And some of them might even be your friends:

Living in a top-floor walk-up in New York City is a mixed blessing.

Sure there are those stairs; all those stairs. There is the moment of dread when you look up the stairs and contemplate the trek up, up and up, carrying groceries, children, luggage, furniture, whatever.

But that’s not all there is. In the current real estate market, top-floor walk-ups may well be the best deals. They can also be quiet spaces that are flooded with light and that have open views of the city, especially if they peek out above their surrounding neighbors. In some cases, they also have a deck or terrace that can become an outdoor living room with the twinkling night sky as a backdrop.

. . .

Since 1968, the city has generally required builders to install elevators in all new residential buildings that have five or more stories. But under certain zoning provisions, a five-story building can be built without an elevator.

Brokers say there are some developers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who have gotten approval to build five-story walk-ups by setting the top floor back from the front of the building and by keeping ceiling height under eight feet.

At five stories, “having an elevator would mean pretty significant common charges,” said Roberto Gonzalez, an agent at Bond New York. “Developers will do walk-ups because they want to be competitive, and they want to use as much of the footprint as they can for living space as opposed to an elevator shaft.”

David Kazemi, a vice president at Bond New York, said that walk-ups don’t seem to bother many of the young professionals looking to buy in Williamsburg. “A lot of people prefer it actually because they don’t want the luxury high-rise lifestyle,” he said. “That’s not the point of living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.”

. . .

People who live in top-floor walk-ups say they have a variety of coping mechanisms that help them deal with the daily hike up the stairs.

Ms. Stern said she learned very quickly not to focus on the number of steps. She counted and knew the exact number at one point. “But that was discouraging because then I found myself counting every time I went up,” she said. “It was much better when I stayed focused on the mission and the goal of just getting home.”

Big shopping trips to the grocery store are replaced by more frequent and smaller purchases, and heavy items like kitty litter might be put on the Fresh Direct order, along with a generous tip to the delivery man.

Mr. Gonzalez, the Bond agent, recently bought a fifth-floor walk-up for himself in Williamsburg, and he said that he had learned to become more organized to avoid having to run up and down the stairs several times a day to retrieve forgotten items. “Before I leave the house now I have a little saying: ‘Money, keys, phone. Money, keys, phone. Money, keys, phone,’” he said. “Because if I forget one of them, that’s when I regret the top floor.”

Mr. Nguyen, the owner in Inwood, said the one thing that he takes special care with is the trash and recycling. “I make sure it’s well secured for the trip down because I don’t want it breaking,” he said.

Also, after spending a week personally gutting and renovating the apartment’s kitchen with a friend, he said, “If I’d known what all we had to go through, I’d have probably hired somebody else to do it.”

He and his friend hauled up 15 kitchen cabinets, two 7-foot-tall storage units, countless bags of grout, boxes of tile and piles of new floorboards. “We sort of had to do a lot of maneuvering and we had to shimmy a lot of things around corners on the stairs to make it fit,” he said. “But it’s amazing what you can do with sheer will and determination.”

In case you thought it would be a good thing for the City to control transportation projects, there’s this — Hizzoner paying a little too much attention to the wrong parts of the Power Broker:

Bloomberg said Friday that a week or two ago, developer Jerry Speyer expressed concerns about whether the city would complete the 7 subway line extension critical to the $1 billion project.

“If I were you,” the mayor said he told Speyer, “I would make absolutely, positively sure that we are going to build that subway before I put one dime of my own money in.”

The MTA’s announcement Thursday night that it had canned the Tishman-Speyer deal came without warning to the mayor, City Hall insiders said.

. . .

Neither Bloomberg staffers nor Tishman-Speyer representatives would discuss the outcome of the hour-long talk at Bloomberg’s London apartment Friday.

“The plan isn’t dead by any means,” Bloomberg said before the sitdown. “All these things go though many cycles.

“The No. 7 line is going to get done,” the mayor added, “and it will be so far along before I leave office that nobody’s going to be able to stop it.”

Plans for the site include thousands of units of housing, commercial skyscrapers, a school and parkland.

Oh, well as long as there’s a park — and a school! — Robert Moses would smile, since he popularized the “get as far along as possible and make ‘em take it back down” philosophy of urban planning (recently embraced by Bruce Ratner, among others).

