Defend the indefensible: new construction ultra-luxury apartments

Defended! Actually, kinda more appealing now.

http://astorplacenyc.com/press/nytimes_1-13-15.pdf

(sort of echoing robyn)

gahh. who lives in these things? actually I think Sen Obama rents an apartment there

an increase in housing stock, whether rental or condo, can take pressure off a tight rental market and moderate prices.
urban density leads to less car use, and leed certified buildings use far less energy than a mcmansion.
occasionally great architecture (i know, very occasionally, but still). check out Calatrava's planned building in lower manhattan or the fordham spire.

here they're marketed to young urban professionals and empty-nesters. not really families.

leed certified buildings use far less energy than a mcmansion

Much less. Leed certified or not, in terms of land use and consolidated waste disposal, skyscrapers are pretty darn green.

In other words, jergins OTM.

Well, my argument is only that many of the places are very small. People pay, like I said, half a mil for a place half the size of my apartment, and I live alone. A nice 3-bedroom that you can stretch out and breed in is going to cost you a pretty penny.

ding! (just not near me thanks, ok).

i've been in a few of these things and i can definitely understand the appeal (floating in a sea of ease), it's just not for me (even if i did have the money).

xpost

urban density leads to less car use,

Maybe. All the ones I've seen have at least one carspace per apartment.

There's rarely anything that good about such planned community styled things. Also it's stupid here that they're all built right near the CBD, where half the residential appartments are empty 'cause everyone still wants a fucking quarter-acre block in the burbs.

J.G. Ballard's High Rise and Cronenberg's Shivers to thread.

This is a real problem. Several years ago, there was a big movement in Chicago to save the Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the burbs, because people were buying them and tearing them down because they weren't big enough. Cretins.

They do in Japan and many places in Europe.

This should have read, $1000. Which is only a slight exagguration.

http://www.1521second.com/
http://www.escalamidtown.com/
http://www.olive8.com/

It's been fascinating to watch the process, from announcements and planning to permitting, and over the last few months, the digging. I don't think the architecture is that great (Escala will be a hulk of a building with a huge-assed floor plate, Olive 8 is too boxy for my taste, 1521 looks hot as hell in the renderings but you never really know until they install the glass), but they're all near transportation links, they'll all bring people into the city that might not otherwise live here, and they raise property taxes to fix those fucking potholes on my street.

Hurting's original contention though is worth returning to: what's with the exclusivity? Could the marketing be more over the top? What's needed in so many of our cities are affordable apartments, right, so why are so many million dollar condos being built and so many condo conversions taking place when there is still an acute need for apartments? It's economics, trickle-down, I know, but still.

If people are buying them then there must be a demand. No one's being forced to purchase.

this is the thing most worth talking about on this thread so far. there's a building that finishing near my work, 3 stories, expensive, 'modern and hip' kind of appeal, but they just put the siding up and it looks 10 years old already, this white fake-wood, might as well be plastic! just total shit. i can't believe it, actually.

I work for a company that refurbishes old buildings into condos and builds new ones from time to time. And there is a demand, but mostly these places are bought by investors that wait for the market to change, and then sell them. You'd be surprised how many units go totally unoccupied while people make money off of them.

Maybe. All the ones I've seen have at least one carspace per apartment.

In SF and Portland and Seattle that's starting to change, with the city councils lowering the parking requirements. Lots of usually smart urban types call it a 'gift to the developers' because they don't have to dig as deep to accomodate so many cars and can still charge almost as much, but fuck, you all know how people have to be forced out of their cars to change. It takes some strong political will to do what these cities are starting to do.

i'm completely for efficient use of dwelling space in urban centres, but are 15' ceilings and a wall of windows really efficient? more efficient than houses, i guess.

I know this is very much true in many cities: Las Vegas, Miami, San Diego. That's a bubble that will pop with a bunch of bad side effects. But there are cities with demand.

fluxion, what city?

xxxp

possibly divided in sections, rather than divided into closed-off rooms

OTM! I would only live in one of those places alone. Even with a wife or girlfriend, where do you go for some me time?

My company lies about how much has been sold almost as a rule. And yes, the first wave of apartments (however many there are of them) are often sold at a reduced price to investors. The math is, you take out the price that it would cost you for upkeep for the couple of years it would normally take you to sell the building, and sell the units for that, instead. Something like 20% off.

It doesn't seem like often works out that way, though. Once something's built, it usually sticks around. That makes the ugliest of these new buildings all the worse: "So I'm going to have to look at this piece for the next thirty years?" The building I work in was supposed to be temporary, for the 1962 World's Fair, with a max use of a couple of years. And here we still are. They've had to earthquake retrofit it a bunch.

Yes, in that it's totally appalling. It's building for the real estate market instead of for the people who (god help them) may end up living there. It wasn't always like this.

