For decades NYC landlords have been dividing their buildings up into tiny apartments, because more money could be made renting a floor out to six families rather than four. And as architecturally offensive as it is to see a Brooklyn brownstone subdivided into submission, it at least meant more lower-income families were being served.

Now the trend is reversing, with interesting results. An article in the Times called "Combine and Conquer" points out that "larger spaces in the city are [now] worth more per square foot than smaller ones," so what people are doing is taking two adjacent apartments, knocking out the dividing wall and combining it into one apartment. (I've even seen this done with adjacent apartments that span two different buildings, including a difference in floor levels, so that apartment-length stairs must be constructed to make up for the height difference.)

In new developments, sponsors have taken already large apartments and supersized them into sprawling homes with 3,000 or more square feet. In grand prewar buildings, buyers have combined apartments to recreate the kinds of gracious spaces that were original to the buildings. In postwar buildings, which seldom had apartments with more than two or three bedrooms, some buyers have created apartments never envisioned by the builders.

I'm all for architectural restoration, as in the case of the prewars, but I find this trend a bit disturbing as it indicates a greater shift towards serving the wealthy over the poor. Admittedly the big picture is a little more complicated than that, and you can read all about it here.