Who Actually Owns New York? Because It's Not New Yorkers.

You hear stories about billionaires from overseas buying up condos in Manhattan and never setting foot in them. I always assumed it was exaggerated. Rich people buying a few penthouses — whatever. That's not why regular people can't afford to live in New York.

Then I looked at the actual numbers. And it's worse than the stories.


The Shell Company Problem

37% of Manhattan properties are owned through LLC shell companies — five times the New York State average (Reinvent Albany, 2023). At the $10 million price point, more than half of purchases involve corporate owners. At $100 million, it exceeds 80% (Brookings Institution). At the Time Warner Center alone, more than 200 shell companies own apartments, and at least 16 of those owners have been the subject of government inquiries.

Why shell companies? Because until January 2026, you could buy a $30 million condo in Manhattan and nobody had to know your name. Not the city. Not the IRS. Nobody. You set up an LLC, wire the money, and the property records just show some vague company name registered in Delaware or Wyoming.

The Treasury Department got suspicious enough to start requiring disclosure on all-cash luxury purchases through something called Geographic Targeting Orders. What they found: roughly 30% of those transactions involved buyers who had previously been flagged for suspicious financial activity (FinCEN). Three out of ten. In luxury real estate.


The Empty Towers

Here's the part that makes my blood boil. Census data shows that roughly 30% of apartments in the quadrant between 49th and 70th Street, Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, sit vacant for ten or more months a year (U.S. Census Bureau). Some of the most expensive real estate on the planet, and nearly a third of it is empty.

Citywide, nearly 75,000 apartments are classified as pied-a-terre — occasional use only (NYC Housing Survey). That number jumped by 20,000 units in just three years. Seventy-five thousand apartments sitting mostly empty in a city where people are sleeping on the subway.

That's enough housing to shelter the entire NYC homeless population. Every single person. And instead those apartments are functioning as safety deposit boxes for people who live in Beijing or Moscow or Dubai.


Who's Buying

Chinese investors are the single largest group of foreign residential buyers in the U.S., spending $13.7 billion between April 2024 and March 2025 — an 83% jump from the year before (National Association of Realtors, 2025 Foreign Buyer Report). The average Chinese buyer spends $1.16 million per purchase, more than double the national average. Nine percent of those purchases are in New York.

Buyers from Russia and the Middle East concentrate on luxury spots like Columbus Circle and Central Park West. The motivation isn't to live there. It's wealth diversification — parking money in a stable asset in a stable country, far from the political instability back home.

And it's accelerating. Foreign buyer activity doubled in early 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. In the first nine months of 2025, foreign investors poured over $7 billion into NYC multifamily properties alone (Commercial Observer).


"It's Not the Main Reason Prices Are High"

I've seen this argument and I want to address it directly. A Wharton study found that areas with heavy foreign investment saw prices grow 8 percentage points more than comparable areas without it (Gorback & Keys, NBER). The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston confirmed that Chinese investment in particular created significant local price shocks. Most economists say zoning and supply constraints are the bigger driver.

Fine. I'm not arguing that foreign buyers are the only reason New York is unaffordable. But 8 percentage points of extra price growth is real money. On a $500,000 apartment, that's $40,000 more than you should be paying — because someone in another country decided your neighborhood was a good place to park cash.

And here's the thing about "only 10%." In a market as tight as New York, 10% isn't a rounding error. Ten percent of Manhattan's housing stock is thousands of apartments. Remove those from the supply and every remaining unit gets more expensive. That's how markets work — when supply drops even a little in a city with inelastic housing, prices don't drop a little. They spike.

A study out of Oxford found that without foreign investment, average house prices in the UK would be roughly 19% lower (Oxford Academic, Journal of Economic Geography, 2025). The researchers specifically found the effect "trickles down" from luxury properties to affordable ones. The penthouse sale doesn't just affect penthouse prices — it reprices the entire building, then the block, then the neighborhood.


Other Cities Tried to Fix This

Vancouver slapped a 15% foreign buyer tax in 2016, later raised to 20%. Foreign purchases dropped from 13.2% of the market to 1.7% in three months (UBC Sauder School of Business). Prices initially dipped about 5-6% in high-foreign-buyer areas. But then they bounced back, because the underlying supply problem was still there.

London added surcharges. Australia went further — in April 2025, they banned foreign purchases of existing homes outright for two years.

None of these fully solved affordability. But that's not the right question. The question is whether they helped. And in Vancouver, foreign buying went from 13% to under 2%. That's thousands of homes that went to Canadians instead of overseas investors.


New York's Response Has Been Embarrassing

In 2019, after a hedge fund manager bought a $238 million penthouse, New York tried to pass a pied-a-terre tax. It would've charged 0.5% to 4.5% on properties over $5 million used as second homes. Estimated revenue: $650 million a year (Brookings Institution).

It died. The real estate lobby killed it.

What actually passed instead was a narrow LLC disclosure requirement — but only for small residential properties, not luxury condos. The big transparency law, the LLC Transparency Act, didn't take effect until January 1, 2026 (NY Governor's Office). And even that only lets law enforcement see who's behind the shell companies. The public still can't.

Oh, and here's a fun one: real estate agents are still exempt from anti-money laundering rules under the Patriot Act. Banks have to report suspicious transactions. Lawyers have to. Real estate agents? Nope. You can help a sanctioned oligarch buy a $50 million apartment and you have zero legal obligation to ask where the money came from.


My Take

I get that this isn't simple. I get that zoning reform matters, that we need to build more housing, that foreign investment isn't the only problem. All true.

But when 75,000 apartments sit empty in a city where teachers and nurses and firefighters can't afford to live — something is broken. When 57% of apartments in a Central Park neighborhood are vacant most of the year while families double up in the Bronx — the system is failing the people it's supposed to serve.

Even if foreign investment is "only" 25% of the problem, that's still 25% of the problem. And unlike zoning reform, which takes decades of political fights, restricting foreign purchases of residential property is something that could happen tomorrow. Australia did it. Vancouver taxed it. We could too.

I'm not saying ban all foreign investment. Commercial real estate, new construction — fine. But existing homes in a city where Americans are already priced out? There's no good argument for letting overseas investors outbid the people who actually live and work here.

New York used to be a place where you could be broke and still build a life. Now it's a place where empty apartments outnumber available ones, and the people who own them don't even know what borough they're in.

Is that really the city we want?


Data sources: Reinvent Albany (LLC shell company ownership data), FinCEN — Geographic Targeting Orders (suspicious transaction data), U.S. Census Bureau (Central Park area vacancy data), NYC Housing and Vacancy Survey (pied-a-terre counts), National Association of Realtors — 2025 Foreign Buyer Report (Chinese buyer spending, foreign buyer trends), Commercial Observer (multifamily investment data), Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (Chinese investment price shocks), Wharton School/NBER — Gorback & Keys (foreign capital and house prices), Oxford Academic/Journal of Economic Geography (UK trickle-down price effects), UBC Sauder School of Business (Vancouver foreign buyer tax impact), Brookings Institution (pied-a-terre tax proposal), NY Governor's Office (LLC Transparency Act).