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motherthrowee t1_j7vlvoh wrote

Everyone should read this article in Curbed about the phenomenon. tl;dr: according to all existing data (census, USPS, wastewater usage, etc.), there has not been a population spike, meaning the "people have come flooding back to NYC and that's why rents rae higher" excuse doesn't hold

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gigawort t1_j7wb28s wrote

One thing the author didn't explore was the average sq ft rented per person. I suspect that's drastically increased since 2021, but I don't know if that kind of data is available.

More sq. ft. person -> less people per unit -> higher demand -> higher prices

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TwoOliveTrees t1_j7xg6e9 wrote

This article doesn't mention household formation once. Household formation has increased in the past two years, and most people consider it one of the main drivers of the increase in rent.

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donttouchthirdrail t1_j7zs815 wrote

The article explicitly says that wastewater usage has gone up, then hand waves it away. Also does not mention household formation.

All I want to do is live in the city I grew up in but you fucking people are trying as hard as you can to make that impossible.

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jadedaid t1_j7xzdlk wrote

Yup. And do you see those people in NY? Have we seen this flood of people? I haven’t.

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crek42 t1_j7wgycc wrote

Can’t read the article as it’s paywalled but isn’t it just the most desirable neighborhoods seeing these increases? Sounds like a bunch of upper middle class, DINKs or whatever bidding up Soho or LES or something.

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sunmaiden t1_j82k9xz wrote

So, one thing that's important when you are doing research is to use more than one source. I'm not going to say outright that the author is wrong, but here are some quotes that should make you want to find more information.

  • "While I am not technically a statistician, I do pay $7 a month for Microsoft Excel"
  • "the New York City comptroller issued a widely circulated report on pandemic migration, which cheerfully asserted that “since July 2021, USPS data has shown an estimated net gain of 6,332 permanent movers"
  • "Placer.AI published a study this past summer that found Manhattan’s population had recovered its pandemic losses, then followed it up this month with a claim that the borough is now 3.9 percent more populous than it had been in 2018"
  • "...data from the New York City Water Board, which shows that the amount of waste treated by the city’s processing plants jumped in 2021"

Also some of these points are not as strong as they seem. Remember that the claim is that people are not coming back to New York _after_ the pandemic, not during.

  • the [census] bureau announced that New York City lost 305,000 residents between July 2020 and July 2021

The article also links to a lot of stories and reports that make different claims than the author is making, with the implication that there is some kind of conspiracy to make it seem like there are more people in New York than there actually are. But if the data is really there then 1) why are the professionals coming to different conclusions than the author, and 2) why aren't there more people coming to the same conclusion as the author? There are quite a few people in New York who know how to use Excel.

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