Well, for
starters, if you own an expensive condo in midtown Manhattan but you don’t live
there, then it’s not a home.
There’s some
weird stuff going on in the prime big city residential markets all over the
globe: folks with a lot of money are buying apartments, co-ops and condos for
great big bucks, but they’re not putting any food in the frig in these
places….because they don’t live there.
Two weeks ago
the Sunday New York Times did a shocking piece on this, read it here.
For example,
in a cozy section of Manhattan—between 56th and 63rd streets,
between Park and Fifth avenues, at the southeast corner of Central Park—more than
half of the high-priced digs are vacant more than 10 months a year.
Their owners
use them infrequently, or, as investors, never.
For example, Trump
Tower (721 Fifth Avenue) has 237 units, some with price tags north of $25
million—only 108 of them qualify under city property tax rules as primary
residences. In 129 of these units, no one's home.
Many of the
folks who own this expensive, empty housing are not New Yorkers, and many of
them are foreign nationals.
It seems like
part of the reason that housing in New York City is so expensive is that a lot
of the existing housing stock isn’t being lived in.
I wonder where
the Trump Tower doormen live?
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2014
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