Asking tough questions about “PEAK” luxury real estate

Glad to see @GiveBackHomes address Luxury Connect, and wonder if the content went beyond cause marketing to raise uncomfortable questions about housing justice and socially-responsible real estate development? Is socially-responsible LUXURY real estate an oxymoron? Why ask? As Luxury Connects meets, NPR Is interviewing the author of The Geography of Risk, and the urgency of moral questions is hard to ignore:

1. Is building $3 trillion dollars of real estate along shorelines (the Atlantic & Gulf coast alone) threatened by climate change prudent, fair to taxpayers who pick up the cost after devastating storms?

http://bit.ly/gRiskNPR (share via social media)

2. Do luxury towers that function as safety deposit boxes for the global elite, aka “Swanktuaries” distort affordability, create zombie neighborhoods and displace ordinary people from cities that are becoming childless?

http://bit.ly/TaxRESwank (share via social media)

Alternatively, did @GiveBackHomes’s address appeal to the audience’s sense of noblesse oblige like prior generations, inspiring some in the luxury real estate community — developers, owners as well as brokers, to share their wealth, expand the economic pie or seed sustainable change, for example by partnering with nonprofits like @NewStoryCharity or other transformative innovators?

Whether they become targets for luxury / mansion / wealth taxes or become as unfashionable as wearing mink coats, don’t think this columnist is alone when he says you don’t need to be a wealth-hating advocate of the Green New Deal to cheer Manhattan’s property price “bloodbath”:

http://bit.ly/CheerLuxRESlump (share via social media)

As tax write-offs are capped, foreign buyers retreat, unsold inventories grow, pipelines pause and million-dollar markdowns spread as McMansions sit on the market over a year, is anyone admitting we’ve seen “PEAK luxury real estate” (at least for a while)?  Or worse, does the stagnant luxury housing market foreshadow a broader real estate tipping point or recession?

Finally, is anyone asking, as Millard Fuller founder of Habitat for Humanity might, what will happen to luxury real estate if the next president builds housing policies based on a “theology of enough?”

What’s the responsible thing to do, for the climate, for a more just distribution of wealth, and for future generations?

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Footnote: There really is an online course in socially-responsible real estate development and its remarkably affordable, just $99 per course, two-course module:

http://bit.ly/SocRespREDev_Edx (share via social media)

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