Look at Manhattan's most expensive buildings in terms of price per square foot (which can be north of $5000!). Some, like 15 Central Park West and One57 and some others on 57th Street, are new but many are not. Famously there's the San Remo building (which is ~100 years old), Walker Tower in Chelsea and a number of other buildings on Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue that are a century old, give or take, and not remotely affordable.
There are factors why these buildings will basically never be "affordable", namely:
- They may have ceilings in the order of 14-18'
- They may have floors and ceilings that are 1' thick or more;
- Land prices are extremely high.
So even though some of these apartments might be "only" 2000 square feet, they occupy the space of an apartment that might be as much as 2-4x as large due to the way the building is built. A stone's throw from Walker Tower you'll find postwars that sell for under $1500/sq ft, for example.
I'm actually a big fan of cities not becoming ghost towns of empty condos and houses that are nothing more than a place to park capital for the ultra-wealthy. Australia, for example, forbids foreign purchases of anything other than new builds.
Developers build ultra-luxury condos because it's way more profitable. Part of the reason is the demand but another part is the cost structure is wrong and New York City and state bear some of the blame for this eg [1]. That's just insurance. Construction itself has become unaffordable. Many capital projects exist in the US today that would simply be cost-prohibitive to build or replace now.
I'm all for an extreme measure here: the world's large urban centers should start taxing homeowners on worldwide income. No double taxation. There are already mechanisms for this. You want to own property in NYC or Vancouver or San Francisco? Great. You're now a resident taxpayer. You can always seize the property if they won't pay.
One thing about Vancouver in particular, and this probably applies to Canada in general: WTF is up with a median wage of C$50k? How is it the US can afford to pay US$350k+ for a SWE in NYC or SF that might earn less than C$100k in Vancouver? How did that happen?
In the developed world there basically hasn't been an increase in real wages since 1980 while the ultra-wealthy get richer and richer. With no wars or revolutions in sight to redistribute that wealth (which, historically, has been what's happened when wealth inequality gets too out of whack), something needs to be done to address that.
[1] https://www.constructiondive.com/news/critics-blame-nycs-sca...