Trend: New Owners Add Bedrooms, Raise Rents Across Brooklyn
The new owner of an Edwardian apartment building in Clinton Hill is renovating and raising rents as tenants vacate. The renovated apartments have more bedrooms and less common space than the old ones. It’s a pattern we’re seeing all over the borough in neighborhoods where rents are rising quickly, such as Bed Stuy and Crown…
The new owner of an Edwardian apartment building in Clinton Hill is renovating and raising rents as tenants vacate. The renovated apartments have more bedrooms and less common space than the old ones. It’s a pattern we’re seeing all over the borough in neighborhoods where rents are rising quickly, such as Bed Stuy and Crown Heights.
At 415 Washington Avenue, two- and three-bedroom apartments with dining rooms and French doors are being turned into three- and four-bedroom apartments. One market-rate unit that was renting for $2,925 a month is now asking $4,500 or $5,000 (in two ads), a tipster who used to live in the building told us. Going by the photos in the ads, the renovation may also be replacing plaster walls with drywall. Instead of families, the apartments appear aimed at roommates, who can pay more per person, she told us.
At 415 Washington, the larger renovated apartments also have a new second bathroom.
At 616 Halsey Street in Bed Stuy, which started leasing earlier this year, developer Weissman Equities converted two-bedroom apartments into three-bedrooms asking $2,950 a month. There wasn’t room to add a second bathroom, but the new owner enlarged the existing one and added a sliding door separating the shower from the toilet so it could be used as one room or two.
During the Depression, large apartments were typically split into smaller units, and whole houses often became boarding houses with rooms to let, or SROs. Now, as neighborhoods in Brooklyn gentrify and become more expensive, the latest trend is to keep apartments intact but carve out more bedrooms to boost rents.
At the same time, the opposite is happening in owner-occupied row houses, where new owners typically reduce the overall number of people living in the building when they renovate. Typically new owner occupants like to create at least a duplex for themselves and no more than two rental units.
 415 Washington Avenue #5A Listing [CitiHabitats]
Photo by Christopher Bride for PropertyShark
Update: Just got some really cool new information about the history of the Clinton Hill building from a Brownstoner reader. Brownstone Detectives unearthed an ad in the Brooklyn Eagle for apartments at 415 Washington, which was known as The Dandridge and built in 1910! The Dandridge advertised “hall boy and janitor service of the best,” “all night elevator service,” and “a telephone in every apartment,” he said. Some apartments also had “the most efficient suction cleaning system in the world” — a vacuum cleaner, apparently. What were the rents? They ranged from $45 to $65 a month.
there have also been 3 robberies in the building (in rent stabilized units) since the new management took over (coincidence?) and despite tenant requests for cameras and a new lock on the very old front door, absolutely nothing has happened. So in addition to the rent hikes and demolition of pre-war character in these apartments, that’s a reason tenants are fleeing.
Oh, no! Really? That’s horrific. I hope everyone is okay.
415 Washington Ave is a grand building with mostly very large apartments. Most people these days do not want or use formal dining rooms, but they do want an extra bathroom. So these new owners are just doing what the market wants and demands as well as doing what needs to be done to subsidize the many long term way below market rent stabilized tenants in this building. And there are many…..
The changing out the plaster walls for sheetrock is to avoid lead paint issues if renting to children.
The ads quoted form the early 1900’s remind me of the stories I have heard over and over of how before rent stabilization; landlords had to really compete to get the best tenants. Apparently the then landlord of 360 Clinton Ave put on the best Thanksgiving dinners, only the tenants of the building could attend. Other landlords would provide maid service and laundry services etc. All this changed with rent stabilization.
Replacing plaster with sheetrock ironically will kick up more fine dust and lead than not–although doing this is in keeping with the letter of the law. Most of the stabilized and controlled tenants at 415 Washington predate the stabilization rules–in other words, they were the tenants the original landlords wanted to court.
In addition, in this specific case, all of the apartments in question had already been renovated within the last five years.
Yes, this is a common approach all over Brooklyn, especially in the pre-war walk-up apartment houses that once had large separate, formal dining rooms. The original bedroom was often small, and is likely considered the secondary BR today, with the larger master being the converted DR.
makes sense – people want big apartments – and you can’t build new ones in many of these neighborhoods – so existing housing stock is getting chopped up. by product of landmarking.
Ugh.
Thats an interesting way of doing it. When I lived in Bk Heights I thought they did that to my apartment because it was a nice sized 2br but one of the walls started exactly at the window, it was one of the few walls where I could hear my neighbors. I can’t believe they’re doing something like that in Clinton hill area, but I guess it makes sense to squeeze as much as you can out of each sq ft. I wonder what this will do for the owner occupied rental unit prices since it sounds like they will be far more desirable than the buildings.
Look at the Lower Manhattan apartments these people have been living in for years: generally old tenements divided into 2 or 3 bedrooms with a kitchen as the only common space. Not surprising that Brooklyn went from: Affordable and spacious -> same priced but spacious -> eventually same price and size as Manhattan