There is no doubt that New York City is expensive. It is one of the most expensive cities in America, right alongside San Francisco.
One things that these two cities share in common is that they have among the most tightly controlled housing markets in the country, and we consistently refuse to build enough housing to keep up with demand. So for better and for worse, these are cities that are expensive by design.
Even our “affordable housing” policies conspire to make these cities more expensive on the whole, rather than less. History has repeatedly shown that when you answer housing shortages with price controls, you get more shortages and higher prices for most people. This is not news. It is a persistent feature of reality that college students go over in week one of basic economics. (Unfortunately far too many of us, myself included, are never confronted with these fundamental realities of life until we are long into adulthood.)
Still, expensive cities like these can be great if you can afford to live in one. They will often offer incredible public services, competitive arts scenes and vibrant economies. Of course, they can also be pretty terrible to live in if you can’t afford them, perhaps most especially from the perspective of basic sanity. They can and will chew you up and spit you out, and given the chance, they are more than happy to impose their own formidable will on top of your own.
For those of us who have more time and creativity to offer than money, there are often amazing benefits to living in less expensive and less saturated cities. There are incredible advantages to living in places like Philadelphia, Austin, Providence, Chicago, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Louisville, Lexington, Portland, Hudson, Houston, Milwaukee, Asheville, Athens and so many others around this amazingly diverse country.
Some of those who currently live in New York find the very thought of even considering these cities offensive. But I believe that this attitude is itself an insult, not only to the people who live in those great cities, but also to other current New York residents considering similar moves for themselves.
Since the very beginning, human beings have always been moving from one place to another, because opportunities have always been on the move ahead of them. The 21st century is no different in that regard. The kinds of opportunities offered by the New York of 10, 20 and 30 years ago are still around. That they have simply shifted elsewhere should be of no surprise to us.
What so many of us tend to forget is that the romanticized “affordable” New York of the 1970s and 1980s was nothing like the New York of today. Instead, it was a whole lot like the Detroit of today: High crime, crumbling infrastructure, looming bankruptcy, and few jobs or opportunity for immediate return on investment. If one wants those kinds of opportunities, one must be willing to pay that kind of price.
With a few exceptions, today’s New York offers new kinds of opportunity to new kinds of people:
Some of them are recent arrivals to this city who bring talent and resources from around the world into our local and national economies. Many of them are longtime residents who themselves have been “gentrified”, developing new skills, making smart investments, and adapting to the changing times. And many more are those who have returned to this city after a generation in which they were pushed out due to increasing crime, crumbling infrastructure and poor civic planning.
Today, what remains the best way for artists and regular working people to get long-term affordable housing in any city is to save up, buy something that is worth more to you than it is to others, and then sit on it, improving the local world around you until others realize just how foolish they’ve been for not realizing how good you’ve got it. This is not rocket science. People far less “intelligent” than you are doing this kind of thing every day.
When artists and regular working people like us get involved in their cities in this way, as our neighborhoods improve and our property values go up, we benefit. And, unlike with a rental, no one can ask us to leave if it turns out that they can get more for the that place they’re allowing us to stay in than we can afford to pay them.
Still, many of us believe that we all would benefit from having far more affordable rents in this city for those of us who are not ready, willing, or interested in buying a place to live. And I agree. With that in mind, there are two surefire ways to make housing far more affordable without adding any more of the ill-advised price controls that have proven to be counter-productive, even destructive, in the long run. They are:
1) Build enough housing to keep up with demand.
If you overdo this, you get really inexpensive housing, much like in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, or Las Vegas a few years ago, when brand new homes routinely rented for less than the cost of their mortgages.
2) Pay people enough money through their jobs so that they can afford where they live.
This requires rolling back both direct and indirect subsidies that allow companies to pay their workers far too little for their area, with the comfortable expectation that other taxpayers, homeowners and renters will foot the bill for them.
There is of course, one more way to make a city more affordable: You can make it a less desirable place to live for people at every income level. (ie “crappier.”)
As stupid as this sounds when you say it out loud, it is far too common of a choice. Despite the best of intentions, this is the approach we inadvertently took in leading to the New York of the 70s and 80s. And it worked: People who could afford to leave the city did so in droves. Those who couldn’t afford to leave were stuck with crumbling infrastructure, disappearing opportunity, rising crime, and a general erosion in their quality of life. That’s one way to do it.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to live in an affordable city. An affordable city is simply one where your income allows you to do the things you care about most without you having a heart attack at age 40. This can happen at any price and any income level. And it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
One person might get a lot more creative work done if he doesn’t have to go insane worrying about rent all the damn time. Another might find the pressure of living in an especially competitive city, having to make ends meet by living up to totally crazy demands quite invigorating and inspiring. That is a choice.
To each their own. No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head, forcing them to live in cities like New York or San Francisco. There’s also no law that says you can’t make great art in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philly or Cleveland. You might just have to generate more of it yourself. Though, for an artist or musician, isn’t that kind of the whole point?
Ultimately, not every place in the world has to be like New York. All I’d ask is that we allow New York to be like New York. And that in our well-intentioned zeal for fairness and affordability, we do not mistake it for someplace else.