[yummyfajitas]

All sorts of really dumb laws make housing more expensive. Rent control and projects take huge swaths of housing out of the market, reducing supply and raising costs. Onerous regulations and NIMBYism make building new buildings difficult (e.g., hippies in the village often block construction of new apartments). Because of rent control most new buildings will be either luxury buildings (not subject to rent control) or condos.

There is a simple solution to housing prices: move subsidized housing out to Jamaica (increasing supply), end rent control and let developers build. Unfortunately, the local culture makes this exceedingly unlikely.

[warfangle]

A lot of the new housing going up (and the reason for the NIMBYism) typically has these attributes (a close friend was in a similar building in BK):

* Extremely shoddy construction (2 years after being built, severe water damage from leaking windows)

* Blank concrete walls with giant leaky windows

* Extremely poor soundproofing

* Overpriced for their size and quality

* Thus, attracting more affluent, less intelligent, and typically more dickish yuppy types

The "simple solution" you propose would be terrible. It would ghettoize Jamaica even more than it already is - even if not done for racist reasons (I'm convinced that's not your reasoning), it would come across as this and get an immense amount of backlash from the council, the population, and community boards throughout the city.

[yummyfajitas]

Thus, attracting more affluent, less intelligent, and typically more dickish yuppy types

Therein lies the real reason. "If we allow new construction, people who are different from us will move in!"

By the way, companies building rental buildings rarely construct them poorly. It's just bad business - once the building starts to leak, renters will move out, and it's the responsibility of the management company to fix it.

As for shipping projects out to jamaica, I didn't mean to single out Jamaica. You could spread it around all the cheapest areas in NYC. But yes, you are correct that it is unfeasible, since people will fight it for cultural reasons.

[starkfist]

The problem is not lack of new buildings. There are dozens, if not hundreds of mostly empty new buildings in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, LIC and downtown Brooklyn.

The expense of housing in NYC is not tied to any real "fundamental." The owners are charging what they think the market will bear. The smaller tenement style and brownstone buildings in the hot rental areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn were usually purchased and fully paid for back in the 1980s... My old landlord owned a block of avenue B that he bought for about $80K per building back in the 80s. Paid off decades ago. He's charging $2400/m per unit. Shit apartments, roaches, old appliances, noisy... The whole alphabet city experience from the 80s still available to BFFs from Maryland psyched to be at NYU!