“The sky is the limit”, Americans say to mean that there is none. Never has the adage seemed so appropriate in New York, where the real estate boom, combined with the most daring architectural innovations, pushes the limits of the sky ever further. To the point of radically modifying the skyline from the city.
For years, we have been witnessing a race towards the sun. Building is being built everywhere, and in recent times dozens, if not hundreds, of construction sites have been completed or are on the verge of being. In southern Manhattan, the Gehry Tower, with the metallic snake shell (265 meters high), and the Herzog & de Meuron Tower, a messy stack of transparent “shoe boxes” (250 meters), shape, with the One World Trade Center (541 meters), the new character of the rapidly changing Downtown. And two supertours of more than 500 meters are to be created by 2020.
“The alley of billionaires”
To the west, along the Hudson River, the new Hudson Yards business district – where L’Oréal has set up its American headquarters – is already emerging. Once completed, it will have around 40 new buildings (offices and homes), including around 15 over 50 floors! In the center of the city, in Midtown, King Kong himself would not be found there: surrounded, the Empire State (381 meters) and Chrysler (319 meters) Buildings will soon go unnoticed among the forest of buildings which swallows them little. little. Even Brooklyn, on the other side of the East River, has seen the emergence of about fifteen new towers, in a district where urban planning had hitherto developed horizontally.
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Nowhere is architectural evolution more visible than from Central Park. From there, walkers can admire two recent luxury skyscrapers rising up to infinity: the One57 tower, in the shape of a periscope, by Christian de Portzamparc (306 meters), and the white skyscraper (426 meters) by Rafael Viñoly, with an inspired design – its author says – of a latticed wastepaper basket.
“Alley of billionaires”, in front of the One57 tower.
Natan Dvir / Polaris images for L’Express
To these buildings will soon be added the Steinway Tower (438 meters, a work of the architectural firm SHoP), which, too, falls into the category of supertall buildings (from 300 to 600 meters). It will have the distinction of being the thinnest tower in the world. These three prestigious addresses and a few others currently under construction share the honor of being on “the alley of billionaires”. This is how we nickname the 57th Street, because of both its luxury brands (Tiffany, Dior, Chanel …) and the profile of its inhabitants, able to acquire goods on a whim. real estate estimated at 20, 30 or 50 million dollars.
A concentrate of real estate excesses
“Billionaire’s Alley” does not delight New Yorkers. In their eyes, it symbolizes all the excesses of the real estate market, which thrives in a certain opacity, and often thanks to dubious foreign capital from Asia, Africa or Latin America. To begin with, the towers of Portzamparc and Viñoly have been casting gigantic shadows over the south of Central Park since their completion in 2014 and 2015.
“The playgrounds where I took my children when they were little are now deprived of sun much of the day, can you imagine the scandal?” indignant artist Mara Hennessey, who remembers the historic victory obtained by Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis. Forty years ago, at the head of a coalition of New Yorkers, she had rolled back a skyscraper project on 59th Street on the grounds, precisely, that it would overshadow the park.
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“These luxury residential buildings do nothing,” adds architect Andrew Berman, who heads the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which works to safeguard New York’s identity. Unlike the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center or even the World Trade Center towers, which house company headquarters and represent jobs, New Yorkers have no sentimental attachment to these half-empty buildings that do not mean nothing. ”
Partly unoccupied, these new skyscrapers are conceived rather as financial investments. Here, the One57 tower, designed by Christian de Portzamparc, facing Carnegie Hall.
Natan Dvir / Polaris images for L’Express
Even the city’s great fortunes are hardly sensitive to the architectural prowess of 57th Street. And for good reason: “New Yorkers who can afford a $ 20 million apartment prefer to invest in a townhouse on the Upper East Side, which is much more charming,” explains Sami Karam, former boss of hedge fund, today slayer of unethical capitalism at the head of its think tank named Populyst (a contraction of population and analyst).
“There,” he says, pointing to 57th Street, which he sees from his office on the 32nd floor of a neighboring building, “there is no neighborhood life; at night, except Carnegie Hall, in the ‘Corner of 7th Avenue and’ billionaire alley ‘, it’s dead … No New Yorker wants to live here. ”
None, except one: Donald Trump, whose triplex, at the top of the Trump Tower, adjoins “the alley of billionaires”! Even Bill Ackman, head of the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, who bought a 1,300 square meter duplex, on the 75th and 76th floors of the Portzamparc “periscope”, for the record sum of $ 91.5 million, n never lived there. “I bought it for fun,” the “Wolf of Wall Street” explained in 2015.
Apartments, like discreet investments
For him as for foreign buyers, the apartments on 57th Street are conceived as investments. “In comparison with Switzerland, where banking secrecy is no longer 100% guaranteed, American real estate offers an interesting solution …”, advances Sami Karam. If, following September 11, the Patriot Act requires that the source of the money invested in the United States be traceable, the legislation provides an exception for the real estate sector. As soon as the risk of terrorist financing is eliminated, investments can therefore go through front companies.
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Unsurprisingly, dubious money from China, Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and even Venezuela has been engulfed – quite legally – in this legal vacuum. To the delight of real estate developers in New York, but also in Miami, Los Angeles and medium-sized cities.
Aware of the problem, the Treasury Department estimates that 30% of luxury apartments today are financed with suspicious money. Last August, the Trump administration confirmed measures to end the legal vacuum. This should primarily concern Miami and Florida, where real estate is driven by buyers from Latin America.
Latent crisis
“When global growth was on the go, everything was fine. But with the slowdown in the Chinese economy, falling commodity prices and recent anti-corruption initiatives in Brazil and China, things have suddenly turned around. , continues the director of Populyst. While the majority of real estate programs, which have reached maturity, are ready for delivery, demand is no longer there. ”
The white tower by architect Viñoly.
Natan Dvir / Polaris images for L’Expres
Worse, some buyers are backing down. At One57, signed Portzamparc, already two apartments – one of four rooms at $ 21 million and the other of 580 square meters at 51 million – were put back on the market last June after their initial buyers disappeared from the circulation. One was an anonymous investor, protected by a shell company, the other a Nigerian businessman on the run.
On 57th Street, after dark, the low number of lights on in the skyscrapers confirms that they are one-third or half-empty. “By the way, for the co-owners, the unoccupied apartments represent a surplus of current charges which amount to thousands of monthly dollars; a nightmare”, notes the editor-in-chief ofArchitect’sNewspaper, Willam Menking. A new real estate bubble?
“In any case, if I were in this business, I would be very nervous,” he said. Sign of the latent crisis: at 111 West, the site of the future thinnest building in the world is stopped on the 20th floor. Stopped by funding delays, it should resume and eventually reach 80 floors, and house 60 apartments. In the meantime, these setbacks make some happy: the kids of Central Park who, on their playgrounds, can still enjoy the sun a little.
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Jean Nouvel at MoMA
Under construction in 53rd Street, Jean Nouvel’s spearhead-shaped skyscraper has reached the 50th floor. There are still 23. Adjacent to MoMA, it will house the extension of the museum which will occupy three of the five lower floors.
Axel Gyldén
