In NYC if you need a $1200 / mo 1BR apartment, sure Manhattan and north eastern Brooklyn aren't options but you still have places like Harlem, Queens, New Jersey, The Bronx, Staten Island all of which are under an hour commute from Manhattan (and with a rapid transit system that respects shift workers by running 24hrs a day).
NYC has also been adding high density (albeit market rate) housing stock by the tens of thousands each year since 2013 or so. NIMBY-ism in Bay Area communities tends to be opposed increased density of any sort, but for the most part in NYC it's focused more on the boundaries of low income housing areas.
East coast municipalities also have a lot more power to make mandates without the kind of broad community consensus that California cities have to abide by. So while residents can express opposition to a development plan and sometimes fight it in NYC, NIMBY advocates only carry weight when they're well equipped to battle city hall.
Basically my point is that it's kind of a stretch to draw a conclusion that the same patterns are applicable to both housing markets. The New York metro and the Bay Area metro are very different places with very different policies and political landscapes. New York's inflated housing market has more to do with legacy policies from the Bloomberg administration and real estate speculation than too few units and NIMBY attitudes, which are a much bigger problem in SF
I don't want to get drawn into a long debate on it, but I think it's clear that NYC has competitive commute times to the Bay Area. Some even think it's worse:
As far as NIMBY goes... I guess I was taking that more broadly. There isn't objections against density qua density, but projects are blocked because they block views. And projects are blocked because of what they'd do to the neighborhood (think highways and housing projects, Forest Hills as a popular counterexample).
There also seems to be some empirical evidence that NYC is actually building housing slower than SF.
Both of those articles are a good illustration of my point actually, sensational conclusions drawn from reports that don't take into account the dramatic differences between the cities being compared. In this case, NYC is so enormous that it's in another weight class where the benchmarks we're being presented are highly flawed in context.
For example, the commute time piece in Fortune isn't looking at metro area, only intra-city commute time. NYC having the longest average commute makes for an interesting data point and it's technically true, but it doesn't take into account the fact that the city of New York has an extremely large land area spread across several islands with a population that dwarfs most of the cities on that list. Considering how the data for NYC is influenced by situations like the non-trivial number of Staten Islanders who commute 1 to 2 hours a day to Manhattan (still intra-city) via ferry + subway, the 31.5 minute average commute time in SF doesn’t look so good. Painting these pictures with the same brush is an effort in futility, the same standards just don’t apply
How so? New York has plenty of NIMBY policies and commuters.