brooklyn

If you feel you got away too easily in the housing collapse, maybe you live in New York's Queens or on the outskirts of another big American city.

Keith Jurow at the Real Estate Channel recently posted an interesting piece, teasingly titled "A Housing Price Collapse in Queens New York Is Almost Certain," in which he argues that homeowners in Queens are a sorry mess who haven't gotten their comeuppance yet.

Citing figures from RealtyTrac and Trulia, among others, he calculates that as of June 16 there were 9,054 Queens homes that banks had put in default since February 2009, none of which had been foreclosed yet. More than 4,000 of those have mortgage debts above $400,000. By his count, at least 25,000 properties in Queens are delinquent in their payment by 60 days or more.

"What happens when the banks start putting into default the 25,000 seriously delinquent homeowners and foreclosing on the 9,000+ properties currently in default?" he asks.

OK, kids. Get out your pencils and show your work: When something new in a former industrial area costs less than half of something old in a classic neighborhood, will lots of people buy it?

The Pencil Factory, so named because it used to be a pencil factory, consists of 93 one-bedroom (starting at $372,000) and two-bedroom apartments (starting at $535,000) a couple of short blocks from the Brooklyn, N.Y., waterfront. It covers three lots, attaching a new brick-clad structure to a landmark site where the pencils once flowed. And it may be the cheapest deal in New York City for a buyer who wants to live the lush life (and doesn't mind the rumble of passing trucks).

On Wednesday, according to broker Hans Schenck of Prudential Douglas Elliman, nearly four dozen folks from New York's brokerage community partied on the Pencil Factory rooftop. What made them so giddy?

Nothing less, it seems, than the return of luxury new construction to Gotham's anxious market.

If you can't sell it, suggest they build their own. That was the refocus of HGTV's "Selling New York," on last night's Episode 10 entitled "Property Hunters."

Finally, it dawned on the CORE Group brokers and GHK Realty's Kleier crew that with so little inventory for sale within the high-end market, and no one buying what is available, the best way to get big dough from those needy, wealthy investors is to facilitate the building of that dream home themselves.

With "Build It Yourself New York," as we'll call it today, we are taken once again out of Manhattan. This time it is to the less-frenetic and more suburban Brooklyn, to check out some truly to-die-for Italianate brownstones, courtesy of CORE. Then we travel with the Kleiers way out east, to the pricey and hoity-toity beach towns in the Hamptons.

Brooklyn's Coney Island is getting something of a well-needed makeover. A new, $30-million amusement park featuring the latest in rides and attractions from Italy's renowned Zamperla Group, is scheduled to open Memorial Day weekend.

It's the latest in a series of upgrades including a new boardwalk, a restyled subway station (left) and a Mets farm team with by far the spiffiest stadium in its league. The sort of development that's still lacking around the New York City landmark, however, is new housing and retail space. This is why area realtors say home prices are unlikely to climb like a seat on the Parachute Jump anytime soon.

It turns out that not all real estate brokers are sleazy. That's what we discover in last night's episode of the HGTV series "Selling New York." We witness CORE Group's Shaun Osher pass up a commission to inform a client that buying is not the best option for him. We also learn how so not cool it is when a client who apparently has been working with Gumley Haft Kleier for two years goes off and shafts his broker by contacting the listing agent of a property directly. Especially when the evil listing agent stakes claim on the buyer as her client.

So this week we finally got some series drama along with some humanity. Here's what happened:

Tenants: have you ever thought you could do a better job keeping up your building than your landlord does? With help from a tireless advocate, some New York City renters are about to get the chance to do just that.

The familiar story -- a building stays full despite questionable maintenance, a landlord fails to pay taxes, the city takes over -- has a happier ending in the Bushwick, Brooklyn and Morningside Heights, Manhattan, just south of Harlem. A group called the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) has corralled a loan for acquiring tax-delinquent properties and a grant to help long-time tenants become shareholders in a new capital structure for the buildings.

And in one case, the renters only had to come up with $2,500. Here's how it works.

It would be reductive to say that it took 20 years for Brooklyn Bridge Park to open. It truly is a feat to create a brand new, and quite grand, city park when the Governor of New York State has been closing parks everywhere else. To do it in a recession, when housing prices are still falling and lots of New Yorkers are out of work, is even more of a feat.

