All-White $1M Studio Has a Ming Dynasty Door But No Bed
Absurdly expensive studios are distracting, but tear your eyes away from the white walls and chandeliers in this renovated West Village studio to focus on the facts. In April of 2014, one Charles Nicola paid$420,000 for a petite apartment on West 12th Street. One flight up, it had exposed brick and a decorative fireplace. Fast forward one year—and one major overhaul—and this white-washed studio hits the market, asking a whopping $989,000. (It would be a lot per square foot if the listing gave the square footage.) In any case, the extreme makeover resulted in what the brokerbabble calls a "Immaculate Village Jewel Box," with white oak floors, a big kitchen island, marble everywhere, and an antique bathroom door that dates back to the Ming Dynasty. Oddly enough, there's not a bed to be found, not even of the Murphy variety. But the place does have a dressing room/walk-in closet and a "three-foot Maria Theresa crystal chandelier," which probably cost a few thousand. Really, who needs sleep when those crystals shine so bright?
Workers at Brooklyn's First Apple Store Are Plugging Away
If Williamsburg hadn't already made it when J. Crew planted its roots, the impending Apple Store definitely confirms that the waterfront neighborhood is now the epitome of consumer culture cool. Construction of the borough's first Apple Store on the corner of Bedford Avenue and North 3rd Street is moving right along, with Brownstoner noting that its foundation is more or less complete. The store will sit directly adjacent from the neighborhood's long-awaited Whole Foods.
With Algorithms Buying Homes, What Could Go Wrong?
Photo by Travis Wise/Creative Commons
The Wall Street Journal reports that big players in the real estate industry have started to embrace quantitative data analysis and mathematical modeling, utilizing algorithms to evaluate how homes are scouted and purchased. For instance, Blackstone Group's Invitation Homes calculates how much a potential property may cost to renovate based on location, size and age, while comparing it to a database of thousands of properties. This computer arms race by players such as Silver Bay Realty Trust means homes with good scores are evaluated in minutes and bid on, often sight unseen, in order to beat rivals to any remaining bargains in the market. While in many ways it's a sign of a slightly healthier market, since the low hanging fruit of foreclosures and short sales have begun to dry up over the last few years, the practice recalls computer-aided trading (when has that ever gone wrong?) and the dreaded B-word, and can drive up the cost of rental properties.
$6 Million Noho Loft Is Massive and for Artists Only
This Noho apartment is located in a rare co-op building that claims to (actually) adhere to Artist In Residence guidelines, meaning that in order to live there you need to be an artist according to city's somewhat strange definition of who and what an artist is. (Choreographers: artists. Dancers: not artists.) In addition to all that, the loft is enormous at 3,200 square feet (big enough, as you see from the above photo, for some serious dancing—ahem—choreographing) and has an equally enormous asking price of $5.995 million.
Co-Op Owner Wants $680,000 or Exclusive Elevator Use, Please
A makeshift Soho hallway is the crux of this week's frivolous lawsuit. It all began when a new co-op owner at 33 Greene Street demanded his third-floor neighbor fork over $680,000, or grant him exclusive floor access to the building's elevator, NYDN reports. Mood Fabrics owner Eric Sauma wants to tear down a wall erected by his third floor neighbor, music manager bigwig Wendy Laister, that allows her shared access to the building's elevator. The wall was erected by Laister and her mother—who formerly owned Sauma's apartment—in the '90s with the co-op board's approval, Laister claims. The hallway allows both apartments to access the elevator; without the wall, the elevator would open exclusively into Sauma's apartment. Laister is now suing Sauma over the six-figure demand.
10 Reasons You Can't Afford To Live in New York City
[Photo via Shutterstock.]
Because the real estate market just isn't intimidating enough on its own, the personal finance site SmartAsset has broken down for Business Insider just how unaffordable New York City is. In all the ways. The cost of living, in fact, is double the national average. Here are the 10 specific (too-expensive) reasons they name, though there are no doubt more.
1) New York City's income taxes are among the highest in the country.
2) The average rent for a two-bedroom in Manhattan (by one measure) is "roughly equal to the entire monthly income of the typical U.S. worker."
2) The average rent for a two-bedroom in Manhattan (by one measure) is "roughly equal to the entire monthly income of the typical U.S. worker."
Smaller Manhattan Apartments Keep Getting More Expensive
This week, real estate appraiser, Curbed graph guru, blogger, newsletter writer, and columnist Jonathan Miller looks at how much it costs to "trade up" from a starter apartment.
[A studio apartment in Chelsea. Photo by Will Femia]
A lot of time and energy has been spent writing about one of the biggest challenges to the New York City housing market in recent years: affordability. One of the primary observations of the purchase market has been the lower number of first time buyers, both locally and nationally. Tight credit, slow household formation, and a creaky economy have been a root cause of keeping their participation muted, but it's also the disproportionately higher price growth over the long term for smaller apartments. Here's my attempt to illustrate this trend, using data from the last 25 years.
