Unlike the rest of us common folk, those who can afford to live in Zaha Hadid's newest apartments will breathe the freshest air in Manhattan.
The luxe units, which are selling from $5 to $50 million, include filtered air. Ground broke on 520 West 28th Street in 2014, and the building should open by 2017.
Starting before the move-in date, oxygen will be filtered four times and then pumped into every apartment, Related Companies' marketing manager Natalie Johnson told Tech Insider.
Although New York City's air quality finally met national standards from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last year, it's still not great.
The EPA measures PM 2.5, or air particles that can lodge in the lungs and cause asthma and chronic lung disease. PM 2.5 starts to hurt your health when it hits 35.5, but the World Health Organization recommends that PM 2.5 shouldn't exceed 10.
NYC's current PM 2.5 level is 26.
High-end builders are increasingly offering pure air to apartment buyers, especially in dense cities like New York and San Francisco, according to the Wall Street Journal. The San Francisco-based developer Troon Pacific, for example, recently designed a new $500 million apartment complex including air that is continuously filtered.
Purified air might be a luxury in these cities, but it's a necessity in other large urban areas where air pollution is a health epidemic. For example, some scientists estimate that China's smog claims 1.6 million lives a year.As a result, education officials recently announced a plan to include air purification systems in every new school, according to the Beijing Times. Wealthy buyers and renters in Beijing commonly spend thousands of dollars to buy their own filters, The New York Times reports.
As for Hadid's building, clean air will be included in each apartments' price tag. In an ideal world, of course, that would be free.
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