[BoxFour]

Eh, I agree with the general point that rental housing has to be financially viable over the long run. I just don’t think NYC politics lets this particular problem turn quickly into a clean “landlords stop renting/developers stop building” outcome. It’ll look a lot weirder.

Affordable housing is too central to NYC democratic politics for the city/state to simply let a large share of subsidized housing totally collapse. More likely, they keep patching it with public money: arrears assistance, vouchers, preservation funds, regulatory tweaks, etc. That’s already basically the pattern.

The real likely long-term problem is that the city robs Peter to pay Paul: It props up housing operations by reducing funding for other services, creating recurring subsidy obligations, or risking pressure on its fiscal position and bond ratings.

They’re already doing that all the time: Part of how Mamdani plugged the budget gap, for example, was by delaying a classroom size reduction in public schools.

Obviously, I don’t think that’s a great long-term strategy. It turns a blind eye to an enforcement problem in favor of a recurring taxpayer-funded operating subsidy.

[eru]

It's a shame that NYC can't raise more from property taxes / land taxes?

They sit on some of the most valuable real estate in the world, surely that should be able to find public infrastructure etc? Especially since the density they have would allow them to provide the infrastructure rather efficiently.

But they are so ham-strung / incompetent, they still have surface level street parking on public roads. Surely, there's more valuable uses of NYC real estate than that, and the market would be more than happy to find them.

(At least they made some inroads recently by introducing some congestion pricing. As neutered as that programme turned out, it's a lot better than nothing, which they had before.)

[BoxFour]

They can and it often comes up: One of Mamdani's tax proposals was to raise property taxes, though he backtracked on it.

Still, NYC's municipal budget is already the largest in the world by far. When I last looked, it was roughly double Tokyo's and bigger than many countries: NYC's municipal budget is larger than Singapore's, for example, and obviously NYC's budget gets to exclude things countries pay for like national defense.

It's likely they will need to continue raising taxes, but we also need to take a hard look at how effective each dollar being spent is.