Here's the quote from the NY Times article [0] your Atlantic article references: > Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015,

Here's the quote from the NY Times article [0] your Atlantic article references: > Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015, or 3,695 of 7,727 apartments, remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts by Nancy Packes Data Services, a real estate consultancy and database provider. So we're talking about 3,695 unsold apartments. There are 3.5 million housing units in New York City. So that's about a tenth of one percent . The problem here isn't that the statistic is wrong; it's that anybody thinks 7k new units over a 5 year period in a metro area of 20 million people is anything more than a curiosity. The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that it offers a sensational explanation -- usually some foreign, outside force -- for a complex problem, absolves the believer of any culpability, and provides an easy, unsympathetic target on which to dump all their rage. "Foreign oligarchs are buying up all the real estate and locking the rest of us out and that's what's wrong with the housing market" is exactly that kind of theory. And 3500 unsold units over 5 years is emphatically not evidence of its veracity. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-york-decade-real-estate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-york-decad...