Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. It’s funny. Actually, I grew up in one of those Archie Bunker-ish–style homes. My relation to New York City is pretty unique and pretty chaotic, as I like to say. My parents — when they moved to America, they decided rather than pay rent, they would, what’s now called, house hack. They ended up buying a two-family home, very small. They lived in the basement, and they rented out the other two apartments. Over time, they turned that two-family home into a four-family home. As my family gained more and more wealth, we moved up in the floors. I think that’s a really interesting thing because you took something that was actually really zoned for two, basically four people, and actually 15 people were living in it. We saw that density firsthand. Now, as someone who grew up in New Jersey, the borders of New York City have never made that much sense to me. I look at Brooklyn — I think by some measures it might be, what, the fourth-largest city in the US, if it were alone. I look at Staten Island — it feels like it should belong to us, not to you. I agree.…

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