One New York Developer's Ingeniously Awful Plan to Segregate the Poor

Extell Development Company built a perfect metaphor for New York City's gaping inequality into the blueprints for a 33-story luxury condo that's slated to rise on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The 274-unit waterfront tower will contain 55 affordable housing units, a concession that earned the developer rights to build more square footage than the neighborhood's zoning would normally allow.

Those 55 below-market apartments will face the back of the building, not the riverfront. And now it turns out, via the blog West Side Rag, that the people who live there (of modest income, making less than 60 percent of the area median) will have their own separate rear entrance to the building, too.