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Introducing Ghost Skyscrapers... In New York City
Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Late last month, New York Magazine published a lengthy and very important article titled: Stash Pad – Why New York Real Estate is the New Swiss Bank Account. The entire article is well worth a read, and left me shaking my head in disbelief the entire time. As someone who grew up in New York City, it’s a real shame to see the continued transformation of Manhattan into nothing more than an oligarch playground, or as I sometimes like to call it, “Disneyland for Wall Street.”
One of the most shocking and disturbing revelations from that article was the fact that:
“The Census Bureau estimates that 30 percent of all apartments in the quadrant from 49th to 70th Streets between Fifth and Park are vacant at least ten months a year.”
One of the highlighted building in the New York Magazine article is the 1,000 foot ultra-luxury development known as One 57. We learn more about this beast from My FOXNY:
NEW YORK (MYFOXNY) - New York City has never been known for its affordability, but a new crop of mega-luxury buildings in Manhattan are redefining sky-high prices. One 57 is the 1,000-foot high building looming over Central Park where an apartment has closed for as much as $90 million.
Jonathan Miller appraises the units at One 57. He said if you were to walk by at night the skyscraper would be largely dark because a majority of the units’ owners are international and don’t live here. They are using the apartments strictly as investments.
The new mega-luxury developments are part of the changing face of New York City real estate, said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at NYU’s Wagner School.
In the video segment attached to the article, Mr. Moss (who looks a bit like a younger Barney Frank) notes: “New York is a safe haven for financially powerful people from around the world.”
Indeed, a safe haven for bailed out criminal global bankers. I agree.
I’m sorry, but there is nothing healthy about this. As I highlighted yesterday, it appears The Bank of China is facilitating money laundering for wealthy Chinese to move dirty money overseas and park it in real estate. The article is titled, Chinese Purchases of U.S. Real Estate Jump 72% as The Bank of China Facilitates Money Laundering, and noted that in some California communities 90% of purchases are being made by the Chinese.
This should not be seen as a surprise given the fact that Central Bank and government policy worldwide is to funnel all money to the 0.01%, while the rest of the 1% treads water, and the 99% are rapidly pushed into debt serfdom. Never forget the extremely powerful chart below from the post, Where Does the Real Problem Reside? Two Charts Showing the 0.01% vs. the 1%:

Welcome to Planet Oligarchy, where empty skyscrapers loom over the hordes of freedom-hating, destitute slaves.
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Fuck Yellen.
I know folks who actually grew up in/around NYC. Not everyone from NY is a douche bag (but it has more than its fair share).
That said, when things really unravel, I can't imagine this is a place anyone would want to be. Banking/finance is bumping up against the limits of growth on the planet.
Smart people need to be smart; get your ass into an industry that PRODUCES SOMETHING USEFUL. Otherwise, congrats on the ex-wife.
Regards,
Cooter
I experienced New York during Hurricane Sandy. I promptly moved a 1000 miles inward to a much less populated place within the year. We humans can break down to primal instincts within hours if not minutes in the right(or wrong) setting. Yeah, you don't wanna be in NYC when the Fit hits the Shan.
Iridium you handled that situation like a gentleman.
Nothing a Winchester, Generator and 20 gallons of fuel couldn't handle. Funny thing is that it was a vacation for me. My daughter learned to walk that week. I rented movies, made stew and kept watch. Seeing the gas lines and being in a neighborhood at night with the only light for miles was what caught my attention.
new york is where money goes to die in a maze of worthless rat holes.
It wasn't NY, but I totally left my big city behind. It will happen in a lot of places, not just NY.
I grew up in smaller towns and spent most of my professional career in large urban settings. Finally getting back to a decent small town was invigorating.
Not sure I will ever go back to urban again.
Regards,
Cooter
I won't. I love knowing my neighbors and seeing kids ride their bikes down the street with no fear because they can. Boys next door play baseball nightly. My tomatoes are coming in. I have dinner with my parents who live 2 minutes away from my job and 15 minutes away from our house. Wife's job will be walking distance by the fall if things work out. We commuted for hours in NYC. We have so much time now. We grill and as a person who grew his first veggies, your respect your food when you're the one growing it. Best goddamned squash ever. I pity those who don't know how simple and awesome life can be. You just have to make it happen.
