Go to any large, high-density city like New York or San Francisco, and you’ll notice a difference in costs immediately.
The price you pay for groceries, dinner at the restaurant, filling up your tank, or even your daily coffee goes up substantially. With high-paying jobs, booming economies, limited space, and soaring levels of density, cities can be expensive.
DOLLAR DISPARITY
Once again supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have roughed up American protesters on American soil. As Erdogan delivered a speech to supporters in New York City at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square on Thursday, a handful of protesters began holding up signs and yelling anti-Erdogan slogans. Men in black suits immediately rushed the protesters and began violently removing them while the crowd punched and shoved those being carried out.
Luckily for residents of New Jersey, New York and New England, Hurricane Jose isn’t expected to pass close enough to the northeastern US coast during its journey north through the Atlantic to cause any real damage. While the National Hurricane Center has warned that the category one storm is expected to cause “dangerous surf and rip currents” along the east coast for a few more days, the region will thankfully be spared the devastation of Sandy, which battered areas with comparatively tame 80 mph winds. By comparison, Irma battered Puerto Rico with gusts of up to 135 mph.
Since the late 1990s, Manhattan real estate has become one of the premier destinations for foreigners - particularly wealthy Russian and Chinese businessmen - looking to stash their money offshore, helping to transform once-derelict neighborhoods like Soho into trendy hubs for the global elite, while sending housing prices throughout the city rocketing higher, putting the American ideal of homeownership out of reach for millions of middle-class New Yorkers.
So what do you do when the bubbly market for your exorbitantly priced New York City commercial real estate collapses by over 50% in two years? Well, you lever up, of course.
As Bloomberg notes this morning, the 'smart money' at U.S. banking institutions are tripping over themselves to throw money at commercial real estate projects all while 'dumb money' buyers have completely dried up.