The myth of gentrification
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. He isn't struggling.
Bernie Madoff
Banned
Not really all that complex imo...It's the entire article. I used to highlight shyt, but that's a lot of work. It's obvious cats like @Bernie Madoff didn't read the thread and that queer @You Win Perfect who one stars anything I post for reasons no one knows. (This isn't at you) The point was to provide another perspective, I obviously don't only post things I believe in (shyt...I almost never do). That's why I posted the response article because no one was countering it so I said fukk it, let me do it
The OP article made a compelling argument, as is the counter.
Over what span of time? 20 years?
U were able to sublease your apartment for a profit because of gentrification.
Im not saying you shouldn't enjoy what you do, just silly for you to cry about gentrification when you are a benefactor of it.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Over what span of time? 20 years?
U were able to sublease your apartment for a profit because of gentrification.
Im not saying you shouldn't enjoy what you do, just silly for you to cry about gentrification when you are a benefactor of it.
3 years. a 2 bedroom is 2000+ in ch now.
I honestly don't see it that way but it's a bit long to explain on a public forum.
I was in CH for 4 years. ~9 years ago a 2 BR in CH was ~1500-2000. And the rent at my 1 BR actually went down when we renewed our lease
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Gentrification Reportedly Great
(Lois Stavsky / Flickr)
With NYC on its way to becoming one long Trader Joe's line, the "g" word has become something of a curse, like "bedbugs" or "gluten-free." But not everyone's afraid of Big Bad Gentrification. In fact, according to an article in The Economist today, we should be drowningmore neighborhoods in artisanal mayonnaise, because gentrification isn't pushing anyone out, apparently.
This isn't the first time we've heard the "gentrification is good" argument, and from an economist's perspective, it makes sense. According to the paper—which suggests welcoming "a bearded intruder on a fixed-gear bike in your neighbourhood," for this is the official gentrifier uniform—when people flood into a crumbling neighborhood, they open new establishments, create jobs, and bring in property tax revenue, all of which help old and new residents. Of course, they also appear to force mom & pop shops to shutter, price out longterm residents and, in New York's case at least, inspire predatory landlords to illegally toss out rent-stabilized tenants in favor of more high-paying ones.
According to The Economist, though, gentrifiers aren't necessarily pushing poor people out, at least on a national scale:
Yet there is little evidence that gentrification is responsible for displacing the poor or minorities. Black people were moving out of Washington in the 1980s, long before most parts of the city began gentrifying. In cities like Detroit, where gentrifiers are few and far between and housing costs almost nothing, they are still leaving. One 2008 study of census data found “no evidence of displacement of low-income non-white households in gentrifying neighbourhoods”. They did find, however, that the average income of black people with high- school diplomas in gentrifying areas soared...
...The bigger problem for most American cities, says Mr Butler, is not gentrification but the opposite: the concentration of poverty. Of neighbourhoods that were more than 30% poor in 1970, just 9% are now less poor than the national average.
The Economist argues that gentrification in Williamsburg, where the median rent for a one-bedroom is now $3,100 a month, didn't actually displace many poor or minority residents. We'd love to hear some of the Southside's Puerto Rican and Dominican locals thoughts onthat. And many of the artists that started the neighborhood's first wave have been priced out, and gentrifying neighborhoods like Crown Heights, Bushwick, and Bedford-Stuyvesant do have many longterm poor and minority residents who may already be finding themselves pushed further east thanks to wealthier newcomers.
To be sure, not everyone's crowing about the blessings bestowed by the Starbucks set. U.S. News & World Report published a piece today showing how gentrification is making many public schools socioeconomically segregated, with wealthier students piling into better-funded selective enrollment programs instead of neighborhood public schools.
An urban geography professor in the Netherlands penned a piece in The Guardian this week warning Detroit residents that gentrifiers will contribute to "growing inequality across the city," noting that the revival of the city's downtown area and influx of white residents will focus better public transportation and security in that small region, while 95 percent of Detroit will continue to suffer.
