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MemeFirst: New York real-estate prices explained -- MemeFirst December 01, 2005 New York real-estate prices explained The 2.2 million jobs in Manhattan pay, on average, $2,025 per week . (You know that feeling you get when you find out you're below average? I've been having that for years.) Manhattan is 22 square miles, which means that the island of Manhattan pays, on average, $378 per square foot per year . And that includes Washington Heights. Posted by Felix at 02:54 PM GMT All proceeds go to MSF -- Comments #1 Pity we can't all work for Goldman Sachs. Posted by: Gherimiah on December 1, 2005 03:28 PM #2 I'll happily defer to someone with a firmer grasp of stats on this, but in the meantime, I wonder, does that average income number tell you very much? Given the massive disparity in Manhattan incomes, between, say, the dishwasher and the hedge-fund owner, which surely are among the widest in the country, wouldn't you also need to know the distribution of the data points? At a minium, wouldn't you want also to know the median income? Also, is this net or gross? Article talked about paychecks, which could probably mean either. Posted by: Matthew on December 1, 2005 04:36 PM #3 Oh, and also, Felix, presumably the 2.2 million people with jobs in Manhattan don't all live there, so your extrapolation doesn't wash. Posted by: Matthew on December 1, 2005 04:38 PM #4 Obvs mean incomemedian income, and I'd be surprised if more than 40% of Manhattanites made above average. Probably less. But even so. And actually, the fact that there are 2.2 million jobs to 1.5 million people in Manhattan actually only serves to exacerbate the demand-supply imbalance when it comes to real estate. Posted by: Felix on December 1, 2005 04:53 PM #5 I hate to be the one to break this to you, Felix, but nearly all residential housing in Manhattan consists of multi-story buildings. The salary range you describe explains real estate prices in Westchester County, NY and Bergen County, NJ to about the same degree as prices in Manhattan. Posted by: Sterling on December 1, 2005 07:05 PM #6 How delightful that the discussion of property prices one is sometimes unable to defuse at dinner parties just carries on here - almost as if taunting one with its dreary ineluctability. And how nice that Felix should bring along his no doubt expert appreciation of statistical lore. The one thing I am missing is the crucial evaluation of bedbug incidence as it affects property prices in Manhattan. In another thread, Betty has said this bedbug malarkey is all a plan of Bush's. For myself, I prefer to recall that bedbugs tend to originate in Belgium. Schtumm for now. More on this later. Posted by: Claude de Bigny on December 1, 2005 08:40 PM #7 Also, this seems to imply that everyone pays all of their income for housing, which is hopefully not the case. To be more realistic (ignoring the issues rightly brought up by the other commentators, including whether all of those people actually live in Manhattan and whether you can just take the sq ftge of Manhattan as the residential sq ftge), say people on average spend 40% of their income on housing. That gets your income for housing per sq ft to around $151. Posted by: Susan on December 1, 2005 09:14 PM #8 Susan and Sterling, you are embarassingly confused. What percentage of real estate in Manhattan is used for housing? According to this http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/landusefacts/landuse_tables.pdf (in case you are confused by the graph, the percents sum together veritcally and the land area sum horizontally). And even assuming that all "Mixed Residential and Commercial" was used for housing, less than 38% of the land in Manhattan is for housing. These data certainly allow for the idea that much of rent paid in Manhattan is for commercial use, and even then, a considerable percent is used for public space (Central Park alone is 10% of the area of Manhattan). Anyway, the amount people earn in a particular location is not directly related to the amount the people who live there earn, or the amount the people live there pay for rent. Look at this site: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/saipe/index.html The direct link is unavailable, but the Median household income for New York County was 43,573. Nassau County on the other hand is more than 71,000. In which place is it cheaper to rent by the foot? Posted by: Andrew on December 2, 2005 07:22 AM #9 I don't think I'm confused. My points are: a) there is actually quite a bit more than 22 square miles of residential floor space in Manhattan because of vertical construction b) a lot of upper-income Manhattan workers live outside Manhattan, and their buying power lifts prices in tony bedroom communities Posted by: Sterling on December 3, 2005 03:38 PM #10 OK, Sterling, let's do it your way. Assume that each of the 1.5 million residents of Manhattan has 400 square feet to call their own: that works out to 1200 square feet for the average family of three and 1600 square feet for the average family of four. Generous, I'd say. That comes out to 600 million square feet of residential real estate in Manhattan. Using that figure, my calculation actually comes out slightly higher : $386 per square foot per year, rather than $378. What makes you think that there's more than 22 square miles of residential floor space in Manhattan? As for your point b, I fail to see how it is in any way germane. Posted by: Felix on December 3, 2005 11:09 PM #11 OK, 22 square miles equals about 613,324,800 square feet. That would leave each of Manhattan's 1.5 million residents with 409 square feet of living space. But I don't believe that most Manhattan residents are actually so deprived, especially when you take into account common areas in apartment buildings such as laundry facilities, hallways, lobbies, etc. I'd be surprised if the average wasn't at least 600, and it's probably more than 800. And besides, that's not what you originally meant - you were dividing Manhattan's land footprint and not taking into account its vertical expansion. As for the second point, I suspect there's a strong tendency among $100,000 - $1,000,000 per annum Manhattan earners - which is well-off to wealthy-on-a-budget - to live in places like Valhalla and Ho-Ho-Kus, especially if they're married with kids. Family-flight in turn increases the average per-capita-square-footage of the Manhattan residential footprint through bleed-off of children. Posted by: Sterling on December 4, 2005 02:29 AM #12 Sterling jumped the shark so long ago it's probably not surprising, but for those of you keeping score at home, he really did just say that the average Manhattanite has 800 square feet of their own. So if you're an average person living with 2 roommates, that means you're in a 2400 square foot apartment. In Manhattan. Yeah. Oh, and that 350 square foot apartment you've got? It's not 350 square feet at all, it's