Risky Business in Some Brooklyn Nabes?
This week New York magazine looks into its real estate crystal ball and sees all sorts of doom ‘n’ gloom on the horizon for Bed-Stuy, Bushwick and, to a lesser extent, Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Of all the neighborhoods profiled in the mag’s Neighborhood Watch feature, in fact, Bed-Stuy and Bushwick are pegged the riskiest. (They…
This week New York magazine looks into its real estate crystal ball and sees all sorts of doom ‘n’ gloom on the horizon for Bed-Stuy, Bushwick and, to a lesser extent, Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Of all the neighborhoods profiled in the mag’s Neighborhood Watch feature, in fact, Bed-Stuy and Bushwick are pegged the riskiest. (They receive a collective risk rating of 9 out of a possible 10.) According to the article, since the two areas are subprime hotbeds, there’s a good chance inventory is going to be flooding their markets–an assessment that jibes with the downturn in sales Bed-Stuy recently posted. In Williamsburg and Greenpoint, meanwhile, the supply of new construction may be outstripping demand. One local broker says Burg prices have sunk by about 10 percent lately. The article also makes the case that properties in Greenpoint, and areas of Williamsburg not within a stone’s throw of the Bedford L, are going to be less of a hot ticket as “creative types” find exotic mortgages harder to come by. These factors combine for a risk score of 7. (The rating for “established brownstone Brooklyn” is, unsurprisingly, a much rosier 2.5, based on the fact that areas like Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope attract affluent, stable buyers.) While Bed-Stuy and Bushwick are undoubtedly feeling more subprime fallout than other neighborhoods, it seems a little premature to predict that demand and prices in Williamsburg are about to take a serious nosedive. You agree with the pessimistic prognostications?
Neighborhood Watch [New York]
Big Slowdown Seen in Brooklyn’s Poorest Zones [Brownstoner]
Photo of Bed-Stuy houses by GKJarvis.
Kill the messenger, not the message.
That seems to be the theme of the day.
Could NY Mag be more wishy washy? Didn’t they just say a week or 2 ago that the hipsters were movin in to the Stuy (an article posted on this site with many comments if i recall) and hail the beauty and wonder of Jefferson just earlier this summer? New York Mag-make up your mind—is Bed stuy the coolest hood in brooklyn with the best inventory of brownstones or a sub prime lender death trap? Has the guy that wrote the article ever strolled through Bed Stuy on a sunday?
Or looked at the demo for recent sales? I am not “a last resort” person and my friends (who are scourering the hood looking for a home) and neighbors aren’t either–They are folks looking to buy themselves a little piece of history, get themselves a little more space, and aren’t into the dubious new construction that is going on all over the city. They are people who have been renting in Manhattan at 3000-3500 a month or living in a crampped co-Op in park slope and are turned off by its upper west side-ification.
And do they really think that the folks buying “have, in short, stretched themselves to their absolute limits”? If they have they probably have not done very much research. The majority of my neighbors have been here for years—most of them are small time real estate moguls–the other portion are teachers, lawyers, and doctors. 50% of the brownstones on my street are undergoing renovation and restoration. And a good number of these folks have actually paid off their mortgages (like the guy we bought our place from) so much for the foreclosure. Of course, Bed Stuy is a big place and what is true on one street is not necessarily thecase on another. In addition, I am the first to say that corcoran’s monthly escaltion of pricing these houses is outrageous—you can’t go from 700K to 1.3 in one year–you can’t sell one floor of a brownstone as a condo with an asking price of 450 in Bed stuy —at least not before NY MAG hails the virtues of a flourishing restaurant row as The Foodie destination.
I still can’t believe NY Mag has the “Market Place Adult” section of the classifieds six pages after multi-million dollar real estate listings in the print edition…what is this the Village Voice?
From a housing standpoint, I’m 100% happy with my decision to live in Bed Stuy. From an investment standpoint: what’s life without alittle risk?
Didn’t New York magazine just call Bed Stuy a “hipster haven” or something to that effect just a few weeks ago?
And we’re talking about the same magazine that published the article “The Tipping of Jefferson Ave”, right?
http://nymag.com/nymetro/realestate/neighborhoods/features/11775/
Besides, when I was shopping for a house last year it was the condo developers who were promoting “creative” financing so all the broker artist hipsters can pay $750K to live in a manhattan sized shoebox across the street from Diner.
NY Mag is scurrilous and will do anything to sell more magazines.
Maybe the Developer’s Group is an advertiser?
This area is so large that you might as well as all off all of Brooklyn should be scared. Bedford Stuyvesant is already the large neighborhood in New York City and to add Buswick you are talking about most of Northern Brooklyn. Where in Bedford Stuyvesant is this downturn last I checked streets such as Jefferson, Hancock, Halsey, MacDonough Stuyvesant even Greene Ave the real estate was just fine…
At least in some of these nabes, the downturn probably has more to do with AY than with the subprime situation.
The New York article was utterly facile. Not only did it ignore vast stretches of the city’s real estate market, it relied on a handful of statistics to make sweeping generalizations about the neighborhoods it did address. This may sell magazines, and may fuel all sorts of rhetoric about evidence for and against a housing bubble, but at the end of the day it has very little to do with hard fact or real journalism.
Creative financing is DEAD! Interest-only ARMS, 80/20 financing and other toxic mortgage products are no longer available. The days of easy lending are over and this will affect ALL neighborhoods.
ItsAWrap