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What if New York City is overpopulated?
Removed by modOverpopulation is oftentimes used as tool to suggest Malthusian policies when a more equitable distribution of resources could solve any issues overpopulation might cause. I’m here to say that New York City is one of the few rare places in the United States that is overpopulated and how from a leftist perspective we should deal with that.
NYC is facing a housing shortage, homeless crisis, private transportation woes, and all these problems all originate from capitalism. So let’s say we did all the things we need to do to fix them from an urbanist perspective. We ban cars, we ban landlords, there’s a mad rush to build new affordable housing, there is some capital flight from the big apple because honestly implementing these policies would make capitalists leave.
But let’s assume we did all that. We could maybe add a few million new housing units to a city that would rapidly deplete them, New Yorkers would move out of their roommates and parents apartments, white people would move back from The suburbs, whatever population is lost from the capital flight would probably be regained through newly arrived immigrants. What then? Under capitalism we are unable to reach the carrying capacity of the city, under socialism we reach it.
Unless we want to subdivide units meant for one individual into units for multiple thus decreasing individual quality of life, we will reach a point where we can’t cram any more people into Manhattan. Eventually urbanists will need to tell people to move to New Jersey and Long Island and the other boroughs. We need to recognize in a purely socialist system prime real estate should go to those with the highest social standing and not those with the most money.
It should be illegal to just move to the middle of manhattan as a transplant from Idaho, unless your like a heart surgeon you should be doomed to the periphery never to enter like Moses into the promised land, maybe your kids or grandkids could have a chance but not you because you ain’t local. Housing stock should go to primarily the locally disadvantaged communities first most threatened by gentrification. Of course in this scenario there would be no gentrification because socialism, but I mean the people would have been most affected by it should get first dibs on houses.
Finally this brings me to tell you why I wrote this, the governor of New York State canceled the congestion plan that would have mildly reduced traffic in order to pander to the suburbs. It’s a major loss for the armchair urbanist community, everyone feels great hatred to the working class aristocrats who “have” to drive everywhere, so now we all hate Long Island and think they are worth less than us as people. Was it a tax on the poor? Yeah but who gives a shit, americans aren’t poor.
Let us recognize that the city of New York illegally occupies stolen indigenous Algonquin land and the colonizers should leave. From the river to the sea could also apply to Manhattan apparently. You could solve all my problems I will still be angry. Why the migrants want to come here I do not understand, america is the great satan. From now on we shall call it turtle island. We all want to go back to the New York in the 70s before the aids happened. Maybe then you could afford an apartment. In a hundred years from now New York won’t be the city, it would lose all perstige, and until it floods the next big thing will Miami!
Turn the empty apartments into public housing, that’s 50 to 100 thousand people housed, convert outrageously large apartments into multiple units, I have no idea how many but I would assume it would be less apartments than the vacancies. So let’s say that’s 200 thousand new houses. Now there’s offices that could theoretically be renovated, theoretically millions of people could live in these, but renovation would be worth more than moving people elsewhere. Plumbing would be a nightmare, fire safety, electricity costs. Just another uneducated guess we get could half a million in there comfortably. Now we could build new housing, there’s not a lot of space in Manhattan that’s immediately available, there’s parking garages that could be torn down and if we really had to we could build on park space, new construction would take years and not be an immediate solution. But if your including the outer boroughs there’s practically limitless space to build, New York could be as dense as Hong Kong. The density would be wasted without a property transport system and since there’s no subway connecting Staten Island to Manhattan a lot of the space Manhattan could use to spread out is not even available because it’s only reachable by car. So yeah, we could fit tens of millions of people into New York, but unless we were to spend a decade to expand the infrastructure a quarter million new people would overload what currently exists. Call it capitalism, call it growing pains, it’s not Kowloon walled city levels of bad but even if we did everything right the scarcity of housing would be impossible to fix by just getting rid of the landlords, although getting rid of the landlords would be awesome.
Manhattan, the densest borough, would only be #16 on densest population.
Doing the math with the chart on page 35, in order to include those vacant without a reported reason, the number of vacant homes in NYC is 353,400 units
Source
So, making those into homes would house well over 353,000 people! Housing not a supply issue, it’s a distribution issue.