probably more than 4000 square feet. You're just not including the lobby and all the hallways. Posted by: Felix on December 4, 2005 02:43 AM #13 My claim is that the amount of residential-zoned floor space in Manhattan probably works out to between 600 and 800 square feet per resident of Manhattan. You're not only challenging this, but asserting that my claim is absurd. Sure you wanna do that? Posted by: Sterling on December 4, 2005 02:59 AM #14 I've tried to find the statistic, but to no avail. It seems that while office space inventor is measured in square footage, residential space is simply measured, in all documents, by units. But we can work with that. So far I've learned that 82% of zoned lots in Manhattan are residential, making up about 280,000,000 square feet, which includes permanently undeveloped spaces like yards and gardens. If the average height of development across all that land is four stories, then, we're looking at about 750 square feet per person. I've also learned that in 1999 there were about 727,000 residential units in Manhattan , which means that the average unit houses two people. So those three-roomies crammed into one 800-square-foot-tenement-with-the-bathtub-in-the-kitchen examples are mostly fiction. Which is a shame because I get a tingle from the mental picture of Manhattan twenty- and thirty-somethings living in cramped, dingy conditions. If we divide the total residential land area by the total number of units, we get 385 square feet, which works out to 192.5 square feet per person, assuming no dwellings above one story in height and no unimproved/vacant land. If the average height is assumed to be four stories, in this scenario we get about 770 square feet per person. Here's a report from Prudential Douglas Elliman that details its 1Q 2005 sales. Units sold averaged 1,334 square feet, which divided by two yields 767 square feet per person. Breaking it down further we find co-ops averaging 1,197 square feet, condos at 1,496 square feet, luxury at 2,921 and loft at 2,145. So that's 598.5 square feet per person at the low end all the way up to 1,460.5 at the top. There's three separate analytical models for you Felix, all of which yield per-person square footage of 750 or better. I admit they're not all that fleshed out, but I'm stuck inside with a cold watching The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three on DVD, and I'm disinclined to dig deeper. But you're welcome to. Posted by: Sterling on December 4, 2005 04:04 AM #15 Sterling: do your calculations include infrastructure or is the 280MM number a percentage of raw space? Building density is higher here than anywhere else in America, but 15% to circulation (in buildings and streets themeselves) would be an easily defended metric. Counting hallways in urban residential structures is like counting sidewalks as part of sf for suburban homes. As much Sterling does sound like a set designer for Friends, Felix, I gotta say, of the 25 or so apartments of people that I can definitely make an estimate of size, we average 500 sf easy. Most everyone is a half a standard tenement lot (25 x 25), with a couple of lofts and post-war, large-scale developments thrown in. This is skewed because many of them are single (I live in a 2bd alone) or have rent-controlled apartments from way back. Posted by: 99 on December 4, 2005 07:19 PM #16 Where does your 280m sq ft number come from? Your first two calculations are based on it, so I'd like to know. (They're also based on a multiplier of 4, which as far as I can tell came pretty much out of thin air.) As for apartment sales, in Manhattan individual condos and coops tend to be much larger than the apartments inside rental buildings. So if you look just at sold apartments as opposed to rented apartments, you're going to get a skewed figure. What's more, if a 3800-square-foot brownstone in Harlem, say, is sold and then the downstairs floor is rented out, that still counts as a 3800 square foot deal under these figures. Posted by: Felix on December 4, 2005 09:21 PM #17 The multiplier of 4 was back-of-envelope guess. The 280,000,000 number came from this PDF . Sorry, thought I'd linked to it initially. As for rental apartments being smaller than privately owned condos or co-ops...not sure I buy that. But even if it's true, how much smaller could they be? 10%? Doesn't really matter. You can apologize any time now. Posted by: Sterling on December 4, 2005 10:06 PM #18 if anyone is real curious why not pony up the $250 to get a list of every tax lot in the city? http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/applbyte.shtml in the meantime, simply because i am tired of having to read sterlings pontifications about things he knows anything about, i downloaded a list of all the residential tax lots from 14th street and below from propertyshark. only 14th street and below, because after 6000+ entries, i became bored. 14th street down is a good representative sample of the 99000+ residential tax lots in manhattan. it includes spacious luxury lofts of tribeca, tenements of the les, projects on the eastside, high rise high density battery park and half building condo conversions of downtown (note that a rental bldg with multiple units counts as a single tax lot with the number of units listed as a seperate data field). the average unit size works out to 1100sf with 590sf per person (based 2000 census population stats for 14th st & below). this includes all common space in a building as it is based on total building size for single tax lot (rental) buildings and counts common space tax lots for condo buildings (read lobbies, circ, etc.) multiplying back out by the 2000 census population numbers for manhattan of 1,537,195... we get 906,945,050sf of residential space in manhattan. let's call that an even 9Bsf since the city lists 3800 acres of lot area in manhattan (165,500,000sf), that gives a rough overbuild factor of 5.5. this will obviously skew higher with the ues & uws densities without actually affecting the sf/person. summary- -590sf of residential per person (inclusive of common areas). close to sterlings low estimate of 600, but nowhere near the 800sf -1100sf average size per unit (inclusive of common areas). again close to sterlings guess based on broker mumbojumbo, but still below the stated average. -9Bsf of residential space in manhattan sterling- close on your numbers, but not nearly close enough to be quite so pompously smug. stick to things you know about, like why bush is a foreign policy genius. felix- remind me what this related to? Posted by: geoff on December 5, 2005 12:34 AM #19 Geoff - The only reason I was pompously snug is because Felix had reacted to to my estimates with such comedic outrage. Also, I don't think 14th St. and below is a good representative sample. Newer and I suspect more spacious high-rises make up a much larger proportion of housing from the 30s up through the low 100s. So I'm sticking with 600+. I suspect the