The one-stop shopping and railroading may be dead after all:

Six weeks after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority selected Tishman Speyer Properties to build a vast complex of office towers, apartment buildings and parks over the railyards on the West Side of Manhattan, the deal has fallen apart.

Gary Dellaverson, the authority’s chief financial officer, said the negotiations foundered Thursday afternoon after Tishman Speyer insisted on changing the terms of the $1 billion development, which both parties had agreed to on March 26.

. . .

. . . critics of the deal said that it should never have been made, especially since the financing for a key element for West Side development, the extension of the No. 7 subway line, had not been resolved. At the same time, plans for the expansion of the nearby Javits Convention Center had collapsed. And given the sour real estate market, critics said the developer was getting an inexpensive development option.

“This deal was unhealthy from the get-go,” said Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky. “It never met the needs of the M.T.A.’s capital plan. The 7-line commitments were never sustainable. And in the end, every single West Side project is in various state of collapse.”

But what is perverse is that people who can afford not to spend half their income on rent are probably doing so, too:

Arnold Somrah was spending almost half of his income on the Park Slope apartment he shared with a friend. The 24-year-old finally moved back into his parents’ Ozone Park home.

“You can’t go out. Your Friday and Saturday nights are done,” said Somrah, who was paying $750 a month for his basement room. Samrah is now saving to eventually buy in Florida. “It’s too expensive here.”

Nearly 530,000 renters in the city are spending 50 percent or more of their income on housing, a 14.9 percent jump from 1999, according to data released yesterday by Rep. Anthony Weiner.

“Financial advisors say, ‘You should spend no more than a third of your income on rent’” said Weiner. “That’s sounding more and more like a pipe dream.”

The Bronx is feeling the burden the most, with 32.85 percent of its renters paying half their income on rent in 2006. Manhattan (22.32 percent) had the lowest.

In case you missed the heady days of Wall Street tycoons and an overheated real estate market:

A century later, when Dr. Mitchell Blutt, a modern-day tycoon made rich on Wall Street, wanted a mansion of his own, he found Mr. Carnegie’s neighborhood, now known as Carnegie Hill, not surprisingly plumb out of space.

To solve the problem, Dr. Blutt bought the two town houses directly east of his current home on East 90th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, in order to combine the three Romanesque Revival, four-story town houses into one 17,000-square-foot dwelling. His plans have prompted protest from neighbors, who see an intrusion of a suburban-style “McMansion,” and from preservationists, who fear that they would destroy the character of the landmark-protected buildings.

“It’s an audacious proposal,” said Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, which works to preserve New York’s historic neighborhoods and buildings. “It’s the kind of thing that seems to be extraordinarily conspicuous consumption.”

Even by the extravagant standards set by the real estate forays of this century’s gilded elite, Dr. Blutt’s plan is unusual. Because the combination of brownstones is relatively rare, especially for conversion into a single-family home, it raises a host of questions not easily answered.

Dr. Blutt had proposed a three-story rear-yard addition that would extend some 15 ½ feet beyond the buildings’ original rear walls. He also wanted to add more than 20 feet to the height of the buildings by adding a fifth floor, as well as a concrete bulkhead for a new elevator shaft.

When Dr. Blutt’s architect presented the plans to the Landmarks Preservation Commission last Tuesday, the commission took no formal vote, but some members noted their concern about the proposed fifth floor and the character of the rear-yard addition. The commission told the architect to submit redrawn plans.

Lo van der Valk, president of Carnegie Hill Neighbors, said that since the historical preservation movement took hold in the late 1960s, the expansion of dwelling space usually took place by building up and out. For instance, during the 1990s, homeowners scurried to buy neighboring apartments, knocking down walls to scrape out a few hundred extra feet.

But neither Mr. van der Valk nor Mr. Bankoff could recall a single case of a person turning three attached brownstones into one single-family home.

Dr. Blutt paid $12.6 million for both of the neighboring town houses, according to public records, and real estate experts estimate the value of all three together at around $20 million, before any renovations.

So that’s how it works:

A class-action lawsuit against top real-estate broker Brown Harris Stevens alleges the firm discriminated against families that were trying to rent apartments in Brooklyn — because they had kids.

The suit, filed Thursday, is the first class action against a real-estate agency for “assisting and enabling landlords to carry out the discrimination,” said Diane Houk of the Fair Housing Justice Center.

One agent allegedly told Jamie Katz and his wife, Lisa Nocera, “I’ll show you everything available that I think is suitable for kids.”

