[javanissen]

> 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.

[lux-lux-lux]

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!