are among the largest in the world, and their size-per-resident has nearly doubled in the past 50 years. But Manhattan reflects America’s national housing market, in at least three ways.įirst, the typical new American single-family home has become surprisingly luxurious, if not quite so swank as Manhattan’s glassy spires. New York’s example is extreme-the squeezed middle class, shrink-wrapped into tiny bedrooms, beneath a canopy of empty sky palaces. We may soon look with equal shame on what might come to be known as bluelining: the transfiguration of those same neighborhoods with a deluge of investment aimed at a wealthier class. We speak nowadays with contrition of redlining, the mid-twentieth-century practice by banks of starving black neighborhoods of mortgages, home improvement loans, and investment of almost any sort. It adds up to what Michael Greenberg, writing for The New York Review of Books, called a new shameful form of housing discrimination-“bluelining.” No wonder, then, that the New York City area is losing about 300 residents every day. And for middle-class families, particularly for the immigrants who give New York City so much of its dynamism, it has made living in Manhattan or gentrified Brooklyn practically impossible. Buyers there could consider themselves lucky: In Cobble Hill, the typical sales price tripled to $2.5 million in nine years. From 2010 to 2019, the average sale price of homes doubled in many Brooklyn neighborhoods, including Prospect Heights and Williamsburg, according to the Times. In the past decade, New York City real-estate prices have gone from merely obscene to downright macabre. But progress here has been stalled by onerous zoning regulations, limited federal subsidies, construction delays, and blocked pro-tenant bills. Mayor Bill De Blasio made affordable housing a centerpiece of his administration. The confluence of cosmopolitan capital and terrible timing has done the impossible: It’s created a vacancy problem in a city where thousands of people are desperate to find places to live.ĭerek Thompson: When a promotion leads to divorceįrom any rational perspective, what New York needs isn’t glistening three-bedroom units, but more simple one- and two-bedroom apartments for New York’s many singles, roommates, and small families. Despite pressure from nervous lenders, developers have been reluctant to slash prices too suddenly or dramatically, lest the market suddenly clear and they leave millions on the table. It didn’t help that the Treasury Department cracked down on attempts to launder money through fancy real estate. Developers bet huge on foreign plutocrats-Russian oligarchs, Chinese moguls, Saudi royalty-looking to buy second (or seventh) homes.īut the Chinese economy slowed, while declining oil prices dampened the demand for pieds-à-terre among Russian and Middle Eastern zillionaires. They were also made for foreigners with tens of millions of dollars to spare. What happened? While real estate might seem like the world’s most local industry, these luxury condos weren’t exclusively built for locals. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times. From 2011 to 2019, the average price of a newly listed condo in New York soared from $1.15 million to $3.77 million.īut the bust is upon us. These colossal stalagmites initially transformed not only the city’s skyline but also the real-estate market for new homes. Even as 80,000 people sleep in New York City’s shelters or on its streets, Manhattan residents have watched skinny condominium skyscrapers rise across the island. Such is the tale of two cities within America’s largest metro. In Manhattan, the homeless shelters are full, and the luxury skyscrapers are vacant.
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