.
Seniors and disabled renters whose income is below a certain level are protected from increases with the city paying the difference.
Of course this doesn’t prevent a small number of property owners from attempting to circumvent the rules by harassing tenants so they will move and owner can spend enough on renovation to remove apartments from rent stabilization system and/or raising rent for routine maintenance vs major capital improvement, etc. There are several nonprofit organizations that help tenants organize and fight cheating landlords.
I saw this article about Austin (or more properly about a book describing Austin’s more recent transformation due to growth/newcomers): https://thehill.com/homenews/4907909-lost-in-austin-book-development-affordability-traffic-water/
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Thanks! I’ll read it in a bit.
ETA: Unlike most stories written about Austin, I don’t have a problem with anything written here. Could be fleshed out a bit, but overall feels sadly accurate. Thanks for sharing.
Sorry but the comparison with London is laughable nonsense, especially the suggestion that “fast, reliable mass transit has kept his hometown of London a hub of immigrants and the working class even as its rents and property values have gone up”.
Austin is one of the rare cities in the US that has built enough housing for prices to start falling. Meanwhile buying a house in London is utterly impossible for anyone who isn’t a millionaire.
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I have known people living in Austin and they said the housing even with high interest rates is still going up,houses selling for more than the asking price. This was earlier this year so may have changed, but things I have read say it is still red hot.
In NYC there is rent control and rent stablized. Rent control applies to apartments where someone has lived their a long time, and where rents basically go up very little if at all. It is why you read about someone who lives in a really expensive area and they are paying like 300 a month for a 2 bedroom apartment. Those are the places that can be inherited. There aren’t necessarily a lot of them, and if the landlord renovates them they can become market rate.
Rent stabilization is something different. Rent Stablized apartments (and I forget the criteria of how they are covered) basically are limited in how much increase they can give on a lease when it expires. They are supposed to look at costs to landlords, like fuel, insurance, etc, and come up with an increase. Lot of the times neither landlords nor renters are happy, and it can range from really low ot somewhat high at times.
There are loopholes in the law and one of the problems with the idea that if you don’t have rent control and whatnot the market will build plenty of housing fails, because what happens is all they build is luxury housing. What makes it even more ironic is to promote new housing being built, they offer developers and owners of new housing tax abatements, where they pay little or not property taxes, supposedly in return for building affordable housing. Hudson Yards was supposed to be that, it got a huge tax abatement for a number of years. And all I can say is if Hudson Yards is affordable housing there must be a ton of people making a ton of money, because it is expensive to buy apartments there and rentals are expensive as hell. I guess you can tell, right across from the complex on 10th avenue is a huge Whole Foods.
The best part of that scam was how they financed it. A lot of the financing was done via the EB5 visa, where foreign investors if they invested 500k or more in a project, got automatic visas for themselves and their families. It was supposed to be used in projects to revitalize economically disadvantaged rural or urban areas with high unemployment. Midtown west where Hudson Yards is located is not such a zone. But to make it work, NY State put together a district that had hudson yards, but also encompassed areas of Harlem where there are these huge public housing projects (where needless to say, many of the people are unemployed or poverty level). So a luxury housing development was financed by a project supposed to help depressed areas…now that is a NYC story.
To think we could have had the Jets stadium there. One of the arguments against the stadium being there was NYC desperately needed affordable housing, that the site should be used for that, not a stadium that was a waste (well, given how bad the Jets generally are, maybe they were right…spoken as a long time sufffering jets fan).
As a New Yorker, I have to say, “not exactly.”
Most of the extremely generous-to-landlords subsidies have been gone for a few years. I recall that for some time, affordable units could be built away from the new construction receiving subsidies but no longer. And in both systems, a family member living with the leaseholder in an apartment for a certain amount of time could assume the lease.
Right now, the only subsidies for new construction are for a certain number of apartments in a project/building/groupof buildings set aside as affordable. There are many different brackets of “affordability,” given the median income in, say, Manhattan, but truly poor people have units set aside. The city has a lottery system, run centrally, to allocate these apartments when they are ready for occupancy, and independent agencies check the documentation of “winners” to make sure they are eligible. These lottery entrants stay on file to fill vacancies.
In the past, landlords administered allocation of "affordable units and it was not done cleanly. For example, in the 2000s, builders in gentrifying Chinatown/Lower East Side would give apartments to college student children of their friends. No more–it truly is a fairly administered system.
Re rent control vs stabilization: “control” started in 1947 when GIs came home to start families after WWII. The law sunset(ed?) and was gone by 1968. Rents skyrocketed and rent stabilization started after less than two years.
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Austin has the fastest falling home prices in the nation.
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From talking to my family, real estate in Austin has definitely cooled. My sister’s next-door neighbors had a relatively difficult time selling their house.
DH and I had to take our first jobs in Maine because the economy in the entire country sucked. But then we could have moved to a big city and designed skyscrapers. We even had the opportunity to move to London and run an office for a firm in Texas that I had worked for during college. But we decided to stay here for the quality of life. Maine calls itself “Vacationland” and its motto is, “Maine: The way life should be.” I think the ambitions of people up here are to buy a second home and take off from work as often as possible. I’ll go to a shop and it will be closed at a random time, just because the owners went hunting or fishing. TBH, as much as I love Austin, every time I go there I am very happy to return to Portland.
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