Who's buying these big-ticket New York City homes? In San Francisco, it's the Silicon Valley people. Conventional wisdom has it that when the IPOs go through, all the newly minted multi-millionaires will upgrade their homes in the city by the bay, making that enormously expensive real estate market even more enormously expensive.
In Los Angeles, it has mostly always been show business and music that have continued to fuel the mansion market, a market in which the discerning observer can recapitulate the world history of architecture within the space of two blocks.