And also in The Guardian this week, a native San Franciscan pointed out that the black culture and community she once enjoyed in inner-city neighborhood is being pushed out in favor of fancy restaurants, boutiques and chains:
I returned home this year to find Fillmore gentrified. The black population of San Francisco is half of what it was in the 80s and Hayes Valley and Lower Pacific Heights are encroaching on what I knew as Fillmore. A hipster-preppy-tech-idea of Fillmore is gradually replacing the neighborhood I knew.
And that’s OK. Cities evolve and neighborhoods change. We can’t stop Manifest Destiny, can we?
But the idea that the wealthy newcomers are culturally superior is as old as white people “gentrifying” areas occupied by people of color. Gentrification supplants one culture with another; it doesn’t fill in a void.
Try telling that to real estate brokers drooling over East New York.
http://gothamist.com/2015/02/20/report_gentrification_works.php
racists are fuming in the comments section
(Lois Stavsky / Flickr)
With NYC on its way to becoming one long Trader Joe's line, the "g" word has become something of a curse, like "bedbugs" or "gluten-free." But not everyone's afraid of Big Bad Gentrification. In fact, according to an article in The Economist today, we should be drowningmore neighborhoods in artisanal mayonnaise, because gentrification isn't pushing anyone out, apparently.
This isn't the first time we've heard the "gentrification is good" argument, and from an economist's perspective, it makes sense. According to the paper—which suggests welcoming "a bearded intruder on a fixed-gear bike in your neighbourhood," for this is the official gentrifier uniform—when people flood into a crumbling neighborhood, they open new establishments, create jobs, and bring in property tax revenue, all of which help old and new residents. Of course, they also appear to force mom & pop shops to shutter, price out longterm residents and, in New York's case at least, inspire predatory landlords to illegally toss out rent-stabilized tenants in favor of more high-paying ones.
According to The Economist, though, gentrifiers aren't necessarily pushing poor people out, at least on a national scale:
Yet there is little evidence that gentrification is responsible for displacing the poor or minorities. Black people were moving out of Washington in the 1980s, long before most parts of the city began gentrifying. In cities like Detroit, where gentrifiers are few and far between and housing costs almost nothing, they are still leaving. One 2008 study of census data found “no evidence of displacement of low-income non-white households in gentrifying neighbourhoods”. They did find, however, that the average income of black people with high- school diplomas in gentrifying areas soared...
...The bigger problem for most American cities, says Mr Butler, is not gentrification but the opposite: the concentration of poverty. Of neighbourhoods that were more than 30% poor in 1970, just 9% are now less poor than the national average.
The Economist argues that gentrification in Williamsburg, where the median rent for a one-bedroom is now $3,100 a month, didn't actually displace many poor or minority residents. We'd love to hear some of the Southside's Puerto Rican and Dominican locals thoughts onthat. And many of the artists that started the neighborhood's first wave have been priced out, and gentrifying neighborhoods like Crown Heights, Bushwick, and Bedford-Stuyvesant do have many longterm poor and minority residents who may already be finding themselves pushed further east thanks to wealthier newcomers.
To be sure, not everyone's crowing about the blessings bestowed by the Starbucks set. U.S. News & World Report published a piece today showing how gentrification is making many public schools socioeconomically segregated, with wealthier students piling into better-funded selective enrollment programs instead of neighborhood public schools.
An urban geography professor in the Netherlands penned a piece in The Guardian this week warning Detroit residents that gentrifiers will contribute to "growing inequality across the city," noting that the revival of the city's downtown area and influx of white residents will focus better public transportation and security in that small region, while 95 percent of Detroit will continue to suffer.
