On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote:
> isn't the upcoming Matt Damon flick, "Elysium" about something like this? > > > Financial Times June 14, 2013 6:49 pm > > Priced out of Paris > > > > By Simon Kuper > > > > Our great, global cities are turning into vast gated citadels where the > > elite reproduces itself > http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more-apartments-are-empty-yet-rented-or-owned-census-finds.html ------------------------------snip New Yorkers who stay in town during summer and holiday weekends know the empty-streets, Potemkin-village look that parts of the city take on. But some Manhattan neighborhoods are assuming that vacant feeling the year round, because the people who own or rent apartments there actually live somewhere else most of the time. This explains why, in a city of bright lights, so many windows dotting the imposing facades of Fifth, Madison and Park Avenue apartment buildings are pitch dark every evening. Wealthy out-of-towners have always had pieds-à-terre and unused investment properties in the city. What is new is how many. In a large swath of the East Side bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 49th and 70th Streets, about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than 10 months a year because their owners or renters have permanent homes elsewhere, according to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey. In one part of that stretch, between East 53rd and 59th Streets, more than half of the 500 apartments are occupied for two months or less. That is a higher proportion than in resort and second-home communities like Aspen, Colo.; Palm Beach, Fla.; Virginia Beach; and Litchfield, Conn. And the ranks of part-timers are growing. Since 2000, the number of Manhattan apartments occupied by absentee owners and renters swelled by more than 70 percent, to nearly 34,000, from 19,000. They proliferated in virtually every census tract south of 110th Street, with the most pronounced surges in the East Village, SoHo, Greenwich Village, Gramercy Park, Midtown East and the Upper East Side. "My block is like a ghost town," said Gay Talese, the author and keen urban observer, who has lived on East 61st off Park Avenue for a half-century. "It’s dark on this street at night, and I’m not talking about summer people in the Hamptons and people who have apartments here but spend a lot of time out of town for tax reasons."
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