Cornerspotted: Hudson & Dekalb Avenues, Downtown Brooklyn
Downtown Brooklyn's Long Island University has come to dominate the area surrounding this week's cornerspotter in the 60 years since it was pictured. The corner of Dekalb and Hudson avenues is now overshadowed by the university's William Zeckendorf Health Sciences Center, and a stretch of Hudson Avenue has been included in the university's gated campus and now only serves foot traffic. Commenter architrance who correctly identified the corner notes that the large building in the rear of the image along Dekalb Avenue now serves as a parking garage for the university.
· Hint: This Corner Now Caters To a Different Kind of Traffic [Curbed]
· Cornerspotter archives [Curbed]
· Hint: This Corner Now Caters To a Different Kind of Traffic [Curbed]
· Cornerspotter archives [Curbed]
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Tour 60 Water, Dumbo's New Mass of Un-Dumbo-Like Rentals
- All photos by Will Femia.
51 IMAGES
The enormous Two Trees-developed, Ismael Leyva- and LEESER Architect-designed 60 Water Street (nee Dock Street Dumbo) rose quickly once it got started, angering some neighbors in the process, and since it started leasing in February 40 percent of the apartments have been rented. Of the 290 apartments in the building, which rises to 17 stories in one section and nine in the other, 58 (20 percent) are affordable, and the affordable units are spread throughout the building (there's even one on the top floor) with the same finishes, and nothing distinguishing them from the market-rate units.
A Beautiful, Handy Guide to New York's Most Iconic Buidings
Drawing/painting/photographing the buildings of New York City is a popular (and pretty) hobby, and the latest architectural artistry from Pop Chart Lab distills the streetscape down to 54 significant structures, from local monuments like the Washington Square Arch to the world-famous One World Trade Center to the historic Plaza Hotel. Called "Splendid Structures of New York City," the poster orders the buildings by height and includes each building's address, year of construction, and architectural style.
Ziegfeld Theatre, Icon of Follies and Red Carpets, May Close
The iconic Ziegfeld Theatre on West 54th Street may not be long for this world. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the CEO of theater operator Cablevision, James Dolan, said that the city's largest single-screen theater—a favorite for east coast red carpets but not much else—hemorrhages money. Dolan went on to insinuate that the company would like to find someone else to finish out its lease, which expires in 2018.
The Architectural Inspiration Behind the New School's Rebranding
[Photos ©Martin Seck, courtesy of Pentagram]
The New School, the 104-year-old New York City institution focused on offering an progressive, design-inspired education, already has a rather ambiguous name. Combined with the fact that the university is actually composed of five sub-schools (e.g. the renowned Parsons School of Design and the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts) and it's suddenly clear why the school recently unveiled a new "visual identity," crafted by graphic designer Paula Scher from the international design studio Pentagram. At the center of the school's new look is Neue, an algorithm-based typeface that highlights the design-centric spirit of the school and its flexible, ever-evolving nature. Incorporating three different widths, the letters can be customized for each sub-school while maintaining a coherent institution-wide aesthetic. And as it turns out, the new typeface that's now all over the street signage and interior walls on campus takes a page or two from the existing architecture, including the striking brass and glass University Center building designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill and opened in January 2014.
This $12M Townhouse Sits on a Secret Garden in NYC
Hidden behind a dozen houses on the Upper East Side exists one of New York's most exclusive leafy enclaves, Jones Wood Garden, a private sanctuary accessible only through the townhouses that surround it—and one of those houses, 160 East 66th Street, is now on the market for $11.9 million. The buyers will hold one of just 12 keys to the garden (you think Gramercy Park is exclusive? There are a whopping 383 keys to it, and it's on Google Maps). The house, recently renovated, is also pretty nice. The brokerbabble says it is "pin-drop quiet," and it features a wood-paneled library, four bedrooms, several wood-burning fireplaces, a rooftop terrace, and a "dramatic Regency-style 13' tall bowed" overlooking the garden from the living room.
Clinton Hill's Grocery Store-Eating Apartments, Revealed
This eight-story, 113-apartment building will rise on the site of a Clinton Hill Key Food, because the neighborhood's apartment-to-grocery-store ratio is not quite skewed enough already. YIMBY spottedthe rendering for 325 Lafayette Avenue, which is being developed jointly by Slate Property Group and the site's current owner, Dan's Supreme Supermarkets. Slate announced earlier that it would bring a grocery store back to the site, but is now being noncommittal about what will occupy the building's 15,000-square-foot commercial space.
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- Senior EditorHana Alberts
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