Chimney Removal Heater Venting

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/nyregion/27gentrify.html?ref=todayspaper

Dakota Blair acknowledges that both he and the apartment building where he lives are somewhat out of place.
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Ruby Washington/The New York Times

“It’s just sad that money can change a neighborhood.”
ROY VANASCO, owner of All Appliance Refrigerator on Myrtle Avenue, where developers have sought to buy him out.

Mr. Blair, 23, a software engineer from East Texas, pays $1,700 a month for a studio in what he calls the Yuppie Spaceship: a new luxury apartment building on an unluxurious corner in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After nine months in the neighborhood, which New York magazine labeled the city’s “next hipster enclave,” Mr. Blair is considering moving out.

He figures that for $1,700, he could be living in Manhattan. There is a subway station down the street from his building at Myrtle and Nostrand Avenues, but it is for the G train, which does not go into Manhattan. Other neighborhoods eagerly anticipate the arrival of new cafes or restaurants, but on Myrtle Avenue, the biggest news is the opening of a Duane Reade pharmacy.

“The only thing keeping me here is my lease,” Mr. Blair said.

Even for hipsters, life in one of New York City’s frontier neighborhoods — long-troubled places at the fringes of gentrification — can be anything but smooth, particularly in these uncertain economic times.

New residents like Mr. Blair have grown frustrated waiting for change to come to Bed-Stuy, a north-central Brooklyn neighborhood with high rates of crime and foreclosures, trash-strewn streets and limited night life. And the owners of businesses that have recently opened to cater to this new population wait, in turn, for a surge that has not yet arrived.

Longtime residents concerned about the architectural and cultural fate of Bed-Stuy, the largest predominantly black neighborhood in New York City, relish the slow speed of change. But they still worry about rising rents and have become weary of living and working next to buildings that are new, sleek and, in their eyes, ugly.

Myrtle Avenue, which cuts across the northern edge of the neighborhood, is at a crossroads of the gentrified and the ungentrified. Down the street from where a shoeless man lay on a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk one recent afternoon, a two-bedroom condo was for sale at 609 Myrtle Avenue for $675,000. On one side of Myrtle Avenue are the Marcy Houses, one of Brooklyn’s biggest public housing projects and the former home of the rapper Jay-Z, where the average monthly rent, subsidized by the federal government, is $334. Across the street is the luxury building where Mr. Blair lives, the Mynt, at 756 Myrtle Avenue.

Along the avenue, there are building and roofing supply stores, auto shops and the twin red-brick smokestacks of the Cascade linen and uniform plant. There is a liquor store that advertises a “Birthday Special” — 5 percent off spirits and 10 percent off wines on a customer’s birthday. Into this mix came FreshDirect, the online grocery delivery service, which officially started delivering in April in Bed-Stuy.

There used to be a 12-foot-wide, blue-colored mural at Myrtle and Nostrand Avenues, diagonal from the Mynt. The painting listed the names of neighborhood murder victims inside the chalk outline of a body, an inevitable memorial in a police precinct where homicide was once a weekly occurrence.

Mr. Blair took a picture of the mural in January, but the snapshot is already an antique: Someone covered it up with a thin layer of concrete, and now only one side of it remains, a tribute to lives cut short — Hollywood, Danny Dan, Rocky — itself cut short. It reads “Rest in.”

The half-covered mural is an apt symbol of Bed-Stuy today: a changing neighborhood not quite changed, transforming not in broad strokes but in half-steps.

The average sales price of residential property and the number of sales in Bed-Stuy, Bushwick and other nearby neighborhoods have dropped sharply, according to a recent report released by the brokerage firm Prudential Douglas Elliman. The report found that from April 1 to June 30, the average sales price in the area was $500,925, down from $539,187 in the same period a year ago. The situation was different in the Greenpoint and Williamsburg area, where the average sales price was $663,946, a 13 percent increase from the same period last year.

There have been other signs of stalled growth.

Bed-Stuy had the second-highest number of foreclosure filings in Brooklyn last year and the fourth-highest of any neighborhood in the city, according to an analysis by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. Building permits have also dropped. In the first two quarters of this year, 50 permits for new residential buildings were issued by the city’s Department of Buildings in Community District 3, which includes Bed-Stuy. In the first two quarters of 2005, 93 such permits were issued.

Jonathan J. Miller, the president and chief executive of Miller Samuel Inc., a real estate appraisal company that prepared the Prudential Douglas Elliman report, said the impact of the credit crunch — tighter lending standards imposed by banks that have made it hard for many people to secure credit — is felt more severely in “emerging markets” like Bed-Stuy.

“The pace has slowed considerably,” Mr. Miller said.

Posted by: greendaniel at July 30, 2008 9:50 PM in response to Bed-Stuy, Do or...?

Yeah and why they're at it fill in the Galap "pond" with some cement, set-up some nice stools on it and turn the Van Halen up to 11. There are no performance spaces left in Williamsburg. RIP Galap.

Posted by: greendaniel at May 17, 2008 12:25 AM in response to Streetlevel: Former Galapagos Space Plays Naming Game

The reason people post is they are simply asking for more information. There is no need to burn people simply for asking a question.

Posted by: greendaniel at May 16, 2008 9:14 AM in response to Finding a Mortgage for mixed used property

OP here. Non-working means that there are no fireplaces that vent into it. Yes, the Gas boiler does vent into it but I was thinking of a way to route this differently. It ruins the flow of the structure because it is literally in the middle of the building. I want to open up the space and since it's a small building it's hard to do that with a chimney in the middle.

Thanks for your input- pretty scary that it might be integral to the support of the structure and that difficult/expensive to remove.

Posted by: greendaniel at April 14, 2008 9:44 PM in response to Chimney Removal Heater Venting

As a commercial/residential property owner, I agree with 9:16 and 9:26.
You should put down at least 30%. Save some more money. I put down 50% on my property and the terms were still not great (820 credit score).

Posted by: guest at May 16, 2008 9:24 AM in response to Finding a Mortgage for mixed used property

An FHA mortgage may be a possibility. FHA does provide mortgages on mixed use properties. You must live in one of the aparments.

Posted by: guest at May 17, 2008 12:29 PM in response to Finding a Mortgage for mixed used property

Do you intend on owner occupying the property?

Call me
718-238-7222

Posted by: MrMortgageMan at June 20, 2008 2:12 PM in response to Finding a Mortgage for mixed used property