And also in The Guardian this week, a native San Franciscan pointed out that the black culture and community she once enjoyed in inner-city neighborhood is being pushed out in favor of fancy restaurants, boutiques and chains:
I returned home this year to find Fillmore gentrified. The black population of San Francisco is half of what it was in the 80s and Hayes Valley and Lower Pacific Heights are encroaching on what I knew as Fillmore. A hipster-preppy-tech-idea of Fillmore is gradually replacing the neighborhood I knew.
And that’s OK. Cities evolve and neighborhoods change. We can’t stop Manifest Destiny, can we?
But the idea that the wealthy newcomers are culturally superior is as old as white people “gentrifying” areas occupied by people of color. Gentrification supplants one culture with another; it doesn’t fill in a void.
Try telling that to real estate brokers drooling over East New York.
http://gothamist.com/2015/02/20/report_gentrification_works.php
racists are fuming in the comments section
Dragonfly Jones
Siiiiiiiilence Punk!!
Be a New Yorker brehs
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
I was in CH for 4 years. ~9 years ago a 2 BR in CH was ~1500-2000. And the rent at my 1 BR actually went down when we renewed our lease
that's a lifetime ago though, breh
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
In Arena’s Shadow, Holdouts at Atlantic Yards Site Must Now Leave
FEB. 16, 2015
Photo
Aaron Piller in the building that he is losing to development, at 666 Pacific Street in Brooklyn, near the Barclays Center. CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
The Appraisal
By MATT A.V. CHABAN
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
FEB. 16, 2015
Photo
Aaron Piller in the building that he is losing to development, at 666 Pacific Street in Brooklyn, near the Barclays Center. CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
The Appraisal
By MATT A.V. CHABAN
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
- Brooklyn. The rusticated arena lost its shot at hosting the 2016 Democratic National Convention, but there was still plenty to cheer during its first N.B.A. All-Star celebration.
It was a busy week next door, too. Just across Sixth Avenue, past the prefab apartments and satellite trucks, sits a squat gray warehouse that has stood since the 1930s and has been home to Atlantic Wool since 1997.
Inside, Aaron Piller, the second-generation president, was hurriedly sorting, stacking and selling off thousands of rolls of fabric, from $2-a-yard T-shirt cotton to $100-a-yard cashmeres.
“The more I sell, the less I have to move, not that I know where I’m going,” Mr. Piller said on Wednesday.
Five years ago, Atlantic Yards’s most vocal opponent and obstacle, Daniel Goldstein, agreed to walk away from his three-bedroom condominium for $3 million. His building then came down so that Bruce C. Ratner’s arena-and-apartments complex could rise.
The Appraisal[/paste:font]
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Yet Mr. Goldstein was not the last man standing.
Photo
An emptied office at Mr. Piller’s business, Atlantic Wool, in the Pacific Street building. His father started the business in 1954. CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
It is Mr. Piller and several other property owners who are keeping the bulldozers from their half-dozen buildings on the 22-acre site. But they all must be gone within the next month or two, by order of State Supreme Court, to make way for the second phase of the development.
The holdouts thought they had years ahead of them, given the expected delays from lawsuits and the reverberations of the recession. But last year Mr. Ratner’s firm, Forest City Ratner, sold a majority stake to Greenland Holdings, a company based in Shanghai. Greenland is eager to see the project, rebranded Pacific Park, completed in less than a decade; condemnations began last June. Those left must now leave.
“We’re so lucky to have found a partner who is impatient, just like we are, and their message to us is let’s get this done,” Forest City Ratner’s vice president for external affairs, Ashley Cotton, said in an interview. “We know our neighbors, we’re sympathetic to whatever experience they’re having, but this is really another enormous milestone on the path of Pacific Park.”
Jerry Campbell, one of two homeowners left, must soon hand over the keys to a pair of rowhouses that his grandfather bought in the 1940s and 1960s after immigrating from Barbados.
Sitting on a couch inside the tin-ceilinged living room of 493 Dean Street, the larger home, Mr. Campbell said he would gladly leave — if only his terms were met.
