One of the problems in big cities is that a great deal of these apartments and houses stay empty. The wealthy snap them up in their hundreds as investments. They’re not homes, they’re money in the bank.
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“these apartments stay empty”
Hmmmm, large amounts of property taxes paid and minimal burden on city services.
My city should have such a problem.
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As an NYC resident, I think this is atrocious. Somehow the city managed to grow and prosper for well over a hundred years without blotting out the sun’s rays hitting Central Park. I thought there were zoning regs that limited the size of buildings that border on the park, but apparently they have been gutted to suit the rapacious desires of luxury developers. Just another sign of the times, where money rules all and things like sunlight, already a scarce commodity in Manhattan, are no longer considerations.
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Actually, NYC real estate taxes are ridiculously low, and there is a severe housing shortage such that many people are living in dangerous buildings not designed for apartments, and now we get the rich of the world coming in and scooping up luxury condos and not even living in them. If so many people have so much money they don’t know what to do with it there is something seriously wrong with how income is distributed around the globe. Really, enough is e-fucking-nough.
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Extending your logic then, every building should just go unoccupied?
I can’t speak to whether this place will truly go unoccupied, but services are burdened whether or not the building is occupied. If it is empty, couldn’t society put the space to better use (e.g. reducing a housing shortage in the city core)? Wouldn’t it be better if they were occupied, since people would spend their money there supporting businesses? If it’s empty, it’s just a big chunk of useless space.
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Really, they let the apartments stay empty? Is there some reason they can’t do what a sane person would do and rent out the space? I hear you can charge a pretty high rent in downtown Manhattan… Is it a zoning issue?
I guess if you’re stupidly rich you might buy a Manhattan apartment right next to Central Park as a vacation home or something. As a pure real-estate speculation though, it seems like leaving a lot of money on the table.
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Manhattan real estate, including taxes and whatnot, is still a better savings vehicle for the very rich than bonds. Same thing is happening to London.
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If I’m interpreting the NYC finance department’s website right, you’re paying 1.2% of the property’s value per year. That’s not crazy high, but it’s not “ridiculously low” by any stretch of the imagination. If by “low” you’re referring to all the tax abatements, however, I’d agree. They’re not the only benefit being given to the rich, though; why in Cthulhu’s name are Manhattan residents given a discount on parking tax when someone making five figures isn’t going to have a car anyhow?
Doubling the tax on property that’s not occupied by a full-time resident would probably be a good idea (the UK increases it by 50% IIRC), although the impact may be lower in NYC than elsewhere.
On the gripping hand, the only way NYC will have affordable housing is if it actually builds enough housing. All those hyper-luxury buildings are going up because the planning process makes it too expensive for anything else. The zoning needs to have multiple zeros taken off its page count and the number of housing starts needs multiple zeros added.
FTR: the developer is not just spinning things positively—of course he is—but flatly lying when he asserts that the shadows will stay in no place for more than ten minutes. The building whose shadow is pictured and many of its ilk lie east-west along Central Park South, which is to say that the sun is always behind them, New York being in the northern hemisphere. The length of the shadows will change somewhat, slowly oscillating between the solstices, and more distant portions of the park may get only brief darkening, but a good chunk of the southern end of the park will be in constant shadow.
And yes, that pisses me and a lot of other New Yorkers off. Most people here recognize that a key to the city’s vitality is the constant churn and change, and that necessarily means some unpleasant losses of tradition and influence of outsized (and outside) wealth. When you live here, you make a lot of compromises with your fellow citizens, lest you drive each other to madness. Counterbalancing this, there are some broadly understood absolute Dos and Do Not Dos, and among the latter is: Do not treat public parks as private space to do with what you will. These buildings break that rule. They should never have been approved.
The English “Ancient Lights” law of 1663, later codified in the “right to light” laws of 1832, is an interesting alternative. Plainly it can be a drag on development—but it would be nice to have a legal recourse here on this side of the Atlantic. More on the laws here for anyone interested.
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Mmmm, e-fucking.
Air rights restricted development, but recently, developers have begun to buy up unused air rights. Apparently, it was this lack of (widespread) transferability that helped keep areas of new york out of shadow, not any explicit right to light.
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I don’t see how we are going to build the dystopian megapoli we were promised in 80s and early 90s cyberpunk fiction if you guys keep complaining.
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Only five and half years until November 2019.
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Lucky Ducky!
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See, there’s the real problem, people feeling entitled to being provided with free light, heat, and energy. Clearly we need to end that, and if we can’t actually destroy the sun, this is doing the next best thing.
It’s probably not unconscionably fiendish.
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Wow. New Yorkers complaining about things. Never seen that before.
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Is it totally out of the question to put mirrors on the building’s facade to counter-act its shadow? That would look weird. And I guess the mirrors would have to rotate, but the owners of One57 could def afford it.
Uh, mirrors don’t work that way. You would need light pipes, and that would be difficult to do without blocking up everybody’s windows in their expensive condos.
Seems fairly accurate flying into LA at 1AM. If anything, it’s less dense than LA actually is, although much flatter.
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