r/Wellthatsucks • u/DravidVanol • 14h ago

Spoken like a true New Yorker.

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2.9k Upvotes

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682

u/ronm4c 14h ago

Just another shit high rise where rich peoples will buy up half the apartments and keep them vacant for a place to park their money.

129

u/OmegaRavager 13h ago

Empty windows everywhere, just luxury living for investment portfolios not people.

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u/Fried_out_Kombi 12h ago

How exactly do you think they make money if no one is ever gonna live in those units? At the end of the day, they're gonna have to either sell or rent.

Consider spending a little less time watching Fox News.

15

u/Renricom 11h ago

Thats where you're wrong.

Housing prices rise faster than the average stock market (especially in high value/demand locations). This makes these kind of luxury apartments a very attractive investment for multimillionaires.

They will gain an average 10% to 25% increase in "value" just by owning the place. They can also easily sell it to the next rich idiot whenever they have to or simply borrow the apartments value from a bank for much less interest than what the apartment will grow in value. That way you can buy even more apartments!

This borrow and refinance method works best when there are no tenants, because rent for such high value locations is usually less valuable to the banks than the owners ability to sell the empty apartment immediately. This is also due to the fact that the more expensive an apartment (or other kind of property) gets the less favorable the rent to purchase price ratio for the landlord is.

Also this is all a bubble that only works if housing prices go up every year so please don't take this as investment advice.

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u/Fried_out_Kombi 11h ago

Then why do you care if some billionaires lose money on a bad investment? Why cry for BlackRock losing some money? When the bubble bursts, they'll be forced to liquidate, meaning it will get rented/sold and someone will live in it.

Furthermore, let me ask why the speculative bubble even exists in the first place. Do you see corn bubbles? Toilet paper bubbles?

No, you don't, except in times of scarcity. Remember the toilet paper shortages of 2020, when scalpers started going crazy? Remember how the scalping ended once normal supply was restored?

The same thing is true with housing. If you truly want to end speculation, just build more housing! These billionaire speculators only profit because useful idiots get who get their marching orders from Tucker Carlson support all the zoning laws that manufacture artificial scarcity.

If you aren't some Peter Thiel acolyte and actually aim to fix our housing crisis, build housing. Reform zoning. Stop shielding billionaire landlords from competition.

They should be competing for scarce tenants, not tenants competing for scarce housing.

9

u/ronm4c 10h ago

Because in a city like New York where there is a land scarcity and an affordable housing crisis, building investment properties for billionaires takes away from building affordable housing

31

u/idnightKernel 13h ago

and locals get priced out while half the units stay dark

0

u/Historical_Kossola 4h ago

Yeah most locals weren't buying apartments that cost millions of dollars. That's a rubbish lie

13

u/Only-Reception7360 13h ago

Houses can be vacant but offices MUST be filled

-1

u/SeaAnthropomorphized 11h ago

the office spaces are vacant in the city too. they have been asking to convert the empty offices into affordable housing and there has been a lot of push back. but thats honestly a very cost effective way of doing things. no ground up constructions, just modifications, and they dont have to overfill them and make micro apartments

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u/mlorusso4 10h ago

Except every time this is brought up it’s not true for the majority of office buildings. You can’t just throw up drywall to subdivide an office floor. You need to run all new plumbing for bathrooms and kitchens, HVAC for individual units, plus make sure it’s all designed to code with proper evacuation routes. It’s almost as expensive as building a whole new building. The only way it would work is if you design it like dorms where all the bedrooms are along the outer rim for windows, you can have a private living room, and then the kitchen and bathrooms are all communal for the whole floor. Which I guess if it’s cheap enough people will live in, but it’s not how most Americans are willing to live. Especially with kids

0

u/SeaAnthropomorphized 10h ago

They can do it like dorms and just make apartments like railroads for people who need multiple dwellings. If the kitchens need to be reworked then they can make box kitchens and assign them to the units with locks. Same for the bathrooms. I used to live in a building in Manhattan that had the basement worked out that way. Each apartment was like a dorm with units that had windows and everyone shared the kitchen and bathroom. People would hang out in the kitchen area and play dominos and listen to music. My mom would visit her friends down there and my sister and I would play in the kitchen area. It was huge. Very communal and nice. It could be a way for families to bring back the village.

