New York’s luxury real-estate market has been in freefall for years,
and now the city’s super-luxe buildings are sitting empty – even as
property price in the city remain stubbornly high, prompting 300 New
Yorkers to move out of the city every day, and filling the homeless shelters to capacity and beyond.
New York – like most overpriced cities – has failed to build enough
low- and middle-income housing of the sort that people use to live in,
and has grossly oversupplied itself with the kinds of safe deposit boxes
in the sky that oligarchs use as a form of medium-term asset class,
possibly without ever occupying it.
The luxurification of cities isn’t an accident. When Michael Bloomberg
was mayor of New York, he explicitly encouraged “bluelining†–
designating whole regions as luxury-only, aimed at the global super-rich
– saying that he wanted New York City itself to be viewed as a luxury good.
The problem with this plan – apart from it being an inhumane form of
ethnic cleansing that chases working people out of our cities – is that
it only works if there are enough global oligarchs chasing these
super-luxe condos to keep the market inflated and liquid (oligarchs have
viewed luxury property in big cities as being nearly as liquid as cash,
because for a time, you could flip them on just a few days’ notice).
But three of the most important centers of oligarchic capital have dried
up: China instituted strict currency controls and its economy is
slowing, and Saudi and Russian oligarchs are much less flush than they
were when oil prices were at their peaks.
The result is a death-spiral for super-luxe property: as bidders dry up,
more oligarchs decide that real-estate isn’t basically a form of cash
that you can spend a weekend in from time to time, and put their
properties on the market. The supply increases, driving down prices, and
that prompts more absentee owners to list their properties, hoping to
get out before the market craters altogether. Meanwhile, property
developers have new units coming into the market, and resort to
bulk-sales to investment trusts, or simply buying the units themselves
in a paper shuffle meant to inflate prices.
It would be funny if it wasn’t for the housing priorities that
languished while the world’s Bloombergs were remaking our cities into
investment opportunities instead of places to live and work. New York’s
got 80,000 people living in shelters or sleeping on the streets. Los
Angeles has so many homeless people that it distorts the national average, and it’s creating a public health crisis as typhus spreads through the sprawling, semi-permanent homeless camps.
San Francisco is in the fourth decade of its homelessness crisis with no
end in sight: efforts to do something about the crisis have been sabotaged by corporate money from Lyft and Stripe; the city spends $65m/year just cleaning up human shit (but only allocated $3.1m/year to providing toilets); and local vigilantes punish the homeless rather than demanding a fix from the city.
A decade ago, a housing bubble was weaponized to destroy the entire
world economy, kicking off instability and chaos that we’re still living
through to this day. And yet, our governments at all level are
insisting that it’s up to the market to supply low-income housing, while
our neighbors are left to sleep and shit and die in the streets, in the
shadows of empty super-luxe buildings that not even plutes want
anymore.
@BethSkw I thought when your knees do that it's a sign you have too much weight on the bar, and that this sort of compensation (where your knees go out of line) can lead to tendon injury in the knees or hips
Lots of 409k jokes but tbh everyone under 50 has the same retirement plan: struggle to make ends meet until society collapses and money isn’t worth anything so don’t worry about it
currently all I want is to purchase a print of bathtub geralt to put in an elegant frame and hang in my bathroom. why is this such a hard thing to find.
egg: scrambled, with cabbage and tamari
steak: medium rare, but meh
milk: whole, cow
alcohol: miller high life
warm drink: coffee with sugar and milk (and in the morning, creatine) twitter.com/TomNovelly/sta…
Straight women on r/relationships: My boyfriend admitted to killing my cat but said it was my fault for owning it. Everything else about him is great though. How do I save the relationship?
Straight men on r/relationships: My girlfriend eats popcorn wrong, how do I fix her.
I have bad news about presidential candidates that wilt under the immense pressure of being challenged on TV by Meghan McCain twitter.com/tomselliott/st…
i think the biggest thing we lost when forums fell out of popularity is the ability for some kid to sign up for some website, make mistakes, be a dumbass kid, then learn from their mistakes and just abandon that account and start fresh as a better person
How the fuck is k*tie h**zog still employed/followed/listened to?? “I won’t vote for someone who recognizes nonbinary people’s existence” is not fucking subtle.
I watched all of The Witcher on netflix yesterday and it was so good and now I'm bummed I have to wait until 2021 for more, also I'm considering dropping all other games to replay Witcher 3 on switch.
Every single scientist I know: sex can’t be called a binary because we know it exists on a broad spectrum controlled by gene expression.
Transphobes: excuse me, but when I was 8 someone told me about X and Y chromosomes.
facebook messenger just notified me i’ve been friends with someone for five years so I retaliated by flying into a rage and permanently deleting my facebook account 💜
The interesting thing about Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440 is that it was actually invented by the Chinese artisan Bi Sheng in 1041. This small detail was definitely left out when I was taught about it.
Oh, so when other ppl call their pets "fur baby" its fine but when I call a kid a "skin dog" somehow I'm "disgusting" and "the worst pediatrician in this hospital"??
@_jbfitz what a relief! I love that movie. last time I saw it was years ago, when they oddly had a screening at the bagdad, back when the bagdad used to do cool shit
dang cant believe im headed to PORTLANDS (CITY OF BOATS) tommorow cant wait to see what is there to greet me hope to see you buckaroos at the big time show to prove love is real. WHAT SHOULD I SEE WHEN I AM IN THIS NEW LAND? ticketweb.com/event/my-frien…
Thinking about if Riverdale had actually had an aro ace Jughead how many more people might have heard those words, and how little people seem to care about queer erasure when it's aro and ace identities being erased twitter.com/poppoIIs/statu…
Every single day you wake up miserable and you try to fill that gaping hole where your soul should be; with money, or with attention; and you don’t care how you get any of it as long as you get it. And no matter how much you get, you will always wake up a miserable little prick. twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
The New Yorker styles D&D as D. & D., a choice that is infinitely dorkier than anything that anyone who actually plays Dungeons and and Dragons has actually done newyorker.com/humor/daily-sh…
Your annual reminder that gyms are SUPER empty this time of year! If you're thinking about making a New Year's Resolution to start exercising, consider making a November resolution instead. Learning the equipment before the gym fills up in January will make everything way easier.
dear WE HURT CHICKENS congratulations on having basic human decency of being slightly less of a bigot your prize is me never wanting anything to do with you still because you are gross and evil and hate gay people just not publicly anymore
i once saw someone say "we're so obsessed with gender that we decided cats are female and dogs are male and honestly i think that says a lot about why it's socially acceptable to hate cats" and i've been thinking about it ever since
Ladies, it’s true, lifting weights will help your posture, your body image, your confidence, of course your strength BUT did you know you will also be able to squat over a disgusting public toilet with ease for the entire time you need to pee
The No.1 Alex 🇯🇵
(ง'̀-'́)ง
bletchley punk
Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast)
Friend Fatale
I'm That Hazel 🕯️ PAX South
Rob
melty blood for dogs
Molly Woodstock
Computer Facts
Zeru
Jessica Huseman
Mar Hicks
Joseph Fink, Still A Halloween Man
Andy Matthews
Chuck Tingle
Sandstone
Amanda's Gaffe-a-Day
Ron Perlman
max & cheese
🏳️⚧️ Sarah ✨
Mike Drucker
juan
Jacob Brogan
Ashley Hamer
groovy goblin
Janel Drewis
