Costly Rents Push Brooklynites to Queens
Youngna Park for The New York Times
A mural in Bushwick, Brooklyn, proclaims the neighborhood's hipness, while the old-style vibe of Ridgewood, Queens, may be on its way out. More Photos »
By MICHELLE HIGGINS
Published: August 16, 2013 Comment
It was only a matter of time, after Bushwick was given a featured role in the HBO show “Girls,” that the young creative types who established this gritty Brooklyn neighborhood as an artists’ enclave began to be priced out.
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Galleries, restaurants and bars have multiplied in Bushwick. Rachel and Kurt of Fox Television’s “Glee” moved into a loft there. Last September, the Clintons were spotted at Roberta’s, the artisanal pizzeria. More recently, Anne Hathaway was reported to be filming a scene for a movie at a local cafe and music joint. And developers have homed in with plans for doorman buildings, and possibly a mall.
Now, with such mainstream endeavors looming and prices on the rise, artists, 20-somethings and young families are taking the L train for the short hop to neighboring and more economical Ridgewood, Queens.
The average monthly rent for a studio in Bushwick was $1,675 in July, up 27 percent from July 2011, according to MNS, a residential and investment sales brokerage. The monthly rent for one- and two-bedroom apartments was also up by double digits, to $1,900 and $2,121 respectively, for the same period.
The price increases come as the gap narrows between overall rents in northern Brooklyn and Manhattan. Last month, the average monthly rent in northern Brooklyn rose to $3,035 — by 8.2 percent compared with July 2012, according to a report compiled by the appraisal firm Miller Samuel for Douglas Elliman. In Manhattan, the average rent was $3,822 in July, up 1.7 percent.
At the same time, developers are looking for a better return on rental buildings as they face rising land prices in Manhattan. “We’re getting a lot of these landlords who historically have been in Manhattan saying, ‘Tell us about Bushwick; what is this area in Queens?’ ” said Andrew Barrocas, the chief executive of MNS. He has organized about a dozen informal walking tours of the area for investors and developers who want a better understanding of the buzz.
Compared with Manhattan, he said, “the rent multiplier is a lot more appealing,” because of lower land costs and the premium that new rentals can command.
Ten years ago, a two-bedroom priced at $1,100 a month would have been on the high side in Bushwick, said Diana Reyna, who represents the area stretching from Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn into Ridgewood, Queens, on the New York City Council. “Today we’re talking about people who are charging $3,000” to roommates who split the rent four ways.
She noted that seven rezoning proposals had been submitted in her district, and that she was pushing for developments to set aside 40 percent of apartments as affordable housing. She added that when one of her staff members, who is moving for the third time in two years because of rising Bushwick rents, heard about this article, he lamented, “Now I’m going to have to move again.”
Ridgewood
Real estate prices in Ridgewood, a working-class neighborhood of roughly two square miles, are on the upswing. But monthly rents are still cheaper than in East Williamsburg and Bushwick. For example, the rent for a three-bedroom in Ridgewood is nearly 20 percent lower than in Bushwick, according to Streeteasy.com.
Ridgewood consists mainly of well-maintained row houses from the early 20th century, between two and six stories high. The median sales price in the second quarter was $400,000, up 14 percent from the same period last year, according to Streeteasy.
Alex Amini, a 24-year-old bass player, is paying just $600 a month to share a large three-bedroom duplex in a renovated Ridgewood row house with four other people. “It’s the biggest apartment I’ve ever had,” he said, “and it’s the cheapest.”
He charts his eastward progression over the past four years, starting in Manhattan, where he paid $1,100 a month for a share in a three-bedroom in the East Village. After a brief detour to the Upper West Side, he went through a series of sublets, all with roommates, all costing $700 to $800 a month, near the Morgan Avenue L subway stop — a burgeoning area called variously Morgantown, Bushwick and East Willamsburg.
“I made some really close friends,” Mr. Amini said of his time living with “random people” in Brooklyn. “That’s part of the allure.”
Ridgewood is quiet by comparison. “There are not a lot of restaurants,” he said. “It is not as much of a hotbed for artists yet.”
But there are signs of gentrification. Notable among the handful of galleries and coffee shops is Bunker, a Vietnamese restaurant headed up by Jimmy Tu, who once cooked at Eleven Madison Park. It was recently named the Best Cheap-Eats Joint by New York magazine.
Even as bright-orange umbrellas shade a new pedestrian plaza where Myrtle Avenue, 71st Avenue and Stephen Street converge, a shop like Ridgewood Coins and Stamps remains straight out of another era, advertising an old-fashioned telephone exchange beginning with the letters EV. Others have signs that reflect the German, Mexican, Polish and other immigrants who make up the community.