They first went to Brown Harris Stevens two years ago when they saw a listing for a converted carriage house in Brooklyn Heights.

Nocera was nine months pregnant, and they wanted to leave their tiny Manhattan apartment. But the broker didn’t show it to them, saying “the owners would not rent to people with children because there was an outdoor space,” according to the lawsuit.

The couple remained in Manhattan, but when they looked again last June, with their baby, Bruno, they liked a $2,300-a-month apartment in Park Slope. After filling out an application, a Brown Harris Stevens broker allegedly said the owners wouldn’t rent to anyone with a child because of lead paint.

“I felt bad,” Katz said. “I felt they were preying on our fears as new parents about lead paint.”

The plight of the self-consciously trendy is they’re always a step or two behind:

The promise of learning the cold, hard realities of today’s housing market is what brought more than a dozen skinny-jean-wearing, tattoo-sporting members of Williamsburg’s art and music scene to Hugs bar last month to attend [real estate agent Eve] Levine’s first “Hipster Mortgage Night.”

It’s the latest version of a marketing campaign Levin first began as mere barroom lectures.

“There is so much information people just don’t know,” said Levine, a musician and artist herself who created the event not only as a tool for marketing her own business, but also a means of supplying financial and home buying know-how to a group of people she bluntly describes as “the opposite of Wall Street.”

Members of that group, frankly, agree with that assessment.

“Figuring out how to buy a home in New York City is like climbing Mount Everest,” said Margaret Raimondi, who attended the event with her fiancé, Brad Augustine.

“Hopefully, ‘Hipster Mortgage Night’ will make it more like climbing Mount Rainier,” she added, referring to the much-shorter mountain in Washington State.

Better to decamp to Jackson, Prospect or even Morris Heights than whoring every detail of your life for clicks, according to the person who started it all (by portraying someone who started it all):

Budding Carrie Bradshaws better think about moving to Queens, says “Sex and the City” icon Sarah Jessica Parker.

Manhattan is bracing for another influx of Blahnik-wearing career girls after the film is released May 30. But New York is “a really hard city, and it’s very expensive and it’s not what it used to be,” Parker told me at the Cinema Society and Linda Wells’ screening of her new film, “Smart People.”

“That’s why the outer boroughs are so desirable,” she said. “The outer boroughs are pretty sexy. It’s just a matter of time before they have their own shows.”

Even though Manhattan just gets tweedier, speculating on a dorm strains credulity:

The city can legally deny developer Gregg Singer a permit to build a student dormitory in the East Village on the basis that he does not have an educational institution lined up to use the facility, the New York State Court of Appeals has ruled.

In the ruling yesterday, the court wrote that if the dormitory were completed and no school leased its space, the city would be unnecessarily forced to either allow Mr. Singer to use it for other purposes or require it to be torn down or left vacant. The 7–0 decision overturned a ruling by a lower appellate court.

The long-standing dispute involves the former home of P.S. 64, on East 9th Street between avenues B and C, which Mr. Singer purchased from the city in 1998 for $3.1 million.

Community groups protested the developer’s plans to build a 19-story student dorm on the site, saying it was an attempt to illegally build luxury housing. In 2004, the city’s Department of Buildings rejected Mr. Singer’s application to build the dormitory, saying the building needed to be affiliated with a specific academic institution beforehand. A state court upheld the city’s decision in 2006, but last year an appellate court sided with Mr. Singer. Yesterday’s decision, by the state’s highest court, reversed the 2007 ruling.

Well, it’s a good thing they rushed to tear down all those people’s homes:

The slowing economy, weighed down by a widening credit crisis, is likely to delay the signature office tower and three residential buildings at the heart of the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the developer said.

“It may hold up the office building,” the developer, Bruce C. Ratner, said in a recent interview. “And the bond market may slow the pace of the residential buildings.”

Mr. Ratner, chief executive of Forest City Ratner, did not specify the kinds of delays possible, but suggested that construction could be put off for years. His comments are his first public indication that the darkening economy has slowed the ambitious project, spanning 22 acres at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.

The developer did say he was confident about starting construction on a $950 million basketball arena for the Nets by the end of the year. The arena was to be surrounded by the office tower, known as Miss Brooklyn, and three residential buildings in the first phase of the project.

But Mr. Ratner has yet to secure an anchor tenant for the Miss Brooklyn building, and now plans to phase in the residential buildings slowly.

