A Couple from Corcoran in Crown Heights
Crown Heights 682 Saint Marks Avenue Corcoran Floors: 4 $990,000 GMAP Crown Heights 1267 Carroll Street Corcoran Floors: 3 $725,000 GMAP
Crown Heights
682 Saint Marks Avenue
Corcoran
Floors: 4
$990,000
GMAP
Crown Heights
1267 Carroll Street
Corcoran
Floors: 3
$725,000
GMAP
In response to all those questions about all the obnoxiously disparaging comments about 682 St. Marks being overpriced – according to ACRIS this house sold for the asking price of 990K. Obviously, this neighborhood isn’t for everyone – and just because you wouldn’t pay that price for a property, doesn’t mean that others aren’t willing to.
To some a refrigerator box is recyclable cardboard, to others a home. Live and let live.
To Mara, and to the post “history”, I think Mara is correct, it is about class distinctions and less well off people being pushed out of a neighborhood (if they are renting). But that in no way excuses racist comments and attitudes. It might explain it, but does not excuse it. What about white flight in the 1940s in these neighborhoods when large numbers of blacks were moving in? The residents would have complained of their property values dropping and spewed all sorts of racist vitriol about the neighborhood property values dropping because of the large influx of poorer blacks. That was wrong then, and the flip side is wrong now.
Current owners do not have to sell, but yes renters bear the brunt of rising prices/rents and can get pushed out. Current owners, if they don’t want to live with anyone who is different from them, can sell and make a hefty profit. Racism is wrong however you try to explain or justify its existence.
To the poster history, who says money can’t buy everything, so deal with racist attitudes – that is just sad – and a disservice to the majority of blacks (I should say African Americans because rarely do you get the same racist attitude from African or Carribean immigrants) who don’t think this way. If you said the same thing the other way around to a black person moving to the Upper East Side, people would be up in arms, and rightly so. Why condone racism in the reverse? It is wrong and continues to perpetuate problems and inequality.
The sad thing is that the people who really need to read responses to their posts probably shot off their mouths and walked away.
Unfortunately, due to the media and the current economic/political power structure in this country, race and class often get interchanged when people point fingers. More white people in this country are affluent than any other race, and so when “gentrification” happens, it is usually white people moving into poorer neighborhoods – often but not always neighborhoods inhabited by people of color. Windsor Terrace has a long history of being white and working class, and it is currently being gentrified as well, only it is wealthier white people pushing working class whites out, so the “color line” isn’t as clear. It is poverty that makes people turn on each other, not race, only we are so conditioned to think black people=poor/dangerous, white people=well-off/targets that it becomes what divides us most. I don’t blame any group that has cared for a neighborhood but cannot afford to buy into it for being outraged that people with more money, access and power are buying up their homes, and if I perceived that I could tell that difference through skin color, I’d make that other group feel pretty unwelcome, too.
To compare racist whites trying to keep their neighborhoods segregated to African-Americans (and Caribbean-Americans, and Mexican-Americans, and, hell, working and middle class Caucasian-Americans) not wanting to be priced out of their neighborhoods by the gentry (yes, that’s what you are) is comparing apples to spaceships. Where do you people come up with this stuff? And last I heard, no rich white folks have been bombed out of their new million-dollar brownstones, or chased down into the street and beaten half to death, or had their windows shot out every night for months on end because they dared to follow the tastemakers into central Brooklyn. Deal with it. Your money can buy property, but can’t buy everything.
900k overpriced? I know for a fact 868 prospect place sold for 1.15M and it is just a nice limestone with a flooded basement.
Exactly, for most folks, buying a place there is not an investment as much as pouring in all that you’ve earned along with sweat and soul to create a home. Why start things on the wrong foot?
I know that this happens everywhere but when you are thinking of putting down your life savings in a nabe it is disheartening to say the least. I’d hate to move in and feel trapped in my house.
I’m the last poster – you are absolutely right.