Supersized Family As Status Symbol

And no one needs the suburbs now that the suburbs are here:

While the national housing market is experiencing a major slowdown, Manhattan’s wealthiest families are buying up as many apartments as they can and combining them into rambling mega-units. Brokers and developers say that buyers in this segment of the market are finding that they have few large apartments to choose from, and so they are creating the spaces they want from a half dozen one- and two-bedroom apartments. While some buyers are swallowing up whole floors of new condominiums, others are buying neighboring apartments in older co-op buildings as they become available.

Gary Barnett, the chief executive of the Extell Development Corporation, which is building the Ariel West at 245 West 99th Street, where the Ashleys bought, said the building has 70 apartments after seven units were combined into three.

These combination units are not bargains: two-bedroom apartments in the building typically cost $1.5 million to $2 million, and three- and four-bedroom apartments cost $2.5 million to $3 million.

Mr. Barnett plans to include 4,500- to 8,500-square-foot apartments in two projects planned for the Upper West Side for more families like the Ashleys. “A number of people we’re seeing who have three, four and even five children need these spaces,” he said.

This trend is seen most often on the Upper East and Upper West Sides. For example, in the last two months, five families paid $5.5 million to $13 million for apartment combinations at the Brompton at 205 East 85th Street. These resulting apartments range from 4,500 to 8,000 square feet, according to the Related Companies, the Brompton’s developer.

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Stephanie Coontz, the director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research group in Chicago, described this as an “hourglass economy” with more rich people at the top and more poor people at the bottom. At the top, the superrich are finding that there are so many “merely rich” people that they have to find new ways to distinguish themselves. They are able to set themselves apart by having larger families and larger combined apartments to house them.

“You’ve got this incredible wealth at the top, and more people jockeying to put themselves at the top of that,” Ms. Coontz said.