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

One way to get public school teachers to live in the community — let them dock their boats at Riverside Park:

Leslie Day flirted, dated, married, raised a family and found her life’s work in Manhattan — or rather, just off its shore.

Born on the Upper West Side, she moved to a 34-foot houseboat at the 79th Street Boat Basin when she was 30, single and a masseuse. She found her future husband, a biologist, on the 43-foot houseboat next door. After they were wed, they traded up to a 57-foot houseboat, and they raised a son. Now, as empty-nesters, the couple live on a 43-foot cruiser.

Dr. Day, 62, who is now an elementary school teacher, recently wrote “Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City.” When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg honored her book last fall in a ceremony at Gracie Mansion, he reached the part of his script that noted where she lived and ad-libbed a reaction she had heard many times. “Do you really?” he said. “That’s amazing. Thirty-two years and it never sunk or anything like that?”

Since 1937, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, the 79th Street Boat Basin has been an object of fascination off the island of Manhattan, part fishing village, part Monte Carlo and all floating opera all of the time.

The boat basin floats on five main docks on the banks of the Hudson River. For decades, there have been as many as 100 pleasure craft, some pristine, others slovenly — schooners, houseboats, yachts and trawlers — tethered just off the Riverside Park promenade, three blocks from Broadway and Zabar’s.

Critics have called the residents squatters on public property, in a high-end trailer park; even the city government, which owns the docks, has not always been comfortable with the arrangement.

But the boaters call themselves a community with rights like any other. Residents have ranged from millionaires to those between jobs. All seem to embrace self-expression. One man liked wearing a Superman sweatshirt as he bounced on a trampoline on the dock.

Location Scout: 79th Street Boat Basin.

For more on the Carnegie Hall squatters see here.

After being strong-armed out of Greenwich Village, NYU begins to look for other places to colonize:

New York University wants to build a 1-million-square-foot campus on Governors Island, school officials said yesterday.

The NYU plan would call for a mix of student and faculty housing and space for academic programs, officials said. It’s part of a 25-year, 6-million-square-foot expansion plan that also targets other parts of the Big Apple, including Downtown Brooklyn.

“NYU sees the potential of Governors Island as a place where we can grow,” said NYU spokesman John Beckman.

The state-city Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation says the university is a good fit, but the agency has yet to determine when it will seek proposals from prospective tenants.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that in this potentially shrinking housing market no developer wanted to take a chance on building on top of a jail:

An eyebrow-raising plan to build luxury apartments, office space or even a hotel alongside the unpopular Brooklyn House of Detention to make it blend in better with the trendy neighborhood has been scrapped for lack of interest.

The city floated the novel idea this spring as a way to tamp down widespread community outrage over plans to reopen and expand the jail, which has been shuttered since 2003.

But this month, city officials acknowledged the ambitious plan died because developers just didn’t bite.

“We’re disappointed, but we’re not surprised,” said Angela Ferrante, the head of a coalition of local groups fighting the jail reopening. Ferrante attended a Jan. 2 briefing on responses to the city’s Request for Expressions of Interest issued in May.

“It always seemed like a long shot that a developer would want to built right next to a prison,” she added, though luxury condos already have gone up across the street.

Correction Commissioner Martin Horn told advocates at the meeting there was only one response — from a developer who wanted to tear down the existing jail, which wasn’t part of the plan.

Correction officials yesterday said they would still be open to development if a viable proposal was made, but said they are moving ahead with plans to reopen the jail and add a $240 million addition to double its capacity from 749 inmates to 1,469.

Earlier: Just Think How Low The Monthly Maintenance Will Go If We Get Whole Foods As The Tenant!

Location Scout: Brooklyn House of Detention.

Real estate brokers love the weak dollar:

The sidewalks of Manhattan are crammed this month with European tourists on shopping sprees, picking up gifts that cost far less in the United States than they do at home because of the weak dollar. But they are not just crowding into boutiques and department stores. Some are also shopping for condominiums.

“There’s bargains to be had,” said Kerry Miller, a public relations executive who with her husband, Marty, a disc jockey, was working through her Christmas gift list by buying sweaters at Abercrombie & Fitch and makeup at MAC, as well as touring 32 apartments. The Millers, from Malahide, Ireland, a suburb of Dublin, searched for a one-bedroom condo. They made an offer for $700,000 on one apartment in the meatpacking district and are waiting to hear back from the seller.