True, only 9.5 acres of the total 85 opened this week. But it's 9.5 acres in a part of town -- Dumbo, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill -- that has a dearth of parkland and public recreation space to offer. Curbed points out that in addition to fields, playgrounds and waterfront walkways -- watch out, Brooklyn Heights Promenade, you have competition -- Pier 1 has a "stairway to nowhere," a granite sculpture of steps that will be a favorite of wedding parties and tourists posing for pictures.

It's a challenge to get your hands on a four-bedroom house in the historic and very, very popular Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. It's pretty much impossible to get one with a driveway, which is one of the things that makes this house such a rarity.

It's semi-attached -- another wonder in brownstone-land -- with four bedrooms and four baths, a total of 1,648 square feet. Yeah, it's not a grand brownstone, some of which can total as much as 5,000 square feet, and it definitely needs some love on the inside: the kitchen and bathroom have some standard, underwhelming Home-Depot-type fixtures, pressboard cabinets and high-1980s tile.

Sure, some of the tonier New York City neighborhoods have seen their shining buildings tarnish in the recession, but not all areas are in decline. Immigrants -- and their environs -- are faring relatively well even amid the financial fallout.

Foreign-born workers accounted for $215 billion in economic activity in 2008, almost a third of the city's economic output, according to a report released this week by the New York State Comptroller's Office. What's more, as Crain's New York pointed out, "the 10 neighborhoods with the greatest concentration of immigrants had stronger economic growth than the rest of the city between 2000 and 2007."

The majority of those neighborhoods -- including Flushing, Washington Heights, Coney Island, Elmhurst and Corona -- are in more affordable Brooklyn and Queens. (Maybe Manhattan will catch on one of these days...)


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Toll Brothers, a national homebuilder that has struggled to implement its plain-vanilla housing formula in New York City's most populous borough, has paid $8.6 million for a parcel near the Brooklyn waterfront.

The company plans to build a 70-unit condominium in the hip, industrial Dumbo neighborhood, according to Brownstoner.com, but the plans have not become public.

News of the sale, which came right before Christmas but was only recently disclosed, follows talk of another residential development further north along the Brooklyn waterfront: the long-bruited redevelopment of the former Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg by Community Preservation Corporation. In addition to converting the historic sugar refinery into housing, a $1.5 billion plan calls for new towers to be built for a total of 2,200 units of mixed-income housing.

At the ripe old age of 64, Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz has finally become a man – at least in real estate terms.

On November 30, Markowitz and his wife, Jamie, bought their first home for $1.45 million on a tree-lined, Windsor Terrace street, just one block from Prospect Park. "I've always been a tenant, all my life. This is the first time I'm a property owner," Markowitz told The New York Daily News.

Atlantic Yards, the controversial redevelopment project in one of Brooklyn's busiest intersections, has been stalled and hobbled since long before scaffolding went up at Pacific and Dean in 2007. Whether or not the nearly $5 billion project is in the public interest is still up for grabs (opposition groups have continually lost their lawsuits claiming abuse of eminent domain), but at least one piece of the project aimed for public use has come to fruition: the Atlantic Terminal, which houses the Long Island Rail Road and just about every major subway line besides the F and A/C, has opened. Brooklyn real estate blog Brownstoner called it "the most momentous news in the history of time."

You would think the economic slowdown would have meant Brooklyn would stop turning into, well, Manhattan. But with Barneys looking to stake a claim in Cobble Hill and your parents making inroads into Williamsburg, it looks like the borough's hipster cred is in serious jeopardy.

I'm a 212 guy. But many of my best pals are on the other side of that physical and psychological divide. They love Brooklyn so much that they hate leaving it to go to work in Manhattan (although I have heard that actual jobs exist within Brooklyn). I can respect their quirky passion and sometimes even understand it, like last summer when I had that yummy iced latte from Baked on Van Brunt Street. There's a nice funky vibe on that side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

When you live above a construction site, the promise of waking up to birds, instead of bulldozers, and sunshine, instead of tarp-covered scaffolding, is what gets you through. 'One day,' you think to yourself. 'I'll walk down my block without worrying about being crushed by a 25-story crane.'

Dream on.

Construction has stalled on 515 properties in New York City, according to an analysis by the New York Building Congress, with 237 of them in Brooklyn.