Manhattan: a city of empty luxury condos and overflowing homeless shelters
Now, what is wrong with this picture? I think we have a testament here to what enabling wealth addicts and placing them on high as an almost exclusive priority is actually producing. Emptiness is a term used in Buddhism, in capitalism, it refers to condos that just sit there without owners/tenants while people increasingly go homeless and hunger pangs ring across the land of plenty.
So, what then, is wrong? Why can't we resolve pressing issues and humanitarian crises that are arising in this country now, (not to mention globally)? Perhaps this mindset has something to do with it and our problems do have easy, quick solutions when our resources and wealth are not reserved exclusively for small percentage of people?
This puts some real juice into the points that some of our candidates are trying to get on the table and focus on. The cost to human lives and the misery and suffering that is happening and will continue grow rapidly is really a litmus test for us. I mean that in the sense of judging our society by how it cares for the weaker, poorer and more vulnerable among us, especially in the wealthies county anywhere in known history.
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 prices 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).
https://boingboing.net/2020/01/18/a-luxury-product.html
