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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anything at all about housing policy in the article.

EDIT: It appears the link has been changed from (IIRC) a Chicago Tribune article to a New York Times article. My comment is about the original article.

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"Luxury Condo" is right there in the headline.

No value judgment is offered about whether a luxury condo is a good, bad, or neutral thing.

Come on.

The fact that it's there to begin with implies it was noteworthy enough to include it, and the choice of including something versus not including is a value judgement. If instead the title read, "New York tech entrepreneur found decapitated wearing expensive suit", it would be more likely to strike people as odd, but isn't it essentially the same thing?

These people are professional writers. Including details that let readers form a mental picture is practically unconscious behavior. Of course they're gonna say "$2.5mil full floor luxury condo" instead of just "condo".

It's part of telling the story. You have to picture this is a very fancy condo, and that it had keyed elevator access directly into his apartment. This implies he likely knew and let the killer into his place. It's part of the visualization.

Why does evidence so far infer this? Potentially, he thought the killer was going to a condo unit on a different floor.

Media guy here. Lots of NYC readers/viewers either live in luxury condos or have a point of view about people who do. For people who do live in such places, the $$$ that they've paid to be there is meant to create a safe and elegant island from all the clatter and chaos of NYC street life.

Murders in such settings instantly trip the "fear alert." Now all of our LC residents need to know how the deed was done and if there's anything about their safe-island assumptions that must be revisited or repaired.

The result: a story that people can't stop talking about. It's fashionable to decry business pressures that force journalists to do this, but the truth is sheer desire for recognition is a sufficient driver, no matter what the business model.

The only security tip you can glean from these events is you shouldn't ride up to your own apartment with your own killer. Reports in actual newspapers, rather than local TV stations from far-away cities reprinting wire stories, mention these salient facts.

They may well have not rode up with the killer. Get a set of fire keys and you can force an elevator to go to any floor, regardless of what fancy keys or tokens the elevator uses to restrict access. And since the elevator opens directly into the apartment, you don't even have to get the victim to unlock their door.

Edit: I can buy the FDNY fire key on Amazon. Anyone could have pulled this off.

Edit 2: The NYT article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/nyregion/dismembered-body...) does say he was in the elevator with his killer. It seems the ABC7 article is lacking a lot of information.

Non-doorman apartment buildings seem to have a glaring vulnerability: social pressure. Because > 99.9% of the people trying to go in behind you are your neighbors or people visiting your neighbors, not criminals, it's difficult to tell people no.

I bet it's possible to get into almost any building in a US city just by wearing a suit and telling people you forgot your keys. Eventually someone will let you in.

It may have not been clear, but I meant "value judgment" specifically in the moral framework sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_judgment

Whether a piece of information is relevant/interesting/newsworthy/etc. is a judgment too, but not the kind I was referring to.

I understood those parts of the article as answering the question “how hard would it have been to get into the building?”

So, the answer to the 4th 'W' - where.

And 'where' matters, given this: The condos in the building are full-floor and the keyed elevator opens right into the apartment.

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