The restaurants and shops (everything from 7-Eleven to Cartier) are the financial engine of Changi and even locals are lured by a tax exemption extended into the public areas and a price guarantee that doubles the refunded difference of any lower price found in downtown Singapore, part of an effort to combat airport price gouging.

BBC: Changi: The airport of your dreams

"What is going to happen is lower and lower-middle income families squeezed out of downtown and glamorous suburban locations are going to be pushed economically into these McMansions at the suburban fringe, " said Nelson.

CNN: Is America's suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare?

The area will become history's largest construction site, or so says the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Centre, an agency that oversees all downtown Manhattan building projects.

ECONOMIST: How much, and how little, has changed

It has the lowest space availability in the city of the three submarkets (Midtown, Midtown South, and Downtown), and that availability in anticipated to go even lower.

FORBES: Manhattan Real Estate Has Become The Gold Standard

Urbane and urban: "Hitch" is very much a tale of Manhattan -- lower Manhattan, where Ms. Mendes's Sara works as a gossip columnist for an upmarket downtown tabloid, and farther-flung parts of the island, where Hitch counsels gauche, lovelorn men in the art of approaching and attracting the women of their dreams.

WSJ: Will Power