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  • New York City pricing is stupid and irrelevant when it comes to price comparisons with the rest of the country. Sorry, citydwellers. :P
    Any decently sized city can be that bad. I'm not sure if it's quite as high as NYC, but Boston and San Francisco are also notorious for having crazy expensive real estate. I know that houses started going up in price very quickly the closer I get to Boston from where I live. Part of the reason I bought the house where I was is that it was relatively cheap (at least compared to what was closer to the city) while still being only about 30-45 minutes from Boston proper.
  • The more expensive land is clearly superior.
  • RymRym
    edited November 2012
    Yet there are still tons of people only making minimum wage there. The super incredibly low minimum wage that people in other less expensive areas still can't live on. I will never understand why society thinks crap like this is okay. >.<</p>
    Society doesn't: the market does.

    Those jobs get filled. There is heavy upward pressure wages for even menial jobs in New York due to the fact that the jobs need to get done despite how expensive it is to live here.

    There is also actually low income housing: it's just not near the subway. I could live in parts of Manhattan for half what I pay to live where I do in Queens if I moved to Inwood or Chinatown.

    There is no way to keep housing prices down, though, due to the simple fact that there isn't that much land here. Prices will continue to rise as more and more people want to live in the City, and this in turn eventually pushes wages up across the board.

    I'm driving prices up myself. I'm one of a whole emergent class of 20-30 somethings in the tech sector willing to pay whatever it takes to live at the center of everything that's awesome. I'm paying for the privilege of never being bored. I would pay more if I had to. Living here is worth waaay more to me than the $3k a month I spend on rent.

    Sure, my high wages are heavily mitigated by my ludicrous living expenses. But I'd end up about the same if I lived elsewhere: there's no way I could make the money I do outside of a city like New York. I thus choose to live here, make big money, and spend big money. One of the reasons its so expensive to live here (rent aside) is that labor costs more because living expenses are higher, so stores have to charge more, etc...).
    Post edited by Rym on
  • Build UP! Skyscraper all the buildings. Then shit can actually get cheap.

    I heard part of the reason that they chose 1 WTC instead of twin towers is because it would have driven down the price of commercial real estate too far.
  • Solution, move to the crappy cities and make them awesome, so you'll get in on the cheap, I'm pretty sure you can buy a skyscraper in Camden for 275k :-p
  • Solution, move to the crappy cities and make them awesome, so you'll get in on the cheap, I'm pretty sure you can buy a skyscraper in Camden for 275k :-p
    Beacon is seeing that happen. But it takes too long, and not enough happens out there. Also, fuck commuting. ;^)
  • Build UP! Skyscraper all the buildings. Then shit can actually get cheap.
    This is somewhat limited by the square cube law. While improvements in architectural and materials engineering can mitigate this, the laws of physics do have caps on how much actually can be done. That said, I'm sure that many older, smaller buildings of no historical significance could theoretically be replaced with skyscrapers built using modern techniques. Although you may have a situation where multiple small buildings are torn down to make one skyscraper. Still, that skyscraper would probably still have a net gain in total living space.
  • Artificial land!
  • Artificial land!
    Orbital space colonies with a direct space elevator line to NYC!
  • I hate to tell you this, but you didn't just run out of land. You're actively losing it. Shit is going to go down in NYC eventually just like it is now in Tuvalu and Kivalina.
  • edited November 2012
    I hate to tell you this, but you didn't just run out of land. You're actively losing it. Shit is going to go down in NYC eventually just like it is now in Tuvalu and Kivalina.
    They'll need to build a hurricane barrier around the harbor, much like they did in New Bedford, MA, and Providence, RI. Heck, Amsterdam also has similar tech to deal with similar problems, and they've been improving on it for hundreds of years.
    Post edited by Dragonmaster Lou on
  • Hurricanes are one thing. Sea level rise is another. Flooding of underground infrastructure is a problem that NYC is already trying to figure out a plan for.
  • There is a cool plan in the works that involves artificial land barriers around Manhattan. Of course, no one wants to pay for it...

    At least, if New York went down, it would take a significant percentage of the world economy down with it. ;^)
  • What I don't understand is how, even with about a week of warning, nobody was out with sandbags making barriers. Sandbags are a proven solution. Really. Why where there no pictures like this?

    image

    Or even better, like this?

    image

    In an emergency, why did nobody respond? How much warning do you need next time? Stock up on bags and sand!
  • Because half the country refuses to pay enough taxes for basic things like this. ;^)
  • What I don't understand is how, even with about a week of warning, nobody was out with sandbags making barriers. Sandbags are a proven solution. Really. Why where there no pictures like this?
    image
    Close enough
  • What I meant by those pictures is "Where were the thousands of volunteers pitching in to protect their own homes and city?" like the photo of the flooding here in Germany.

    And the second picture was a "Why don't you get the guys from the Mississippi to come help?" kinda question.

    Both approaches, the top down and bottom up/volunteer, were completely absent. A few bags in front of the NYSE and an Apple store don't cut it.
  • edited November 2012
    There are 2 reasons that sandbags weren't commonly deployed.

    1) The storm surge was not expected to be as high as it was. It topped even the most severe predictions.

