Matt forgot why he was making the graph, but to me the interesting thing it shows is how central the New York City subway system is. Its effects dominate everything else, even the 1970s urban crash. Arguably, by making urban living in many ways more convenient for urban workers than commuting, it's the reason the 1970s crash was relative mild. And if Robert Moses hadn't killed off plans for a Staten Island subway line, the population would probably rival that of the other boroughs.
To me, the interesting thing is that it reminds people that the population of Manhattan is still considerably lower than when the subway system was built. There's a lot of room for population density to go up.
It shows just how negative an effect zoning and rent control and rent stabilization has had on NYC.
Oh, I dunno, John. I'd suggest a visit to the tenement museum on the Lower East Side. The incredibly high population of Manhattan at the turn of the century was supported by a ratio of people-per-square-foot of real estate that very few of us would be willing to tolerate today, and which frequently resulted in unsafe and unsanitary conditions with tragic consequences. We don't live three or four to a room anymore. The total residential square footage in Manhattan has climbed even as population has fallen.
It's not about repeopling vacant lots or empty buildings; raising the density of population in Manhattan back to its former levels would require a tremendous amount of new construction to accommodate new residents. Zoning is a useful and necessary planning tool, used judiciously - rent control and stabilization have probably done more harm than good. But even if you stripped away all three, it's not clear to me that you'd see Manhattan's population levels return to their former highs.
What Megan's pointing out is that as soon as the presence of convenient transportation allowed New Yorkers to decamp for cheaper alternatives, they did so. Manhattan was so dense because it was an island with natural boundaries, and because the other (largely residential) boroughs were inaccessible. Brooklyn grew first, with its own waterfront and industrial base, but it was the bridge which set off its first boom, and the subway which inaugurated the second. Transportation physically shrank the distances in the city, and lowered the implied costs of living in the outer boroughs. Changing the rules won't change that reality.
If you lifted all the laws and restrictions in the city, you'd probably see more development in the other four boroughs than in Manhattan - the land is cheaper and more available there. Manhattan would probably see more redevelopment and gentrification, as price appreciation would force many of its residents to the outer boroughs, and existing properties would be renovated and then converted to co-ops or condos. (Buying an existing rental property, renovating it, and flipping it for sale as condos or co-ops provides a mind-blowing return on investment - only the innumerable legal hurdles to doing this keep so many of the units in the city as rentals.) So it's even possible that lifting all of these restrictions in the city would result in a lower residential density in Manhattan, as apartments into which working families are presently crammed are renovated and sold to an upscale clientele.
Yes, and I'm familiar with that, but it's silly to suggest that the only way Manhattan could have higher population density is to return to those times. Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Paris, Athens, and plenty of other cities have higher population density.
The Upper East Side has the highest population density in Manhattan by a considerable margin. Are you suggesting that it's all unsafe tenements in the Upper East Side? Is there a particular reason that the rest of Manhattan couldn't have a population density approaching that of Manhattan Community Board 8?
But it's climbed much more slowly than in other locations, and much more slowly than it could have. The massive increase in housing prices compared to construction costs (and the increase in permitting costs) as examined by Ed Glaeser provide evidence of this.
Yes. And since very little construction of new large buildings has happened in the last fifty years, that would be quite possible. Since the marginal price of housing in New York is much, much higher than the construction cost plus the unimproved value of land (separated from permitting costs, as in Ed Glaeser's research), this would be very easy to do.
Possible, but extremely unlikely; the probability approaches zero. It's a lot more likely that the amount of profit available for building larger apartment buildings would cause smaller buildings (including possibly brownstones) to be torn down and replaced with larger buildings.
If you lifted only some restrictions, but still made permitting of new construction very difficult, then your theoretical outcome would be considerably more likely. But if you lifted "all of these restrictions," then almost surely there would be much more housing built in Manhattan.
The question is both of density and use however. Manhattan is not all residential. Midtown has a far lower population density than the upper east side, but has a far greater square footage density, it's just used for commercial purposes. It isn't clear which would take up the bulk of the slack produced by lower regulation, commercial real estate or residential.
It's not clear what the proportions would be, sure, but considering that supply of all construction has been restricted, along with the obviously quite high demand for residential housing, it's almost certain that the result would be some significant increase in population density.
I have much less empirical evidence for saying this part, but it does seem to me that commercial real estate has, in general, had an easier time gaining rezoning and permits than residential in Manhattan currently, at least for people like Columbia, NYU, and the New York Times who can get the city to use eminent domain on their behalf. For that reason, it seems to me that residential is currently effectively restricted more than commercial real estate, and, concomitantly, removing the restrictions would benefit residential construction more.
