Inequity and Iniquity in Manhattan Housing
Two weeks ago, my column portrayed the child heroine of Andrea Elliott’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Invisible Child, looking at dawn from her Fort Greene, Brooklyn homeless shelter “over the rooftops and the projects and the shimmering east River. Her eyes can travel into Manhattan, to the top of the Empire State Building” and other skyscrapers.
Most of the action in Invisible Child occurs from 2012 to 2016. The book opens with Dasani’s family — two adults and eight children — all living in one room (520 square feet) at the Auburn Family Residence. In 2015, I did not know about Dasani, but I had visited buildings like Auburn and was also reporting about very different kinds of shelter — ones that could shelter people but were (and still are) often used to shelter money.
In 2015, the May 15 cover of New York Magazine ran this headline: “New York Real Estate Is the New Swiss Bank Account: Foreigners are flooding the market to stash, hide, and sometimes launder their money.” That intrigued me, because I had done some research into Manhattan condos selling for $20 million and up. For example, after checking out the New York Rescue Mission, I visited Condo 70B high up in the Time Warner Center adjacent to Central Park. (In 2021 it became the Deutsche Bank Center).
The view was spectacular like Dasani’s, but Condo 70B had warm Norwegian wood walnut paneling and flooring, automated solar shades, and custom millwork, lighting, and sound systems. Dasani shared a bathroom in the hall, where “mothers shower quickly, posting their children as lookouts for the building’s predators.” Condo 70B, though, had switchable glass in its three bathrooms — translucency for privacy, transparency to bathe while looking out at the park. Sadly, 70B’s inhabitants had that view only three times in the past year: For 362 days of the year, no one was home. A realtor told me the owner was “happy to keep it as a good place to have his money.”
Invisible Child shows how Dasani slipped down three flights of stairs and into the cafeteria, “where more than a hundred families will soon stand in line to heat their prepackaged breakfast. With only two microwaves, this can take an hour. Tempers explode. Knife fights break out.” Meanwhile, shell companies without products in 2014 bought more than four out of five Time Warner condos that sold at prices like 70B’s $27 million asking price, give or take a few million.
Among the owners of condos from the 68th through 78th floors, according to The New York Times research, were Dimitrios Contominas, arrested in 2014 in a Greek corruption sweep; Vitaly Malkin, a Putin crony who allegedly plundered Angola; Andrey Vavilov, a Russian reformer turned oligarch; Anil Agarwal, a mining magnate under fire in Zambia and his native India; and Kabul Chawla, who allegedly misused the life savings of New Delhi residents.
Business Insider in February 2015 noted that 16 foreign owners of Time Warner condos were the subjects of government investigations: “They could not have chosen a better place to stash their wealth — from the unadorned hallways to the multiple entrances, this was a high-rise built for anonymity.” But jumping forward ten years: January 2, 2025, is the deadline for shell companies and LLCs that do business in the U.S. to fully disclose who is behind them and who actually owns the assets.
According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a branch of the Department of the Treasury, the new rules regarding disclosure are “a significant step forward” that will “protect the United States from bad actors who exploit anonymous shell companies to engage in money laundering, corruption, sanctions and tax evasions, drug trafficking, fraud, and a host of other criminal offenses.” We’ll see.
In the meantime, I’m trying to find out what happened to Dasani, but a New York article labeled “Luxury Real Estate: Plaza Regret” showed the dire fate of some who bought condos in what was once New York’s most luxurious hotel, The Plaza. (Cary Grant sips cocktails there at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest). Their investments have not appreciated. One couple paid $14 million in 2008 and 15 years later listed it at $13.9 million.
In 2015, a Plaza selling point emphasized the opportunity to be next to “Russian billionaires when you sashay into the large, glamorous marble lobby on Central Park South,” but one realtor told me only 30 percent of the condos were occupied at any given time: “So many people just put their money in New York City. They buy apartments and don’t even use them. They just keep them to have them in their portfolio. That’s real estate in New York. It’s a big safety deposit box.”
From what I’ve read, it’s not much different now. Back then, one Plaza resident said to me on an elevator, “First time in a week someone’s been on the elevator with me.” I asked, “Do you like that?” He said, “I like the privacy.” Others like (to quote one brochure) “floors with walnut-bordered herringbone parquet designed to reflect original mosaic patterns found in The Plaza’s lobbies, and kitchens with Nero Marquina stone countertops and mosaic Calacatta marble-tiled backsplashes.”
But the Dasanis of the world sleep on floors that reflect original vomit. It’s fine with me when people who earn a lot live in expensive real estate. We have a problem when thieves buy the best real estate — and especially when it goes unoccupied most of the time. Maybe the new regulations will help.