actual number is around 750, as stated above. As for your justification of your work - "simply because i am tired of having to read sterlings pontifications about things he knows anything about" - I'm not sure what it means. Perhaps you meant to write "nothing" instead of "anything"? I'm not claiming to be right all the time - I am not right all the time. I am, however, pretty much always right whenever Felix gets all worked up and tells me I have no idea what I'm talking about. Thanks for your small role in marking off another example for me to throw back at him at some future date. Posted by: Sterling on December 5, 2005 06:19 AM #20 Renter-occupied apartments are much smaller than owner-occupied apartments. And as the PDF you yourself linked to shows (see page 24), the vast majority of apartments in Manhattan are renter-occupied. Think about it: one needs maybe 350 sq ft per person to live in some reasonable comfort. Beyond that, you're shelling out extra cash for extra space. Owners are happy doing that because they have 100% equity in that space: everyone has heard the advice that they should buy the biggest apartment they can afford. Renters, on the other hand, are simply giving away thousands of dollars in rent every month, with nothing at all to show for it. So they tend to go not for the biggest apartment they can afford, but rather the cheapest apartment they find adequate. Put it this way: Manhattan is full of individuals spending an enormous proportion of their income on outsize mortgage payments. Almost everyone, when they move from renting to buying, sees their monthly housing costs rise substantially. If you move to Manhattan and have a relatively low income, then you might spend a crazy amount of it on rent, it's true. But if your income is average or higher (and remember that average is $2,025 per week), I very much doubt that your rent is making nearly as much of a dent in your paycheck as it would if you owned your own apartment. You reach a standard of living you're comfortable with, and you stop. Anything beyond that is money which you could otherwise spend on clothes, or travel, or restaurants. Whereas if you buy , you're not spending so much as investing. The only money which you're really spending is the interest on your mortgage -- and even that comes with a tax deduction. Or let's put it another way. That Elliman report you linked to has an average sales price of $1.21 million. A typical rental yield in Manhattan these days is 4%, so if rentals were functionally identical to owner-occupied apartments, which you seem to assume, then the average rent in Manhattan would be over $4,000 a month. In fact, of course, it's nowhere near that. Posted by: Felix on December 5, 2005 06:55 AM #21 There's the shark, and then there's the A train. Sterling's Manhattan clearly stops at 96th street. Sterling, dear, north of that bright white line, the housing stock is incredibly stable and consistent in terms of size and layout. Harlem is just now getting it's first 'luxury' apartment building in a half century. Any larger apartment complexes are housing projects, which have smaller units by definition, and, allowing for the dispersal of the towers in some International Style fantasy also insures that the density does not increase much. Posted by: 99 on December 5, 2005 04:03 PM #22 Felix, just because apartments are currently going for $1.21 million a pop doesn't mean that everyone who owns an apartment paid that much. Rent prices move in sympathy with real estate prices but are less prone to bubbles. What you're missing here, and you've missed the same thing when we've talked about the stock market in the past, is the difference between speculative investors and income investors. Speculators don't buy an apartment (or apartment building) primarily for the benefit of the rent; their main motivation is the hope of flipping the property at some later date for a larger sum than they paid for it. The current Manhattan real estate bubble is the product of speculators. Real estate income investors view rent collection as their goal - most apartment buildings in any town or city in the U.S. are owned by income investors. They get less press than speculators, but they also tend to go bankrupt less often. The market value of a rental property can be determined by the amount of rent it generates for the owner, not the other way around. Manhattan rents are high - probably even ludicrously high - but that is a function of large demand chasing relatively low supply, and is only weakly related to current real estate prices. I do acknowledge your point about space not being a priority for Manhattan renters, there is some truth in that. People who do see space as a necessity tend to wind up in rental units in Brooklyn, Queens or Hudson County. But that's not exclusively the case. Posted by: Sterling on December 5, 2005 04:59 PM #23 This thread is hilarious and sad, although a good example of how the same statistics can be applied to support any and all political positions. Posted by: sac on December 5, 2005 06:39 PM #24 Sterling, Manhattan is the one real-estate market in the US where there are, to all intents and purposes, zero speculators under your definition. No one buys Manhattan property in order to flip it. For one thing, co-op boards (and even condo boards, for that matter) hate flippers, and are likely to punish them. There's flip taxes, brokers' fees of 6% for the seller, and a luxury tax of 1% on any apartment over $1m for the buyer. Prices are so high that the carrying costs are enormous -- and you can't rent out the apartment in the meantime, because that makes it pretty much unsaleable. There are, of course, lots of buildings owned by income investors in New York. Most of the East Village, where I live, is comprised of such buildings: they normally have 20 or so apartments (say 5 floors, 4 apartments per floor), and they've been going up in price almost as much as individual apartments have -- the only reason they haven't gone up just as much is because many of the tenants are rent-controlled or rent-stabilised below market. These are typical New York apartments, from a renter's point of view -- but I can tell you, as someone who was apartment hunting in the East Village for almost a year, they're much less typical from an owner's point of view. Also, there's a strong incentive for for-sale apartments to be as large as possible: price per square foot is positively correlated with size. That's not the case in the rental market: it's easier to rent out a 650sqft apartment for $2500 than it is to rent out a 1300sqft apartment for $5000. Posted by: Felix on December 5, 2005 09:14 PM #25 "Manhattan is the one real-estate market in the US where there are, to all intents and purposes, zero speculators under your definition. No one buys Manhattan property in order to flip it." Felix, of course people speculate on property in Manhattan. Just because the barriers to entry are high doesn't mean some won't jump them. How else do you think a modest apartment winds up costing as much as a dozen Mercedes-Benz CL500s? Who do you imagine is providing demand at that level? You know banks are not issuing $1,000,000 mortgages to households with joint incomes of $200,000. It's trust fund kiddies - who are often divorced from fiscal reality - and speculators. As for your point about different-sized apartments being suitable for rent versus sale, I might agree with you except for the fact that every rental apartment IS OWNED by someone. It IS PART of the for sale market. I'd be surprised if fewer than half of the condos in Manhattan are rented out by their owners. Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 01:51 AM #26 Sterling, I'm afraid the factors leading to high apartment prices are much more mundane than your feverish mind would like to imagine. Lots of global liquidity, driving down interest rates and banks' credit tests. Lots of demand, due to Manhattan's status as the center of the universe and high Wall Street bonuses. And very limited supply. The market for flippers is Miami, not NYC -- where a condo can be bought and sold three or four times before it is even built. As for your point about rental apartments being owned by someone, it sounds clever until you stop to think about what I've already said. Rental buildings are owned by landlords; the vast majority of condos and co-ops are owner-occupied. For one thing, co-ops vastly outnumber condos, and they're hard to rent. And as for condos, they generally get rented out when they're not the place their owner really wants to live. Given how valuable they are, few owners who don't want to live here would rather rent out their condos rather than simply sell them. Take my East Village condo building, for instance: when it went condo in 1983, only one owner lived here. Today, all the units bar one are owner-occupied. I haven't done my homework on this, but I'll happily accept your wager: I'll bet the standard bottle of vintage champagne that more than half the condos in Manhattan are owner-occupied. Deal? Posted by: Felix on December 6, 2005 02:43 AM #27 If you go double or nothing on the proposition that the amount of existing residential floor space in Manhattan divided by the number of residents of Manhattan is equal to or greater than 600 sq. ft., then it's a bet. How are we going to research this? FWIW, I am descended from a man who is reputed to be the first person to negotiate a real estate deal in New York: Wessel Wesselse (ten Broek). He may have been the man to offer 60 guilders (often misreported as $24) as the purchase price of Manhattan from the Canarsies. (Technically the Canarsies didn't own Manhattan Island - it's not for nothing that "Canarsie" is in Brooklyn. Also technically the Dutch West India Company didn't care which tribe owned it. It just needed some bunch of natives to smile and sign off on the deal to keep the English away.) This of course conveys no special knowledge upon me, but it certainly adds a humorous subtext to our disagreement. Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 04:14 AM #28 I'm not sure about the terms of the wager: we seem to be betting on two different things at the same time. But spell it out, and I'll be amenable. I do want to ensure, of course, that hallways and elevator shafts and the like do not count as residential floor space. And please also ensure that if one of the propositions can be determined while the other one can't, then the other wager still stands. Posted by: Felix on December 6, 2005 05:55 AM #29 I'm not sure how we could specify the terms to exclude elevators if they are included in filings. However, it occurs to me that Manhattan Borough probably requires a statement of total dwelling space for its Certificate of Occupancy, so that would work for me. And no, I think double or nothing sounds good to me, especially since we will be attempting to falsify two of my estimations, rather than either of yours. Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 06:20 AM #30 You've lost me, I'm afraid. When you say "double or nothing", are you proposing a 2BVC bet on the residential floor space, and no bet at all on the proportion of condos which are rented out? Or what? It makes no sense to me: "double or nothing" normally happens after A has lost a bet and B has won it. Then going double or nothing means that either B wins double the original amount, or he wins nothing. You essentially run the bet over again. Are you maybe trying to propose something whereby if I lose I lose 2BVCs, and if I win I win nothing? Posted by: Felix on December 6, 2005 07:44 AM #31 Are you trying to squirm out of it? Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 06:03 PM #32 Sterling, will you propose your bet already? I've already said that I'm likely to accept. Just tell me the terms! Posted by: Felix on December 6, 2005 06:12 PM #33 I did! Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 06:25 PM #34 OK, have a few moments now, I had to get someplace before 2pm and the roads are crap with snow and slush. Um, OK. My terms for the bet is those two things specified, avg. sq. footage = 600 and = 50% of condos. Either side has to get both right to collect. gotta run Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 06:51 PM #35 So if one of us gets both right, he wins 1BVC or 2BVCs? And if one of the two turns out to be unverifiable, then it's a wash? Posted by: Felix on December 6, 2005 07:22 PM #36 Honestly, Felix, I doubt either number is verifiable. Like I wrote above, the city appears to track residential rental inventory by units, rather than by square footage. Also, most owners of condominium units who rent them out do so through agents - even the tenant may be only vaguely aware of the legal status of the unit. In NJ I don't think an individual condo owner even needs to report the unit as a rental property if it's in a building that's already inspected under multi-family housing regulations (or if it's a standalone unit or duplex). The rent revenue has to be reported as taxable income, naturallly, but not to any entity with housing oversight. So make it for one bottle and yes both figures have to be verifiable. That said, if either of us can show a grouping of not-completely-conclusive figures from multiple sources that seem reasonable and fall long or short of my guesses by ten percent or more, then I think we should accept them. (Of course, I have arguably already met this condition with my square footage prediction, and Geoff's calculations don't contradict it under the 10% rule I suggest.) Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 10:05 PM #37 as i mentioned earlier, you can get the sf and unit count for every residential tax lot in the city from the cities web site... google 'bytes of the big apple' and look at the 'pluto' product. the license fee is $250 or you can get the info from propertyshark.com. there are 99000+ listings for manhattan. at 100 listings per page, thats a lot of cutting and pasting into excel. both of these will give you tax lot sizes (whole buildings/unit count or condo unit), which will be inclusive of common area. 10-15% is considered a fairly standard deduction for circulation. mechanical space is not included in the floor area count. happy dueling Posted by: geoff on December 6, 2005 10:29 PM Post a comment Name: Email Address: URL: Remember personal info? Yes No Anti-spam question: Share four cupcakes equally among four people. How many does each person get (in digits)? 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(7) Comments 06/12: geoff: as i mentioned earlier, you can get the sf and unit count for every residential tax lot in the ci 06/12: Sterling: Honestly, Felix, I doubt either number is verifiable. Like I wrote above, the city appears to tr 06/12: Felix: So if one of us gets both right, he wins 1BVC or 2BVCs? And if one of the two turns out to be unv 06/12: Sterling: OK, have a few moments now, I had to get someplace before 2pm and the roads are crap with snow an 06/12: Sterling: I did! 06/12: Felix: Sterling, will you propose your bet already? I've already said that I'm likely to accept. Just te 06/12: Sterling: Are you trying to squirm out of it? 06/12: Felix: You've lost me, I'm afraid. When you say "double or nothing", are you proposing a 2BVC bet on the 06/12: Sterling: I'm not sure how we could specify the terms to exclude elevators if they are included in filings. 06/12: Felix: I'm not sure about the terms of the wager: we seem to be betting on two different things at the s 06/12: Sterling: If you go double or nothing on the proposition that the amount of existing residential floor spac 06/12: Felix: Sterling, I'm afraid the factors leading to high apartment prices are much more mundane than your 06/12: Sterling: "Manhattan is the one real-estate market in the US where there are, to all intents and purposes, 05/12: Felix: Sterling, Manhattan is the one real-estate market in the US where there are, to all intents and p 05/12: sac: This thread is hilarious and sad, although a good example of how the same statistics can be appli 05/12: Sterling: Felix, just because apartments are currently going for $1.21 million a pop doesn't mean that ever 05/12: 99: There's the shark, and then there's the A train. Sterling's Manhattan clearly stops at 96th stree 05/12: Felix: Renter-occupied apartments are much smaller than owner-occupied apartments. And as the < 05/12: Sterling: Geoff - The only reason I was pompously snug is because Felix had reacted to to my estimates with 05/12: geoff: if anyone is real curious why not pony up the $250 to get a list of every tax lot in the city?<br 04/12: Sterling: The multiplier of 4 was back-of-envelope guess. The 280,000,000 number came from <a href 04/12: Felix: Where does your 280m sq ft number come from? Your first two calculations are based on it, so I'd 04/12: 99: Sterling: do your calculations include infrastructure or is the 280MM number a percentage of raw 04/12: Sterling: I've tried to find the statistic, but to no avail. It seems that while office space inventor is 04/12: Sterling: My claim is that the amount of residential-zoned floor space in Manhattan probably works out to b 04/12: Felix: Sterling jumped the shark so long ago it's probably not surprising, but for those of you keeping 04/12: Sterling: OK, 22 square miles equals about 613,324,800 square feet. That would leave each of Manhattan's 1 03/12: Felix: OK, Sterling, let's do it your way. Assume that each of the 1.5 million residents of Manhattan ha 03/12: Sterling: I don't think I'm confused. My points are: a) there is actually quite a bit more than 22 02/12: Andrew: Susan and Sterling, you are embarassingly confused. What percentage of real estate in Manhattan i Trackbacks
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Amazon.com: House of the Dead: DVD Your Store DVD See All 32 Product Categories Your Account | Cart | Wish List | Help | Advanced Search | Browse Genres | Top Sellers | New & Future Releases | Television Central | Life & Learning | DVD Essentials | Blowout DVDs | Movie Showtimes | Used DVDs Search Amazon.com DVD Web Search Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in . DVD Information Explore this item buying info editorial reviews customer reviews cast and crew fun facts Listmania! The worst Modern Horror Films : A list by Jason Voorhees "Jason V" Add your List Ready to buy? Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering. A9.com users save 1.57% on Amazon. Learn how . MORE BUYING CHOICES 183 used & new from $0.70 Have one to sell? House of the Dead (2003) Starring: Jonathan Cherry , Tyron Leitso Director: Uwe Boll Rating: See larger image Share your own customer images List Price: $18.00 Price: $15.99 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. See details You Save: $2.01 (11%) Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Want it delivered Friday, December 30? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. See details 183 used & new available from $0.70 Edition: Other Versions and Languages Other Versions (VHS Tape) List Price Price Other Offers: VHS Tape House of Dead (2003) (Spanish) (Sub) $44.98 $42.73 VHS Tape House of Dead (2003) $9.98 $9.48 34 used & new from $0.45 Better Together Buy this DVD with Alone in the Dark DVD ~ Christian Slater today! Total List Price: $37.98 Buy Together Today: $33.98 Customers who bought this DVD also bought Alone in the Dark DVD ~ Christian Slater Boogeyman (Special Edition) DVD ~ Barry Watson Saw (Widescreen Edition) DVD ~ Leigh Whannell The Texas Chainsaw Massacre DVD ~ Jessica Biel Explore Similar Items : in DVD , in Books Storyline Genres: Horror , Thriller , Action , Mystery Tagline: The dead walk...You run Plot Outline: A group of teens arrive on an island for a rave--only to discover the island has been taken over by zombies. The group takes refuge in a house where they try to survive the night. Plot Synopsis: This film is a prequel to all of the The House of the Dead video games. Set on an island off the coast of Florida, a techno rave party attracts a diverse group of college coeds and a Coast Guard officer. Soon, they discover that their X-laced escapades are to be interrupted by zombies and monsters that attack them on the ground, from the air, and in the sea, ruled by an evil entity in the House of the Dead... Plot Keywords: Cleavage | Spin Off From Video Game | Gun | Zombie | Based On Video Game | Island | Florida Keys | Martial Arts | Nudity | Decapitation | Gore | Severed Head | (Show all 68 plot keywords recommended by customers) Product Details Actors: Jonathan Cherry , Tyron Leitso , Clint Howard , Ona Grauer , Ellie Cornell , See more Directors: Uwe Boll Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dts stereo, Widescreen, Ntsc, Widescreen Anamorphic Region: Region 1 ( U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats. ) Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Rated: (Not for sale to persons under age 18.) Studio: Live / Artisan DVD Release Date: January 27, 2004 Run Time: 90 min (original theatrical or airing runtime) Average Customer Review: Based on 287 Reviews DVD Features: Available Subtitles: English, Spanish Available Audio Tracks: English (DTS 6.1 ES), English (Dolby Digital 5.1 EX), English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo) Commentary by: director Uwe Boll, post-production supervisor Jonathan Shore, producer Shawn Williamson, and actor Jonathan Cherry (Unknown Format) Commentary by: executive producer Mark Altman (Unknown Format) Deleted scenes "Behind the House: Anatomy of the Zombie Movement" making-of featurette "Stacked for Zom-Bat: The Sexy Babes of House of the Dead Prepare for Battle!" Sneak peek of new Sega game Nightshade From IMDb: Quotes & Trivia ASIN: B0000YEE6C Amazon.com Sales Rank: #12,784 in DVD Theatrical Release Information US Theatrical Release Date: October 10, 2003 MPAA: for pervasive strong violence/gore, language and some nudity. Production Company: Boll Kino Beteiligungs GmbH & Co. KG, Brightlight Pictures Inc., Herold and Besser Studios, Mindfire Entertainment USA Box Office: $10 Million Budget Estimate: $7 Million Filming Locations: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Editorial Reviews Amazon.com The usual slasher-movie teens charter a boat to attend a rave in Washington's San Juan islands, find zombies there, and splatter their guts all over the place. House of the Dead shows early promise when the boat captain is the dude from Das Boot (Jürgen Prochnow) and the mate is the inimitably weird Clint Howard. Alas, things devolve from there. The movie includes frequent flashes from its video game inspiration, not that we need much reminding of the obvious source. Amongst the rotten dialogue, bad acting, and gratuitous topless scenes, there's one looooong shootout sequence in the middle of the picture that should be the main attraction for fans of this kind of thing. Otherwise, it's at the level of every other slasher movie, video game or no video game, in which stupid people do stupid things to keep themselves in harm's way. --Robert Horton Customers who viewed this DVD also viewed Dawn of the Dead (Widescreen Unrated Director's Cut) DVD ~ Boyd Banks Elektra (Widescreen Edition) DVD ~ Jennifer Garner Land of the Dead (Unrated Edition) DVD ~ Simon Baker Blade - Trinity (Unrated Widescreen Edition) (New Line Platinum Series) DVD ~ Wesley Snipes Explore Similar Items : in DVD , in Computer & Video Games Spotlight Reviews Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers. 47 of 50 people found the following review helpful: Lord have mercy! , March 30, 2004 Reviewer: Shawn Watson "God of Gods" (Badger's Brook, Scotland) - See all my reviews There are people out there who will greenlight anything! That is the only explanation I can offer as to why the House of the Dead movie exists. And that's only scary part to the whole movie. It's so bad you'll go off movies forever. I seriously wanted to switch this off and turn the TV over to the Paint Drying channel but I was bound by my word to suffer the whole thing. I don't know why I do these bad things to myself. As if it matters, here's the basic jist of the 'story'. A group of twenty-somethings are so desperate to go out to some island in the Pacific Northwest (Canada actually, because it's cheap) for the 'Rave of the Century' (which consists of about 8 people and un-raving music) that they pay some craggy old fisherman $1000 to take them there after they miss the main ferry. That's gotta be some rave to be worth all that dough! The fisherman warns them that the island is also known as the Island of the Dead (hang on-I thought this was HOUSE of the Dead?) and that they are all doomed yadda yadda yadda. First faults here. Why would a tiny little rave (of the Century my foot!) be held on some remote island? Why would anyone willingly pay loads of money to get it? Why pay even more to the craggy old fisherman to take them back when they could just come back with the others? Once they arrive they discover that the rave (which consists of about 2 tents, a small stage and a port-a-john) has been smashed, there's blood everywhere and no one is around. What would any rationally thinking person do? Run for their lives of course. But no, these clueless, obviously blind people decide to go look for them. Soon enough they discover an old ramshackle house that's 50 times as big on the inside as it is on the outside. Another half hour of stumbling around in the forest follows, as an excuse to kill of some of the lesser characters, and after much tedium they arrive back at the house again. The characters, like the movie, go nowhere. Jammed into this ghastly disaster is a superabundance of gibberish dialogue, heinous acting, mumbo-jumbo exposition and zillions of clips from the once-popular arcade game of the same name. Why this was universally accepted as a good idea with the filmmakers I'll never know. The clips have no reference to any of the scenes and only degrade this trash even further, if that is at all possible. It has nothing to do with the game save for some cheap, throwaway line at the end. It makes Resident Evil look like cinematic glory. Hell, even the Double Dragon movie seems multi-Oscar worthy in comparison to this junk. The only one who comes out of this with his dignity still intact is Jurgen Prochnow. He could have just taken his money and ran but he tries his best with the awful script and brings a tiny bit of pathos to his character. The rest of the cast suck I'm afraid. The characters are idiots and deserve to die. Plus, if you cut out the swearing and pointless nudity, I see no reason why this film cannot be shown on Saturday morning TV. It's not frightening in the slightest. Pirates of the Caribbean is more scary than the skeletal bad guys in this film. And where did all those bad guys come from anyway? There were only a few people on the island to begin with. I guess this justifies the reason they chose to reuse footage over and over. I kid you not, you'll see the same zombie die a dozen times. Who's ultimately to blame for that scandalous waste of celluloid? None other than director Uwe Boll. His control over the movie is non-existent. You can clearly the see actors have no idea what they should be doing and that the zombies aren't really taking it all seriously. The actors seem like they're reading off cue cards as they constantly pause in the middle of long sentences and carry on talking as soon as they see the next card. It all feels very unnatural. Plus the film is shot like a two-part mini-series. I have indeed seen better TV productions. And don't get me started on the editing. The film is an incoherent babble with thousands upon thousands of pointless shots and dozens of meaningless camera pans. No real skill or talent was put into making this at all. It truly baffles and