Set Speed Condo Report: 364 Myrtle Avenue
Today’s new condo reports focuses on a development that has been profiled on Brownstoner before. Located on a busy commercial stretch of Myrtle Avenue between Clermont and Adelphi, lies this unique 4 story building. Featuring angled windows to take advantage of light and outdoor spaces, this new construction attempts to set itself apart from the…
Today’s new condo reports focuses on a development that has been profiled on Brownstoner before. Located on a busy commercial stretch of Myrtle Avenue between Clermont and Adelphi, lies this unique 4 story building. Featuring angled windows to take advantage of light and outdoor spaces, this new construction attempts to set itself apart from the others.
The site consists of one commercial condo and three large floor-thru duplex condominium units. The ground floor commercial unit measures in at just under 2000 square feet for $994K, while the other three units are 1533-1688 square feet and cost $877K, $890K and $919K. The residential units have 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. Maintenance is about $260 a month.
Units feature 17 foot high ceilings, large gourmet kitchens with stainless steel appliances, en-suite bathrooms, spacious closets and laundry hook-ups. This condo is located close to many amenities, like supermarkets, restaurants, bars and hardware stores. But as last week’s two shootings attest, the area still contains some rough spots. An open house is scheduled March 26 from 12:30 to 3:30pm.
364 Myrtle Avenue [Corcoran] GMAP
New Building on Myrtle [Brownstoner]
Every Thursday, ltjbukem, whose own blog Set Speed scrutinizes the progress and quality of new developments in the area we know as Brownstone Brooklyn, pens a guest post about goings-on in the condo market with an emphasis on new projects.
They absolutely could and should. The problem is that in Brooklyn that puts them in further north and east in Brooklyn, where there are many single family homes that are still affordable, and new construction going up everywhere.
The problem is that there is little to no access to public transportation in these areas. Many of those neighborhoods lack any amenities and require people to drive EVERYWHERE. While they can find housing, their costs for everything else increase. One of the advantages the poor and working poor always had in NYC was access to public transportation and centralized housing. That is going away. The poor are being pushed further and further out in the boroughs and while many people think that may not be a bad thing, NYC needs a working class. Moving to communities with better schools essentially means moving out of NYC today.
NYC can’t be all celebrities, famewhores, and investment bankers. Teachers, bus drivers, locksmiths and plumbers need to be able to live in the city as well. Why not in Ft. Green where they always have?
Oh Lord – isnt virtually every ‘up and coming’ neighborhood in Brooklyn filled with people in that same boat – priced out of in their original/1st choice neighboorhood and looking for a nice place to live w/o leaving the city – at least your mythical 120K a year family has subsidized housing while looking (not to mention a much better pension than virtually anybody)
You don’t know the financial realities of those people. Did it ever occur to you that many families in the projects have several members working? Or work multiple jobs? With a lower rent maybe they can afford a decent car to make their lives a little easier. As for the parking lots- well, they were built into the projects. You might not also be aware that many projects are not all that close to subways and the buses may not be as good as in other areas. And have you ever watched some elderly person get on the bus with bags of food too heavy for her to really carry? Face it – the amount of money you have doesn’t buy you the rights in this country to all the decent cars,shelters,views or parking. If you think you’re owed because you pay more in taxes? Wrong- the higher your income level, the better your tax breaks. Sure some people will always scam the system, – do you think Kenneth Lay didn’t hurt people in the Enron bust? White collar crime is even worse in scale and impact- I don’t hear anyone talking about that.
The only thing money seems to give some people is an air of entitlement. So let’s stop trying to paint the desire for those nice views the projects have as a function of the market. There’s a difference between market dynamics and greed.
And good for those who moved out of the projects and had the foresight to buy in in the 70s and 80s for cheap. That’s how it is supposed to work and those families have established a legacy that will help their children and beyond. The hypothetical couple should do the same, but they will have to look somewhere else, maybe even outside of the NYC area. People across the country move all the time to try to establish economic security for their families.
CHP, unfortunately they are often faced with much worse, foremost being absentee parents and no nuclear family. And think of the irony of the parents serving, for example, in iraq and elsewhere, with taxpayers footing the bill. think of the resources that money could buy. vicious cycle indeed.
E-bomb,
I could tell you stories about landlords who provide no services for their tenants, and force them to live in situations that you wouldn’t let a junkyard dog live in. You are a landlord. Does that make you, or all landlords cheating scum?
I could also tell stories about crooked stock brokers, cops, grocery store owners, sales people, and people in every possible group imaginable who are dishonest and are cheating the system in some way. Does that mean all stockbrokers, cops, etc are crooked? Of course not.
Every time there is a discussion about poor people, someone has to bring up the poor people who are scamming the system. No S%$t, there are thieves out there. You do no one a service in telling these stories, they only distract from a much larger picture and serve to damn an entire group of people who have more than enough on their plate already.
By the way, MOST of the people who have cars, or whatever possessions they have, paid for them by working legitmate jobs. Thank God for credit cards and payment plans. This is still supposed to be America.
Oh Lord, that’s where I think that family has to be realistic and look beyond the borders of the neighborhood in which their project is. My family was solidly middle to lower middle class and we lived paycheck to paycheck. We could not live in the fancy neighborhoods. Taking your example, why is that family entitled to be able to buy in Fort Greene now? They can find a more modest place somewhere else and work their way up like everyone else – focus on the kids and move somewhere with better schools. Be practical.
Just to tie this all up in a nice bow and bring it back to the condos on Myrtle…
Many of the people that moved out of Ft Green projects purchased homes in the neighborhood. Many of the people who sold their brownstones five years ago to people for $500k were folks who purchased them for $50k back in the 70’s and 80’s. The question is, lets assume there is a two income household in the projects today, both gainfully employed (say working for the city) and each making mid-$60’s and they wanted to buy a house where could they buy?
Myrtle Avenue, as a commercial strip with the associated traffic and noise is probably one of the least desireable strips in the neighborhood on paper. The cheapest condo in this building is $877k. That is way out of our mythical family’s range.
I think that the condos are an interesting renovation, and I like what they’ve done with the space. Given the way the community is going folks will probably come in and snap them up, if everything is as it appears. But for that family that wants to remain in the neighborhood they’ve grown up in, its a pretty sad state of affairs.
I heard a story on 1010 WINS this morning about a school in the Bronx that doesn’t have any computers, and is trying to get some. A teacher said that one of the questions on a standardized test was “How does Windows help us in today’s world?” Some of the kids answered that windows help us to see out of buildings. They had no clue. They have no computers. How do we expect poor people to climb out of poverty, get good jobs with prospects for moving up the corporate ladder, and out of poverty – and perhaps the projects, when our schools can’t provide a tool that is now as important as paper and a pencil? To those of you who think the poor just don’t want to get it together, how do you suppose they do it if this is what they are faced with?
Prime land, indeed.