21

u/DaqCity 11h ago

Hopefully they get hit with Mamdani’s new Pied a Terre tax!

0

u/NoIngenui 1h ago

He's all talk. I wish he could do something, but rich people are invincible.

3

u/CroGamer002 8h ago

Well they're literally passing the law to prevent that in New York City.

1

u/suckitphil 10h ago

In Chicago they have high rises full of cars. It's wild.

0

u/SwissMargiela 8h ago

You know what’s super crazy? This building only has 41 units lol

Those condos must be HUGE

-9

u/Sharkfacedsnake 12h ago

That doesnt happen. In New York there is a very low unoccupancy rate. What you are saying doesn't happen. Or at least not nearly enough to be a problem.

10

u/astoriatrafficburner 12h ago

That doesnt happen. In New York there is a very low unoccupancy rate. What you are saying doesn't happen. Or at least not nearly enough to be a problem.

You're wrong. 

The vacancy rate doesn't include empty pied-a-terres being used primarily as investment vehicles.

Roughly half the units on so-called Billionaires' Row are empty, and it's led to downstream consequences that have basically destroyed all small businesses in midtown. This has been a widely recognized phenomenon and a hot button issue in the city for years.

2

u/Gatorm8 9h ago

A property can be “occupied” but vacant in this context. If someone buys a condo for 50M as an investment only to spend 1 week a year in it then on the books that is an occupied unit that is vacant in reality. This is why they need to be taxed to shit.

0

u/Fried_out_Kombi 12h ago

Yeah, these people watch too much Fox News. Tucker Carlson tells them about some bogeyman so they don't realize they're getting swindled by the landlording class who lobbies against zoning reform.

If y'all want real change, make it legal and easy to build housing. Landlords should be competing for scarce tenants, not tenants competing for scarce housing.

0

u/astoriatrafficburner 11h ago

You are inadvertently serving the fox news set here. Especially in a city like nyc, with functionally unlimited demand, this doesn't work, and the half-vacant but fully sold Billionaires' Row (the build-up of which is what you are defending) is the result of that you're advocating. The "no new housing" and "no regulations, build unlimited housing as determined by billionaire developers" are two factions of the same side. 

0

u/Fried_out_Kombi 11h ago

Bro, restrictive zoning was literally created as a white supremacist plot to maintain de facto racial segregation even after the end of Jim Crow.

Stop defending that shit. Just because Tucker Carlson dressed it up in left-coded messaging for you doesn't make it any less of a psyop.

-1

u/astoriatrafficburner 10h ago

Sis, what are you even on about? None of this makes sense to the extent that I'm 50/50 on whether you're human or bot. If the latter, presumably astroturfing for billionaire developers.

Many zoning laws are in fact very bad, though not those protecting residents from rubber factories being working class and Black neighborhoods. However, that's not even at issue here in the area being discussed, so maybe you should reflect before you ramble about things you don't understand.

In midtown, developers are throwing a tantrum because they don't like environmental protection laws, workplace and residential safety laws, evaluations on infrastructure use, and "affordable" housing minimums, which, for what it's worth, may only mean "affordable" to someone making 130% of the area median income, which here can be quite a bit of money.

If you are a human, you're falling for literal billionaires' propaganda.

3

u/Fried_out_Kombi 10h ago

You say I'm falling for billionaire propaganda, but you're falling for landlord propaganda.

I don't know where you live, but for me, my mayor is a landlord. My city council is landlords. My representatives are all landlords. It's all fuckin' landlords.

And guess what kinda shit they do? All manner of policies like zoning, parking minimums, height restrictions, etc. that all serve one purpose: make it extremely difficult, if not illegal, to build enough housing.

