Mylan Cannon/The New York Times  The Census Bureau reports increasing areas of Manhattan real estate rented or owned by out-of-towners who spend little time here.  New Yorkers who stay in town during summer and holiday weekends know the empty-streets, Potemkin-village look that parts of the city take on.  Much of 551 Madison Avenue is dark, reflecting the part-time occupancy of thousands of apartments in Manhattan.  But some Manhattan neighborhoods are assuming that vacant feeling the year round, because the people who own or rent apartments there actually live somewhere else most of the time. This explains why, in a city of bright lights, so many windows dotting the imposing facades of Fifth, Madison and Park Avenue apartment buildings are pitch dark every evening.  Wealthy out-of-towners have always had pieds-à-terre and unused investment properties in the city. What is new is how many.  In a large swath of the East Side bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 49th and 70th Streets, about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than 10 months a year because their owners or renters have permanent homes elsewhere, according to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey.  In one part of that stretch, between East 53rd and 59th Streets, more than half of the 500 apartments are occupied for two months or less. That is a higher proportion than in resort and second-home communities like Aspen, Colo.; Palm Beach, Fla.; Virginia Beach; and Litchfield, Conn.  And the ranks of part-timers are growing. Since 2000, the number of Manhattan apartments occupied by absentee owners and renters swelled by more than 70 percent, to nearly 34,000, from 19,000. They proliferated in virtually every census tract south of 110th Street, with the most pronounced surges in the East Village, SoHo, Greenwich Village, Gramercy Park, Midtown East and the Upper East Side.  “My block is like a ghost town,” said Gay Talese, the author and keen urban observer, who has lived on East 61st off Park Avenue for a half-century. “It’s dark on this street at night, and I’m not talking about summer people in the Hamptons and people who have apartments here but spend a lot of time out of town for tax reasons.”  He described the part-timers as “skim-milk New Yorkers — only 2 percent.”  Reasons abound. The construction of luxury housing, especially condominiums, has exploded in the last decade, and the market for high-end apartments has rebounded. Manhattan continues to attract foreign investors seeking a haven.  More out-of-towners contemplating retirement in the city are trying Manhattan on for size, with an apartment they visit now and then. Globalization has more executives sleeping less often in what is ostensibly their hometown. And many New Yorkers have long spent most of their time elsewhere and claimed permanent domicile there to avoid the city’s higher resident income tax.  Some other cities are concerned that too many out-of-towners buying up desirable homes will deaden neighborhoods and deplete any street life: Charleston, S.C., has subjected second homes to higher property taxes than primary residences. New York City does not, taxing second and permanent homes at the same rate, but a state tribunal this year suggested that city apartments owned by commuters could be included in the definition of a permanent abode, subjecting them to New York taxes even on income earned out of state.  Still, fears of creating dead zones have been muted in Manhattan, where congestion routinely trumps desolation as an urban crisis and where, as a result, some residents actually prefer the sense of solitude.  “I love getting up in the morning and seeing Park Avenue empty,” said Abby Leigh, an artist who lives with her husband, Mitch, the composer and real estate developer, on East 68th Street.  Among all of the 845,000 apartments and houses in Manhattan, 102,000 were identified as vacant in the 2005-9 American Community Survey. Of those, about 33,000 — or about 1 in every 25 Manhattan homes — had an owner or renter who lived there less than two months of the year.  The proportion of part-time apartments in the borough peaked at nearly 4 in 10 in 2007, then dipped with the recession and has been rising again.
Lifeless apartments are increasing in number as out-of-town owners and renters use them for a short time each year.