boggles the mind how movies this unfathomably bad can get made and George A. Romero can't even get anyone to take his calls. House of the Dead makes some idiotic reference to Romero in a lazy attempt to be 'post-modern' but it only irritates that they think THIS is in the same league as a REAL zombie movie. For what it's worth, the 1.85:1 anamorphic picture looks great and the Dolby 5.1 soundtrack is clean but very unimpressive and only serves to pronounce the heavily over-used ADR even more. The DVD comes with extras but why torture yourself. Isn't this review warning enough? Stay away! You are all doomed I tell you! Doomed! Doomed!!! Was this review helpful to you? ( Report this ) 11 of 12 people found the following review helpful: Bad, but not fun in the way some bad films can be. , November 9, 2004 Reviewer: Christian Hokenson (Burbank, CA United States) - See all my reviews Folks, save yourselves from "House of the Dead." This is pretty atrocious filmmaking at its most insulting. Worse than even "Resident Evil." I know, I know... they are just videogames, not a movies (but if you check out the special features junk on the "House of the Dead" DVD you can find out the filmmakers had a much different, and much higher opinion of their effort). "House of the Dead" offers lots of action but, as usual for today's young auteurs weened on MTV, it's pretty damn hard to follow and, after a while, it becomes repetitious to the point of sheer boredom. The acting is rotten (save for Jurgen Prochnow (it's a long way from Das Boot, ain't it captain) and the ever weird, always interesting Clint Howard (it's a long way from "Evilspeak" isn't it Coopersmith)), the special effects are decent (when you can see them, and hey... ALL special effects should be decent nowadays, shouldn't they... no points there). The direction is nearly non-existent, and the screenwriting is simply bad... but not bad in a fun way-- the way you can play drinking games with a movie or MST3K it to death on a Friday night around the hookah. I can't even really bring myself to call this a horror film, for not once was I horrified save for the moment, toward the end, where I thought to myself, "y'know, you've actually wasted nearly two hours of your life on this inglorious piece of poop, man." This "film" has the temerity to namecheck George A. Romero and his (as one character aptly puts it) "Holy Trilogy" of zombie classics: "Night, Dawn and Day" natch. Well, 'tis true.. Romero is clearly sui generis when it comes to apocalyptic zombie horror. No need to run (as the current spate of zombies is wont to do), for there's nowhere to hide. Romero at the very, very least has an understanding of the basic rules of filmmaking that at least keep a viewer's interests alive for his dead folks... not only that, but he clearly understands the most basic rules of drama and character. I know many folks that didn't grow up with Romero's films might look at them with some derision regarding black n' white zombies in "Night of the Living Dead" or the baby-blue flesh and Crayola day-glow colors of blood from "Dawn of the Dead." Yet, Romero knew how to handle the gory violence in his films (over-the-top and with great shock-value) and, in the end, Romero wasn't simply striving for realism in gore so much as he was trying to make a valid (still valid!) point about how human beings act in a society under severe stress. He had something to SAY, and he was able to SHOW it without lots of lame-assed exposition that passes for dialogue these days. Uwe Boll on the other hand, knows at least how to load a camera and keep it running (and running and running and running). But he has no sense of story whatsoever, no sense of pace, no sense of continuity and no sense of fun. This is a dreary exercise in crap filmmaking with a decent-sized budget... the kind of budget Romero should have had for his underrated films, but hey! at least Romero knows how to use a dollar wisely. Boll seems to be a kid on the ultimate sugar high as he spends money on fancy camera angles, weird point-of-view shots, CGI gore, and buffed out stuntpeople as decayed corpses... and yes, I know this movie is really just a videogame. In fact, the "director" even goes so far as to include shots from that videogame as segues to his badly choreographed action sequences. After the first few heads a-poppin' (yay, for gun violence) it gets rather dull, and then the action speeds up even more in order to keep the audience awake and, well, just plain confused from what I could see. Boll hits all the cliches just right... POV of the bullet going into flesh and inanimate objects, bullet-time cinematography (can someone please put a stake in the heart of this visual stunt once and for all?!?) and of course some good-lookin' young adults with sawdust for brains and the martial arts skill of Bruce Lee flippin' the bird to the laws of physics. It's inane, it's astonishingly lame and it's insulting to sit through, and yet I did, just so you can avoid having to sit through it too! One thing about George A. Romero and his highly regarded trilogy of zombie films: the zombies themselves were often secondary to the living human characters they sought to munch on. They were scary because you could clearly see they were no longer reasonable human beings-- your family, your friends-- but just dead things with a devastating single-minded instinct for moving foward toward a hot lunch. It didn't matter if they ran or did Cirque d'Soleil-style acrobatics in order to get to you, or just simply lurched. The zombies were always a wave of nearly unstoppable slowness, and thus a very handy metaphor for everything from groupthink to mall shoppers on a Sunday afternoon. In "House of the Dead" the zombies are just fodder, nothing but magnets for lead projectiles... and yes, I know, it's just a videogame. In the end, avoid this load of manure and check out Romero's films if you haven't yet (and, really, what self-respecting zombie fan has not seen them yet?!?). If you can't handle character building, drama and a fairly amazing story of the breakdown of society due to lack of cooperation among the living (and, yes, plenty of gore), then I say turn to either "Re-Animator" or, better yet, "Return of the Living Dead" which at least also manages to tell a story and offer up some halfway decent acting with he gore. Both of those films also offer copious amounts of nudity for you teenage horror fans who seemingly can't get close to the real thing... and yes, I know the videogame movie does too, but the other movies have the added benefit of actual skilled filmmakers behind the scenes, while "House of the Dead" does not. "Return of the Living Dead" actually gives the horror fan a shining example of what "House of the Dead" could have been in the right hands. One film is loads of fun (and hey, by the way, Romero's films offer fun and humor in spades lest you think they are simply turgid sociological dissertations), and the other is so