The new rich infesting the city, by contrast, are barely here. They keep a low profile, often for good reason, and rarely stick around. They manufacture nothing and run nothing, for the most part, but live off fortunes either made by or purloined from other people—sometimes from entire nations. The New Yorker noted in 2016 that there is now a huge swath of Midtown Manhattan, from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue, from 49th Street to 70th Street, where almost one apartment in three sits empty for at least ten months a year. New York today is not at home. Instead, it has joined London and Hong Kong as one of the most desirable cities in the world for “land banking,” where wealthy individuals from all over the planet scoop up prime real estate to hold as an investment, a pied-à-terre, a bolt-hole, a strongbox.
For most of a decade now, like lava flowing inexorably from some deadly volcano, the residences of the superrich have moved east from the Time Warner Center to create Billionaires’ Row, the array of buildings on 57th Street and several adjoining streets and avenues that is already dominating much of the Manhattan skyline. These “supertall” skyscrapers are defined as buildings taller than 984 feet: One57, at 157 West 57th Street (1,004 feet); 432 Park Avenue (1,396 feet). Well on their way to being built: 53 West 53rd Street (1,050 feet), 111 West 57th Street (1,428 feet), and 217 West 57th Street (1,550 feet). Finished or not, many of the apartments were—at first—snapped up as soon as they went on the market. The Times used to tick off their record-setting sales in its Sunday real estate section, down to the absurdly exact dollar and cent: one recent lower-end example, $47,782,186.53! Nor are the records these sales set likely to remain for long. A triplex at the forthcoming 220 Central Park South will reportedly be sold for $200 million, and a four-story apartment at the same address is priced to move at $250 million. These would be the largest home sales ever recorded anywhere in the United States.
