The bar for “luxury real estate” continually rises in New York these days—wine cellars, heated pools or screening rooms are increasingly par for the course. But perhaps the most coveted amenity continues to be the parking garage, says the New York Times. Their recent tally of listings in Manhattan and Brooklyn with garages included a dozen from $1.195 million, for a Crown Heights brownstone, to $18.75 million for a Greenwich Village carriage house. A garage, according to Jonathan Miller, chief executive of Miller Samuel Inc., can easily add five percent to a house’s asking price, and sometimes as much as 25 percent. One Bedford-Stuyvesant resident moved into a Crown Heights four-bedroom brownstone with a garage, which he’s now selling for $1.195 million — apparently having all that storage space for rakes and such resulted in an insatiable desire for the suburban life. The article comes on the heels of a Transportation Alternatives study called “Suburbanizing the City,” which critiques the Bloomberg administration’s policy of requiring developers to build off-street parking with new buildings, which, they say, will add 170,000 new cars on city streets by 2030. Might make the buildings more desirable and valuable, but, according to TA, garages and off-street parking could add 431,000 tons of CO2 per year by 2030.
The Ultimate Luxury: A Garage [NY Times]
Suburbanizing the City (PDF) [TA]