Manhattan’s One Percenters will now have one more type of real estate investment that the have-nots of the world could never hope to afford: $1 million parking spaces. The spots for sale cost more per square-foot than the luxury building’s apartments do.
A new luxury development in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, 42
Crosby Street, will offer 10 underground parking spaces in the
10-unit apartment building. Each spot will be offered for a
whopping $1 million, which will cover the full term of a 99-year
lease, the New York Times reported. So, after all that money
spent on a place to park their car, investors will not actually
own the spot. But they will have a storage space and charging
station.
The spots are spacious, between 150 and 200 square feet each, or
$5,000 to $6,666 a square foot. The nine three-bedroom units
upstairs will cost between $8.70 million, or about $3,170 a
square foot, and $10.45 million, around $3,140 a square foot. The
duplex penthouse will be listed for $25 million. And that doesn’t
include the monthly common charges for operational expenses.
In comparison, a 275-square-foot SoHo studio was listed
for-sale-by-owner in November for a measly $295,000. “Good news:
it has a bathroom. Bad news: the wall separating the bathroom
from the kitchen is about three feet high,”Curbed
New York wrote in its description of the so-called
micro-dwelling.
NYC parking now literally costs a million bucks. A $1 Million
Parking Spot http://t.co/b2WSQdFdZ7 by @michellehigginspic.twitter.com/pfYykuKhkV
— Candace Jackson (@candace_jackson)
September 9, 2014
Only 23 percent of households in Manhattan ‒ the most expensive
of the Big Apple’s five boroughs ‒ own a car, NYCEDC.com
reported. The average cost of rent there was $3,873 in July,
while the median sales price of an apartment was $920,000 in the
second quarter of 2014, according to real estate blog MNS and the
Times, respectively.
But to the richest of the rich, having a private parking space in
their apartment building adds caché.
“Most ultrahigh-net-worth individuals have car collections as
well as service vehicles for their staff,” Giles Hannah, a
senior vice president at Christie’s International Real Estate,
told the
Times. “Parking is in serious demand and has proven an
excellent investment with no sign of a decline.”
“When someone is paying $50 million for an apartment, another
$500,000 for the luxury of not walking a block or two and having
your own spot, I guess it becomes a rounding error,” Izak
Senbahar, the president of the Alexico Group, said.
The city is becoming known for its massive wealth gap and how it
shows in real estate. In July, the New York City Department of
Housing Preservation and Development approved plans for a
33-story high-rise on the Upper West Side that will sport 219
luxury units and 55 affordable ones. But the wealthy residents
won’t have to rub elbows with the building’s “poor,” as the two
sets of units will have separate
entrances. While wealthy residents will be able to enter the
building from its designated front entrance, affordable housing
tenants will be required to go in through a back alley.
“This ‘separate but equal’ arrangement is abominable and has
no place in the 21st century, let alone on the Upper West
Side,” Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal (D-UWS) said to
local news outletWest
Side Rag when the plans were unveiled. “A mandatory
affordable housing plan is not license to segregate lower-income
tenants from those who are well-off. The developer must follow
the spirit as well the letter of the law when building affordable
housing, and this plan is clearly not what was intended by the
community.”
The founder and chief executive of the brokerage firm CORE in
Manhattan, which is handling the sales and marketing at 42
Crosby, sees nothing wrong with how the development is pricing
the parking spaces.
“We’re looking at setting the benchmark,” Shaun Osher
told the Times. “In real estate, location defines value and
parking is no exception to that rule.”
In SoHo, Osher added, there are “few to no options” for
parking, let alone a private spot in your own building.
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