much less than fun it could lead to suicide. I know I wanted to off myself just for getting through to the credits. The films of Romero along with Peter Jackson's brilliant, low-budget "Braindead/Dead Alive," and the recent releases of "28 Days Later" (a quasi-zombiefest) and the hilarious (and quite bloody) "Shaun of the Dead" all offer far more entertainment value (key words here, folks) than "House of the Dead." These films all have some quirky things to say about life along with loads of furious bloodletting, while "House of the Dead" is simply a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Was this review helpful to you? ( Report this ) Customer Reviews Average Customer Review: Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers. Give it a break! , December 28, 2005 Reviewer: Erick Irungaray "erickufo" (el paso, texas United States) - See all my reviews What do the people expect out of a movie that is based on a real shooting arcade game? We all know that lately, most of the horror movies suck now in these days, don't they?. Was this review helpful to you? ( Report this ) 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful: OMG , December 6, 2005 Reviewer: Jonas Brock (Tampa) - See all my reviews I expect horror movies to be somewhat bad or silly, but this was unreal. Avoid at all cost. Was this review helpful to you? ( Report this ) 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful: This is bad. , November 13, 2005 Reviewer: Kimberley Wilson (VA USA) - See all my reviews House of the Dead is based on a video game I had no expectations that it would be good but I was astonished at how bad it is. While watching it I kept thinking that it must be a parody. Surely Uwe Boll was joking when he did this, right? He's mocking bad horror movies, right? Wrong. I suspect that everybody who worked on this film was serious. This movie is so bad it's pathetic. It' likes watching Old Yeller get shot, seeing Litte Timmy drown in the well and finding out that the department store Santa is just a guy from Skid Row who was sobered up for the evening. I won't get into the plot becuase there aint any but there's a scene in it that's so dumb it haunts me and is a perfect example of the whole film. One of the "teens" (Why do teenagers in horror movies all look like they're on the wrong side of 30?) decides to fight the zombies with karate. Karate on the undead. Think about that. I don't care if you studied for five years under Pei Mei and David Carradine was your sensei, karate is not going to cut it when fighting zombies unless you're going to do the flying walk to safety thing. She gets eaten of course and one of her companions just stands there and looks. He has no reaction at all. The actor plays the scene like he's at the beach. Some bad horror movies are funny is a goofy sort of way. Others are mildly interesting because somebody at least tried to do something with them but this is just miserable. How this thing got to the theaters is some kind of mystery. Was this review helpful to you? ( Report this ) 5 of 5 people found the following review helpful: Holy crap, this movie is terrible , November 1, 2005 Reviewer: Michael J. Gold - See all my reviews I've seen some bad movies in my time, but man this one really takes the cake. I can't believe this garbage was put in theatres. The acting is hilarious. I love how there are zombies all over, and one guys girlfriend even turns into one and attacks him, then gets shot repeatedly. The boyfriend just kinda shrugs it off. No emotion at all. NOTHING Although my favorite part ever that me and my friend are now quoting non stop is the heartfelt scene where Curien is crying about how some lady died, he says (and i quote) She's dead, i didn't save her.. IT WAS MY FAULT... Were you here? did you see it? Did you see watch them rip her apart? SEE WATCH them rip her apart. I had to rewind to make sure i wasn't hearing things, then i put on the subtitles. Was that REALLY their best take? Man this movie is horrible and that's what makes it great. One of those corny ass flicks you can watch just to laugh at. Was this review helpful to you? ( Report this ) See all 287 customer reviews... Listmania! The Scariest and Coolest Moder... : by K. S Schneider The Good, The Bad, and The Ugl... : by Lunar Strain The worst Modern Horror Films : by Jason Voorhees "Jason V" So You'd Like to... Remember why they call film art : by Colin Nickell , Amateur Movie Critic Know How to Survive the Best Zombie Movies? : by hitlercosmetics , Zombie movie lover. watch the 100 worst movies of all time : by Joseph Dewey , a fan of really horrible movies Fun Facts from IMDb.com: Awards Click here to see more Awards Fangoria Chainsaw Awards: Chainsaw Award for Worst Film Leo Awards: Leo for Feature Length Drama: Best Make-up Trivia Click here to see more Trivia The movie is set before the events of the first House of the Dead video game. At the end of the film the survivors are rescued by a helicopter. As it is landing two men dressed in trench coats get of the helicopter. This is a reference to the original House of the Dead video game in which the protagonists are two special agents in over coats. Goofs Click here to see more Goofs In the laboratory, one of the supposedly gray, rotting, skeletal zombies lying on a table has a very visible pink, healthy nose sticking out of its skull. Crazy Credits Click here to see more Crazy Credits The opening credits play over video of the games, from both the arcade andDreamcast versions, begining with the famous "You must stop Curien!" scenefrom the game! Movie Connections Click here to see more Movie Connections Followed by: House of the Dead 2: Dead Aim Edited from: House of the Dead Quotes Click here to see more Quotes [pointing on a zombie in the water] Greg : Shoot it! Capt. Victor Kirk : What do you think I am trying to do, you f***ing moron? Rudy : You did all this to become immortal. Why? Castillo : To live forever! For more information about "House of the Dead" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) Look for similar items by category Browse similar items in: DVD > Actors & Actresses > ( B ) > Brazeau, Jay DVD > Actors & Actresses > ( C ) > Cornell, Ellie DVD > Actors & Actresses > ( H ) > Howard, Clint DVD > Genres > Action & Adventure > General DVD > Genres > Art House & International > By Country > Canada DVD > Genres > Art House & International > By Country > Germany > General DVD > Genres > Art House & International > By Genre > Action & Adventure DVD > Genres > Horror > General DVD > Genres > Horror > Things That Go Bump > Monsters DVD > Genres > Horror > Things That Go Bump > Zombies Suggestion Box Your comments can help make our site better for everyone. If you've found something incorrect, broken, or frustrating on this page, let us know so that we can improve it. Please note that we are unable to respond directly to suggestions made via this form. 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