So hundreds of people who could live in those condos will instead have to commute from further out, or pay more for an alternative apartment, or not be able to pursue their New York dreams at all. Why is that something we romanticise?
It is hers, she can choose to maintain it for its current use if she wishes, unless it is causing harm. There is a grey area here with derelict sites, as that is a waste of space and often they can be dangerous, but that does not appear to be the case here.
A rich person has every right to burn a pile of money or spend it on some extravagant luxury, but we still consider it distasteful when they do. Particularly when that pile of money is unearned, which seems to be the case here - it's only an accident of birth, and an accident of factory location, that means the factory is now on such valuable land.
In my ideal world there would be a land value tax so that people paid a fair rate to the rest of society for the land they were taking up, rather than the lottery of buying land once and owning it forever.
In that case it falls into the derelict site grey area and genuinely wasteful, not providing any real worth even to the current owner's whims.
Nagged maybe?
IMHO, the reaction to a story like this should be "shrug" or "cool building, interesting story", not "what a hero!"
Isn't this woman exercising her property rights in a perfectly fair way within the market economy that we have, in exactly the same way that so many developers have exercised their rights to tear down X and replace it with Y, where many people might have preferred to keep X?
If she weren’t so notably irrational, the New York Times wouldn’t be writing an article on her.
Human beings are deeply irrational, not everything has to be tweaked for maximum output / productivity / efficiency / optimisation.
Only she knows what's best for her property. There's nothing irrational about doing what you want with what you got. It's the opposite that's irrational.
But it's her right. I hope it bites her, but it's her right to be irrational.
Wait, so is it supposed to be the market deciding or this one lady?
Rushing into things, taking the first offer, etc. This is irrational. Finding the right way to "dispose" of equipment, i.e. finding the highest bidder or, failing that, the closest scrapyard, before finding a new leasee, is not irrational.
So what? An increase in housing supply results in lower prices for everyone. If the "rich" are buying a condo in location A, that means they're likely not buying that condo in location B. That means the price has to be lowered since now A and B are competing. If A and B are competing for rich people, that means less "rich people" demand in location C.
In a place like Sunnyvale, houses are exceeding $1.5 million for essentially starter homes. If there were a larger supply in, say, Palo Alto, that would mean less demand in Sunnyvale, which means more people could afford to live there even if they couldn't afford Palo Alto. There just aren't enough places for sale in the area, so even if someone wanted to buy at the higher-end, the supply is constricted which means they have a lot of money to spend elsewhere. Increasing high-end housing in Palo Alto necessarily decreases demand in lower cost neighborhoods in the area. In short, building more housing for "rich" people frees up more housing for everyone.
This kind of intuition rarely work in real life though. People migration flows and the housing market isn't a A+B=C type of problem.
This is not true. Building too much housing for rich people simply results in a lot of empty housing. See for example, Manhattan or Vancouver, which have hundreds of empty condos that could be occupied by locals but are instead owned by wealthy foreigners who leave the units vacant.
Sales tax doesn't apply to real property sales, so presumably you meant to suggest a real estate tax that would only apply to non-residents...which could be trivially avoided by hiring a token caretaker to pay utility bills, turn on the lights, etc., to make the property look occupied (which is what Chinese investors have been doing since Vancouver introduced the vacant property tax.)
This is happening a little bit in my working class neighborhood. House goes on the market. It’s listed as sold, family moves out, nobody moves in. Likely some millionaire’s 8th empty investment house.
The solution is not to give up and stop building real estate, making it an even more attractive investment. The solution is to build so much real estate that we tip the balance, and make real estate unattractive to speculative investors.
The market can stay irrational for a long time. China has spent hundreds of billions on empty housing in planned cities the past few years, and they're still going due to speculative investor demand.
Let's face it: the evidence shows that the easiest and most cost effective way to deal with this problem is market-informed regulation.
This kind of "trickle down" in NYC real estate exists, sure, but it doesn't spread very far. You could make more difference for "regular" folks if e.g. you added mixed-income restrictions on the new property, but by default the market doesn't work that way.
Research [1] shows that these types of restrictions lead to the exact opposite: A shrinking supply of affordable housing and rapidly rising property prices.
[1] http://smartgrowth.umd.edu/assets/documents/research/knaapbe...
Who pays the difference between that $1200 600ft2 apartment occupied by a single New York "artist" and the market price of the rent for the same apartment occupied by a working family of two?
That middle class in NYC needs 2x more money to have as much as middle class in Houston...
Why preserve it? Because its better for our spirit to preserve some memories of the past rather than tearing them down for another handful of forgettable multi-million dollar condos.
I have an extra bedroom. It would be maximally efficient to rent the room, but I prefer to put my luggage in there.
It's not owner's job to fulfill other people's dreams or to mitigate other people's poor lives.