How does that work?
What happened was that, in spite of rent control, Manhattan steadily got more expensive over the years. And, like the downtown of many other cities, some areas of the island gradually transitioned from residential to commercial.
In spite of? That's not how rent control works.
Rent control is responsible for uncontrolled and new Manhattan housing being more expensive than it would be otherwise would be. Rent control pushes down the rents of some existing housing, but makes it unprofitable to build new housing and limits the housing stock, pushing up the prices of housing.
In some cases, the rent controlled housing will just simply provide cheaper housing to long-term residents while screwing over newcomers. However, in many other cases the rent controlled housing will pass into the hands of the wealthy and connected; often it will still be more expensive than it would be otherwise, it will just be paid for in methods outside normal rent.
Or do you have another explanation for why guys like Charlie Rangel have access to multiple giant rent controlled apartments, whereas ordinary people I know struggle to find housing?
A Manhattan of even more people sounds like a nightmarish place to exist in this life. As cynic points out,it probably was.
So the Upper East Side is the most nightmarish place to exist in Manhattan or in New York City?
Yes. I hate people and I like land. If I were a gazillionaire, I'd live on hundreds of acres of mixed forest/meadow.
Pardon my ignorance - but I don't see what the data has to do with rent control/stabilization and zoning. Can you (or someone) clarify?
QT
New York and its fabulous subway are so great that only one half o fits native born population moved away since about 1970. A population that was 8 million in 1970 would be less than 4 million today.
No, it was not the subways that "saved" NY. What saved NY was that people from dungholes around the world moved to NYC. Without foreign immigration NY would resemble other dying US cities. Right now, NYC population is over 50% foreign immigrant or first generation children of immigrants.
From the NYC Dep't of Planning - 2000
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/nny_exec_sum.shtml
"Given the high level of out-migration from New York, immigrant flows mitigated catastrophic population losses in the 1970s, stabilized the city's population in the 1980s, and helped the city reach a new population peak of 8 million in 2000. Immigration has also had an indirect effect on the city's population growth by way of immigrant fertility, with foreign-born mothers accounting for over one-half of all births in the city. Overall, immigrants and their U.S.-born offspring account for approximately 55 percent of the city's population.
From the NY Times - 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/24/nyregion/40-percent-in-new-york-born-abroad.html?pagewanted=all
"Without immigration, for example, New York's overall population would be shrinking. Instead, the stream of people from around the world is offsetting the loss of city residents to death and relocation to the suburbs and other regions. The result has been a modest net gain of about 130,000 since 1990, to an estimated total of 7.4 million last year.
''Absent immigration, we would be seeing a very different New York, with neighborhood abandonment and depopulation,'' said Dr. Philip Kasinitz, a sociology professor at Hunter College. Dr. William H. Frey, a demographer at the State University of New York at Albany, said, ''These groups are revitalizing and re-energizing these neighborhoods.''
The 2010 census will show even more of an increase.
So NYC's super duper subways didn't have one thing to do with "saving" the city. Again, NYC is such a grand place that 1/2 of its native born population chose to leave over a 30 year period. If foreign immigrants hadn't replaced the lost population, NYC would be in a situation similar to Buffalo.
Except that NY has always been full of immigrants. Where do you think all those folks that stopped by Ellis Island were from? Jersey?
Yeah, lets even go back to 1609 and those dutch "immigrants".
I'm talking recent, not past. The only appreciable immigrant movement to NY after WW II were Puerto Ricans, American citizens, until the waves started to hit in the latter 70s and onward.
Fact is that 1/2 of the NY native population voted with their feet and left.
Is that more or less than is typical for other big cities? The US is fairly notable for labour mobility, after all.
Alsadius: It's certainly true of a lot of older cities that lost population and never recovered. Other cities like Denver, Charlotte, Dallas, etc have grown since the 70s.
My point was to refute the author's contention: "but to me the interesting thing it shows is how central the New York City subway system is. Its effects dominate everything else, even the 1970s urban crash. Arguably, by making urban living in many ways more convenient for urban workers than commuting, it's the reason the 1970s crash was relative mild."
The subway did nothing to stem flight. Only foreign immigration mitigated the flight and, without it, NYC would be a ghost of former self population wise.
Staten Islanders should be sad that the line was killed- they could have been Queens.
Actually, SI is more like "Brooklyn south". When it boomed, beginning in the latter 70s, it was due to people from Brooklyn escaping the rot that was overtaking that borough. Many of those ex-Brooklynites were of Italian descent and their neighborhoods were being squeezed by all expanding slums.
