The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Real Estate: The Three-Headed Dragon Plaguing NYC || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

New York is a service-based economy, and anytime you have a system like that, cost of living becomes an issue. While the finance bros working 80-hour weeks might be able to afford NYC prices, there's a three-headed dragon wreaking havoc on everyone else...real estate. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/real-estate-the-three-headed-dragon-plaguing-nyc

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here, coming to you from New York's Central Park. New York is a city, obviously, where there's not a lot of manufacturing or agriculture, because there hasn't been greenfield potential here in over a century. It's a services economy, with finance, of course, being the biggest and baddest. But in any system that is based on services, cost of living becomes a critical issue, because these are all very highly value-added jobs, but people still have to live there. And the people who serve the services economy and serve the people who serve the services economy still need a place to live as well. So living costs are a big issue with real estate probably being at the top of the list. And in that, New York is facing a triple challenge.

The first is demographics. The American Northeast is the oldest and fastest aging part of the country. And as more people move into retirement, a lot of folks who have lived here all their lives to serve the servicers are discovering it's kind of out of their pay grade. So we're seeing a significant amount of relocation among older folks to warmer climbs. Of course, not everyone can afford to up and leave a rental apartment in New York for a condo and Boca, so it's disproportionately hitting people who are on the wealthier end of that scale. The second big issue is COVID and more importantly, technology. When COVID hit and everything shut down and the office went away temporarily,

New Yorkers, in many cases, decided to camp to other places. Some move to upstate, some moved to the south, some moved to Florida. Florida, because if you could just wire in for work, then you didn't need to be paying a New York rent, or New York taxes in many cases. And now that COVID is over, those technologies have only improved, and a lot of people are resisting coming back. Now, New York has not had as much of a problem getting people to move back as, say, San Francisco, but it's still had a disproportion hit on the economy overall. Specifically, you're talking about people moving into places like Jackson Hole or Charleston and maybe commuting in once or twice a month. And that's a very different real estate picture on this side of the equation because any money that you can use to buy a condo in New York,

you're going to be able to get, you know, a mansion in South Carolina. And since roughly 8% of the population of New York pays 90% of the taxes, every person who relocates is a real fiscal hit to the government here. But the third one is probably the most important because even with people moving out, we're still seeing rental costs here in New York be stable to positive. The third big factor is international fear. The more problems we see in Europe and especially in China, the more people who try to get their money out and get it into a place with rule of law

where you might actually be able to buy a physical asset with real estate being the number one for most consumers. And so you get these ridiculous needle buildings in New York that not a lot of of New Yorkers live in. Most of these have been bought out by foreigners who may not even have an intention of ever looking at the floor, much less moving in, simply as a way to park their assets. And so we're getting these huge distortions in a lot of property markets around the country with New York and being at the top of that list, where foreigners have come in and bought up property, especially at the higher end, just to park on it. And that's made it more difficult for everyone else to find a place or even find someone to build a place. Because

the hot money is going to something like this that is not really of use to solving the real estate or the living cost problems of the city. All right. Does this mean that New York's done? Of course not. It's still the world financial capital. But it does mean that the business model for both private sector and the government is going to have to change in order for the city to thrive in the future. All right. That's it for me. Y'all take care.