It is also the entire cause of the "gentrification" problem many are so pissed off about. Nobody wants to move into a poor area, they are forced into it because you can't build skyscraper high rises in the good areas.
"Lifting the barriers" to development doesn't mean that a 50 story residential tower will be built in Central Park West. You are the barrier. Lifting them means that as a citizen, you lose control of your surroundings.
Somewhat OT, but I worked in the building constructed due to that eminent domain process, it was really nice.
Pfizer later sold the whole thing for pennies on the dollar to a defense contractor after pulling out of that town, all that after never actually building on all of the land that was leveled.
I wouldn't call giving free reign to eminent domain "lifting barriers."
I don't think Manhattan is a good example of a place with too restrictive laws. But SF and DC certainly are. In DC for example, you wouldn't see 80 story apartment buildings in Georgetown, but you would see them in Chinatown, NOMA, NavyYard, and other places.
Instead lower middle class black neighborhoods are converting to overpriced condos as fast as house-flippers can do it.
The Caltrain electrification project will further speed this trip since electric trains can accelerate and decelerate more rapidly. The full San Jose to SoMa trip should be roughly 16 minutes quicker based on impact studies.
Commuter trains have to stop and let people on and off.
Cities like Chicago have long distance commuter trains, but the commutes are still long. You can take a train from the near west side of Chicago to HArvard, IL (where Motorola built a huge campus and then abandoned it) in about an hour and 45 minutes. But it would be a 70 mile drive. But that skips over a bunch of farmland.
Chicago to Cary, IL would like SF to Mountain view. Train ride is 1:15 minutes. But then you need to get from the train stations to each door on both ends. Realistically its more like 1:45 door to door. People do it.
But living in a high rise is much more preferable to me.
Yes? That's about 100 years old and not part of the NYC subway. It also requires you to leave and pay again on the NYC Subway. It's a great system, and about a 12 minute walk from my apartment, but not what I meant. Not sure where you're going with this?
Anyway, I was thinking more along the lines of extending the 7 to NJ.
Enter the train at Secaucus, for example, then be able to go to Grand Central Station. Part of the hassle of mass transit is that if you need to make 3 transfers, and have to wait 10 minutes at each one, your commute gets long fast. Extending the NYC Subway in NJ would have several benefits, including reducing the slow crawl through the Lincoln tunnel, where almost 7000 busses cram in daily.
Sounds like you would have liked the new tunnel that Christie single-handedly killed in 2010
"ARC would have cut passenger transfers by 97 percent and taken an average 23 minutes off each trip, according to the GAO. It also would have been financed at historically low rates."
Though its owners may sometimes crash there, it's not really a "residential" structure, per se. The primary purpose it serves is as a sophisticated portfolio diversification instrument -- or (for offshore title holders), a convenient money laundering device:
But it's already unaffordable for the average NYer before it's even ready. If wealthy foreigners can park their money in manhattan, they will, without living there. That doesn't help scarcity for actual residents.
I don't see why that's an argument against. If they are going to plow their money into a city it's better if it's into 1 or 2 units in a dense skyscraper rather than buying entire mid and low rise buildings. Residential skyscrapers are strictly better at reducing price pressures.
I'd have no problem at all with those billionaire towers but for the nonsensical property tax breaks (421a, J51, etc). Throw in a small non-resident property tax differential and I become an enthusiastic booster.
If a bunch of billionaires want to pay property taxes while using barely any city services that sounds like a win to me. We can use that money to provide better services to the people that do live in the city year round.
In my observation the people who are most bitter about billionaires "buying up Manhattan" are the multimillionaires who want to be on the top of the heap.