Today, it really is very similar to Queens - entire neighborhoods of row houses, now called "townhouses". Contrary to what the author says, there is a "subway" (a raised line) that runs from around the ferry terminal right down the spine, hugging more to the east where there always were population centers, of the island to its southern tip. It's very old and was originally privately owned by one of the big railroads.
There are also rail lines that connect it to Jersey. Most are abandoned. They run down the west shore and along the north shore - the areas that were industrial and/or maritime.
The subway has allowed for the sort of population density that has enabled the city to support 8 million people--imagine for a minute if the subways were shut down permanently--and every New Yorker had to get a car or commute on bus or foot. It'd be an unworkable mess.
I don't know if Staten Island could have been another Brooklyn or Queens with subways though--it's still a great distance to the center of the city (Manhattan) where most of the jobs and nightlife are--so the subway tunnel ride would have been pretty long. Any ideas as to how long a ride it would have been under New York Harbor?
The present ferry ride is about 15 minutes. See my above post. Staten island is heavily developed with residential housing - just not a lot of big apartments. Of course, NYC in its infinite wisdom did build some public housing projects there years ago - near the ferry. That means that Staten Islanders get to enjoy some of the the disfunction and crime that comes with that.
It's also wrong to think that the subway serves everywhere in the boroughs. Many, many people have to first take a bus to get to the subway and then take that to Manhattan for work. There are a number of "express busses", that you pay a premium for, that take people from places without subway access to Manhattan.
If you live in one of the outer boroughs and work in another outer borough, you'll most likely have to drive to work. The subway is basically set to take people to Manhattan.
Humans are most comfortable
in small homogeneous communities;
21st century Hi-Tech will make
this practical in the future,
unless we return to the past.
It looks like hi-tech is outrunning the cultural mores at the moment. The resistance to telecommuting even in hi-tech industry itself is quite monumental -- warm bodies in the office still count for a lot.
Disclaimer: I've been telecommuting for the last 8+ years... can be done, but reduces one's options tremendously :( On the other hand, who in their right mind would move to NYC from Dallas to make extra 25%, if that much?
My work keeps trying to persuade me to telecommute. I have little interest in it. Being at home alone connected only by the Internet is inefficient for sharing information.
Plus working in the central city means that there's a diverse range of shops, cafes, restaurants, theatres, art galleries and dance classes in easy walking distance of the office.
My workmates feel the same.
My work keeps trying to persuade me to telecommute
Interesting, but probably a wrong approach: if you already live in an urban setting (and like it), you stand to gain nothing from converting your expensive living space into home office. Unfortunately the right approach entails telecommuters from across the country competing for the job :(
Max - I work in the energy sector. If anyone there wants to live and work in the quiet countryside there are already jobs available in remote outposts of the transmission grid operator, refineries, power stations etc. This may well explain why the company has only managed to hire one person in the energy sector as a telecommuter out of about 40, and that was filled by an ex-journalist rather than someone with energy sector specialism.
i am most comfortable in large diverse urban areas. the suburbs freak me out. does this mean that i'm not really human?
It only means you live in L.D.U.A. in the first place. What would make you move to TX?
I guess I wrongly assumed you responded to me... I assume no responsibility for the "humans are..." part of M.Report's haiku. My beef is mostly with the fact that hi-tech jobs still concentrate in L.D.U.A. (or XL.SU.A for that matter) even when there's no longer an overwhelming reason for them to do so.
Some people have wondered why the Verrazano Narrows Bridge didn't include subway tracks for Staten Island service. The Manhattan and Williamsburgh bridges include train tracks, as did the Brooklyn and Queensboro bridges at one point, and the R train's Bay Ridge terminal isn't far from the Verrazano.
The main reason is that the Verrazano had to be built with a very high center span to provide ship clearance. Trains can't handle steep slopes, and this meant that any train track approaches on the Brooklyn side would have had to be immensely long to keep the slope within manageable limits, well over one mile. In addition, it's doubtful that any line would have been particularly useful, as it's already almost an hour on the R from Bay Ridge to Midtown.
The Upper East Side had a population density of 118,184 people per square mile, according to the 2000 Census. That is the densest neighborhood in New York City or in Manhattan.
Manhattan, while quite dense compared to other places, had a population density of only 66,940 per square mile according to the same census.
Considering that, and considering that the Upper East Side is far from being hell on Earth or a collection of squalid tenements, it seems quite reasonable to me that Manhattan's population could increase by 50% without devolving into squalor. It would not even require Manhattan's overall population density to equal that of the Upper East Side to do so.
it seems that cynic and duder have forgotten about the invention of the elevator.
... considering that the Upper East Side is far from being hell on Earth or a collection of squalid tenements
Because it is full of the rich and young upwardly mobile. Rich people rarely live in squalid tenements.
