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by al_borland 28 days ago
If I was a developer and building owner who only cared about money, it seems like it would be much better to build a luxury building where the units are sold, but sit empty most of the time. This seems to be the environment in NYC. The proper systems need to be in place so it makes sense to build housing for actual people, rather than building stored real estate value for the ultra rich, especially foreign investors who may never even set foot in the US and are just looking to diversify their portfolio.

I’m not an “eat the rich” person, but these mostly vacant buildings in a city with a housing affordability problem are a crime. I don’t necessarily fault the billionaires for this, I fault the politicians who sat back and watched it happen, approving all the projects along the way.
1 comments
javanissen 28 days ago
> these mostly vacant buildings in a city with a housing affordability problem

Vacancy rates are extremely low in NYC at 1.4%. Anything below 5% indicates drastic under-supply of housing. I don’t think that vacant real estate for billionaires is a significant contributor; it’s almost exclusively an issue of supply.

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lux-lux-lux 28 days ago
That percentage only includes the openly listed units; NYC has a massive shadow inventory of rentable inventory deliberately kept off-market for various reasons.

1 Wall St, for example, kept 85% of its units arbitrarily off market in order to prop up rents, and thus imputed property valuation. This kind of behavior shouldn’t be encouraged by the state and financial system, but guess what we do!

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