General

Just a reminder that the Brownstoner one-year anniversary party will be taking place this Saturday from 4 to 7pm at the Pioneer bar in Red Hook. Lots of drink specials and a full barbecue menu. Plus a chance to buy Brownstoner t-shirts at a 20% discount! Kids are welcome so bring the whole family–we are.
Directions [Pioneer Bar-B-Q]

We’ve lived in some pretty nice dormitories in our day, but nothing campared to the pre-war splendor that 180 Pace University students are enjoying this year in Brooklyn Heights. The Clark Street residence hall–with its black and white marble floors lined with brass and gold accents, its roman columns and its hallway candelabras–was completed this summer. Students, who are shelling out between $12,000 and $14,000 for the nine-month school year to live there, also get use of the flat screen televisions, DVD players and ethernet service that come with each room. Times have changed, but then again we were still a couple of years away from having an email account when we graduated from college.
Clark St Residence is Place to Live [Pace Press]

Just a heads-up that Brownstoner will be throwing a one-year anniversary party on Saturday, October 1 from 4 to 7 pm at the family-friendly Pioneer Bar in Red Hook. More details to follow.
Directions [Pioneer Bar-B-Q]
Local Watering Holes [Brownstoner]

Something to consider for your next move…

According to the NY Post, Fort Greene homeowners are getting smacked by sanitation cops with $100 “dirty sidewalk” fines for s couple of slips of paper. We had our own run-in in South Williamsburg with a real gem of a sanitation cop last year when a neighbor from two doors down started hurling bags of garbage at our front door, mistakenly under the impression that we had been putting our household garbage in his cans. Mrs. B, baby in arms, stepped outside to confront the guy just as a sanitation cop pulled up. As the large man was screaming in her face menacingly, the cop, rather than try to do anything to physically protect her, starting writing her a ticket for the garbage on our stoop. After the neighbor finally backed off, Mrs. B asked for the sanitation cop’s name to act as a witness if she decided to file assault charges. The cop just shrugged his shoulders and said, “I didn’t see nuthin’.” And with that drove off.

Any other stories about run-ins with the sanitation cops?
City Play Dirty with Tix [NY Post]

As we’ve confessed on a number of occasions, our programming skills don’t extend much beyond the basic html we need to write our daily postings. So we’re going to need some help creating a new feature we want to launch in September and are hoping there might be a coder out there willing to lend a hand. If you are interested in helping out, please shoot us an email.
Thanks a lot.
Brownstoner

We’re happy to welcome new blog Eating for Brooklyn on to the scene. Written by Pete Hassler (cool last name, no?), the blogspot-hosted site promises to explore “the bounty of Brooklyn,” including restaurants, farmer’s markets, and other “hidden gems.” We’re down–we think the borough’s non-Smith Street establishments could use a lot more coverage. We hope he’ll supplement his verbiage with some photos going forward and alert us to new openings on the horizon.
Homepage [Eating for Brooklyn]

Well, we finally got our act together and, like any good Brooklyn-based company, have made ourselves a t-shirt. With the help of our friend Matt’s Fort Greene-based company Pigeon Extraordinary, we cranked out an initial batch of 40 or so shirts (roughly 10 per size), including some for the tiny tots in your life. We have no idea what the demand will be, but, like Doritos, if you keep crunchin’, we’ll make more. We’ve only got one color selection at this point–green and brown print on light blue background. Hit the link below to go to the store that Matt’s also running for us. Full outsourcing–we love it! BTW, you’ll need a paypal account to get get your hands on one of these babies.
Brownstoner T-Shirts for Sale [Brownstoner Store] (more…)

Pastoral scenes to kick off your weekend…

We just got an email from a loyal Brownstoner who recently left Clinton Hill for Denmark. Unfortunately for her, she went out of the frying pan and into the fire:

The market is just as wild in Copenhagen as it is in New York. And everyone just says the same “This can absolutely NOT go on for any longer!” Half the people here are eagerly waiting for the market to crash. We went to an open house for a wreck last weekend and it looked like a block party!!! And it wasn’t exactly cheap!

Kouun wo inorimasu, Julie!

According to blogger The Food Section, Italians can’t get enough of this Brooklyn-brand gum. The one-track-minded boys over at Curbed see this as yet another sign of a bubble in our dear borough.
Brooklyn’s Bubble, Now in Mint [Curbed]

In the latest issue of Time Out NY, we learn that even wealthy movie stars have brownstone horror stories:

Having moved her brood from a cramped Manhattan apartment to a cozy brownstone in her home borough of Brooklyn, Connelly is also well acquainted–despite her presumably hefty budget–with the hell that is Gotham real estate…”Right after we moved in, the toilets started overflowing out of the tops of the tanks. Then it gets even weireder: We took a trip to Scotland, and the minute we get off the plane, there are all these voice messages from our alarm company saying the fire department is at our house. We later found out that something happened on the fifth floor of the building, and water was gushing everywhere–through the ceiling, down the walls…By the end of it, there was a foot of water in our kitchen.”

