Why the Rent is Still So High

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We will begin on this Monday with a question that could begin any show on any day around here. Why are rents in New York City going up if the population is going down? What happened to supply and demand? Greg David covers business and economics for the news organization The City. He also runs the business and economics reporting program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and he's got a new article in The City that finally tries to address this question head-on. We've been asking it on the show kind of tucked into other housing segments we've done. His article is called simply, "Why are New York City rents so high? It's complicated." Greg, thanks for coming on on this head-scratcher that's so central to life in our area. Welcome back to WNYC.

Greg David: Thank you. It is a head-scratcher, Brian. I set out to find some great smoking gun here because as you said, the population of New York is less than before the pandemic. The numbers are a little uncertain, but we are sure it's less. Secondly, despite the mayor's spin, the city's had a relatively anemic economic recovery from the pandemic. We are about to recover all the jobs we've lost, but the nation as a whole has regained several million jobs beyond what it had before the pandemic, about 3%. The third thing that troubled me was that while rents went up in the rest of the country in 2021 and 2022, they haven't been going up in 2023, in some places they've been going down, and yet our rents continue to go up in 2023. I said to myself, "This doesn't make any sense," and we went out to the city to see if we could find an answer.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Let's back up and drill down a little bit on some of the basic numbers that make either of us ask the question. Our audience is not afraid of some numbers here. The first line of your article says, "New York City's population remains well below its pre-pandemic level." Do you know how much lower?

Greg David: No, we don't know how much lower. Here's why. The 2020 census put New York City's population at close to 8.8 million, but a lot of people in retrospect think that that number was inaccurate. Maybe kids were home from college because their colleges had closed in the pandemic, maybe the city found a way to boost the number they thought that was too high because if you take that number, then you've got a decline of 400,000 people during the pandemic. There are some other revision numbers which create a lot of difficulty. The city comptroller has a really nice little section in one of his recent newsletters about this. I think that what we could say is that by July a year ago, July 2022, the city's population was probably 200,000 below the pre-pandemic number. We gained some back in the 12 months after that, but clearly, we didn't gain back all the jobs. We didn't gain back all the population.

Brian Lehrer: The population. Your numbers for the cost of rent with that lower population, or as you call them in the piece, eye-popping. For the average apartment in Manhattan just before the pandemic, rent was around $4,400 a month. That's high enough. Today, you write, it's around 5,500. From 4,400 to 5,500. How unique is Manhattan though? I see you also have stats for Brooklyn.

Greg David: Well, the best numbers that you could have are for Manhattan in Brooklyn. These are the element numbers which are regarded as the benchmark for those two. There's StreetEasy numbers for Queens, and Staten Island, and the Bronx. They don't show as big an increase, and the Brooklyn increase wasn't quite as big, but there have been increases in those areas too.

Brian Lehrer: Do you go out from there at all geographically? For instance, Newsday was featuring an article this weekend, I don't know if you happen to see it, called, "Long Island is really expensive. Here are 12 ways to make it more affordable." Have the other boroughs or the suburban counties just outside the city suffered a similar population loss, first of all, and rent increases, or are we really mostly talking about Manhattan and certain parts of Brooklyn as a phenomenon of its own here?

Greg David: Well, the population of the suburbs did not go down. Indeed, people left the city for the suburbs. We know that. The suburbs are mostly single-family housing, and with the demise of Hochul's great housing program last year, nothing's being done about it. There were increases in rent, but we think a lot of the pressure in the suburbs was people buying homes. Yes, there were increases, but the big increases are in Manhattan and to some extent Brooklyn.

Brian Lehrer: Kind of related to that, your conclusion is that the cause of this inversion of supply and demand that it seems to be is complicated, and you list six main components, which will go down some of now. One interesting one related to what you were just saying is what you call shifting population, which has to do with both young families in the city leaving and retired seniors in the suburbs coming, acting differently than they have historically. Want to walk us through that part?

Greg David: Yes. Every year a group of New Yorkers leaves the city. They're usually people whose kids have just reached five years old. They leave the city for two reasons, more space and better schools, but when the pandemic hit, three cohorts of this group, kids, people with kids two, three, four and five all left at once. I actually know a couple exactly like this. They were committed to the city, they claimed to be committed even when their kid went to his school, although I was somewhat skeptical of that, but when the pandemic hit, and he was two, they left for the suburbs.

