I read this a few days ago and got some nice Schadenfreude out of it. Billionaires overpaying for shitty apartments, and experiencing what ‘normal’ people have to endure all the time.
She’s aware that the plight of billionaires won’t garner much sympathy, but says she is speaking out on principle.
“Everything here was camouflage,” she said. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have never bought.”
They could’ve settled with in some ‘less expensive’ building, but chose one that that wasn’t even finished; great thinking. Yeah, no real sympathy there, unless they continue and rally for better tenants’ rights for the rest of us.
I laughed out loud at the part where they explain they got around the height limits by just building certain floors with ridiculously tall ceilings. Also very funny that this gross monument to excess is having so many structural issues. Who could have foreseen an extremely tall building having problems with swaying in the wind?
During the beginning of the article my thought was the most common one which is that the problem is just the same one that plagues India but on a different scale. Here developers are busy erecting housing societies, apartments etc. for the expanding middle class (in wealth at least, I don’t know about the absolute numbers). But there is a patttern of fraud, delivering the housing much later than agreed upon date, delivering really poor quality of construction, not taking maintenance seriously at all because it is just more cost incurred to the developer and so on.
But the article has some gems like this one:
The disputes at 432 Park also highlight a rarely seen view of New York’s so-called Billionaire’s Row, a stretch of supertall towers near Central Park that redefined the city skyline, and where the identities of virtually all the buyers were concealed by shell companies.
Not much to say about this but what the fuck.
Now, correspondence between residents, some of the richest and most influential people in the world, reveal thorny arguments over how to remedy the problems without tanking property values.
Wow what the fuck even more.
I was under the impression that these buildings came about because of some engineering breakthrough but:
Luxury developers use a loophole in the city’s zoning laws to build these soaring towers in New York City. This may be one reason why these supertall buildings are facing a range of problems
Fuck everyone involved in this.
