The tower is almost guaranteed to stand longer than the 30 year maximum for tax abatements. Im not familiar with how often Newark gives them out and if they're full the full term, but all developments pay tax eventually.

The landlord will definitely pay Newark property tax.

Some of the people who live there will drive of course but it'll be a percentage. If you block this project, homes will get built in suburbs instead and nearly every adult will drive.

In the economy we have, where capital is privately owned, cities can basically only say yes or no to developments, and saying no is almost always the wrong answer.

It doesn't have any zoning variances so whatever the broad street redevelopment plan requires by default is what it would have for affordable units.

I care about housing affordability, but there are a million other good reasons to allow construction of market rate housing. The people who will live in this project will pay taxes in Newark, and probably not drive. If you don't allow construction in cities (which necessarily have lots of buildings already), people are going to live elsewhere. Opposing redevelopment of cities is supporting greenfield development in suburbs.

As for parking lots, those should be built on too, but it's harder for cities to force people to give up the land they own if they aren't willing to sell. They're currently against New Jersey law, but land value taxes (as opposed to property taxes) could penalize people for sitting on land they're not actively making money from and just waiting for the price to go up.

It's not dishonesty, it's ignorance that I corrected immediately upon finding the right information.

The reddit post is just a render of the completed project, not the article about the commission. No one mentioned the 1899 townhouse in any of the comments I responded to, so excuse me for thinking the (also old) building on the corner would be the one demolished for a tower which is on that corner.

The reason rents increase despite relatively impressive construction is that Newark isn't its own housing market. Newark and JC are building a lot, which indirectly causes gentrification (by improving public services mostly), but the NYC metro area's supply has not kept up with demand even a little.

Vibes are not a good way to evaluate projects. It'll have 344 residential units with 417 beds. Hundreds of potential Newark taxpayers will be kept out to preserve three townhouses.

Both this site and the adjacent parking lot should be turned into towers, but the developers only own this site. If you demand they go elsewhere and buy land from a compant that someone else in this thread said charges way over market rate, itll just not get built.

It's the building in the majority of the footprint of the tower, but here is the other side. The second one looks kind of nice and I wouldn't mind if they left the front up, but it's really nothing incredible, and the first and third definitely suck. I don't know if all three townhouses are on the chopping block through.

Edit: only the first of the three townhouses will be demolished. I think it's ok looking, not actively ugly but not worth preventing hundreds of homes to preserve.

Behold, a historic building. I oppose demolishing ornamented victorians or anything with cool masonry because we'll never be able to build like that again, but this is incredibly generic and quite ugly.

The existing facade sucks. I can't imagine anyone is actually sad to see it go.

Edit: I mistakenly was looking at the building in the majority of the towers footprint. The actual building the commission wants to preserve is the first of these three townhouses. It's not actively ugly, but I don't think it's worth blocking the construction of hundreds of homes over.

The only building on that block of broad street I'd remotely care about would be the one on the north end, which I think won't be demolished. The other one on street view that's kinda nice has the big bite on the ground floor. I'm sure the block looks shitty on street view because theyve stopped maintenance ahead of demolition, but I just don't think any are nice enough to block hundreds of homes over

I must be looking at the wrong building? It looks like they're tearing down a two story shop with ugly stucco walls. The only thing architecturally interesting about it is the little battlements, but even they're not that good. Not every building should stand forever.

Am I looking at the wrong site? The building at the north corner of broad and central looks generic and ugly.

Edit: it seems like the building they want to preserve is the first of these three townhouses. The one in the middle is cute but it's the plain-but-not-ugly one getting the axe.

I'd support public housing but we don't have the tax system that existed post-war to fund it, and raising taxes enough to do so would be nearly politically impossible.

I don't think the idea that private developers are capable of lowering housing prices is actually discredited. New construction tends to be very expensive, but places that allow lots of building are overall cheaper than comparable places that don't. Upzoning slows rent growth in adjacent areas, and in some cases where it's done on a huge scale (like Sydney and Minneapolis) it actually has decreased overall rents.

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.

Owning houses you don't own only makes sense if property taxes are relatively low and you expect the price to keep going up forever. Prices are rising because despite the surge of construction, there isn't actually enough housing near jobs and transit for everyone who wants it. The empty luxury housing thing is mostly a myth but the solution is higher taxes and more constructuon.

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.