This depressed rents immediately because all these apartments came on the market, but when we begin to get the recovery, when people begin to come back in 2021, and 2022, and this year, there are fewer new apartments for rent because nobody's leaving. You did get the decline, but then nobody is leaving for the last three years because that group already left.

The second part, which I got basically is a theory of E.J. McMahon, who really follows these population numbers closely at the Empire Center, is the other thing we know is suburban housing values shot up immediately with the pandemic, people leaving the city, and he thinks a fair number of people, empty nesters, decided to sell their homes at a big profit, downsize and rent a pied-à-terre in the city. Those are two ways that changes to the normal population flows led to demand in the city.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Assuming E.J. has that part right about the seniors, the empty nesters in the suburbs, selling their homes at a profit and getting pied-à-terres in the city, are you surprised at all by that? If fear of COVID is a factor for that age group in particular, you would think they might not relocate into more density.

Greg David: Brian, I'm 73, and I don't have much fear of COVID. It may just be different with different people.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I guess. Another factor in the rising rents, you write, is remote work. Why would that affect rents?

Greg David: Well, because remote work is not just a suburban story. People in the city are working remotely. There are all these anecdotes about how the Brooklyn cafes are so crowded because everybody's home all day. With remote work, people wanted bigger apartments, and that led to pressure on the market as well. In addition, there are digital nomads. These are people who are working remotely, but said, "Hey, I want to work remotely from New York." We have some evidence for that. I wrote a while ago, when Google made every employee declare a home city, the headcount in New York City went up by more than 1,000 because people said, "Oh, I'm going to declare New York as my home base." That's how remote work played into it.

Brian Lehrer: That's so interesting about Google. You said, and it was in your article, when they asked their workers to declare a home base in 2022, the New York City headcount jumped by more than 1,000 people, that's Google employees. Does that surprise you, or does it just confirm that young adults with good income still want to move to New York?

Greg David: Yes, that's what it confirms. Indeed, that gets to my point about the economy. We haven't had a great recovery, but there were two parts of the city's economy that did really well in the pandemic, tech and Wall Street and finance generally. Of course, those are the people who make the best pay. They're the ones who can afford more rent. I think that's the way that played out.

Brian Lehrer: This is a tangent to your article, but does that start to refute the New York is finished hypothesis that some people have and that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, for example, has political reason to promote? We've already established that seniors have more than before been selling their homes in the suburbs because prices went up and moving into the city. We've been saying pied-à-terre, I guess pied-à-terre is more like a second home, but they've been moving into new permanent apartments in the city and so that's older people. Then younger people, like with those Google numbers, also moving into the city. The premise here is that the population went down, but we've been talking about populations that are coming.

Greg David: I think that I certainly don't believe New York is finished. I think that we had this enormous period of prosperity, I call it the Bloomberg de Blasio boom. It took us to levels we had never seen in population, in jobs, in economic activity. We face some problems at the moment. Some of those problems are difficult but housing, which is one of the most important problems we face, is a product of our success. I don't think there's an ounce of truth in DeSantis, that is rhetoric.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we invite your calls and texts and tweets on why rents are going up in New York City, even though the population is going down and it is going down, even though those various groups we were just discussing are coming. Landlords, real estate brokers, anyone else on the inside help us report this story. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text or tweet @BrianLehrer. Why do you think the usual laws of supply and demand don't apply in the city right now or ask a question about it for our guest, Greg David, who covers business and the economy for the news organization, The City, and runs the Business and Economics reporting program at the Newmar Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

You get to audit Greg's class for free for one question. Make it a good one. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Again, you can also text us at that number or tweet @BrianLehrer. We're going down the factors in his article in the city for why rents are going up, even though the population has declined compared to before the pandemic. Another factor you list is the rising interest rates from the Federal Reserve Board to curb inflation. Why would rising rates help cause rising rents?

Greg David: Well, because people who would have normally decided to stop renting and buy in the city or elsewhere aren't able to do so. Actually, I met someone who works for the city and I was outlining my thesis to her. She said, "Oh, that's me. Six months ago, I was going to go out and look for a place to buy, but I can't, because interest rates are so high, so I'm still renting." That's another group of apartments that should have come onto the market that didn't.