    2) The frontage that the sandbags would have had to line in order to stop the water coming in is huge. The city had its hands full just getting the evac done and working out the logicstics of shutting down. They would have had to bring in shit-tons of sandbags from outside the city and divert resources to deploying those sandbags rather than focusing on the other tasks (setting up shelters, getting people evacuated, preparing the subways for potential floods, getting disaster communication channels in place, etc).

    As for the volunteers... those people were mostly evacuated. The evacuation order was mandatory, meaning that there would be no emergency help for those people if those chose to stay. And you can't deploy sandbags you don't have; they would have had to ship them in on a grand scale.
    Post edited by Nuri on
  • sarcasm
    Oh, I know. I was just clarifying that I saw photos of "some sandbags in New York" but they weren't of the scale I was talking about
  • There are 2 reasons that sandbags weren't commonly deployed.

    1) The storm surge was not expected to be as high as it was. It topped even the most severe predictions.

    2) The frontage that the sandbags would have had to line in order to stop the water coming in is huge. The city had its hands full just getting the evac done and working out the logicstics of shutting down. They would have had to bring in shit-tons of sandbags from outside the city and divert resources to deploying those sandbags rather than focusing on the other tasks (setting up shelters, getting people evacuated, preparing the subways for potential floods, getting disaster communication channels in place, etc).
    1. is not an argument against sand bags, but just that even if they had been deployed they wouldn't have been so effective. Post-hoc justifications for doing nothing are easy but flawed.

    2. Is all true, but how about next time? Will NYC learn that prevention is way more effective than cure? Is the money spent to haul in tons of sand and bags and have volunteers working round the clock to put defenses around subway and tunnel entrances so expensive that it's cheaper to let the infrastructure flood and then repair it? It would divert some resources, true, but what is the cost in no preparation vs emergency preparation vs long term flood defense infrastructure. I say the middle ground is the best shot and preventing future disasters.
  • Its like when Georgia had that freak snow/ice storm* situation a couple of years ago. We had warning at least a few days in advance I think, yet when the snow/ice craziness* happened, the city still only had like 2 plows available. Took about a week to clear the main roads, and half of that was by it melting through people driving on them anyway.

    *Not really a storm or crazy by yall's northerner standards, but crazy for GA. :-P
  • 1. is not an argument against sand bags, but just that even if they had been deployed they wouldn't have been so effective. Post-hoc justifications for doing nothing are easy but flawed.
    No, what it means is that they didn't think they would NEED the sandbags because the flooding wasn't supposed to be that bad. Why put up sandbags when you don't expect the water to get high enough to need them?

    As for the second point... The mayor seems to be saying they will try to build smarter instead of just rebuilding what was there. We'll see what actually happens.

  • edited December 2012
    Preventive approaches to emergency management are clearly superior, as a general rule. The biggest problem is that they are politically much more difficult, because the effects are not immediate and obvious.

    This article has a more in-depth discussion on the matter.


    As for your particular suggestion, sandbags are quite easily justified as preventive measures go, given the relatively low cost and ability to deploy at relatively short notice. In particular, properly sandbagging subway entrances seems like it would not have been that difficult to achieve, and would have had a significant effect.

    Ultimately, I guess this is a symptom of a more general lack of preparation. It's a poor excuse, but NYC has relatively limited experience with flooding, and flooding of this magnitude is an unprecedented event.
    Post edited by lackofcheese on
  • You guys and your derailing into whether NYC is going to sink....

    So anyway, I was looking at the interest rates as I might need to worry about this and a 15 year mortgage is something like 2.625 and a 30 year is like 3.5 crazy.
  • Are they seriously charging a higher interest on longer loans? Man, am I glad Finnish banks haven't figured that one out yet. Anyway, best advice I can give you is to seriously shop the loan around. I went to about ten different banks over here and the offers varied wildly. Do a second round with the top four offers and see if they are willing to improve.

    Also remember that banks are run a bit like franchises (at least over here), i.e., two different Bank of America branches might give you a different rate. Finally, after you have the first offer it pays to mention this fact in subsequent interviews as a way to speed things up a bit.
  • The higher interest rate on the longer term loan allows them to get more profit from it, and to gain some of it earlier in the term. Your monthly payments are lower, and it takes longer for them to get their money back. It's also riskier because instead of just 15 years during which you could lose your job or default, you have 30 years where financial instability is a risk. It makes perfect sense for them to charge more for that kind of loan.
    You guys and your derailing into whether NYC is going to sink....
    It definitely won't. The ocean will RISE. :P

  • So I put a 260 bid in and got counter offered 267.. Should I try to weasel a few more dollars out of them or take the bid! (oh and for you guys who said just take the price you see it's now 33k off what they had it listed for.
  • I'd offer something like 262 and a more generous occupancy (if that was something on the table). Otherwise...

    7k isn't that much in the grand scheme of a loan.
  • edited December 2012
    yea, I'm thinking I may sit it out and force them to take the 260k, since I am in no hurry and they probably are.

    Because while it doesn't matter much long term, in the short term I have to put down like 20% of that value PLUS closing costs. So that's a pretty large chuck of cash I have to shell out.
    Post edited by Cremlian on
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