Corcoran Serving Value Meals in Brooklyn in May

fobsdelhi: If prices only go up, why are they going down so fast? A good 20% drop so far in park slope, and there is no bottom yet.

I put zero stock in the statistics about how expensive NYC housing is compared to other major cities. It’s all about how you draw the lines around the areas to be compared (which simply isn’t done on an apples-to-apples basis in any of the surveys I am aware of).

The reverse white flight already happened in NYC. This is not the 70s or the 80s. I know retired white couples from the suburbs who have moved here because it’s just so nice and all.

And no matter what the composition of owners of brownstones may be, there will be people who need to sell. And the number of them currently deciding to do so is below average, which means in all likelihood we are going back to the other side of average (ie above it) soon.

If it does not make sense, let me add another argument…
Historically, in the last 60 years, the US has been unique in the developed world, in terms of the great white flight to the suburbs.
Today, even after market corrections, the average price of a house in Paris/London/Tokyo is nearly three time that of major cities in the US.
In the future, as the white flight reverses itself (which is unfortunately linked to gentrification) due to cultural, logistical etc changes, prices will only go up.
All the talk about the great depression, it is not here and will not be here. We have a smart guy running this country for a change.

From Park Slope writer/blogger Douglas Rushkoff’s site:

“…It was once again possible to sit on one’s stoop with the kids and eat frozen Italian ices on a balmy summer night. One could walk through Prospect Park on any Sunday afternoon and see a black family barbecuing here, a Puerto
Rican group there, and an Irish group over there. Compared with most parts of the world, that’s pretty civil, no?

Romantic as it sounds, that’s not integration at all, but co-location. Epcot- style détente. The Brooklyn being described here has almost nothing to do with the one our grandparents might have inhabited. It is rather an expensive and painstakingly re-created simulation of a
“brownstone Brooklyn” that never actually existed. If people once sat on their stoops eating ices on summer nights it was because they had no other choice—there was no air- conditioning and no TV. Everyone could afford to sit around, so everyone did. And the fact that the denizens of neighboring communities complete the illusion of multi-
culturalism by using the same park only means that these folks are willing to barbecue next to each other—not witheach other. They all still go home to different corners of the borough. My writer friend’s kids go off the next morning to their private school, those other kids
to public. Not exactly neighbors.”

Read it all http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated/intro/

I think this whole story about a shadow inventory of houses bringing the market down in the near future has too many holes. Allow me…
The proportion of houses sold by folks who are actually moving/owner died/financial problems during peak times was low. The crazy demand for housing in Brooklyn and consequently increasing prices was the only reason for a majority of the sellers to enter the market.
I lived on a nice block in Prospect Place during the boom time and many owners who lived in their Brownstones for decades decided to sell and move to more affrodable places (nice incentive to retire). The same owners today will just rent their houses or stay in it.
Hope that makes sense.