While natives remain wary about real estate and worry about bonuses and the economic climate, foreign tourists are keeping brokers busy with their eagerness to buy up Manhattan apartments, which many see as investments.

“The exchange rate is like a gift from God for Europeans,” said Danielle Grossenbacher, the broker for Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy who showed the Millers around. “Everybody is feeling they have an opportunity to purchase a piece of Manhattan.”

These buyers are transforming a traditionally slow month for Manhattan real estate brokers at a time when brokers nationwide are struggling to sell homes. This year, Manhattan brokers are waking before dawn to talk by phone with European buyers about amenities and closing costs and working late advising foreign buyers in town on the best places to shop for gadgets and clothes.

. . .

Jonathan Fletcher, who works in information technology, and Aine Marshall, a dentist, came to Manhattan from London to buy a $1 million investment property. Mr. Fletcher, who is considering buying in the financial district, where he believes there is opportunity for appreciation, plans to put down his deposit money first and wait for the dollar to weaken more before paying for the entire apartment. Even if he does not buy an apartment, the savings from shopping in the United States covered the cost of the trip, he said. They spent a total of $8,000 on clothes, a camera and a $5,000 drum set that would have cost about double back home.

The New York City real estate market may be avoiding foreclosures, but it likely leads the country in “maintenance fee defaults”:

Skyrocketing common charges are the last straw for condo and co-op owners barely staying afloat in a volatile housing market, with mortgage rates hitting the roof.

In two Trump buildings alone, seven people were slapped with liens last month for not paying a total of $50,000 in fees.

One Trump condo owner owes more than $19,000 in unpaid maintenance fees, after falling five months behind on common charges.

While some owners struggle because of job losses or skyrocketing flexible-mortgage rates, the surging building fees are not helping matters.

The fees are increasing, management companies say, because it is costing more for water, fuel, utilities and insurance.

“Unquestionably, there have been increased defaults in payment of maintenance charges and common charges. I’ve noticed it since the summer,” said Herbert Cohen, a partner in Stieffel & Cohen in Manhattan, who represents 60 different cooperatives and condominiums.

This month alone, his firm filed nine liens against owners of the condos at 20 West St. in lower Manhattan.

Those outstanding charges range from $1,433 to $9,241.

Though not all missed payments are due to the current economic climate, industry experts say that maintenance-fee delinquency is on the rise as charges continue to climb — which could be a foreboding indicator for an unhealthy housing market.

Is Long Island City big for its britches? How about just big and it bitches? Battery Park City on the East River is starting to get picky about who it wants in the neighborhood:

A plan to build a six-story grad school dormitory and a 13-story residential tower across from the massive Queens West development in Hunters Point is meeting with stiff opposition from the local community board.

This month, the land use committee of Queens Community Board 2 unanimously voted to reject a Board of Standards and Appeals variance application for the dorm, which would house 220 CUNY Graduate School students, and the apartment tower, with a planned 169 units and ground floor retail.

“Dormitory housing in itself is transient housing at its best and offers no stability to the community. We believe that it is a detriment to the growth of Hunters Point,” said Board 2 Chairman Joseph Conley in a letter to the BSA.

But Howard Goldman, attorney for O’Connor Capital, the developer, said it is the dorm that is driving the project, which is slated to be located on 47th Ave. at Fifth St.

“Like many other institutions in the city, they [CUNY Graduate School] have a need for affordable housing for their graduate students,” he said.

The site, said Goldman, “seems like a good candidate because it is just across the river [from the Manhattan-based grad school] and relatively accessible by subway.”

Saying that he understood the community board’s “concerns about the size and density of the project,” nevertheless, the attorney said, the project’s neighbors are much bigger.

“The project is basically across the street from Queens West, where you have 30- to 40-story towers, and is one block south of a proposed high-rise development, Anable Basin, that has been in discussion for a couple years now,” he said.

Poor Britney . . . “pop tard” always seemed a little harsh:

One broker could single-handedly lower New York’s collective IQ, after parading two of California’s better-known bottle blondes through Manhattan apartments.

And oops, Britney Spears is looking to buy in New York again! Our sources say that the singer mom/pop tard is searching for a West Village loft in the $9 million price range. She had previously owned an apartment in the Silk Building on East Fourth Street that she sold for $4 million last year. “Britney and her manager recently looked at a couple of places a few weeks ago,” says a source. “She apparently wants to start over in NYC.”