And yeah, pre-war buildings are very favored in Chicago, too, at least by people I know. They're cheaper and they just so happen to still work.

the NJ real estate bulls fail to mention, however, that they're REALLY competing with brooklyn and queens -- hoboken and jersey city are NOT manhattan, and never will be. and WHEN (not i said WHEN, not IF) the housing crash gains momentum, there will be even LESS reason to buy these overpriced shoeboxes in NJ (or the outer boroughs) as manhattan real estate will go from obscenely overpriced to merely overpriced.

BTW, as a Hobokenite have you ever seen Delivered Vacant? It's fantastic.

Most of these new builds are colossally energy inefficient. It is possible to build tall, passively cooled glass fronted buildings but these require huge voids within the structure to move air around. and voids cut down floor space. So these buildings end up being air conditioned.

When i was looking to buy my place I looked at a few developments like this and they were badly sized and badly built in the main. One place I saw didn't have two walls at a right angle (by design, how the hell do you put a bed in the bedroom) and a pitched roof that pitched inwards to give bigger glass walls and the gutter down the middle of the room was already leaking into the living room, they wanted £199,000 4 years ago.

I mean what would all the "amenities" that you're paying for cost separately?

Gym membership with pool - let's say $150/month for a NICE one
Parking space - I dunno, a few hundred bucks a month?
Security guard - you're paying a small share of one dude's shitty wage
Cleaning (assuming they don't actually clean your apt): see above
Heat/electric - $100 a month average maybe? Unless those glass fronts are REALLY inefficient

So where does the rest of the money go? It certainly eats into your "investment" profits in any case - sort of like the fees on the sexier-sounding mutual funds.

Ha ha, they actually use this slogan on some new-build flats ("lived here/be home by now") on the southern SE23-end of Lordship Lane. Zone 3, Forest Hill! I mean, if it's meant for central London commuters passing on the bus, chances are they've already been travelling for 45 minutes - another 5 min up the hill to Forest Hill proper (where you're not likely to be living on a noisy A-road, where there are shops, local amenities, etc) isn't going to kill you.

no, i haven't. i've been aware of this film for a while, but never have had the time to actually see it.

is the site that you frequent this one, by any chance? kannekt is outrageous -- stuffed to the gills with real estate agents, condo builders, and their various fluffers; they also actively censor and ban anyone who has the unmitigated audacity to question the intelligence of buying any of the overpriced R/E shit for sale in hoboken and jersey city.

1,000% with TOMBOT upthread -- i also wanna see blood flowing b4 i even CONSIDER buying real estate in this market.

OTM re: quality. here in n. jersey, a lot of these shitty, overpriced monstrosities are built by k. hovnanian, an R/E developer that has been shitting out property excresences all over NJ for well over a decade. a good friend of mine from college ran his own contracting business during the 90s; he did work on hovnanian projects throughout central and south jersey, and he ALWAYS complained about the shoddy workmanship, crappy materials, etc. lo and behold, some of the crappiest "luxury" condos in hudson county are hovnanian properties. the ubiquitous toll bros. also seems to produce a high %age of crap "luxury" buildings up here, too. "vertical trailer parks," as one wag has taken to calling 'em.

Another way condos go against the conventional wisdom, which is that having a mortgage saves you money in the long run. Is it any wonder people buy in the burbs?

Much like how you could follow the rise and fall of the dot com era by the thickness of each issue of Wired magazine, I suspect that the 2007 fall will be measured by the page count of Dwell.

i was referring to the velocity development, which as the below pics show are a bunch of pretty generic condos right smack dab to hoboken housing projects (and which have the source of much derision over at hoboken411.com):

img src="http://hoboken411.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/velocity-top-view-2.JPG" img src="http://hoboken411.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/Velocityprojects.jpg"

but my comments fit just as w/ the beacon (which are as equally generic/ugly as velocity, and in an even WORSE ghetto!)

i also love the beacon webpage's map of all of JC's "attractions" -- which, for those of us who know JC, are all a good schlep from where the beacon is located.

ihttp://hoboken411.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/Velocityprojects.jpg

http://hoboken411.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/velocity-top-view-2.JPG http://hoboken411.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/Velocityprojects.jpg

"Don't worry," the man replied, "You won't wake the hoes."

My friend stood there stupified for a moment 'til he realized that the man was referring to the Ho family whose 'residence' down the hall was the only one finished and who happened to be out of town.

-- Eisbär (llamasfu...), December 11th, 2006.

The photos include restaurants in the Paulus Hook neighborhood, which is about two miles away and not really accessible from where The Beacon is by public transport.

that's basically the story of ALL of hudson county (except maybe union city, which is landlocked). even those cold-water walk-ups are on the market for mad $$$ these days (and are almost as absurdly overpriced as "luxury" shitboxes like velocity and the beacon).