Viewing entries tagged
Real Estate
According to this website's top 10 list of the dreamiest neighborhoods in America my neighborhood ranks number 7. That said, based on the competition (Scottsdale? Ew.) on this list I'm not sure I'm happy about this.
#7. Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York. This neighborhood's historic charm, top-notch restaurants and shopping, and proximity to Prospect Park make it an attractive alternative to Manhattan for families and professionals. Seventh and Fifth avenues are Park Slope's main commercial areas, while other streets are occupied by renovated brownstones, which can sell for millions of dollars.
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Okay, the headline is slightly disingenuous: Iranian-American home developer Fred Milani is putting up his 16,500 square-foot replica White House located in Atlanta for sale on account of the economic downturn. Asking price? $9.88 million.
This person estimates the actual White House (132 rooms, 55,000 sq ft, 18 acres, 16 family-guest rooms, an underground bunker, 3 kitchens, 3 elevators, and 28 fireplaces) is worth today $308,058,000. It was originally built at a cost of $232,372. Slaves weren't unionized back then.
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Photographer Jay Maisel purchased 190 Bowery, a six-story, 72-room, 35,000-square-foot building, 42 years ago for $102,000. He still resides there with his wife and daughter. Today it's worth anywhere from $30 million to upwards of $70 motherfucking million. That is an insane ROI.
Along with the usual financial difficulties faced by artists this Manhattan neighborhood back then "was where people ended up, not where they aspired to live." And when Maisel moved in "the main floor was knee-deep in garbage and coated in soot." Despite its unassuming and graffiti marked exterior, today:
The house now feels like a dream world, or a benign version of the vast hotel in The Shining. Hallways go on forever. Rooms are filled with projects in various phases of completion. The renovations, mostly done by Maisel, are very “artists live here.”
I want to live there.
Read more here.
Curbed linked to scans of a New York Magazine article from May 28, 1984 examining the gentrification of the Lower East Side where in 1984: the "Christodora," a derelict 16 floor building on “Ave B facing Tompkins Square Park” that was “boarded up, ripped out, and flooded” and purchased for $62,500 in 1975 was sold eight years later for $1.3 million to Harry Skydell, a 26-year-old lawyer-cum-inchoate real estate developer of just four months.
In the context of today's and well, since 1984, real estate market in NYC, the article's naivety is downright quaint and almost charming if it wasn't so darn depressing to read in retrospect (and altogether predictable)! Here are a couple choice excerpts from the article:
Some people who have lived there for years are understandably unhappy, particularly many of the shop keepers who are unprotected by rent control. Others are mostly bemused. “I've lived in my rent-controlled apartment for years and pay $115 a month,” says one man. “I live on the Lower East Side. The young kids who just moved in upstairs and pay $700 a month for the same space -- they live in the East Village.”
[...]
The rents for redone apartments in bombed-out sections of Avenue B soared—sometimes even topping prices for equivalent space on the UES. On lower Second Avenue, a 1200-square-foot two-bedroom apartment was recently put on the market for $2,000 a month. On First Avenue and 1st Street, an 850-square-foot loft rents for $1,200.
And of course only one year and and a week after owning the Christodora, Skydell and his partners doubled their $1.3 million investment when they sold it to another developer for $3 million.
Today, apartments in the Christodora building are really fucking expensive.
Read more here.
One of the remaining bastions of affordable housing in Manhattan might be reduced to yet another playground for the rich, trust-fundy, or finance-affiliated. MetLife announced that it might sell Stuyvesant Town and its coterminous counterpart Peter Cooper Village. Of course, MetLife stocks rose following this announcement. I've said it often, but I'll say it again: real estate, particularly in Manhattan, is ridiculous. Why is Peter Cooper so famous? The man invented Jell-O for god's sake. JELL-O. Without him, we would have never had Bill Cosby in those ads shrilling for that gelatin goodness...or jello shots, for that matter.
Since no one was killed, it's okay to gawk at this surveillance video recording (Amazingly, not a YouTube clip) of the gas explosion that completely demolished the townhouse on 62nd Street. In New York City, real estate is practically pornographic. People obsess over it and fanatically write and blog about it. When a studio apartment that is the size of a closet costs more than houses in most markets, the obsession--sometimes voyeuristic--with real estate in NYC is understandable. So, for some real estate buffs, watching the building explosion must have been like watching a snuff film.