Brian Lehrer: Another factor on your list. keeping apartments off the rental market to use as Airbnbs. Isn't that mostly illegal in New York City?

Greg David: Not yet. Maybe soon. The city's trying to make it illegal, but it hasn't implemented its law yet. As a matter of fact, Airbnb has challenged it in court and we might know the new rules are scheduled to go into effect September 1st. What we think is that there are about 25,000 apartments in New York being used as Airbnbs. This is not Airbnb in the sense that I have a spare room and I'm renting it out. This is arbitrage where people say, "I'm going to rent out my apartment through Airbnb 300 days a year, and I'm going to make so much money from it. I can live somewhere else and still make money." We think that 25,000 apartments that could be available aren't.

Brian Lehrer: Here's our first text. It's three words. It's one I was expecting. The three words are you want to guess?

Greg David: Landlord greed?

Brian Lehrer: That's it. Landlords are greedy. Should we presume as an assumption at the base of this conversation that by and large, landlords are going to charge as much as they can get for the apartments they rent at any time and that hasn't changed before the pandemic?

Greg David: We are talking here about market-rate apartments, not rent-regulated apartments, and the landlord's job is to get the highest rent possible. That's their job. Our job from a public policy standpoint is have enough apartments in New York that they can't do it. Yes, landlord's greedy? They're supposed to be greedy. If they're in the business of getting the most rent they can, that's how they make a profit.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We could have a whole other discussion about whether they're supposed to be greedy beyond a point and whether landlords or anybody else who's selling something could be charging less than the absolute most rapacious amount of money that they could get for whatever the product is but that's another show. Susan in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Susan.

Susan: Hi. Well, I'm so glad that you just said that, Brian. I live on the Upper West Side and what I've noticed over years is that the lights along Central Park West, and believe me, the apartments are there, but nobody's living there. There are no lights, no one's there. On my block, there are three buildings empty. People have bought these buildings and are not renovating them. They're just sitting empty. When you do not have apartments that are being unoccupied but not available for rent, rents are going to stay higher. I do think that the guest should talk about a class situation here. It's not just rents going up, but people who have come to the city for decades, for hundreds of years to be creative and so forth, can't afford to live here anymore. I hope that that issue is addressed as well. Basically, there are apartments that are empty, that is, they're rented, but nobody's there. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Susan, do you take this as that the landlords are warehousing the apartment for a time that they can charge even more rent?

Susan: Yes. Some of them, for instance, were rentals, and then they became co-ops and condominiums.

Brian Lehrer: These are rent-stabilized apartments, you think, by and large?

Susan: I don't know quite honestly. It's just scary to live in an area that's the desert along Central Park West. If you come along there and you're there in the evening, you'll see no lights are on.

Brian Lehrer: Are out in apartments. Susan, thank you very much. Greg, first of all, on the premise, do you think what she's describing is the situation?

Greg David: Well, there are two different factors here. One of which are the pied-à-terres where people rent an apartment in New York and occupy it three or four months a year because they have so much money. There's a group of those. It's very hard to get data on how many there are. Then there's the word you used, Brian, Warehousing. Warehousing is something that's happening with rent-regulated apartments, where some number, it's very controversial-- The city at one point said there could be 90,000, the most recent-- The city meaning my publication. More recent numbers put the number at 40,000.

These are rent-regulated units that are not being rented. The tenant's advocates say that this is a conspiracy on the part of landlords to pressure the state legislature to weaken the rent laws. The landlords say that's poppycock. These are apartments that have been lived in for a single tenant for a long time. They need an enormous amount of renovation to be rentable again. The new laws, the 2019 rent reform laws make it uneconomic to do so, so they're not going to rent out the apartment. Needless to say, that's an incredibly controversial issue. What is clear is between Airbnb and warehousing, a significant number of apartments that could be available for rent, probably at least 65,000, maybe more, are not available to people. Clearly, that is pressure on the marketplace.

Brian Lehrer: Here is [unintelligible 00:19:40] in Kew Gardens, who is a landlord who I think wants to say it's something other than greed causing him to push up the rent. [unintelligible 00:19:48] thank you for calling in. Hello.

