[mapt]

NYC is home to ~half of the co-op housing in the United States. This is a relatively unusual arrangement. Co-ops generally forbid renting / subletting, they practically ban REITs, new resident-owners go before a board to get approval. They should be considered the same as owner-occupied housing, and for long-term owner-occupied houses where the asset value isn't a big deal, higher property taxes are on average a wash - they pay higher amounts for higher levels of public services. Perhaps your $2k/month goes to $3k/month but transit becomes free, trash collection becomes effective, and the schools become better. Or in the alternate universe your $2k a month goes to $3k a month and then we hand residents a $12k check at the end of the year.

Either way, vacancy gets punished, landlords can't treat the city's housing like gold boullion, and the price of housing is fractionally more tied to the cost of living than the future economic outlook in potentia.

Picture a conventional Ponzi scheme operating in the Lower East Side, which has scaled to be 30% of the city's economy. Whole industries have risen up around this scheme, it's essentially printing money in a way that seems like it might be legal if you squint, and you're not trying to regulate/tax it. It's growing so fast that it's actually causing problematic inflation for the rest of the city.

Can you afford to let it grow unchecked, indefinitely?