Heh, I planted some seed from a Zucchini that I saved last year without doing anything to ensure that the pollination was from another zucchini. Today I noticed a decent sized squash on the plant behind some leaves. It turns out it's a yellow squash/zucchini F1 hybrid. It was shaped like a yellow straight neck, but is a light yellowish green. Of course, the first thing I did was to bring it inside, wash it and start slicing it up to see if it was any good. It was very good. Closer to yellow squash in flavor, but lighter in texture with a distinct sweetness. Now we'll have to see if I can get some patty pan genetics in that line. I have a whole shitload of seed that I saved, and squash seed stays good for a few years. I'm going to start moving away from "pure" cultivars and towards squashes that I've selected for hardiness and flavor. Same with corn. I have a few stalks that are putting out 5-6 cobs. That makes me happy.
Now, if I had just had the pellet rifle when that little raccoon went skittering down my fence this evening...
It's a bit late in the season for squash. Plant those seedlings north facing. My pumpkin vines are going crazy.
My pumpkins are gettibg fertilized every 7-10 days. I've got 2 on the 1st vine and more coming.
I forgot to mention the gophers. I planted extra vines for safety. Did I mention the gophers? Nasty little buggars.
Wall Street gophers
I also planted asylum around my apricot trees. The Racoons hate asylum.
I have until Sept or Oct for growing things like squash. But I also have squash bugs like fuck. Learn your climate and learn you pests. I figure that I'm going to have to be able to grow food without industrial inputs. That means that fertilizer is local, whether I need it or not.
Squash bugs = Diatomaceous earth...
Yup.
Use for inside the house pests too. Safe and cheap if you stay away from health food oz. sizes. Go to a local grain and feed store and ask for food grade.
Stick some in your pets as well. Kills worms and parasites. Works with people too.
My house was empty for a couple of years before I renovated it and an ant farm settled in the property. After a rain, it was like a horror movie. ANTS EVERYWHERE. Blasted inside and outside the house with DE and no more ants. Moisture ruins the effectivness of DE, so I'd blast around the foundation every two weeks.
Bug Kryptonite.
Much respect. It's all about quality of life.
If a man was well prepapred it might be interesting. I am not sure if humping .308 in Manhattan would be any party so stick to .223 with tracers and armor piercing mixed in.
It would be sort of like a Bug Hunt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPdq9rWxTL0
Pvt. Vasquez has got the sector north of 96th Street. You have been warned.
He can have it. How many pawn shops, check cashing places, and shitty fried chicken places does a fella need?
Now that you have stepped up, care to impress us with a dissertation on how the inability to maintain supply lines have wrecked dominant empires in the past?
Regards,
Cooter
I think escaping from NYC might be easier than escaping NJ.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWpFE4bUMdY
Fuck either of those places. I'm going to have enough problems where I am, and there are only 2 million in my entire state, which is around twice as big as both of NY and NJ put together. But, I have access to water where I am, so here I'll stay.
An index of tyranny is all that his represents. Worldwide government out of control. There's room for banks that DON'T accept any electrons. Just cash/bullion
In her ass. The one below the waist.
In case you missed it: One Hyde Park, London
A Tale of Two Londons
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/04/mysterious-residents-one-hyde-...
"Who really lives at One Hyde Park, called the world’s most expensive residential building? Its mostly absentee owners, hiding behind offshore corporations based in tax havens, provide a portrait of the new global super-wealthy. "
A supertower is coming to West 57th Street, in the Manhattan.
Your thoughts, hedgies?
I was thinking that we could pass the hat around ZH and put Tyler up in some decent digs.
Don't be dropping a flowerpot off your balcony.
Amazing (and troubling) to see how much new construction is going on in these late days of the oil era.
Here in S.F., too. Big expansion of convention center recently announced.
I guess some people are going to have to starve to make possible the high life in that "supertower" on 57th.
Require a non-nominal residency within the property by a flesh-bound entity for >90% of the year.
I just wanted to say " sleep well bitchez" before 300 idiots placed their trades...
So much of what made NYC a unique place was the availability of giant, cheap spaces, so if you wanted to try a new business idea out or set up a studio, it was not necessarily a life changing decision. I was just in Berlin a few weeks ago and, having grown up in NY, it reminded me of what New York was, when Williamsburg was shabby old buildings on a toxic waste site and Park Slope was affordable. The availability of cheap space was the foundation of a real retail economy -- trying to set up a business wasn't as wrought with horrific risk when rent was not obscene. In Berlin you can see people actually trying to be entrepreneurs still even among the poor. Here the only "entrepreneurism" is whether daddy has enough friends to capitalize your private equity fund these days.
Now all we get are more bank branches, frozen yogurt chains, subway, starbucks -- may as well fucking move to Ohio.
Well, if it makes you feel better, most of the toxic waste is still there.
Toxic waste of over-financialized economy is something new, it inflates prices, distorts, starves and kills rest of the economy producing nothing of tangible value.