If you make everyone rich, the problems of poverty will be resolved, yes.
But the great bulk of them still will no more want to live packed in as sardines than they do today.
The upper east side is a small neighborhood with a minority of the rich. I lived there myself briefly, when single and hanging out in Maxwell's Plum. When spouses and kids arrived, my friends from there and I all moved to better neighborhoods for family living -- more space, less cost. As people naturally want to do.
The UES is pretty much only residential. The vast majority of the people employed in the UES are retail and local services to support residential (shoe repair, dry cleaning, Duane Reade, bars and restaurants).
Most of the professionals that live in the UES work in midtown or downtown. Heck, I know more people that live in Manhattan and commute to Westchester than I do people that live in Manhattan and work in the UES. Office buildings take up lots of space.
I was looking at a time-progression map of Boston the other day and was surprised how much of it literally did not exist a couple hundred years ago (the shoreline has been built out considerably). I wonder what a similar map of NY would look like.
to me the interesting thing it shows is how central the New York City subway system is. Its effects dominate everything else
That's what immediately struck me too in the graph before looking at the text.
And remember, almost all those people in Manhattan were squeezed in below 14th Street, because they all had to get to work in the downtown dock/commerical area by walking or using ground-level transport that travelled at foot-speed.
The subway allowed a flood of urban sprawl into the wilds of middle and upper Manhattan, as well as the other boroughs, by letting them ride to work from those wilds.
If that chart had a line for "Manhattan, below 14th Street" it would start falling like a rock in 1905.
By enabling the sprawl of the masses into the countryside -- into far better and less-expensive housing, in far better living conditions -- the subways were one of the great benefactors of social welfare in US history.
All built by the private sector on time and under budget, and operated profitably in top condition at low cost to riders -- until the government intervened and wrecked them. They've never recovered to what they were.
A brief history of them.
John Thacker,
Do you know NYC at all? One reason, I would suppose, that the UES has the highest population density is the absence of other, non-residential uses. The area is almost entirely residential. The West Side has Columbus Circle, Lincoln Center/Juliard, Riverside Park, Columbia University.
Areas further downtown have lots of office, warehouse and commercial space, small parks, schools -- not to mention landmarks of various kinds. In the UES, there is the Guggenheim, which is not large. The Met is on 5th Ave, but the building protrudes into the Park, not into residential space.
It's true that there are a number of high rise buildings on the East Side as well. They contribute to density, and maybe you could argue that such buildings could exist elsewhere in the city. Except that those buildings are terrible, and people don't want to live there. At least nobody I know. I would not live there in a million years. The bulk of the popuation of those buildings are young kids on middling salaries who like to hang out in the frat bar scene on 2nd or 3rd Avenue.
Williamsburg is a much better place to live. That's symbolic of the way real estate has developed in New York. Neighborhoods gentrify as old warehouses are converted into nice loft apartments that provide much better living quality than the gigantic bland high rises. Places like Park Slope, Fort Greene, Boerum Hill, Central Harlem (right east of Morningside Park), and even Bed-Stuy and Sunset Hill have gotten makeovers. I'd argue that market forces are driving this. Most everyone would rather live in a nice loft space in W'Burg than a shitty high rise apartment on 2nd Avenue.
Most everyone would rather live in a nice loft space in W'Burg than a shitty high rise apartment on 2nd Avenue.
this sounds a little like that famous misquote, "i don't know how nixon won. i don't know anyone who voted for him." plenty of people prefer the UES to williamsburg. i suspect you hang in some rather hipster-ish circles and that explains your aversion to "frat bars" and UES high-rises.
Why not use the famous quote from the great Yankee catcher, Yogi Berra:
"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
Damn Billyburg hipsters.
Ah, so the problem is not actually that no one wants to live there, but that the wrong sort of people live there, those people who aren't our kind, right? I suppose that you think it's important that NYC be preserved for the "right kind of people," but forgive me for being as disgusted by this argument in this case as when I hear it being deployed by people who don't want black people moving into their neighborhood.
Market forces? Highly distorted markets affected by heavily regulation. "Most everyone" would like to live in a larger place in Manhattan than in a smaller place, sure, but that doesn't mean that market forces are driving it. "Most everyone" would like to live in an enormous mansion too, but that doesn't mean that the optimal market resort is a few people living in mansions and everyone else living far away because they can't afford them and because the supply is limited. You're arguing pretty directly here for laws to benefit the wealthier and connected few at the expense of the many.
You do realize that this is exactly the argument that people who live in suburban McMansions use to defend their own neighborhoods, shaped as they are by large-lot zoning and other regulations?