“I honestly had a firm belief in the rule of law and the project, which, as described, seemed a genuinely good thing for the neighborhood,” Mr. Campbell said, his Barbadian accent coming through (his mother moved back to Barbados and he grew up there). “As long as I could replace what I had afterward, I had no reason to object.”
His idea was novel, if unrealistic to everyone but him.
Photo
Jerry Campbell’s home, second from right, at 493 Dean Street in Brooklyn, is among the properties that will be razed for the second phase of the Atlantic Yards project, now called Pacific Park. CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times
When Forest City first approached Mr. Campbell in 2005 — the year after his grandfather died and left the homes to him and some overseas relatives — he countered its offer to buy the property with a swap. Mr. Campbell, who is handling the family’s negotiations, said he suggested that Forest City give him 12,000 square feet of space in the 27-story tower that would rise from his lots.
“I said they should make me a junior partner,” he recalled.
The proposal was rejected out of hand, but Mr. Campbell still clings to some kind of trade, rather than a sale. Like the homes, he has his grandfather to thank for that: “He said: ‘Jerry, look, I’ve been around. You don’t want that money. Money can be gone tomorrow. Tell them you want property, because you can always make do with that.’”
Or so they thought.
For Mr. Piller, it is his father, Louis, who gives the property at 666 Pacific Street special meaning. Louis Piller arrived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan by way of Paris after the Holocaust, having survived the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland as the rest of his family perished. In 1954, he started a jobber business, buying, selling and recycling fabric scraps.
The business grew and he moved to Greene Street in SoHo, where it thrived until the rent tripled in the 1980s. With their first taste of gentrification, the Pillers resolved to always own their facilities. In 1986, they arrived in Brooklyn, in Fort Greene, and 11 years later they relocated across the street from the rail yards.
Mr. Piller vividly remembers the day the twin towers fell. “We were standing on the corner, watching in disbelief,” he said. “Not that we could now, since they ruined our view with that ugly arena.”
Photo
Warehouses near the Barclays Center are also in the path of the project's expansion.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times
The next humbling came a few years later, with the arrival of Forest City. It took a toll on Louis Piller, his son said.
“I don’t want to trivialize what happened by comparing this to the Holocaust,” Mr. Piller said, “but in the end, he felt like here was the government again, coming to take everything from him.” His father died in 2013.
What bothers both men more than having to leave is that Empire State Development, the state agency handling the eminent domain proceedings, is offering them less in compensation than Forest City once did.
“Take one look at this crazy market and tell me how can they say he’s worth less now than 10 years ago,” Jennifer Polovetsky, a lawyer representing Mr. Piller, said.
In condemnation cases, the government seizes the property first, then the negotiations begin, often with a low offer from the state. The owner then counters, and they either settle or let a judge sort it out.
“We will continue to work closely with the entire community, including the affected residents and businesses, to address and meet their needs and concerns,” said Marion Phillips III, president of the state’s Atlantic YardsCommunity Development Corporation.
Both men may not like the state’s numbers, but ultimately they may be the ones who miscalculated the situation.
They were party to some of the lawsuits trying to stop Atlantic Yards, but unlike Mr. Goldstein, neither was particularly outspoken about it. Even so, Mr. Campbell said he would have done everything the same way.
“It’s not that I’m anti-Ratner,” he said. “I’m just for myself.”
As the cheering crowds stream by on the way to the arena, he may be the only one.
Correction: February 19, 2015
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the concentration camp where Louis Piller was held. It was Plaszow, not Paszów
Always own the place you live in. Always. People who blame the "system" because they werent responsible and didnt think ahead during their prime working years deserve the incoming fukkery
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
The wealthy are walling themselves off in cities increasingly segregated by class
By Emily Badger February 23 at 3:43 PM
Kumar Appaiah, under a Creative Commons license.
Concentrated poverty is one of the biggest problems facing cities today, as more of the urban poor become isolated in neighborhoods where the people around them are poor, too. Growing economic segregation across cities, though, is also shaped by a parallel, even stronger force: concentrated wealth.
