Why does the article blithely take it for granted that we should treat investments by rich foreigners suspiciously while investments by rich Americans are no problem? The big problem in New York real estate is lack of supply — the vacancy rate in rentals hovers around 1%, and building new apartments is a nightmare. So of course, prices go up as demand keeps growing and supply is prevented from growing.

There may be some extremely marginal contribution to housing costs that you can blame on these ultra-premium buildings, but it's not the root cause, and playing whack-a-mole with these symptoms is what got the city's real estate so expensive in the first place.

Do folks think that if One57 hadn't been built, a building full of $150k studios would have gone up in its place? Because of the difficulty and cost of building, these money towers are increasingly the only thing that developers can afford to build. Build something more palatable and you'd go out of business.

The backlash to these buyers is IMO a misguided blend of economic misunderstanding and xenophobia. Something tells me that if the rich buyers were all from Colorado, people wouldn't have quite so much to say about it.