New York City is huge. No one would ever deny that. It is packed with people, cars, and buildings of all shapes and sizes. Manhattan is full of tons of things to see and do, amazing nightlife, penthouse apartments, and the shopping is great. However, some of these Manhattan neighborhoods are starting to see more vacancies than in years past, and they are lasting year round.
According to the New York Times, many of the people who own, or rent apartments, in Manhattan “actually live somewhere else most of the time.” Sure, people of wealth have always had their apartments, and unused investment properties, in the city, but the numbers are increasing.
“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.”
“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.” The city is becoming more of a destination than a place of residence for many people. NYC was, and always will be, a huge destination for tourists, vacationers, and business-people, but maybe these things are slowly pushing out the people that live there full time.
Of course, there are reasons for this. “The construction of luxury housing, especially condominiums, has exploded in the last decade, and the market for high-end apartments has rebounded. Manhattan continues to attract foreign investors seeking a haven.”
These out-of-towners that purchase apartments for only a short time could eventually produce dead-zones causing a large depletion in street life. “Among all of the 845,000 apartments and houses in Manhattan, 102,000 were identified as vacant in the 2005-9 American Community Survey. Of those, about 33,000 – or about 1 in every 25 Manhattan homes – had an owner or renter who lived there less than two months of the year.”
If this trend continues, commercial real estate in the city could be drastically altered. Well, maybe not drastically, but altered non-the-less. It could potentially become harder to find tenants for these commercial buildings within the city, especially apartments and multi-family units. Brokers could be forced to search high and low, on a grander scale, all over the world, to find someone to fill their spots.
Sure, commercial real estate will still exist and tenants will be available, but it might not be the traditional New Yorker that is living in those apartments anymore.
Do you think New York City could ever turn into a ghost town?
Source article by Sam Roberts from the New York Times.
#CRE #finance #economy
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