By exploiting legal loopholes to target the
super-rich, developers are ravaging New York
and its people, writes Oliver Wainwright
A preposterous Mussolini balcony pokes out of
the top of the most expensi-ve home in America,
offering high-altitude 1iews across Central Park.
The air may be thin up here, but the architecture
is cl oyingly thick with allusions to 1Ianhattan's
golden age of skyscrapers: limestone slabs rise
in clumsy setbacks to a faux Art Deco crown.
'Architecture is a banquet and most architects
are starving to death', says the building's
architect, Robert Stern, who has stuffed his face
at the table of historical allusion and vomited
the half-digested results across the skyline.
Topped with a $238-million apartment,
220 Central Park South represents the grotesque
pinnacle of New York's current waYe of super-
tall, super-skinny, super-expensive towers,
a brazen eruption of etiolated beanpoles that
has sprouted along Billionaires' Row and the
southern fringes of Central Park over the last
few years. These silos for the super-rich might
not come as a surprise: form has always followed
finance in :Manhattan. But these towers signify
a new species of steroidal safety deposit box
architecture, the iniquitous extrusion of excess
capital into a physical bar chart of inflated land
values and free-market planning regulations.
The impact became evident when a wall of
shade formed by the monolithic ranks of towers
began to eclipse the southern side of Central
Park. Stern was unfazed: 'People don't come
to Manhattan to get a suntan', he says. 'Besides,
we need room for aspiration. A lot of people can't
afford these apartments, but they aspire to them.'
Aspiring to a multi-million-dollar shoebox in
the clouds might keep Stern and his team
motivated, but it doesn't do much for the
average New Yorker. De-velopment boosters
claim these gilded sky mansions 'gi,•e back'
to the city via the trickle-down benefits of luring
ever more ultra-high-net-worth indi-viduals to
reside here and pay taxes. In reality, they are
bloated monuments to tax evasion. Thanks to
arcane condo tau\:ation policies, billionaire hedge
fund manager Ken Griffin's $238-million four-
storey pad at the top of Stern's tower is taxed
as if it were worth only $9.4 mnlion, ·while those
in poorer areas are shafted at much higher rates.
Rubbing salt in t he wound, the city's so-called
'inclusionary' housing policy does little to
redress t he balance. A dreaded Faustian pact,
like the UK's Section 106, it is a doomed
bargaining tool that naively banks on deYelopers
having an altruistic bone in their bodies and
being will ing to cough up a small percentage
of affordable housing. As ''ith Section 106, the
rules are wide open to negotiation and t he side
with t he most eA."})ensive lawyers (guess who!)
wins. D evelopers can gleefully slash t he amount
of affordable housing on the grotmds of 'financial
\iability' or pay in lieu to build low-income
housing in less desirable areas. As a reward for
their begrudging co-operation, they are free
to pile more floors atop their teetering towers.
The bureaucratic bounties go on. Another rule
allows the buildings to be extended even higher
on grotmds of needing additional 'mechanical'
space. For some inexplicable reason, floors
dedicated to structural and mechanical purposes
do not count against the total allowable size.
As a result, architects enlarge these voids to
push penthouses nearer to the clouds, raising
their value in the process. .About a quarter of
the floors in Rafael Vifioly's 432Park Avenue
are empty - 90 vertical metres of overpriced air.
But the most iniquitous part of this litigious
horse-trading, envelope-inflating and loophole-
exploiting system is that it happens behind
closed doors, with no public scrutiny. The US
tradition of individual ii·eedoms and indisputable
rights means the whole planning process
operates on an as-of-right basis. Codes are
written, developers find ways to exploit them,
and the public is powerless as the unintended
effects are wrought in increasingly swollen
shafts of glass and steel above their streets.
~ew York City is by no means alone. But,
as the craclie of the skyscraper and a safe haven
for surplus cash, it is here that the symptoms
of financialisation are most painfully visible.
The latest pernicious product of the system
is the $25 billion redevelopment of Hudson
Yards, proudly promoted as the largest and
most expensive private real-estate project
in US history. Conceived as a citadel of luxury
apartments, offices and shops - where you
can spend five figures on a watch and $800 on
a haircut - it feels like a malignant glass tumour,
sucking the life out of ~ianhattan's west side.
Backed by Oxford Properties Group, a Canadian
investment company owned by the Ontario
municipal workers' pension fund, it is a money-
making machine without the slightest desire
to make a piece of the city for New Yorkers.
And t he project somehow benefited from almost
$6 billion in state funding and tax breaks.
From Hudson Yards to Billionaires' Rovv,
these towers are the totemic markers of a period
in \vhich real estate is the ultimate asset cl ass,
more valuable than all t h e world's stocks, shares
and securitised debt combined. In a damning
indictment of society's priorities, these rampant
vehicles for ceaseless wealt h accumulation are
burgeoning while homelessness is at its highest
leYel since t he Great Depression. They are
the glass and steel shrines to an age when the
capital of capitalism finally consumed itself.