Speaker 4: Good morning. Hello. The only thing for me, my insurance for the building was $3,000 a year. Right now, I'm paying $6,000 on a two unit and store downstairs. Also, my mortgage was 1,900 before COVID. I didn't have locked rate. My rate went up to 7.5%. Right now, my mortgage is 4,500 a month. When I went to my tenant and I just tried to increase $100 on the rent, they gave me a big drama, and it was a big hard time. I have to accept, couldn't increase it because if they told me to take us to the court, and if I went to the court, it would be almost a year to evict them, and I would lose big time on this, so I just accepted it, and the landlord is not greedy, in my opinion.

Brian Lehrer: What was it about recent conditions that caused the insurance rates to go up, if you know?

Speaker 4: At all, I don't know if my broker goes back and forth every year to remove the policy or what, but I have the same policy for almost 10 years, and it was only 3,000. For some reason, last year, they came up and said, "Your policy is 5,700 now."

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad. Thank you very much. Greg, does this relate to anything you know about?

Greg David: Yes, insurance rates are rising not just for landlords, but for homeowners and car, and people who do cars. The insurance industry hasn't done very well. They've had many losses because of the hurricanes and other natural disasters, and rents are going up. I'm actually hoping to do a story on this. I was told that there were only two insurers providing insurance in the Bronx for multifamily properties. The marketplace has diminished as people have regarded this as a riskier area to provide insurance for. Of course, it's fair to say that landlords suffered a lot of cost pressures when energy prices rose so much last year. It's fair to say those pressures are ebbing, just the way they are for us at the gas pump.

As inflation comes down, and it has come down a lot, the pressures on landlords will ease a bit.

Brian Lehrer: We just heard a landlord story. Here's a renter story. Heidi in Sea Cliff, you're on WNYC. Hi, Heidi.

Heidi: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for taking my call. Yes, it's pretty wild. My husband and I lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for 10 years and loved it and just had ambitions of raising our family there. Obviously, the pandemic changed things, but financially speaking, it just felt really difficult because all of the building in Williamsburg, the community that we came to know and love, were all just luxury units. Our apartment, we thought, was pretty expensive. We were in for three years. It's $5,200 a month. Then we actually just had friends move in when we moved out two months ago, and they raised it to $6,500 a month without doing any upgrades at all. If anything, they should have fixed the floors.

There are things that they just neglected. I think a lot of my friends who are also young parents, we have a two-year-old and a four-year-old, are going through this same thing of, "Can we make this work? Probably not. Where should we go?"

Brian Lehrer: Yes. So you moved to Sea Cliff, for people who don't know, Sea Cliff is on the North Shore, Nassau County, near Glen Cove, around there. Are you renting on Long Island or did you buy? You renting?

Heidi: We were able to buy, and I grew up on the North Shore, which is talking about that article from Newsday. It's very expensive on Long Island. We felt like we found this gem in the desert because Sea Cliff is very small as far as lot sizes. It's very walkable. There's a tremendous amount of Brooklyn transplants here. There's actually a little beer store that sells T-shirts that say, "I used to live in Brooklyn." It's just a joke, so many people are moving here. We love the sense of community. It's what we love about this city. We love creatives. It felt like a loss of identity, leaving the city and moving to the suburbs. It was really sad to think about leaving. Once we found Sea Cliff, we're like, "Oh, my gosh, we could actually picture ourselves here without feeling like we're losing so much of what we love about the city." It's only a 45-minute drive to get back in, which is sad.

Brian Lehrer: Heidi, thank you for your call. All right. That might spark a whole rash of new articles. Greg, if people don't already think of Sea Cliff as a new artist's enclave, I don't know if it's true, or Heidi just knows a few people like her.

Greg David: She's classic. This is the classic New York story that's been going on for decades. They are just the people who leave the city when their first child reaches four or five. It's been going on a long time. I'm sure she has more space at Sea Cliff. She's probably going to have better schools, actually.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but she said she wanted to stay in Williamsburg, and it was really the rent and the luxuryization, if you will, of the rental market in Williamsburg, in particular, that drove her out?