We’re not sure the “cozy” description is terribly apt, but, man, what a bummer!
Brooklyn’s Hottest Mom [Time Out NY]

Well, folks, it doesn’t look like there are a whole lot of open houses this weekend–apparently the brokers have done so well in this bull market that they’ll all be at their beach houses. We’re heading out for a few days of rustic living at Mrs. B’s family’s farm in Virginia and will be back in business on Tuesday. Enjoy.
Brownstoner

Business Week tackled the bubble question last week. One of the experts interviewed was Frank Nothaft, chief economist, Freddie Mac, whose view, we’ll admit, should be taken with a grain of salt given the vested interest his employer has in keeping the party going:

Housing is local, local, local by nature, and it’s the local economy driving valuation of a home. The large markets people think about — New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. — where we’ve seen double-digit home-value gains in the last three or four years, are driven by economic growth and rising family income, coupled with a 40-year low in mortgage rates. I would worry about local markets that have weak economies, where the unemployment rate has gone up over the last couple years, or where we have begun to see a bit more of a speculative fervor (by that I mean: A lot of investor vs. owner-occupant purchases).

Comment: New York economy seems okay and very low investor-to-owner ratio.
Housing Bubble — or Bunk? [Business Week]

Blogger Sassy, who started putting his two cents in to the Comments section recently, is making a move from one white-hot real estate market–San Diego–to another–Brooklyn. We dig his rationale:

Sassy is a sucker for pre-war apartments, and if I’m gonna spend 2500 a month to own a 1BR, it’s gonna be in NYC, not San Diego (sorry Dago!). The stucco 70′s shitbox will not cut the mustard.

Word. Sassy’s Top 5 Hoods in the County of Kings? 1) Clinton Hill/Fort Greene; 2) Bay Ridge; 3) Red Hook; 4) Prospect Heights; 5) Ditmas Park.
NYC 2K5 [Vista Seeker]

Reader’s Digest recently rated the country’s cleanest and dirtiest cities. As you can see, the Big Apple didn’t do so well…

50 Cleanest (and Dirtiest) Cities [Reader's Digest]

A recent study by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch found that the richest Americans have been cutting back on their real estate exposure as the rest of the country has been loading up:

The World Wealth Report showed that Americans with $1 million or more in liquid assets cut back their real-estate holdings to 13% of their portfolios in 2004, down from 17% in 2003. The decline followed an increase in 2003. The rich increased their investment levels in hedge funds, bonds and cash. “They’re bringing down their total level of exposure and taking some risks off the table,” says James P. Gorman, former head of Merrill’s private-client group and now head of corporate acquisitions, strategy and research…Since the wealthy are often at the forefront of investing and financial trends, market experts say their shift could be a leading indicator of a market peak.

Rich Lower Risks on Mansion, Sweet Mansion [Wall Street Journal]

What an embarassment. This article made us so glad that we no longer live in Manhattan and that our children will not have to grow up around the kind of shallow, materialistic people epitomized by Gary Rabin. Hey, we’ve got nothing against double-wide townhouses, believe us, we just wish you didn’t have to be a one-dimensional, status-hungry jerk to own one:

WHEN Gary Rabin closed on a 38-foot-wide New York City town house this month, he happily acknowledged that his new home’s girth would make him the envy of the tony town-house set. He had started off in 2003 with a 19.6-foot-wide brownstone on a quiet Greenwich Village block – wide enough by any conventional brownstone standards. There was no need to hang his head in shame the way he might have had he bought, say, a 13-foot-wide property. But being slightly below the coveted 20-foot mark, it wasn’t the sort of statistic he was likely to brag about among his real estate-savvy friends at dinner parties. In the fall of 2004, he found what he was looking for: a 38-foot-wide town house a few blocks away, a massive piece of real estate for New York. Sure, it was a lot more expensive, but he’s a lot happier, too…”There’s an element of pride when you walk out the door in the morning,” Mr. Rabin says.

Gag.
Quest for a Wide Town House [NY Times]

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting interview with Joel Kotkin, author of “The City: A Global History,” in which Kotkin prescribes a focus on basic middle-class amenities like schools and infrastructure rather than constructing extravagant cultural centers. We thought it was relevant given all the discussions surrounding stadiums in New York:

To [Kotkin], attracting and keeping people in urban environments is less about projecting an image of “cool” and more about providing the basics that encourage and support a strong middle class: jobs, schools, churches…”No urban civilization has flourished long without middle-class families,” he says in a recent interview in New York.

He also goes on to worry about “ephemeral cities” (often marked by expensive, small apartments) which appeal to the single and the young who then leave when it’s time to settle down. Sound like a certain borough to anyone?
Secret to a Thriving City [Christian Science Monitor]