A new analysis from Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander at the University of Toronto's Martin Prosperity Institute, which identifies the most and least economically segregated metropolitan areas in the United States, makes clear that economic segregation today is heavily shaped by the choices of people at the top: "It is not so much the size of the gap between the rich and poor that drives segregation," they write, "as the ability of the super-wealthy to isolate and wall themselves off from the less well-to-do."
Florida and Mellander created an index of economic segregation that takes into account how we're divided across metro areas by income, but also by occupation and education, two other pillars of what we often think of as socioeconomic status. Among the largest metros in the country, Austin ranks as the place where wealthy, college-educated professionals and less-educated, blue-collar workers are least likely to share the same neighborhoods:
Florida and Mellander
Notably, that top-10 list has four Texas metros. The Washington metro area comes in just behind these big cities, as the 26th most economically segregated in the country, out of 359 U.S. metros. Orlando, Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis, meanwhile, are the least economically segregated among the metros with at least a million people.
Florida and Mellander
Before calculating their combined index, Florida and Mellander also looked at separate measures of segregation by income, education and occupation, and an interesting pattern arises across all three. Within a given region, such as Washington, we can think about income segregation, for example, in at least two ways: To what degree are the wealthy isolated from everyone else? Or to what degree are the poor concentrated in just a few parts of town? The wealthy can be highly segregated in a metro area (occupying just a few neighborhoods), even while the poor are pretty evenly dispersed (with low segregation).
The interesting pattern: By income, the wealthy (households making more than $200,000 a year) are more segregated than the poor (families living under the federal poverty line). By education, people with college degrees are more segregated than people with less than a high school diploma. By occupation, the group that Florida has coined the "creative class" is more segregated than the working class.
The problem of economic segregation, in other words, isn't simply about poor people pushed into already-poor neighborhoods — it's even more so about the well-off choosing to live in places where everyone else is well-off, too. In fact, of all the different forms of segregation that Mellander and Florida examined, the segregation of the wealthy was the most severe. As they write:
While there have always been affluent neighborhoods, gated enclaves, and fabled bastions of wealth like Newport, East Hampton, Palm Beach, Beverly Hills, and Grosse Pointe, the people who cut the lawns, cooked and served the meals, and fixed the plumbing in their big houses used to live nearby—close enough to vote for the same councilors, judges, aldermen, and members of the board of education. That is less and less the case today.
And in their data, these patterns were particularly strong in the largest metros. The larger and more densely populated a metro area, they found, the greater the economic segregation there:
Florida and Mellander
New York, San Francisco and Boston may attract diverse populations: people working in high tech and low-wage retail, workers with master's degrees and GEDs, parents pulling in six figures and minimum wages. But in these cities, mounting evidence suggests those people aren't living anywhere near each other. Which is to say that they may be experiencing the very same city in very different ways.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...s-increasingly-segregated-by-class/?tid=sm_fb
By Emily Badger February 23 at 3:43 PM
Kumar Appaiah, under a Creative Commons license.
Concentrated poverty is one of the biggest problems facing cities today, as more of the urban poor become isolated in neighborhoods where the people around them are poor, too. Growing economic segregation across cities, though, is also shaped by a parallel, even stronger force: concentrated wealth.
A new analysis from Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander at the University of Toronto's Martin Prosperity Institute, which identifies the most and least economically segregated metropolitan areas in the United States, makes clear that economic segregation today is heavily shaped by the choices of people at the top: "It is not so much the size of the gap between the rich and poor that drives segregation," they write, "as the ability of the super-wealthy to isolate and wall themselves off from the less well-to-do."
