Comments on: Could You Live Here? As City Pushes For Smaller Apts, We Look at Life 300-sq.-ft. and Below

By: WoodyinNYC

WoodyinNYC — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 13:27:00 +0000

Huge amounts of parking are required for all NYC buildings, so that cost will be included in the apartment rents. Whether they own a car or not, people will be living in 300 square feet, while subsidizing another 300 sq ft per stall (and more space than that including the ramps and drive aisles inside the garage).

This is insane! Simply cut the required parking to reduce the rents needed.

By: Noir Diaz

Noir Diaz — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 18:05:00 +0000

For no other reason but on general principal landlords should be taxed until they bleed white–with corollary incentives of tax reductions if they decrease rents. Concomitantly all under $3,000 per month rentals should be re-regulated: absolutely no increases across the board for 5 years. By this mechanism tenants wont have the tax increases passed onto them. Would this plan assuage the alleged housing stock deficit? Not sure, but it wouldn’t hurt it.

By: Scott Baker

Scott Baker — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 07:11:00 +0000

Kudos to the Mayor for thinking outside the (tiny) box, but the fact is there are 22 square miles of vacant buildable land in NYC. This land is held by speculators who are dis-incentivised from building by too-low land value taxes. Raise the Land value taxes and lower (or eliminate) the taxes on actual buildings, and landowners will be forced to put the land to better use, or sell it to someone who can. Prices will come down for renters, while taxes will go up for the city. Land taxes are the most reliable and best source of revenue, and the most fair and progressive. Unlike capital, land-location cannot be moved away. Unlike taxes on sales and wages, taxes on land do not discourage commerce and work. A tax on land values would end bubblenomics, and the source for ALL the largest economic crashes in history. This 133-year old Georgist idea was tried before in New York,and is the reason why we have such a large inventory of pre-war buildings, built when buildings were very lightly taxed, compared to now. It’s an idea whose time has come again.
- Scott Baker, president of Common Ground-NYC, a Land-tax reform group, http://commongroundnyc.org/