tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7321349.post2398396761024700012..comments2024-03-18T22:21:33.261-07:00Comments on The Debate Link: Poor DoorDavid Schraubhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04946653376744012423noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7321349.post-9576844803130805932013-09-02T19:23:55.239-07:002013-09-02T19:23:55.239-07:00I'd want to see the design before I judged thi...I'd want to see the design before I judged this. Theoretically much of the interaction among residents of a building happens in the elevator (at least, I've always had more interaction there than in the lobby). But there's nothing necessarily illegitimate about a building design where the most expensive part of the housing has a different elevator than the rest. It may be a practical necessity of the design. <br /><br />For example, the building where I lived while working at a law firm in NYC was made up of two towers: one facing onto Central Park (and thus mind-bendingly expensive) and the other on a street (so only appallingly expensive). The two towers were connected by a lobby -- enabling the cheaper back tower to have a Central Park mailing address -- but necessarily had separate elevators, because there's no way to have a single elevator for two distinct building towers. Since there was a lobby connecting the two, with a single doorman and small exercise room, we in the back tower could use the front entrance on the Park (which was very attractive and was where the doorman was, so the door wasn't locked), but often used the back entrance (opening into a cement wall area, buzzed through a locked door after camera inspection by the doorman) because it was more convenient for the back tower.<br /><br />They also secured the elevator so you used a fob to get to your floor, which was for the security reason of ensuring that people who entered the building for commercial purposes (there was a doctor's office among others) couldn't access the residential floors. But it also meant those of us on the cheaper back tower and lower floors couldn't get to, say, the penthouse with views of the park.<br /><br />I easily can imagine a design for legitimate architectural reasons where there might not even be a connecting lobby, so there would be different entrances from the exterior to get to your apartment. So long as the building's residents share amenities (exercise, storage, bike rooms, etc), i.e. the lower-income residents can get to the same spaces the higher-income residents can get to within the building, I don't think this is a problem.<br /><br />Obviously the motives can be very different when dealing with low-income residents as opposed to merely less-rich residents, but NYC real estate is a bizarre enough thing that I'm a little cautious about leaping to judgment based on reports from the NY Post.PGhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09381347581328622706noreply@blogger.com