Why do the super-rich treat affordable housing in the Bronx as a lucrative asset class?| Annia Ciezadlo

Affordable housing should never have become an asset class for the rich to make returns on investments. Of course this system is broken

In New York, some things never change. If you die in a fire, it's always your fault. When a fire started in a heater and ripped down the hallway of an apartment building in December 1998, killing four people in a blast of heat and smoke, city officials framed the fire as a tragedy that could have been avoided if people had only remembered to close their doors. People should close the door behind them when leaving a [burning] apartment," said then-fire chief Daniel Nigro - now the city's fire commissioner.

They would not have died if they had stayed in their apartments," said the city's then-mayor, the now-infamous Rudolph Giuliani, musing that it's easier to blame things on mechanisms rather than on what human beings understand, do or don't do".