What Happened to the West Village?

Ultimately the people who buy up housing in major cities as a place to park money are going to end up shooting themselves in the foot.<p>Parking a few million dollars in a Manhattan apartment is desirable because it&#x27;s unlikely to lose value and you can actually use it when you visit. But if all the apartments are owned by people who mostly don&#x27;t live there and only visit a few times a year, the thing that made them valuable - being located in a desirable, dynamic city where lots of people live and work, is no longer going to be true and they&#x27;re going to lose value.<p>Cities should implement punitively high property taxes on any homes or apartments that are not used as a primary residence, either by the owner or a tenant.

I used to hang out in the village from around 96 or so to the late 00&#x27;s. The place was packed with all sorts of people visiting the numerous quirky shops, many of which lined 8th st. Punks, metal heads (me included), hip hop, skaters, artsy and bohemian types, tourists, from high school kids to elderly. There was real life there. Record stores, book stores, comic book shops, clothing and fabric shops, collectibles, gaming, etc. We&#x27;d go to bleecker bobs and go to this grugy dude in the back and order black metal imports. Generation records always had tons of vinyl and they had a great band tee shirt collection. The chess shop was few doors down and one friend was a frequent player.<p>Over the summer I took the train in to walk around the village and was heartbroken. Half the stores along 8th st are indeed boarded up. Shops I was familiar with were gone. The eerie part that struck me was how empty village was. Sure there were people walking around but not the hustle and bustle of all walks of life prowling the shops.<p>It&#x27;s been sanitized. And thats whats happening. The white glove suburbanites are doing their damndest to scrub away New York City&#x27;s &quot;dirty&quot; history so they can live in&#x2F;visit their septic utopia devoid of unsightly things and people. And the same thing happened to Williamsburg too. They killed my home and I increasingly feel like a stranger in my own city.

Cities are becoming expensive for two main reasons. People with unlimited funds buy them up because its an investment you can actually use, and dual income couples cannot move to smaller places where it is possible that only one of the two can get a well paying job in their chosen profession.<p>The internet has created an environment where it is incredibly easy for landlords to find tenants and dramatically decrease the cost of tenant churn for them. This allows them to raise rents much more aggressively, and quickly, than they could have done in the past.

Cities change...it’s the longing for days past that created the housing crisis in SF in the name of preservation.<p>I’m not familiar with the exact building restrictions in West Village but I assume there’s strict height restrictions that have been grandfathered in long ago...I’m going to guess these restrictions is the exact reason why the ultra wealthy can just buy up a small building and make it into a SFH, which obviously just exacerbates the housing problems in the neighborhood.<p>The story touched on this a bit but also seems like every time I visit half the stores are either closed or new because rents are so high for businesses. The only stores that I see have staying power are the ones that look like obvious money laundering fronts like jewelry stores. It’s this strange ghost town for retail.

I guess this is what they call a &quot;hot take&quot;, but it&#x27;s simply impossible to preserve a neighborhood&#x27;s character and keep it affordable. You either have to build the same type of residences upward (in the city), or adjacent (in the suburbs), or have prices go through the roof, or have a period of crisis and collapse clear everyone out.

Was speaking with someone recently about the city feels increasingly empty. There are less store fronts and such for sure, but huge swaths of apartments in NYC are investments. They may sit vacant for years on end for some Saudi Arabian wealth fund. There are certainly reports of the dropping population, but in other ways things feel tangible. Living in NYC you come to discover how small of a world it is, disparate friend groups may in turn know each other, how big is this city really? Neighborhoods feel emptier, huge parts of the population of the city are from wealthy Chinese and foreign backgrounds (this is not to disparage them). They don&#x27;t really work jobs or have traditional careers, but fill the city, making it seem more hollow.

The author explicitly acknowledges that the result of rent control is nepotism. Why is someone&#x27;s friend&#x27;s niece a better resident of this neighborhood than anyone else?

When nice places for people become too expensive, the obvious thing to do is to make more nice places for people. In America, however, it is only legal to make more nice places for cars.

It might be quite eye opening to learn 2000 square foot storefront in Manhattan starts around $10000 a month in the cheapest (ABCD) parts.