Open House Picks
Boerum Hill 152 Dean Street Prudential Douglas Elliman Sunday 12-2pm $2,300,000 GMAP P*Shark Carroll Gardens 327 President Street Brown Harris Stevens Sunday 2-4pm $1,700,000 GMAP P*Shark Discussed Here Lefferts Manor 118 Rutland Road Brown Harris Stevens Sunday 1-3pm $1,595,000 GMAP P*Shark Prospect Lefferts Gardens 140 Lincoln Road Aguayo & Huebener Sunday 2-4pm $1,250,000 GMAP P*Shark
Boerum Hill
152 Dean Street
Prudential Douglas Elliman
Sunday 12-2pm
$2,300,000
GMAP P*Shark
Carroll Gardens
327 President Street
Brown Harris Stevens
Sunday 2-4pm
$1,700,000 GMAP P*Shark
Discussed Here
Lefferts Manor
118 Rutland Road
Brown Harris Stevens
Sunday 1-3pm
$1,595,000
GMAP P*Shark
Prospect Lefferts Gardens
140 Lincoln Road
Aguayo & Huebener
Sunday 2-4pm
$1,250,000
GMAP P*Shark
The only plus of the crazy market is that it is forcing a higher quality of people to move to the burbs and other places outside of the city. Whereas the burbs used to get the boring monied types, they are now getting influxes of editors, teachers, writers, artists, architects, designers, and so on. The kind of people that made Brooklyn cool and hip in the first place.
Amen that, Bob. I guess these houses were not exactly built for schoolteachers and clerks, so that era was probably the anomaly. But it makes me hope the market would cool off some, just for the sake of people trying to get a foot in somewhere.
Am I right to calculate that President St. house at about $590 a square foot. Pretty good price of somehting that needs that kind of work no?
Linusvcapelt,
I think you got it right when you wrote that “it just especially sucks to be a new buyer now.”
I long for the days of what the founder of the Brownstone Revival Committee, Evrett Ortner, described as the “school teacher’s coup” where a couple at that relatively low income level could afford to buy a brownstone, renovate it themselves, and live like “millionaires” when that term actually meant something.
Anon 11:15,
Sorry–my 11:18 post wasn’t a response to your post, which I read afterward. The Rutland Rd. house’s price does seem to brake the 50% parity with PS I’ve written about. Whether the two houses (Rutland & 1st St.) are truly comparable is hard to say. I guess we’ll have to see what the houses actually go for since the true value is determined by the market (although, at times, I wish these things were determined by something less inexplicable).
1. anon 11:15 gets me exactly right. This is not about whether PLG is nice or not. It’s about whether it has improved, in proportion to its price increases, at the same rate that other nabes (like PS) have improved in proportion to their price increases.
2. Maybe I’m wrong, but having followed places like this site over the past few years, PLG asking prices seem to have increased at a greater percentage than PS asking prices. And that’s demonstrably true of other nabes, like Clinton Hill, where people are buying beautiful homes and hoping for amenity improvements to come eventually. Just look at the numerous realtor neighborhood price reports Brownstoner has been posting.
I believe you that PLG had great neighbors, great houses, the park, etc. 30 years ago — that’s exactly my point. Things staying the SAME are not reasons for prices to rise faster than inflating; things getting BETTER are.
To put it bluntly: If PLG’s prices have increased, over 30 years, by the same factor as PS’s, then the neighborhood should have “improved” (however you define it–schools, shopping, whatever yr priorities) as much as PS has in 30 years. Has it? Maybe it has — your earlier post suggested the opposite.
3. Having said all that, I agree with your 11:18 post that the absolute dollar difference is now greater. I suspect that is why prices have been able to increase at the highest rates in the (relatively) lowest-priced neighborhoods. Because if you’re buying at the lower end of the price range you have fewer options, and therefore it’s easier to drive prices in that range up in a hot market. (Whereas if you have $2.5M to spend on a Slope brownstone your options are wider.)
None of this is to say that PLG is a bad place to live. Just that for someone trying to buy cheap now, the rewards for buying a cheaper neighborhood, in relative terms, are smaller than they used to be. (Or, the more money you’ve got, the better deal you get, nowadays.) I could probably say the same about plenty other perfectly nice neighborhoods. It just especially sucks to be a new buyer now.
I’m not sure I made things any clearer.
Whew, I can get a bit long winded at times. What I meant to say was that a PLG home buyer who might have paid $50,000 less in ‘the mid -’70s, compared to that better known nabe across the park, might now pay $1,000,000 less–the same percentage “saving”but a lot less money spent in absolute terms, even when you allow for inflation
Bob, linusvanpelt isn’t saying that life in LM is “bleak.” His point is the one I was trying to make earlier–price increases in the slope, carrol gardens, fort greene, etc have gone hand-in-hand with an improvement in amenities. Prices in PS are manhattan-level but PS now has manhattan-quality stores and restaurants. Since LM has not seen a similar increase in amenities and is, according to you residents, still dealing with assorted quality of life problems, it follows that the ratio of LM prices to slope prices should be lower than it used to be when the difference in amenities wasn’t as huge.
And, looking at the BHS site, I’d say the Rutland Road house at an asking of 1.6 is about on par with a 1st street house with an asking of 2.2–way above the 50% ratio.
I (the one planning to move to upper Westchester) feel intense “suburban anomie” in the Jersey burbs and lower Westchester. Those miles and miles of deadly quiet streets lined with houses without a soul in sight send shivers down my spine. I couldn’t last a week in Scarsdale, for example. Upper Westchester, however, feels like the country to me. Many of the towns feel like villages and once you’re out of the towns it’s rolling hills, woods, and fields. To my mind, there’s no suburban anomie to be felt. And the last few years have seen an explosion of cultural venues as artists pushed out of Brooklyn have opened galleries, museums, and art schools. Most of the people we know and meet up there are ex-city folk and are the kind of creative people we used to have as neighbors in Brooklyn. But it is obviously all highly subjective and personal. As with Brooklyn neighborhoods, what works for one person doesn’t work for another.
Back to the topic, anyone go to the Rutlan raod open house?