Ohioan here...ouch :)
Live like a king in Ashtabula. Lake is beautiful. Nearby Cleveland is well endowed with high culture. And climate is no worse than NYC's.
Meanwhile, in the suburbs, lots of former homeowners are now renting from relatively new corporate subsidiaries, multi-millionaire investors, and the extended families of H-1B visa holders...
On the upside, what they're paying more in food and transpo costs they are partially making back in saving on property taxes.
Live free or die, indeed.
When you own 15 apartments around the world, you gotta budget your time.
It's called a pied a terre.
What can you say except, "God bless America and God bless the godless Chinese!"
If we can repatriate a trillion dollars into sky-high apartments, it looks to me like divine intervention, talk about your shovel-ready projects!
So isn't it time yet for the mile-high buildings, stop with this 1,500 foot nonsense, and let that shrimpy kilometer tower in Jiddah be used to grow mushrooms or something.
Yeah, and mount quad vulcans and a couple of laser cannon on the top floor, just in case.
Yeah, what's the fuss. Foreigners buy these overpriced apts by handing money to Americans. Eventually, they'll sell at a loss to Americans. Bring it on.
Just asking to be the focus of some Asshat terrorist.
Just remember, in Weimar Germany, entire appartment blocks could be purchased with a mere ounce or two of gold. 1000 ounces of silver even in 1979 bought an average house.
One day - maybe soon -New Yorkers may get to experience
Escape From New York, as their very own Snake Plissken.
THEN they might recall their anti-gun laws.
Too Late, bitchezzz.
Snake PlisskenCall me Snake.
I have worked on a lot of these buildings doing general construction, they are pretty much all vacant.
I have joked with friends that New York city is like "disney land" all the buildings are pretty much fake/empty/for show... above the 5th floor almost everything is empty.
If you go say to the 7~9th + floor on any random building you pick-out in the city (especially near the river) you will discover they are pretty much empty, and in quite bad condition.... most of the buildings in NY are in heavy dis-repair because no one occupies the top floors so no one really cares if the roofs are leaking/doors are falling off the hinges. . . etc . . . sometimes they use the empty space for storage . . . or as a smoking section of the building essentially.
Its a lot like north Korean ghost cities, but not as bad because the bottom half of buildings are somewhat . . . used to actually do something beyond paying people to stare at blank computer screens.
90% of New York cities population probably consists of yellow taxi cab drivers.
http://www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11_12/traffic_taxis.jpg
They make it almost unbearable to drive there.
Would be soo much better if they banned Taxis and just allowed more efficient car service companies to manage logistics. . . . you know sending cars where they actually need to be instead of just flooding the streets with cabs and congestion on a permanent level. . . and it would be cheaper also . . . to drive from the airport to my house in a cab it freaking costs 60$ and its only like 15 minutes away. . . a car service to go there was like 20$..... and the car doesn't smell like ass.
Meh. Anyone dumb enough to live in NY gets what they deserve, especially since the marquee jobs are in finance and add zero value to planet Earth.
Elysium may be the next step for the 0.01%....why even stay on the planet with the serfs? seems to be their attitude
eh, um,
heard that Federation of Galaxy is giving earth:
Alien Ultimatum
Can they selectively target and not make us collateral damage?
As an entrepreneur I offered to sublet mine to DHS so they can house contagious infected illegal immigrants. The doorman complained to the co-op board and his house was SWATTED by various sub-agencies. They apparently killed his dog. A chihuahua, I believe. CPS took his kids. His wife now wants a divorce. They planted, I mean uncovered, enough incriminating other evidence where he has been denied bail and will be deported after serving a life sentence.
The board will be interviewing the following candidates for his replacement next week
Sum Ting Wong
Wi Tu Lo
Ho Lee Fuk
& Bang Ding Ow
The ghost of Nork Dictaters? Kim Dik Sum< Suk sum Dik
Thats where ghost bankers live. If you listen late at night you can here the nail guns....
NYC has empty luxury apartment buildings and commerical space buildings due to rent control.
Rent control actually creates a shortage (and eventually a scarcity) of affordable housing, while also creating malinvestment into luxury apartments and commercial spaces (both exempt from rent control laws).
Economic truth.
And without rent control, affodability would increase and malinvestment cease?
Yes, without rent control, affordability would increase and malinvestment would decrease (maybe not cease as you put it).
Rent control causes a shortage of affordable housing. Young people live alone rather than have roommates. Old people live in big apartments rather than move out so that young families can move in. These are documented facts in rent controlled cities. The turnover rate is much less than in other parts of the country. This is what is known as a shortage.
