Item — HN Reader

"'High end' here means 'luxurious' – a marketing position for a building."

In London it has long been a joke that all new builds are branded "luxury apartments" as a matter of course, even if they are really low specification, i.e. the term "luxury" has become both obligatory and in the process meaningless.

1 comments

In the US they are called "luxury rentals", so the marketeers aren't constrained to marketing merely apartments. They can be called condos or townhomes... or whatever else their imaginations can come up with. The reality is: stacked boxes with paper thin walls and minimal property outside the box.

Not sure about other cities, but in Los Angeles a "luxury housing unit" can be exempted from rent control (there's an application process) if it would otherwise be subject to it.

I imagine that a lot of the dilution has come from (re)developers labeling units as luxury and doing the bare minimum to qualify, specifically to avoid rent control.

Blackstone is spending millions to retain such exemptions trying to block Prop 10 as we type

No safeguards like those in Phoenix, it's still the wild, wild west of politics & regs here.