Greg David: I'll bet your houses in Sea Cliff aren't cheap.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. It sounds like she's renting for less, maybe, but I know what you're saying. All right, we're not going to resolve that whole story. We'll continue with Greg David in a minute and more on why the rents are rising, even as the population is falling in New York City, what happened to the laws of supply and demand? Stay with us.

[music]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we continue with Greg David, who covers business and the economy for the news organization The City, and runs the Business and Economics Reporting Program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He has an article in The City that asks why rents are rising in New York City, even as the population is declining? What happened to the usual laws of supply and demand? By the way, here's a listener texting to that refugee from Williamsburg, who moved to Nassau County. Listener writes, "Why didn't she check out Queens before moving to the Burbs?" We will leave that there as a rhetorical question.

Another listener texts, Peter Cooper Village in StuyTown, Lower East Side, has highly sought after three-bedroom apartments sitting empty for over six months. "These apartments aren't being listed, and a friend who is literally next up for the lottery has been told these units are in a different lottery. It's a mystery what's going on, and it's all very fishy. They are definitely just holding off on renting these apartments." Greg, I don't know if you're familiar with Peter Cooper Village in particular, or if that represents even a larger group of apartments that maybe you referred to before when we talked about warehousing.

Greg David: Well, this is a very interesting issue. Peter Cooper is owned by Blackstone now, a private equity firm. Private equity firms, of course, have a terrible reputation, and they're buying lots of multifamily buildings in New York. It's a story way up on my agenda to dig into. I don't know the specifics there, but I do know that Blackstone had to sign a very specific agreement with the city about keeping rents affordable there. It might be definitely something to look into.

Brian Lehrer: I referred earlier to warehousing of rent stabilized departments. I think Rebecca in Brooklyn is going to try to go further with it than that. Rebecca, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Rebecca: Thanks so much, Brian. I really appreciate it. I just wanted to go back to that conversation about warehousing. As I understand it, warehousing also applies, as you just mentioned, in the case of Peter Cooper Village, to market-rate rentals. I think that's an important point to make because it really gets at how landlords are manipulating the market. It's not just simply a case of supply and demand. There was a really insightful article in Curbed, New York Magazine, by a reporter who looked at how buildings in his own market rate building were being kept off the market for months, if not years. This is a luxury rental building. I think that's a really important point to make when we're talking about the market and what the market will bear. How landlords may be--

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you brought that in. Peter Cooper Village, which the previous listener texted about, and I'm not sure if we said it explicitly, I think that used to be a rent-stabilized complex, but it isn't anymore. That might be an example, too, of a market-rate apartment that's being warehoused rather than rented. Rebecca is making that point and saying that Curbed, which is part of New York Magazine, reported on that. Greg, what-- Assuming you think that's actually happening.

Greg David: It isn't actually happening. We read that story. It's about software, right? There's this software program allowing landlords to increase rents. It doesn't make any sense to us. By the way, if that were true, that software program would be in use in the entire country, and we wouldn't see the fact rents are falling elsewhere. I don't think there's any evidence that a significant number of market-rate apartments are kept off the market. It makes no sense. It's part of the attitude. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Right, because since the market rates are so high, why would somebody warehouse a market-rate apartment, right?

Greg David: Why would you do that? The landlord conspiracy issue that landlords are somehow figuring out that it's better to leave an apartment vacant because they'll get more money. The economics say just the opposite. It's the airline seat issue. If I go to a store to buy a shirt and I don't buy it today, the store doesn't make care that somebody might buy it tomorrow. When an airplane takes off, that seat can no longer make any money. That's why they want to sell them all.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and that would apply to the market-rate apartment.

Greg David: If you let an apartment go unrented, you're not getting the money. It doesn't make any sense. Warehousing in New York is a problem, not of market rents. It's a part of rent-regulated apartments. Brian, I want to talk about supply and demand for a minute because my students are going to get mad at me.

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Greg David: Because I'm about to teach this class I do in the fall Called Covering Markets and Companies. The default answer in all the markets class is always supply and demand. Why did something go up? Supply and demand. Why did something go down? Supply and demand. We think that the normal laws of supply and demand didn't quite work the way they should have, but in some way they did. When you had these factors that hit in 2021, 2022, and 2023, you actually got a lot of demand in the marketplace and a lot of churn in the marketplace. That was Brad Lander's view of it. That gave landlords market power. In that case, there was demand and the supply issues were complicated.

