surrealchemist t1_iu9irut wrote on October 29, 2022 at 4:40 PM

Reply to comment by TenzeFiyer in Another building bites the dust... gentrification is real out here. by Towers_Oh_My27

Landlords and property owners don't make things look nice to make it nicer to live there. They make it nicer to justify charging the rent. If you just keep letting more and more in without any pushback then the other landlords are going to look at the market and start raising it as well because the whole average gets thrown out. Then it just spirals. There isn't much push back because people just see construction and new shiny things and think its good because it looks pretty and you can go to a starbucks or whatever.

sutisuc t1_iu9j83f wrote on October 29, 2022 at 4:43 PM

It’s like half the people on this sub haven’t seen what happened to jersey city over the years. Couldn’t possibly build more in a city of that size over the last 20 years and it’s more unaffordable than ever. Why people want to price themselves out of Newark I have no idea. Maybe there’s more property owners on this sub than I’ve realized

VroomRutabaga t1_iu9lywa wrote on October 29, 2022 at 5:03 PM

I would argue this sun is 80% a mix of developers and property owners foaming at the mouth.

twinkcommunist t1_iua7k15 wrote on October 29, 2022 at 7:35 PM

This country has freedom of movement. You have no choice but to let as many in as want to move in. What you can control is whether enough new housing gets built to accommodate newcomers or if they have to compete with residents for existing homes.

surrealchemist t1_iua95p2 wrote on October 29, 2022 at 7:46 PM

There are other types of housing though the city can encourage. Things like renter co-ops, low income units, non-profit housing. They can put caps on rent if they wanted. The recent push to put extra tax on vacant properties is good as well if it can prevent landlords from sitting on a unit to wait to replace it with a higher rent tenant.

twinkcommunist t1_iuaa0zo wrote on October 29, 2022 at 7:53 PM

I'm fine with those other things if theres actually enough money behind any of them to actually get them built. Price caps usually have really bad second order effects. I don't think a vacancy tax would be useful because less than 6% of units in Newark are vacant which usually just means that landlords wait a month or two between tenants; things aren't sitting empty long term. (Especially in a city that has a lot of structures that aren't habitable but would count as vacant because they have walls and a roof). I'd rather just have a universal higher property tax that goes to a public housing developer that builds apartments to rent slightly above the cost of maintenance.