Quote of the Day
The places that will suffer most in real estate losses are the suburbs where the hedge fund managers and all those guys who made all their money off this crisis they created, paid many millions of dollars for huge houses they can only sell to the similarly very rich. There was a recent article in…
The places that will suffer most in real estate losses are the suburbs where the hedge fund managers and all those guys who made all their money off this crisis they created, paid many millions of dollars for huge houses they can only sell to the similarly very rich. There was a recent article in the NY Times about that, if anybody saw it. I’d rather be in my little Brooklyn neighborhood that’s still affordable to those from many OTHER industries, than sitting in a huge house in one of these suburbs, knowing my former Wall Street neighbors are all going bankrupt and their houses will sit unsold and unuccupied for possibly years.
— by traditionalmod in A Letter From The Inside
Architerrorist:
Why not Stamford?
My family sold a nice Victorian in Larchmont back around 1979 and got around 70K for it. I’ll bet that house costs $2-$3 million now, so I’m not buying the prices didn’t shoot up in the burbs arguement.
Also, I’d say the suburbs have remained generally the same over that time period. They were nice then and are nice now. Many parts of Brookly (Williamsburg, Red Hook and my very own Boerum Hill for example) are much better than they were back then. At least part of the price runup in Brooklyn is due to that.
Pierre de taille, I beg to differ, based on recent personal experience. My partner, who works in the financial secter, has been working in Greenwich for some time, and we decided the commute was just too rough from our home in Brooklyn. Not that we particularly wanted to live in Greenwich, but I was still flabbergasted by the $2 million dollar price tags on what were basically glorified high ranches. There were a few interesting houses around that price point, but they were in highly undesirable locations (main roads, merritt pkwy, etc). I know people with nice, although not knock-your-socks off houses in Greenwich which are in the 3.5 million dollar range. It’s true that things are sitting on the market, but people are not giving homes away by any stretch of the imagination. “Nice” but not over the top homes in Cos Cob and OG are still way upwards of the 2 million mark.
In the end, we were forced to look 35 minutes drive north of Greenwich to find something we like that was similar in price to our Brooklyn home.
DIBS I get your point but $2million is still considered a rich house even in Greenwich CT. Remember that a lot mid-level wall street guys also live in the “mid-range” Greenwich neighborhoods of Cos Cob & Old Greenwich with great homes but not @ the super rich levels of the excesses you see in the media… again a $2 million pad in Greenwich is top tier material.. just not top 1%.
Somebody on a thread yesterday said the same thing that was said in today’s quote of the day. Anyway, rich Wall Street types purchased goods and services from people who work in many other industries like the arts, high end home goods, etc… If they can no longer do so, it will affect the artists in Fort Greene, caterers in Williamburgh and everyone else.
This is so untrue. House prices in the nice burbs have not shot up in value overnight like they have in many formerly sketchy precincts of Brooklyn. Suburban houses in the nicer towns may end up retainng more of their valuation because their values were not hyper-inflated to begin with. I think the suburbs are, unfortunately for us, in a better position to weather the storm. And the high-up executives are never the ones to suffer too much from these setbacks anyway, the axe falls on middle mangement and support.
Compared to Greenwich, CT, absolutely!!!!
Soo… a $2 million brownstone is an affordable fallback property now? YIKES! No wonder why we’re in financial la la land.
I try to console myself with the fact that there’s not a lot of big wall street money in places like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill but everything’s so interconnected I’m not sure it will matter.