Long-term supply and demand will determine market rents in New York. We think that might be happening now. Most of the people I talked to think the great rise in rents is almost over. We're going to get new figures at the end of the week. The summer is an area, a time when rents go up. They might go up again in the numbers we get for July and August, but most people see stability after that, at least for a year or two.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text and a tweet from listeners saying basically the same thing. They're both responding to the small landlord, [unintelligible 00:32:38], who called in earlier saying he's not greedy and even a small rent increase that he tried to impose on his tenants in, I guess, a market rate apartment when his insurance and other costs were going up because of inflation, was strenuously resisted and he couldn't do it because he thought he would wind up having to fight for it in court. One listener texts, "The landlord calling in represents the same pitfall as the Airbnb discussion in the past. You hear from mom-and-pop operations, but the big property holders who have big effects on the market don't have to explain themselves, don't call in." Similarly, a listener tweets, "Where is the President?", meaning federal government, and local government on this, the entire work base is detrimentally impacted while landlord profits soar, separate smaller landlords from big landlords regarding regulation.

Also, many buildings have tons of violations and it's not worth it. What about any policy that might separate what the small landlords can do, who might have a sympathetic story to tell, from the big landlords who really might be raking in the box and really might be being greedy landlords, but beyond what they need to do to make really good profits. It doesn't seem like the regulations, doesn't seem like state law or city law does separate them, or that the small landlords really want to be singled out for better treatment.

Greg David: I spent a lot of time during the pandemic writing small landlord stories because they have suffered the most. They are an important part of the New York City economy. They are important part of the housing market. By the way, this is an important way for people to build wealth, to own a couple of buildings, et cetera. I just don't see the legal or efficient ways you could separate small and large landlords. What we do know, Brian, the ultimate solution here, and the ultimate solution is more housing. The Adams administration says 500,000 more units in the next decade. The Hokel administration wants 800,000 more units statewide. They both proposed a very extensive series of proposals. The legislature did nothing. Nothing. That's the ultimate solution. The ultimate solution is to build housing.

Brian Lehrer: Because the suburbs resisted, right? The suburbs resisted more density, and they had enough members in the legislature to kill the more density requirements.

Greg David: The chairs of the Senate and assembly committee, Rosenthal and Kavanaugh, are city representatives, and they didn't do anything either. The city's agenda went nowhere. We can't even convert office buildings, which are going to be vacant and go bankrupt pretty soon because the legislature wouldn't even deal with that. They wouldn't give us the city, the power to do ADUs, additional units to work on the basement apartments. Look, the suburb revolt was a big problem, I agree, but the city legislators didn't step up either.

Brian Lehrer: Let's end with this. On one of our shows last week, we had the journalist Rose Barkin for an article he had in Queens, New York Business, your old employer, suggesting a grand bargain could be possible between landlords who want a new tax break program for affordable development and progressives who have opposed a new tax break program for development but who want something of their own. They want a statewide rent stabilization program known as good cause eviction that the landlords obviously opposed. Under his hypothetical grand bargain, developers would get their tax break and make enough to incentivize building a lot of new apartments and tenants would have new protections. Politically speaking, could you see it?

Greg David: No. I know Landlord Group is going to give way to good cause eviction. By the way, I think he got it all wrong, frankly. The problem is that progressives in New York are not committed to the idea that supply is crucial. I think we saw that last year. Hokel didn't do a very good job either of getting groups like labor unions and environmentalists behind her program. Yes, actually, that's the fantasy that tenant groups have been talking about for a long time. It is a fantasy. By the way, the tax break is a very small-- It's called 421A, is a very small piece of the housing agenda, and definitely would not on its own be a reason for people to seek a good cause compromise.

Brian Lehrer: Greg David reports on business and the economy for the news organization The City, and runs the business and economics reporting program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. His new article on The City website that's a news organization, The City, not to be confused with the city of New York, is asking the question, why rents are going up if the population of New York City is going down? Greg, thanks for sharing it with us.

Greg David: Thank you.

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