Five Fun Facts from Open NY Happy Hour
Yesterday I trekked down to Lavender Lake (fun fact #0: not actually a lake!) for a happy hour hosted by Open New York. ONY advocates for building more housing in New York City. A lack of housing is one of the biggest barriers to achieving abundance in this city, so I think ONY is a pretty good group to support. Even though I’ve been a member since the start of the year, this happy hour was my first ONY event. I met some cool people last night so I wanted to share some conversation tidbits:
Team TLC is a local group that supports local asylum seekers and migrants. This a huge need for the city right now, so you should definitely check them out! I met someone who is a regular volunteer with them.
I think everyone — including myself — assumes that having more electric vehicles (EVs) on the road means a lot less air pollution compared to gas guzzlers. I’m not sure this has been studied super rigorously, but there is at least preliminary analysis that shows EVs might actually pollute the air more than gas vehicles since EVs are so heavy and wear down tires faster. When tires wear out, they pollute the air with heavy particulates. I’m definitely keeping an eye on this as EVs become more ubiquitous in New York City.
I spoke to a Community Board (CB) member who agreed with me that CB meetings are too damn long!
More interestingly, the member asked us how we would vote on a ULURP hearing they had about adding parking spots to a lot. You can probably guess my initial response (👎). But, there was a twist — the parking lot would be growing vertically, and NIMBYs in that district uniformly opposed the measure since it would increase traffic. Also, apparently there was no chance the lot would become housing. How would you vote, given those facts?
There are other people like me who are curious about how housing and city finances intersect. I recently encountered this idea at work during a Slack thread war about return-to-office. I pointed out that a positive externality of commuting to work was supporting the subway and local businesses (and their blue-collar workers) in Lower Manhattan. I did not realize this, but another co-worker pointed out property taxes on commercial real estate in Lower Manhattan effectively help fund the outer boroughs (e.g. Manhattan sends more money out to the other boroughs than it receives). I’d like to learn more about how local real estate taxes work!
Open New York has an active housing book club! You can find them in the #bookclub channel of the ONY Slack 🙂
Interesting summary!
On the question about the parking building, I take the view that the city should allow property owners to construct any residential or commercial structure that is safe. I’m not a fan of cars in NY or parking, but if it’s private land and the building/use isn’t unduly disruptive to the neighborhood (like a noisy manufacturing facility) then it should be allowed.
At the same time, we should impose high taxes on cars in the form of city-wide congestion charges and higher gas taxes. As many intersections as possible should have red light cameras and speeding cameras that automatically send tickets. All buses should have cameras that ticket cars nearby that violate any road rule. We should reduce city speed limits.
So: I’m in favor of property rights, but for public space (like streets) there should be rigorous and reliable enforcement of rules that force drivers to bear the costs to society of their actions.