Set aside the technical issue of where the lines run on the map. There are five million people in Brooklyn and Queens. I find it a bit strange that this enormous population has to go somewhere else – anywhere else – for restaurants, hotels, a business district. They are more densely packed than municipal Chicago, including downtown, yet their mass transit system is almost entirely designed to get them to Manhattan. It may be that there are no tourist destinations in Brooklyn or Queens, at least as long as we are excepting the airports and baseball stadium. But there are plenty of cities with no tourist destinations – how many people go to Houston for a relaxing holiday? It is the people who have rights and interests, not the municipal entity.

Coming back around to housing, the political games about who gets access to which housing in Manhattan obscures the issue that the future of multi-dwelling units should be in the outer boroughs, where it is possible to build without unacceptably blocking out the sun. The hard construction costs are not terribly different on the two sides of the East River, but the economic rent in terms of “value of planning and zoning permission” is wildly different. This encourages major developers to build in Manhattan…and encourages “tenant’s advocates” to fight all the harder for their “right” to continue to occupy the same space.

I would like the money and energy spent defending the status quo in Manhattan to be used to encourage development in Brooklyn and Queens. Stripped of restrictions, Manhattan will be renovated organically, and the result would be a much more vibrant city overall. Or three cities or five, if you prefer…

It’s the same reason that 99% of visitors to Chicago are not going to spend time sightseeing in Skokie. The only time visitors to NYC are going to spend time outside of Manhattan is their way to and from LaGuardia.

(Yay! It’s Friday!)

By the way, the large developers love it. Rent control both keeps a large number of units off of the market and keeps extensive land from being redeveloped (no rent control program can succeed without some other provision that makes eviction difficult). The artificial scarcity benefits the well-connected, who are the ones able to navigate the system and get zoning approvals. Think of it as the urban equivalent of What’s the Matter With Kansas.

The problem is that the logic is counterintuitive to people who don’t understand economics. Or more cynically, pro-rent-control advocates do understand it, but know that anti-landlord policies will get them elected. And the policies end up hurting the people who need it the most. I’ve got a feeling that it’s not that people wouldn’t be able to understand it, it’s that they don’t take the time.

I don’t understand your quibble. Also per Wiki (2000 census data, population and population density):

Manhattan: 1.5 million; 66,940/sq.mi.
Brooklyn: 2.5 million; 34,920/sq.mi.
Queens: 2.2 million; 20,409/sq.mi.
Chicago: 2.9 million; 12,750/sq.mi.
Houston: 2 million; 3,372/sq.mi.
Oak Park: 52,524; 11,173/sq.mi.
Skokie: 63,348; 6,309/sq.mi.

On this basis, how are Brooklyn and Queens not more like the cities of Chicago or Houston than their suburbs?

And the NY MSA (at a population of 18.8 million) is gigantically bigger than the population of greater Chicago.

Can you tell I’m bored at work today?

- Chris

To those of us outside of New York, only Manhattan counts. Brooklyn, Queens and all the rest are no different than Oak Park or Skokie. Per Wiki, greater Chicagoland is 9.5 million folks or so. In other words, gigantically bigger than Manhattan’s suburbs.

I don’t want to distract from the rest of your note because you are correct regarding population densities, but it is irritating to the extreme when these comparisons are made regarding some outer borough with different cities.