Photo: The Living Room at 605 West 42nd Street A new year has begun and rental predictions for NYC real estate in 2016 are already dynamic seedlings of thought. Although the city is a shapeshifting landscape with equally elusive intangible and concrete trends, it’s still fun to forecast the future.

While some modern apartments advertise their sustainability, Gotham West, the massive apartment building at 550 West 45th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, is attempting to entice future tenants with sustenance.

Need a condominium, but can’t get a mortgage? Well, there’s good news for people in that fix with some New York City property developers are converting residential developments planned as condominiums into high-end, rental apartment buildings instead. Such conversions have been seen in a variety of locations around the city. With people buying less and renting more, there is an unprecedented demand for larger apartments, which has also been proved to be extremely lucrative in the real estate scene.

When Sheffield 57, a luxury Manhattan apartment building on 57th Street, was originally built in 1979, it was a colossal building, standing 58 stories tall and holding 845 New York apartments for rent that tended towards the small; it was a building for lower-income families who wouldn’t mind the cramped living conditions if it meant they could live in the Clinton neighborhood. Fast forward to 2005, when real estate investor Kent Swig bought the building for a then-unheard of $418 million, with an eye towards consolidating the apartments for rent and turning them into luxury condos for sale. But the purchase and subsequent plans for renovation sparked a battle between the developer and the tenants who already lived there. Renters wondered what would happen to their apartments, whether they’d be able to stay, and if they’d be able to put the rent they’d already paid towards a purchase.

In an unexpected twist, Related Cos. elected to switch the luxury condos in MiMa, their 63-story glass high-rise on 42nd Street and 10th Avenue in Midtown West, to luxury rentals. Related planned for over 3 years to sell the 151 units as luxury condos, all located above the 50th floor of MiMa. The 663 luxury rentals on the lower stories were always been designated as rentals, but this sudden reversal to an all-rental building rather than a mixed sales and rentals building is more telling than it appears, though not in the way we might initially assume. This is not a case of desperate landlords panicking and using the luxury rental market as a safety net. Rather, this is a calculated decision based on the strengths and weaknesses of the rental and sales markets. If Related is making a smart decision, and it certainly appears that way, then MiMa's move to rental bodes well for the luxury rental market in Manhattan.

The words Manhattan and real estate development have long been synonymous, so it should come as no surprise when The Real Deal recently announced that the Gotham Organization would be taking on one of the largest new construction projects in Manhattan yet. The Gotham Organization project is expected to cost over $520 million and consists of four separate buildings spanning an entire Manhattan city block at 550 West 45th Street between 10th and 11th Avenue. Out of the 1,238 expected units for rent, close to 600 of them will be constructed with low-, moderate- and middle-income New Yorkers in mind.

Since a renaming campaign that began in over 50 years ago, some things have officially come off the menu in Hell’s Kitchen—grit and squalor, gang bivouacs, dire poverty. In 1959, the Manhattan neighborhood stretching from 34th to 59th Street west of 8th Avenue attempted an image makeover when grisly gang violence took the life of two young boys and generated waves of negative media coverage. That year it was alternatively named Clinton—but not unanimously.  Artists and residents in the community have argued name-politics since the beginning. Where HK has a plucky cachet, Clinton rolls of the tongue with glass sterility. Is the neighborhood a niche for Bohemians, or young urban professionals? Is graffiti art or blight? Are high-rises the future? Technical name grumbling still fills the air, but any stroll through the warehouse-y neighborhood will reveal a juxtaposition of both worlds.

At Luxury Rentals Manhattan, we are not unaware that people browsing Manhattan rental apartment listings are often looking for different things. This is why we've built our search so that NYC apartment hunters can find apartments near subways and rental listings near parks and so on. It's our hope that a more focused and specific way to search Manhattan apartments will lead to a more satisfying and successful experience. That said, there is not currently a search function at LRM that enables you to find an apartment located near a delicious hamburger. For that, we use the LRM blog. No, seriously: we've covered Shake Shack pretty extensively in the past, and we're not going to stop doing that. We do it for you, readers. And also we do it because we're hungry, and because Shake Shack is delicious. And so it is with no small amount of delight that we inform Luxury Rentals Manhattan readers that rental listings in Battery Park City will very soon be rental listings near a delicious hamburger.

Manhattan real estate is the land of acronyms and abbreviations, and from Soho apartment listings to FiDi rentals to apartments on the LES, it's one that New Yorkers speak every day without even noticing it. So, in a certain sense, MiMA -- a hybrid new luxury rental and condominium building from The Related Companies whose name is short for Middle of Manhattan -- fits right in. In just about every other way, though, MiMA stands out -- for its location on 42nd Street and 10th Avenue, at the heart of booming Clinton; for its stellar suite of amenities; for its luxurious (and not-at-all cheap) apartments for rent. MiMA is as ambitious and extravagantly amenitized a new construction luxury rental development as Manhattan has seen since... well, since Midtown West neighbor The Ashley, probably. But MiMA is also further proof that Manhattan's high-end rental market is returning to robust health -- Manhattan rental listings don't come much more luxurious than this.