But a few are clearly catering to a new demographic. ChocoLatte Café, a year-old coffee shop a storefront away from Ridgewood Coins and Stamps, has cards at the door promoting a local yoga studio with student specials. A block away, Ridgewood Thai has an oversize chandelier, fake lotus flowers floating in pots and a Mod aesthetic.
“Many of the young people who work in Williamsburg — bartenders, waitresses — if you ask them where do they live, they say Ridgewood,” said Gene Keyser, a broker with Halstead Property in Brooklyn. “It’s the young folks, east of Fort Greene, the Pratt kids, finding themselves priced out, who are now pushing out there.”
Families are also being lured to Queens from Brooklyn by the space their money will buy. In March Betsy Hoffman, an agent with Brennan Realty Services, a brokerage that focuses on Brooklyn town houses, began helping a couple who have a year-old child and wanted to buy a free-standing house in Bedford-Stuyvesant. With a $700,000 budget, they were quickly priced out. Next they turned to Bushwick, but that was a washout, too.
“The next logical step was to go to Ridgewood,” said Ms. Hoffman, who found the couple a three-family fixer-upper there that met their budget. Unfortunately the deal fell through, but they are continuing to concentrate their search on Ridgewood.
New development may have a harder time finding a foothold in Ridgewood than it did in Bushwick. Last month, the community board recommended that a manufacturing area south of Myrtle Avenue be designated an industrial business zone, to help retain jobs and fend off residential construction.
Ms. Reyna, the councilwoman, said that in terms of rezoning, “we have to draw the line as to where we go and how far we will go to develop housing, so it’s not so much to the point that we lose our work force,” by eliminating small businesses and manufacturing.
Bushwick
While interest in Ridgewood is growing, Bushwick remains the hub of activity.
A proposal by the Read Property Group to develop several rental buildings on a mostly vacant site that used to house the Rheingold Brewery was approved with conditions by the community board; it is making its way through the public approval process, including review by the borough president, the City Planning Commission and the City Council.
The project would add 977 apartments, retail space and a park to the area near Woodhull Medical Center and the Flushing Avenue J train. About 24 percent of the one-, two- and three-bedroom units are to be below market rate, according to Mitch Korbey, a partner in the law firm Herrick, Feinstein, which is working with the developer.
Nearby at 815 Broadway, Douglas Steiner, a developer and the chairman of Steiner Studios, plans to turn a former Conway store into 40 rental units with a large retail component.
And two stops away on the J train, Colony 1209, a 120-apartment rental building going up on DeKalb Avenue, is expected to open this fall with studios and one- and two-bedrooms. Pricing is being finalized.
Colony 1209 will be aimed at “trendsetting” 20-somethings, said David J. Maundrell III, the founder of aptsandlofts.com, a New York brokerage that specializes in the marketing of new developments. Indoor bocce courts and a vintage arcade with games like Donkey Kong are on the long list of planned amenities. If the place is not promoted correctly, he pointed out, the bohemian sensibilities of the target audience could be offended.
“I have to be authentic with this,” said Mr. Maundrell, who has employed a photographer living in Bushwick to capture the essence of the neighborhood in pictures to be used in advertising. The building’s home page will include the Twitter feed of Bushwick Daily, an in-the-know blog. “They don’t like corporate,” he said of his prospective tenants. “You can’t fool around.”
Already, questions are being raised about whether Bushwick is losing its edge. Last year, an entire city block at the Morgan Avenue L stop sold for $12.15 million to a developer with plans for a retail complex. The Commercial Observer noted the news with the headline, “A Mall Grows in Bushwick?” It went on to ask if the plans for “Brooklyn’s hippest neighborhood mark the death of cool or the beginning of mainstream success in Bushwick?”
Although that has yet to be determined, some residents are concerned about the neighborhood’s rapid transformation.
“There is a lot of anxiety about the pace at which Bushwick is changing,” said Deborah Brown, an artist who directs the gallery Storefront Bushwick and serves on the local community board. In May she bought a 7,000-square-foot warehouse, which she is using as her studio and has started to use as her gallery. Ms. Brown, who lives in Manhattan, was first struck by Bushwick’s then nascent art scene in 2006, when she dropped off her niece at an apartment in the neighborhood. Recognizing the seeds of gentrification, she soon bought a two-story vacant factory with her husband, Eric Ploumis, to use as her studio and to be part of the creative community. “I thought, ‘I have seen this happen so many times, this time I’m going to be in on it.’ ” But she didn’t anticipate the speed of the neighborhood’s change. “It’s been faster than I could imagine,” she said.
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