Florida and Mellander created an index of economic segregation that takes into account how we're divided across metro areas by income, but also by occupation and education, two other pillars of what we often think of as socioeconomic status. Among the largest metros in the country, Austin ranks as the place where wealthy, college-educated professionals and less-educated, blue-collar workers are least likely to share the same neighborhoods:
Florida and Mellander
Notably, that top-10 list has four Texas metros. The Washington metro area comes in just behind these big cities, as the 26th most economically segregated in the country, out of 359 U.S. metros. Orlando, Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis, meanwhile, are the least economically segregated among the metros with at least a million people.
Florida and Mellander
Before calculating their combined index, Florida and Mellander also looked at separate measures of segregation by income, education and occupation, and an interesting pattern arises across all three. Within a given region, such as Washington, we can think about income segregation, for example, in at least two ways: To what degree are the wealthy isolated from everyone else? Or to what degree are the poor concentrated in just a few parts of town? The wealthy can be highly segregated in a metro area (occupying just a few neighborhoods), even while the poor are pretty evenly dispersed (with low segregation).
The interesting pattern: By income, the wealthy (households making more than $200,000 a year) are more segregated than the poor (families living under the federal poverty line). By education, people with college degrees are more segregated than people with less than a high school diploma. By occupation, the group that Florida has coined the "creative class" is more segregated than the working class.
The problem of economic segregation, in other words, isn't simply about poor people pushed into already-poor neighborhoods — it's even more so about the well-off choosing to live in places where everyone else is well-off, too. In fact, of all the different forms of segregation that Mellander and Florida examined, the segregation of the wealthy was the most severe. As they write:
While there have always been affluent neighborhoods, gated enclaves, and fabled bastions of wealth like Newport, East Hampton, Palm Beach, Beverly Hills, and Grosse Pointe, the people who cut the lawns, cooked and served the meals, and fixed the plumbing in their big houses used to live nearby—close enough to vote for the same councilors, judges, aldermen, and members of the board of education. That is less and less the case today.
And in their data, these patterns were particularly strong in the largest metros. The larger and more densely populated a metro area, they found, the greater the economic segregation there:
Florida and Mellander
New York, San Francisco and Boston may attract diverse populations: people working in high tech and low-wage retail, workers with master's degrees and GEDs, parents pulling in six figures and minimum wages. But in these cities, mounting evidence suggests those people aren't living anywhere near each other. Which is to say that they may be experiencing the very same city in very different ways.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...s-increasingly-segregated-by-class/?tid=sm_fb
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
New York City Rent Hikes Outpace Income Growth, and It Sucks
Wednesday, February 25, 2015, by Hana R. Alberts
Rents continue to rise across the city—and more than one data-driven report corroborates the priciness of the market right now. Now official Census Bureau statistics drive home the point: New York City rents are climbing faster than both inflation and income growth. Here are the numbers: "In a city where two of every three homes is a rental, the median rent rose 3.4 percent, after adjusting for inflation, to $1,200 a month from 2011 to 2014. ... While housing became more expensive, the survey found that the median household income for all renters changed minimally, rising by 1.1 percent, to $41,500, from 2010 to 2013."
Here's more intel on the state of the city right now:
The median rent in 2014 was $1,500 for market-rate apartments, $1,200 for rent-stabilized units, $900 for rent-controlled homes and $583 for other apartments, a category that includes public housing.
The study also revealed that 30 percent of area renters are "severely rent burdened," which is housing-analyst code for when rent takes up more then half of a household's income. This information is important beyond scaring renters into submission: it provides even morejustification for Mayor BIll de Blasio's ambitious affordable housing plan. Plus, the state government is set to debate whether to beef up rent-regulation laws in order to keep housing affordable. Reports like this are fuel for the pro-tenant side—sorry, landlords.
http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2015/..._hikes_outpace_income_growth_and_it_sucks.php
Wednesday, February 25, 2015, by Hana R. Alberts
Here's more intel on the state of the city right now:
The median rent in 2014 was $1,500 for market-rate apartments, $1,200 for rent-stabilized units, $900 for rent-controlled homes and $583 for other apartments, a category that includes public housing.
