This is a conspiracy-theory-level analysis that isn't supported by any available evidence.

Seven buildings. That's not representative of...anything. It's not even worth talking about. And the effects are largely positive for the city, anyway. You've got a few big, empty buildings concentrated on one street where billionaires park their money, pay a bunch of property taxes, and use zero city services. That's an unqualified win.

It represents several billions of dollars worth of luxury real estate left vacant, and obscuring central park.

If you want to call that "nothing" then there is no reaching you.

No idea why you're being downvoted. This meme (rich people buying luxury condos, letting them sit vacant, and then profiting somehow) doesn't make any sense, and that article posted as evidence for it undermines it by depicting those units as being un-rentable due to oversupply in the market.

it makes total sense you park your money in an asset that will increase in value over time. you don't need to actively use it.

And in the meantime, they choose not to rent it why? The intuitive answer is: they're hard to rent, because there's way more luxury condos available to be rented than people who want to rent them, and it was a bad investment that the rich person will probably lose money on (if not in absolute dollars, then in comparison to some other property that is desirable to rent). But a lot of people in this thread seem to think it's intentional and rich people have some devious way of making more from a vacant condo than a rented one.

NYC has super low property tax. It's a win for no one

If I were faced with a situation where the taxes were sub-optimally low, then I would simply raise the taxes, instead of trying to remake the entire concept of private property.

Attracting billionaires is a win. Even if they’re just there for a couple weeks a year they’re providing a lot of prestige.

Prestige sounds like "paying in exposure" that artists keep hearing about.

I mean brands do that. Look at Redbull having a F-1 team (and other sports team).

There are insane tax breaks these luxury apartments get, too, on the order of a 90% discount. It's not like these properties are generating huge windfalls for city or state government.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/billionaires-get-lo...

Sure, but they don't cost the city anything, either. They sit empty and the city collects money. Meanwhile, the owners aren't even there and use zero city services. Should those taxes be higher? Fine with me! But these apartments are a low-salience/high-visibility distraction. They have hardly anything to do with the issues in the broader housing market.

Actually they do. They influence the mindset and strategy of developers.

Can you supply some evidence that it is a conspiracy theory? Because I read this article in The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/american-h...

"But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times."

Sorry, but I trust the Atlantic over you unless you got some facts.

Here's the quote from the NY Times article [0] your Atlantic article references:

> Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015, or 3,695 of 7,727 apartments, remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts by Nancy Packes Data Services, a real estate consultancy and database provider.

So we're talking about 3,695 unsold apartments. There are 3.5 million housing units in New York City. So that's about a tenth of one percent .

The problem here isn't that the statistic is wrong; it's that anybody thinks 7k new units over a 5 year period in a metro area of 20 million people is anything more than a curiosity.

The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that it offers a sensational explanation -- usually some foreign, outside force -- for a complex problem, absolves the believer of any culpability, and provides an easy, unsympathetic target on which to dump all their rage. "Foreign oligarchs are buying up all the real estate and locking the rest of us out and that's what's wrong with the housing market" is exactly that kind of theory. And 3500 unsold units over 5 years is emphatically not evidence of its veracity.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-york-decad...

Ah. I see. I'll stop parroting that line now that I understand the impact better. I still think it is shitty of rich people to do that, however.

4% of apartments in nyc are vacant. You can claim that luxury units are more expensive because a block on the southern border is made up of half empty units owned by billionaires, but the rest of the city does not experience that phenomenon at all.

that's what you get when there's rent control; luxury housing doesn't count so there's more of an incentive to build that instead