Flashback: Clinton Hill Twenty Years Ago
A reader (a lawyer with Lexis/Nexis, we can only assume) emailed us this New York Times article entitled “Gentrification: The Case of Clinton Hill” published on February 8, 1987. The whole piece was interesting, but the rapid price appreciation that happened in the space of a couple of years in the early 1980s particularly jumped…
A reader (a lawyer with Lexis/Nexis, we can only assume) emailed us this New York Times article entitled “Gentrification: The Case of Clinton Hill” published on February 8, 1987. The whole piece was interesting, but the rapid price appreciation that happened in the space of a couple of years in the early 1980s particularly jumped out at us:
As in other rapidly gentrifying areas, almost every new sale sets a new record for the block. Naida McSherry, a local broker who specializes in brownstones, can rattle off a half-dozen recent sales that reflect phenomenal appreciation in value: from $75,000 to $292,000, from $55,000 to $285,000, from $68,000 to $214,000, from $68,000 to $200,000, from $115,000 to $310,000. In most cases, the lower price was for an unrenovated four-story brownstone sold in 1982 or 1983 and the higher price reflects the last year’s sale of the house in renovated, or somewhat improved condition.
Percentage-wise, those are bigger increases than have occurred over the past 5 years, we’d guess. We’re curious to know what Clinton Hill brownstones were going for in the early 1990s–it couldn’t have been any more than these prices.
Anon 5.04 – public schools in the area do need improvement, but the housing stock is great and many if not most people I know who have bought in the area in the past 5 to 10 years send their children to private schools anyway.
anon 4:37 — notice you didn’t say anything about the school down the block.
Anonymous with the most beautifully ironic spelling error, you’ve clearly never been inside many of the houses, on St. James or CH in general, as they are rife with original details in very many instances, and are far far far from rundown. Your loss is our gain!
eeks – I mean ‘their children’.
in 10-15 years they could be saying exactly what many people say today — What kind of dopes pay over $1m for a rundown house in a less a neighborhood where they wouldn’t send there children to the
school down the block.
Seriously! Show me any house on St. James for 800-900k and I will run there.
These prices certainly put today’s market in perspective though…what will they be saying 10-15 years from now about what we’ve paid this year?
To Park Sloper, houses on St. James between Lafayette and Greene are now fetching well above $1million, depending on the house. Try $1.3 to $1.5 or more – and you’ll likely have to do some work. For example, look at 77 St. James – asking $1.325 and it is in contract (Corcoran I think).
Sloper, was McSherry the big heavy set woman with all the cats who had an office on Fulton? I purchased my 5 story in 1995 for $375K. She showed me dozens of properties in the the $230-350K range. But i ended up going with someone else who showed me dozens of properties also. It’s interesting how quickly a sellers market can turn into a buyers market and vice versa.
I bought a Clinton Hill brownstone from the same Naida McSherry in 1990. She was a broker, but she owned this particular house on St. James Place between Lafayette and Greene. We bought it for $300,000, and I believe she had bought it only a year or two earlier for $100,000, and probably put no more than $50,000 into renovating it. Houses on that block are now selling in the $800,000 to $900,000 range.