Alyssa Katz explains how New York could create affordable housing from its empty glass condo buildings and failed takeover projects:
Commuters arriving in Brooklyn via the Manhattan Bridge are greeted with a shiny vision of New York City’s future that never came to be: condo buildings with names like the Oro, the Toren, and Forté, towering monuments to real-estate developers’ credit-bubble hubris. Two-bedroom apartments in the Oro were priced at nearly $1 million apiece; today, just 90 of 303 units have been sold. The Forté would have gone into foreclosure had its developer not voluntarily relinquished the building to the bank, losing investor Goldman Sachs its $13 million stake. Property records declare 37 of its 108 units purchased, and the high-rise itself feels even lonelier — as night falls, just a few windows in its upper reaches are illuminated.
On the opposite sidewalk of Flatbush Avenue one drizzly fall evening, more than a hundred demonstrators, members of the Right to the City Coalition, drew attention to another possibility: A city starved for affordable housing could find it in the glassy confines of failed luxury dreams. They had converged from hardscrabble neighborhoods on the frontiers of gentrification, where jackhammers had provided the soundtrack for Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s second term.
