Tom Scannapieco is standing in the penthouse suite of 500 Walnut, his latest addition to the tippy-top of Philadelphia’s real estate market. The building is still under construction and the walls are a raw grey concrete. Caches of tools and building materials lie scattered about the huge room. Men from seemingly every building trade union in the city, and South Jersey besides, swarm almost every floor of the 26-story building.

500 Walnut isn’t done yet, but the views are already there to be admired, offering a vision of the city that isn’t usually available this far from the cluster of skyscrapers west of City Hall.

Look out of the easterly windows and see the Delaware River coiling gently around the city, stretching up to the Betsy Ross Bridge in the Northeast and down to the Walt Whitman Bridge in deepest South Philadelphia. The three fingers of Society Hill Towers poke up below, looking rather stubby from this height. Across the river there’s Camden City Hall and an expanse of South Jersey beyond. To the north Independence Mall stretches out, gashed by construction equipment, and then a sea of rowhouses fade off into the blue distance.

Of course the views are this spectacular in a double-decker penthouse suite with its own private elevator. Like all the units in 500 Walnut, there are no interior walls so the space is entirely customizable (all the utilities are in the floors and ceilings). There’s also robotic parking service.

In 2016, when 500 Walnut was still just a rising four-story nub, the then-imaginary penthouse sold for almost $18 million. It was the most expensive housing sale in the history of the city — surpassing the penthouse in Scannapieco’s previous ultra-luxury high rise at 1706 Rittenhouse Square Street.

“We are bargaining for that very, very small slice of the market,” said Scannapieco. “I’m not trying to appeal to a wide range of price points or types of people. And that enabled us to maximize everything. That’s our niche.”

Philadelphia isn’t seeing a boom in this kind of ultra-luxury housing. In fact, Scannapieco doesn’t have any real competition—in the city limits anyway — for new buildings at this price point. The only other new construction within striking distance is Carl Dranoff’s recently opened One Riverside, where prices start at $715,000 and the penthouse is listed at $7 million. 500 Walnut’s prices start at $3 million.

“Most developers would be paralyzed by a building of this size, but not Tom,” said Cecil Baker, the architect for 500 Walnut and One Riverside. “This is a needle tower and the wind pressure, the lateral pressure is so severe. You just don’t see them very often because they are so expensive.”

But in a city with a poverty rate as staggeringly high as Philadelphia, and a median income under $40,000, should the average city resident care about Scannapieco’s needle tower aimed at housing the wealthiest strata? Should one even, perhaps, be irritated by the ten-year abatement on the property that allows its exceedingly wealthy occupants to avoid real estate taxes for the next decade?

Scannapieco is prepared for that question. He’s been in the real estate game for decades, although he only entered Philadelphia proper in the first years of the 21st century when he started acquiring land for 1706 Rittenhouse. Before that, he’d spent his career building and marketing housing in the suburbs (including one ultra-luxury development in Bucks County’s New Hope).

Until recently, that’s where the market that he’s now selling to was almost exclusively based. The fact that the wealthy are taking a greater interest in city living, he says, is cause for celebration.

“This enables Philadelphia to attract a very influential wealthy market that can do things no other segment of the market can,” said Scannapieco. “A lot of our buyers are known for their philanthropy. They are corporate leaders who make decisions about job location, so it’s very, very important for the city to be able to have those types of people live in Philadelphia.”

The negative externalities of ultra-luxury housing in places like Manhattan, Miami, London, and Vancouver are not going to accompany 500 Walnut. Scannapieco’s clientele may “want New York,” but they aren’t the kind of people who have been purchasing ultra-luxury condominiums in Manhattan. Foreign nationals do not see Philadelphia as a market where they can park their capital in gold-plated housing in the sky. There are no Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, or other foreign nationals buying units in 500 Walnut, says Scannapieco.

Philadelphia is still a regional city, not a world city, and the people who are buying at 500 Walnut and One Riverside are almost all from the area. Scannapieco says that two-thirds of his buyers are moving in from the suburbs and that the final third are moving from elsewhere in Center City. In Dranoff’s case, it’s closer to a half and half split.