The study also revealed that 30 percent of area renters are "severely rent burdened," which is housing-analyst code for when rent takes up more then half of a household's income. This information is important beyond scaring renters into submission: it provides even morejustification for Mayor BIll de Blasio's ambitious affordable housing plan. Plus, the state government is set to debate whether to beef up rent-regulation laws in order to keep housing affordable. Reports like this are fuel for the pro-tenant side—sorry, landlords.
http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2015/..._hikes_outpace_income_growth_and_it_sucks.php
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Red Hot Rubble of East New York
One drizzly December day, real-estate broker Keith McLaurin was driving a silver minivan down Arlington Avenue in Brooklyn, a few blocks from the East New York station on the Long Island Rail Road. He pulled over in front of an aluminum-sided house with a battered brown awning and called out to the young man on the stoop, whose sweatshirt read IN MEMORY OF WHEN I GAVE A shyt.
“What’s up?” McLaurin shouted. “Is Ice home?”
McLaurin, an electrician who lives in Brooklyn, moonlights at a firm called Exit All Seasons Realty. He specializes in situations of distress. Before making the house call, he had told me that he works to match homeowners facing foreclosure with private investors who are searching for deals. “They hire me to come in and find these properties,” McLaurin said. “And they’re willing to pay me handsomely to do this.” He said three different prospective buyers were interested in this house. He bounded up its front stairs and through an entryway decorated with faded pictures of the Virgin Mary.
Brooklyn Real-Estate Prices Are at Record Highs
On the psychographic map of a historically segregated city, the sprawling slums of eastern Brooklyn have long been considered too impoverished, crime-ridden, and hazardous for investment. But today, in an economically transformed New York, the territory represents some of the city’s most important—and contested—real estate. Speculators seek profit where others fear to venture. They are rushing toward the margins ahead of an economic upheaval that people in Brooklyn real estate call “the wave.” But the area is equally valuable to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is eyeing it for affordable housing, his signature political initiative. To both investors and public-policy-makers, the decrepitude of these neighborhoods represents a rare, and perhaps perishing, opportunity. They’re priced for the poor—at least for now.
The wave has already churned through Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where median home prices have roughly doubled since 2010. As McLaurin stood on Arlington Avenue, a rowhouse on nearby Moffat Street in Bushwick—purchased for $260,000 out of foreclosure last February—was on sale for $1.1 million. But here, just across Cypress Hills cemetery, the median price was only $400,000. The people McLaurin was working with, whom he would identify only as “private investors,” were anticipating that they could get the house for a drastically discounted cost, since it appeared to have a delinquent mortgage. But first, McLaurin would have to persuade the house’s occupants to sell.
Jerry Joseph—“Ice” to his friends—was in his first-floor bedroom, watching daytime television, wearing a fleece sweat-shirt and a winter hat. The house’s heat and electricity had been shut off, and Joseph was siphoning power for the TV from next door. The bank sued to foreclose on the house’s mortgage in 2010, around the time its owner, his stepfather, died of cancer. “Everything, like, you know, crashed,” Joseph said. His mother had since moved in with a daughter, and Joseph said no one had made a payment in years. He gave us a tour, his breath visible as he showed us the kitchen. Joseph’s nephew—the guy on the stoop—lived upstairs, and another bedroom was filled with belongings of the nephew’s two children and their mother. “She’s supposed to move in because she’s getting kicked out of the place where she is right now,” Joseph said. “You know how it is, they can’t be homeless.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/east-new-york-gentrification.html
long article
One drizzly December day, real-estate broker Keith McLaurin was driving a silver minivan down Arlington Avenue in Brooklyn, a few blocks from the East New York station on the Long Island Rail Road. He pulled over in front of an aluminum-sided house with a battered brown awning and called out to the young man on the stoop, whose sweatshirt read IN MEMORY OF WHEN I GAVE A shyt.
“What’s up?” McLaurin shouted. “Is Ice home?”