After a while, rent control causes a scarcity (different than a shortage) of affordable housing. There is no incentive to build housing or maintain housing which will be under rent control laws, so nobody builds new housing and very few get maintained. Rent controlled housing gets old, run down, and abandoned. There are enough abandoned housing units to house every homeless person in NYC, but of course the Left won't tell you that.
Rent control takes the incentives away from building and maintaining affordable housing units that will only lose money. So the incentive shifts to building luxury apartment buildings and commercial space buildings that are exempt from rent control laws. It is a misallocation of resources.
Economics is really just how you allocate finite resources. You either do it well (in a free market), or you do it badly (by setting prices such as rent control). It is very simple to understand.
I recommend Thomas Sowell's books on economics for further understanding of the basics that the mainstream media gets wrong 24/7.
NYC is going to be turned into parking lot. Insiders know = empty luxury buildings.
hey, the Chinese have a lot of ancestors to house
Why is everyone leaving but no one seems to be going anywhere?
NUEVO YORKE is where you can pay $400 for a $20 meal... get driven around by a paki member of the local al q sleeper cel at twice the speed limit, playing chicken with pedestrians and other cabs...(honey is today the day i wear my jihadi exploding belt?)..... get your windshield squeegeed by a Yale graduate and if you dont tip you get a nail dragged across your gallardo clearcoat...ask directions to a non existant address and get specific turn by turn advice from a NYer (because they dont want to admit they dont know everyting)... rub shoudler to shoulder with an insider-info trader, or groin to groin on the A train with a hot babe if that's your thing... while smelling the aroma of ass combined with never washed armpit mixed in with bum vomit and the rotting corpse odor of the derelict who sleeps on the train at night....ot take your uber door to door on the company tab...and if you have time to kill take a bus and watch the pedestrains pass you along the way.... and be sure to destroy your car navigating across steel plates set up to take out your undercarriage and if that doesnt work there is a pothole that will remove one of your wheels... dig we must (sounds like Al Sharpton came up with that slogan)....listen to the local madrassa inspired mullah across from Macy's.... and then visit the 2 holes in the ground that NY calla a monument / souvenier stand carnival money making enterprise on other's grief..you can navigate the streets and never hear a word in english, especially on 5th ave outside the diesigner stores... you might even meet Mr toyota buying his wife/girlfriend a few thaousand bicks worth of designer shit... or you can deal with nigerian organized crime or go to china town and get the knock offs... and be sure to knock on the door of the ravenite club and ask if john is around... bring an uzi ...be sure to look everyone directly in the eye and god help you if you smile while doing so...take a seat in the village and guess the gender of passerbys...go to brooklyn... now get the fuck out(bring an english-brookly dictionary..fugged about...have an orange julius and kaopectate if you eat from a mobile rat stand.....sanctuary city, lib shithole.... tel aviv west....
Sounds like more fun than my last visit to NYC...
Imagine if you had to commute into that cesspool every day, from LI, NJ, or White Plains, to make under $100k per year.
... and they keep building.
Hudson Yards and Manhattan West, all within a quarter mile, will contain about 30-million s.f. of wasted space. Considering the occupancy rate of the "Freedumb Tower," I envision many bailout attempts by their well-connected owners down the line. NYC is the greatest public teat sucker of them all.
While installing an IT product at a San Francisco savings and loan in 1972 I became good friends with the S&L’s IT Manager. He had migrated from Hong Kong to seek his fortune in America.
Every payday the IT manager and I went out to lunch and along the way he would cash his pay check getting half of it in cash. When I finally summoned the courage to ask him why he carried so much cash he said “No I am not going to spend this cash. I am buying land, gold and silver with the money...Asians do not like paper money we prefer what is real…”
I was somewhat perplexed by his answer about buying land, gold and silver. So finally one day I ask him “…why do you need so much land, gold and silver...” He chuckled and replied “ …you know nothing of Asian customs. We all buy and keep what we can carry on our backs if war or government forces us. If things are stable we look for a place to grow food.
“Thousands of years of wars in Asia have taught us to buy what is small enough to carry if we are forced to move but has value where ever we must live at the moment. If I don’t have to flee the land will support me. I will never own your paper money you carry in your wallet for very long for those reasons…”
I took his words to heart and bought my stash of gold when it was in the $300 range. I often think about the “real world” lessons he taught me…
Im finding a huge % more of summer rentals on the market all for at least 30% more than past years in NYC and our reasoning for a upstate lakefront summer rental over our usearl NYC destinations this year
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgHZubM7M-I