Equinox, the $225-a-month luxury gym chain, is getting into the hospitality business, the Wall Street Journal reports. Equinox will be opening its first health-and-fitness-oriented hotel in Hudson Yards in 2018, with a Los Angeles location set to open in 2019. They hope to eventually build 75 worldwide.
Equinox’s parent company is Related Holdings, a real estate investment company. Related is the primary developer of Hudson Yards, the massive redevelopment project that will turn Manhattan’s far west side into a Battery Park City-like condo complex. This means that amongst these luxury condos will be a luxury hotel from an already-established brand catering to people like this chill-seeming dude:
“[the hotel gym] is a deciding factor for me,” said Mark Mobius, head of Franklin Templeton Investments’ emerging-markets group who is on the road about 300 days a year. “If a hotel has a tiny gym, I look elsewhere.”
There has been a 21% increase in the number of hotel rooms in New York City in the past five years, with another 27,000 in the pipeline, according to Crain’s. New York has seen a boom in hotel construction mainly due to hotels’ popularity with developers and investors, since they are a reliable source of profit from their markup and turnover. An Equinox hotel is just another bar in the gate that makes New York a community for the rich, a place to store capital rather than a place to live or actually experience. If you’re visiting New York and want an affordable place to stay, you’ll probably have to book an Airbnb in some rando’s apartment in Bed-Stuy, because now even private homes are hotels that enrich the coffers of another $20 billion-dollar company. Soon, there will be gleaming condos and hotels all over the city, and no one to inhabit them but coyotes.
(Image: Google Maps)
