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How do we love bubbles? Let us count the ways: tulip bulbs in seventeenth-century Holland. Gold prospecting in California in the 1840s. Dot-coms in San Francisco in the late 1990s. Real estate in Manhattan at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
What’s that? Don’t believe that New York City’s housing market is, in fact, a bubble? Think the decade-long joyride of escalating prices will continue unabated? That the law of gravity currently tethering home prices nationwide does not apply to the island
of Manhattan, given its steroidal economy and Tribble-like population growth? Then you, fair optimist, are far from alone.
Indeed, those who have sat on the sidelines the past few years, awaiting the crash of Manhattan real estate, must be experiencing non-buyer’s remorse. After a 7 percent dip from the previous quarter in condo and co-op sale prices last fall seemed to augur the end of the good times, Manhattan’s market roared back in 2007, with most of the city’s largest real-estate firms reporting, by mid-year, double-digit percentage increases in median prices from the year before. In all, by mid-2007, the average price of condo sales had risen to — wait for it, pucker up — $1.5 million.
But now comes the truest test. Developers, seemingly hellbent on drowning the market in the Hudson River, have recently unleashed a surge of condo construction unprecedented in the city’s history. And perhaps sensing that the surest way to remain afloat is by marketing to the extravagantly wealthy (hey, that’s you!), they’re erecting properties that are dedicated to lifestyle — specifically, the joys of being extremely rich. Many are the handiwork of the biggest-name architects (Gehry, Stern, Johnson, et al.), and all boast an array of high-end amenities so over the top that it might be embarrassing were it not for the fact that the average sale price of the city’s luxury market (the top 10 percent) is now $4.6 million. Pay $4.6 million, one could say, and you deserve a nice gym.
The following buildings, suffice it to say, have really, really nice gyms.
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