Meanwhile, sources says Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Darren Sukenik, the broker who’s taken Britney shopping, has also brought Jessica Simpson through one of his listings on West 17th Street with a $3.99 million price tag.

The loft-like, six-room duplex penthouse condo in Chelsea, with three bedrooms and two baths, has 2,400 square feet of space with a wood-burning fireplace and a terrace with views in three directions.

But we’ll always have Ikea.

Location Scout: Red Hook.

The landlord-tenant dispute that will only die when one of them does:

For nearly a quarter century, since Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, Lascelle Wright, 49, and his neighbors have been locked in a dispute with their landlord.

Even by the standards of New York City, where such disputes are blood sport, their face-off has become a long, strange war of attrition.

Mr. Wright is one of seven holdout tenants, most of them poor, elderly and in ill health. They want to remain in the Windermere, an echoing, ruined beauty of a building that was designated a city landmark in 2005. The alternative, they say, is the street.

Mr. Wright’s rent is $100 a month, but the landlord has provided no mailing address for his checks, so Mr. Wright has not paid even that.

A grand apartment house in the Romanesque Revival style, the Windermere is an eight-story building at West 57th Street and Ninth Avenue. It was famed in its late-19th-century heyday for its marble fireplaces, its uniformed “hall boys” and the latest in technological wonders, the hydraulic elevator and the telephone.

. . .

Nearly 7,000 miles away in Tokyo is [Masako] Yamagata. The head of the Toa Construction Company, he is 89 years old and hospitalized.

Last week, Mr. Yamagata did not respond to a list of questions. A woman who described herself as an employee supplied his age and the status of his health and said she would notify Mr. Yamagata of the inquiry. But she added, “I cannot tell you when he will or if he will answer at all.”

Last year, one of many housing activists who have tried to help the holdout tenants, Roseanne Haggerty, was finally granted a meeting with Mr. Yamagata in Tokyo after six years of entreaties.

She described him as white-haired and charming, if enigmatic. In a wood-paneled office that reminded Ms. Haggerty of an American recreation room from the 1970s, Mr. Yamagata had many American souvenirs, including a small Statue of Liberty and an ashtray with a New York logo.

In an informal gesture, he rolled up the sleeves of his white business shirt and showed Ms. Haggerty small scars on his arms from kidney dialysis. He could no longer visit New York because of his illness, he told her.

. . .

When Mr. Wright became a tenant in 1980, the Windermere was about half full, with about 80 families, he recalled.

By 1982, a previous landlord was offering incentives of up to $5,000 an apartment to vacate the building. Many left. By 1986, when Mr. Yamagata’s Toa Construction bought the building, Mr. Wright counted only a dozen or so families remaining, most protected from eviction under the city’s housing laws.

For the next two decades, the tenants and their advocates, in and out of housing court, attempted to resolve the standoff.

On Sept. 19, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, using reports from fire inspectors, cited Toa for 209 violations, including fire safety problems like exposed wiring, “the accumulation of refuse and/or rubbish” and “no electrical supply entire building.”

At the contempt hearing today, Mr. Yamagata could agree to the repairs.

If he does not, the city could perform the repairs and send him the bill.

Or some form of long-term alternative housing might be sought for the tenants until the building is habitable, according to Housing Conservation Coordinators.

Mr. Wright said he remained calm throughout the fight.

“I don’t curse, I don’t yell,” he said.

“The landlord is waiting for us to die,” he said. “But I’m 49, and he’s, what, almost 90?”

Definitely something all New Yorkers can take pride in — a bunch of upscale chainstores drove up rents and turned Fifth Avenue into one giant overvalued loss leader for retailers:

Rodeo Drive? Puh-leeze!

The country’s far-and-away leader in elite retail remains Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, by a $7 million mile.

Real-estate firm Colliers International ranked the most expensive shopping streets in the United States by price paid per square foot, and Fifth Avenue took top honors, with an average rent of $1,350.

Rodeo Drive, by comparison, ranked third with a relatively bargain-basement price of $480 per square foot.

“Retailers, and in particular luxury retailers, continue to desire prime street-front locations,” said Ross Moore, senior vice president at Colliers.

And more than anywhere else in the country, “prime” means Fifth Avenue.

“Fifth Avenue is iconic. It’s synonymous with fashion and shopping,” said Tiffany Townsend, communications director at the city’s marketing organization, NYC & Company.

