Can Our Richest Dodge the Climate-Change Bullet?
So where do you see yourself living the rest of your life? The richest among us are keeping their options all open.
On the one hand, our deepest pockets are buying up new super-luxury abodes as if the gravy trains that their lives have become will never stop running.
On the other hand, our richest are running scared. Or, to be more accurate, our rich are descending scared — into fabulously luxurious underground bunkers.
Should these behaviors leave the rest of us optimistic about what the future may bring? Or pessimistic? Our wealthiest need not choose one or the other. They can easily afford to cover all the bases, and, these days, they’re doing just that.
The bases on the optimistic side — like Manhattan’s hottest new luxury condos — certainly don’t come cheap. The newest luxury lodgings now on sale in the Big Apple, gushes one just-published insider analysis, include a host of new units going for over $10 million each.
“Outdoor living has become a given,” notes Mansion Global’s Rebecca Bratburd, with developers emphasizing at every opportunity “landscaped rooftop spaces for entertaining and relaxation.”
Consider 80 Clarkson, a still-under-construction high-end Manhattan enclave that luxury builders will be opening up next year right along the Hudson. This enclave’s two connected limestone towers — one 45 floors high, the other a mere 37 — will once complete be offering up some 112 luxury units, at prices ranging from $7 million each to over $60 million.
Landscaped roof decks will top both of these towers, and the development’s “complex cubic form of stepped setbacks and pocketed terraces” will keep splashes of greenery outside nearly every unit’s window. This “transformative project,” exults one local realtor, will redefine “luxury living along Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront.”
Among the project’s many lush amenities: a porte-cochère entrance. Such entrances have been around since the reign of the ridiculously rich French “Sun King” Louis XIV. They’ve become, over recent years, the “hidden perk that New York’s mega-rich now demand.”
Back in Louis XIV’s day, porte cochères — coach gateways — offered royals a private, covered entrance for horse-drawn carriages and their passengers. Modern porte-cochères can run up to triple the size of an average Manhattan apartment, enough space to let chauffeured limousines pick up and deposit well-heeled passengers inside a completely covered entrance way off-limits to prying eyes.
“With New York experiencing a new gilded age,” news reports started noting a half-dozen years ago, “porte cochères are making a comeback in high-end buildings.”
But gilded ages have a nasty habit of collapsing, and these days, as Yahoo! Finance reported last month, “political turmoil, wars, and natural disasters” have our super rich hedging their bets. Many are investing in estates and luxury properties that sit in off-the-beaten-track remote locations.