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January 18, 2020 05:25 pm PST

Manhattan: a city of empty luxury condos and overflowing homeless shelters

New York's luxury real-estate market has been in freefall for years, and now the city's super-luxe buildings are sitting empty -- even as property prices in the city remain stubbornly high, prompting 300 New Yorkers to move out of the city every day, and filling the homeless shelters to capacity and beyond.

New York -- like most overpriced cities -- has failed to build enough low- and middle-income housing of the sort that people use to live in, and has grossly oversupplied itself with the kinds of safe deposit boxes in the sky that oligarchs use as a form of medium-term asset class, possibly without ever occupying it.

The luxurification of cities isn't an accident. When Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York, he explicitly encouraged "bluelining" -- designating whole regions as luxury-only, aimed at the global super-rich -- saying that he wanted New York City itself to be viewed as a luxury good.

The problem with this plan -- apart from it being an inhumane form of ethnic cleansing that chases working people out of our cities -- is that it only works if there are enough global oligarchs chasing these super-luxe condos to keep the market inflated and liquid (oligarchs have viewed luxury property in big cities as being nearly as liquid as cash, because for a time, you could flip them on just a few days' notice).

But three of the most important centers of oligarchic capital have dried up: China instituted strict currency controls and its economy is slowing, and Saudi and Russian oligarchs are much less flush than they were when oil prices were at their peaks. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/_GyaotljhQI/a-luxury-product.html

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