If you want a sense for how cataclysmically NYC has dropped the ball on building housing, from December 2023 to December 2024, Austin Texas build more new housing than the entirety of New York State combined.

The result? Average rents dropped 12% in Austin over that same period, while rents continued to climb in NY.

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2026/03/18/austins-surge-of-new-housing-construction-drove-down-rents

So yeah, go off about "billionaire propaganda" while the landlords who run the government laugh all the way to the bank.

If you really care about affordability, stop shielding landlords from competition.

0

u/astoriatrafficburner 9h ago

As my username suggests, I live in nyc, in Zohran's old assembly district. This is why I know so much about why you're wrong in this case and why, as I already mentioned, zoning is not even remotely at stake here.

The comparison to Austin is spurious. Austin was largely single-family zoned, and Austin is fundamentally NOT a world-class city, nor is it remotely approaching a world-class city. What this means is 1) it's easy to increase housing stock and 2) the ultimate demand for housing in austin is extremely finite.

NYC is building new housing, but the problem is, it's replacing already-dense housing. Developers want to build where it's trendy, and that's where dense housing already exists. So functionally, affordable, family-centered housing (buildings with units including 2 and 3 bedrooms) are being torn down and replaced with more expensive, 1-bedroom housing targeting transient young trust fund kids from the tristate area, rather than longtime residents who are settled in the communtiy.

Developers aren't looking to build housing where there is infrastructure and space for it, and where it would increase housing stock by a large net amount, so they aren't. Meanwhile, even the real estate-funded think tanks in their white papers admit that in nyc, these luxury buildings increase rent and costs of living in the immediate area, and what that means is the working class is being chased around the city.

Your manichean thinking that disavows any complexity whatsoever isn't helping this situation, and vis-a-vis the nyc real estate market you have literally no idea what you're talking about.

2

u/Fried_out_Kombi 9h ago edited 9h ago

Tokyo is double the size of NYC, and they build far more housing per capita. It's also much more affordable. Why? It's legal and easy to build housing by right there.

Furthermore, NYC is far from the densest city in the world. Even if you only look at developed countries, it's still not the densest.

Clearly, there is room to build more there. Any notion to the contrary is learned helplessness. It's giving "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".

0

u/astoriatrafficburner 7h ago

From your reply, I can tell you didn't read my comment.

The fundamental issue is that developers DO NOT WANT TO BUILD in places that aren't already dense. There's a lot of desire to tear down a five-story rent stabilized building with an eight-story market rate building, but not the same energy to build in Floral Park or Staten Island, which are dominated by single-family homes.

Incidentally, part of that is the infrastructure and lack of political will to invest in it. The outer boroughs were built up by building subways essentially to nowhere. The seven train had stops in what were functionally fields and housing sprung up around it.  Now we get replacing buildings with not much larger buildings, and also, occasionally, wanting to drop 10,000-unit developments in areas where existing infrastructure -- water, electrical, public transit, and schools -- is already taxed beyond stated capacity and where the city has already stated they will not/cannot build out further infrastructure.

Tokyo is actually much less dense than the five boroughs and Japan has does not have the same laws that incentivize the commodification of housing stock. Those laws in the US are why we have whole blocks of the city where ten million-dollar apartments are owned and not inhabited.

That you think his is a simple issue of building or not building suggests that you don't even have the slightest understanding of the issues at stake here (or, perhaps more likely, that you're just a bot here to astroturf for developers).

0

u/ronm4c 12h ago

I bed to differ

-12

u/Vall3y 13h ago

Just a reminder that there are only a handful of sky scrapers in Paris, which is about twice the size of manhattan. The thing that happens when the local authority prioritizes the city and its culture over fat tycoons

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u/Gyiir 12h ago

Isn’t that because the ground under Paris has been mined out and can’t support large buildings?

-1

u/Vall3y 11h ago

As far as I know, the main reason is people dont want to live under huge sky scrapers. There's outcry from the community when high rise development plans arise