> Don't think I could live there, I like sunshine

I live there. My Brooklyn apartment gets ample sunlight year round. Most people don't live in these hugely sun-starved areas, they're mostly offices. That said, it can be brutal in the winter: get up, it's light out, go to work in the dark on the subway, get to work in your fluorescent-lit midtown office building where you've been fighting for a window seat for 2 years because it makes you miserable to go a full day without any sunlight, stand on a street corner for 15 minutes during your lunch break just to see the sun that day, sun goes down at 4 PM and it's dark till the next morning. Nice.

That said, this is only for a month or two during the winter. My biggest problem living in NYC is, by far, noise pollution. It's next to impossible to find a place that's well and truly quiet, and I desperately need it from time to time.

> Can you build higher?

The current crop of large skyscrapers are facing severe difficulties[1] due to a slowdown in price increases, likely due to a slowdown in wealthy foreigners viewing Manhattan high-rises as an investment[2].

> I wonder what NYC will look like in 200 years

Depends how the transit situation and global warming situation goes (i.e. assuming NYC is not mostly underwater or destroyed by hurricanes). The first elevated rail line (predating all the subways and highways) in NYC opened about 150 years ago. A New Yorker 200 years ago surely couldn't have imagined the MTA subway network nor Robert Moses' car-oriented sprawl. Similarly, it's tough to imagine the city in 200 years, but I have some guesses for 100 years...

Infill will continue, and neighborhoods along subway lines will creep upward vertically, as higher and higher buildings pop up in further out neighborhoods -- this is how cities tend to grow, organically, gradually, one step at a time. My neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, is mostly 3-4 story brownstones, but I've seen a number of 7-8 story buildings appear over the last year. 1 story garages or empty lots in the neighborhood are also quickly being replaced with 3-4 story brownstone/rowhouses. If subway capacity (and demand) exists, the buildings will continue creeping up.

Beyond that, transit creates neighborhoods. The hardest part of transit, at least historically, has been right-of-way. Once Moses' network of highways outlive their lifespans and must be demolished (I give it less than 50 years, these highways weren't build to last[3]), it should be straightforward to convert them to at-grade train lines that integrate with the existing subway network. This will open up vast areas of Queens and perhaps even Long Island for higher density development (assuming the zoning laws can get their shit figured out regarding density/parking requirements before that happens). In terms of working locations, I fully expect Industry City and Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City to become more important as destinations instead of the traditional Manhattan high-rise office.

Manhattan? It'll probably get some fancy new buildings here and there, but I imagine in 100 years it'll still look much the same. Zoning codes make it almost impossible to build taller/better than what's already there, in many cases[4], and these things are hard to change, because often the stakeholders in the old buildings are also the ones with a lot of political clout...

[1]: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/1/4/14157208/manhattan-real-estat...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreig...

[3]: http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/32/19/32_19_mm_bqe_meet...

[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...