McLaurin, an electrician who lives in Brooklyn, moonlights at a firm called Exit All Seasons Realty. He specializes in situations of distress. Before making the house call, he had told me that he works to match homeowners facing foreclosure with private investors who are searching for deals. “They hire me to come in and find these properties,” McLaurin said. “And they’re willing to pay me handsomely to do this.” He said three different prospective buyers were interested in this house. He bounded up its front stairs and through an entryway decorated with faded pictures of the Virgin Mary.
Brooklyn Real-Estate Prices Are at Record Highs
On the psychographic map of a historically segregated city, the sprawling slums of eastern Brooklyn have long been considered too impoverished, crime-ridden, and hazardous for investment. But today, in an economically transformed New York, the territory represents some of the city’s most important—and contested—real estate. Speculators seek profit where others fear to venture. They are rushing toward the margins ahead of an economic upheaval that people in Brooklyn real estate call “the wave.” But the area is equally valuable to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is eyeing it for affordable housing, his signature political initiative. To both investors and public-policy-makers, the decrepitude of these neighborhoods represents a rare, and perhaps perishing, opportunity. They’re priced for the poor—at least for now.
The wave has already churned through Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where median home prices have roughly doubled since 2010. As McLaurin stood on Arlington Avenue, a rowhouse on nearby Moffat Street in Bushwick—purchased for $260,000 out of foreclosure last February—was on sale for $1.1 million. But here, just across Cypress Hills cemetery, the median price was only $400,000. The people McLaurin was working with, whom he would identify only as “private investors,” were anticipating that they could get the house for a drastically discounted cost, since it appeared to have a delinquent mortgage. But first, McLaurin would have to persuade the house’s occupants to sell.
Jerry Joseph—“Ice” to his friends—was in his first-floor bedroom, watching daytime television, wearing a fleece sweat-shirt and a winter hat. The house’s heat and electricity had been shut off, and Joseph was siphoning power for the TV from next door. The bank sued to foreclose on the house’s mortgage in 2010, around the time its owner, his stepfather, died of cancer. “Everything, like, you know, crashed,” Joseph said. His mother had since moved in with a daughter, and Joseph said no one had made a payment in years. He gave us a tour, his breath visible as he showed us the kitchen. Joseph’s nephew—the guy on the stoop—lived upstairs, and another bedroom was filled with belongings of the nephew’s two children and their mother. “She’s supposed to move in because she’s getting kicked out of the place where she is right now,” Joseph said. “You know how it is, they can’t be homeless.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/east-new-york-gentrification.html
long article
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
PaulSSJan 28, 2015
Wow. NYC real estate, and hence the social matrix of NYC, is completely perverted. If you were anywhere else in the USA calling "LOW INCOME" a yearly earnings of between $41,951 and $67,120 you would be forcibly committed to an mental health facility. Really, low income is $67,120 for the purposes of real estate zoning and development of new housing? All of you are simply sick for having internalized these standards. And it shows a completely, violently hostile orientation to anyone who is even middle class, forget about low income or outright poor people. There is no real estate vision for New York City. There is only a violently discriminatory economic environment in which people who are actually middle class and below are purposefully being driven to extinction within the borders of the city. This isn't just horrible politics or horrible business practices, it is simply inhumane, and perverted.
Wow. NYC real estate, and hence the social matrix of NYC, is completely perverted. If you were anywhere else in the USA calling "LOW INCOME" a yearly earnings of between $41,951 and $67,120 you would be forcibly committed to an mental health facility. Really, low income is $67,120 for the purposes of real estate zoning and development of new housing? All of you are simply sick for having internalized these standards. And it shows a completely, violently hostile orientation to anyone who is even middle class, forget about low income or outright poor people. There is no real estate vision for New York City. There is only a violently discriminatory economic environment in which people who are actually middle class and below are purposefully being driven to extinction within the borders of the city. This isn't just horrible politics or horrible business practices, it is simply inhumane, and perverted.