. . .

The influx of such global brands as Apple, Hugo Boss and others has dramatically driven up prices along Fifth, rising from an average of just $1,000 a year ago.

Gucci last year agreed to a record retail price of $1,500 per square foot for the right to bring back their flagship store to The Trump Building.

“Fifth Avenue is by far the greatest retail street not just in the nation but, in my opinion, the world,” said Stephen Siegel, chairman of Global Brokerage at CB Richard Ellis, who brokered the Gucci deal.

. . .

Fifth Avenue, however, just misses being the priciest stretch on Earth, with London’s Old Bond Street taking the top spot at $1,400.

Because once you’ve lost Heath, mass foreclosures can’t be far off . . . Heath Ledger as leading economic indicator:

It wasn’t supposed to matter to Brooklyn. Heath Ledger, the crown prince of the borough’s celebrity aristocracy, apparently fled his fiefdom in Boerum Hill for Manhattan after splitting up with his girlfriend, the actress Michelle Williams.

“To each his own,” said Jay Wilkinson, 29, an actor who lives in the neighborhood, speaking just blocks from the house on Dean Street where Mr. Ledger had lived since 2005 with Ms. Williams and their daughter, Matilda. He echoed a theme expressed by many on blogs and in the streets after the breakup. We barely notice the stars among us. If we lose one, no big deal.

In that, though, lies a tale of arriviste anxiety. What if Brooklyn’s recent cachet as the locus for what’s next is little more than a thin and fragile crust of chic, hiding the insecurity of people who constantly measure the social currency of their ZIP code by Manhattan standards?

The number of trendy boutiques, bistros and music clubs in Brooklyn may have spiked in the last five years, but its infrastructure of cool still represents only a fraction of that found in Manhattan. Its new identity is moored to a finite number of shops, restaurants, luxury condominiums and, yes, celebrities. If even one leaves, a void is created. Could the borough’s new status vanish as quickly as it ascended?

In recent years, Brooklyn’s pool of second-tier celebrity mascots (John Turturro, Rosie Perez, Norman Mailer, Steve Buscemi) has swollen and taken on a level of movie-star glamour, thanks to recent home buyers like Jennifer Connelly and her husband, Paul Bettany, Adrian Grenier and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard.

These famous names, functioning as both symbols and selling points for the new Brooklyn, helped drive up property values, provided a focus for gossip in coffeehouses and dog runs, and instilled pride among the tide of newcomers who arrived — sort of by choice — from Manhattan and beyond.

. . . in a city of slumlords:

Home ownership in New York City is barely half the rate of the rest of the country, new figures show.

More than two-thirds, or 67.3 percent, of single-family homes, co-ops and condos nationwide were owner-occupied in 2006, the last year for which figures were available.

The figure here was just 34.4 percent, according to a Census Bureau report released yesterday.

About 1 million New Yorkers owned their own homes last year. The New York housing market consists of approximately 3 million residences.

“New York City has a low home-ownership rate compared to other large urban areas,” said NYU professor Ingrid Ellen.

And no one needs the suburbs now that the suburbs are here:

While the national housing market is experiencing a major slowdown, Manhattan’s wealthiest families are buying up as many apartments as they can and combining them into rambling mega-units. Brokers and developers say that buyers in this segment of the market are finding that they have few large apartments to choose from, and so they are creating the spaces they want from a half dozen one- and two-bedroom apartments. While some buyers are swallowing up whole floors of new condominiums, others are buying neighboring apartments in older co-op buildings as they become available.

Gary Barnett, the chief executive of the Extell Development Corporation, which is building the Ariel West at 245 West 99th Street, where the Ashleys bought, said the building has 70 apartments after seven units were combined into three.

These combination units are not bargains: two-bedroom apartments in the building typically cost $1.5 million to $2 million, and three- and four-bedroom apartments cost $2.5 million to $3 million.

Mr. Barnett plans to include 4,500- to 8,500-square-foot apartments in two projects planned for the Upper West Side for more families like the Ashleys. “A number of people we’re seeing who have three, four and even five children need these spaces,” he said.

This trend is seen most often on the Upper East and Upper West Sides. For example, in the last two months, five families paid $5.5 million to $13 million for apartment combinations at the Brompton at 205 East 85th Street. These resulting apartments range from 4,500 to 8,000 square feet, according to the Related Companies, the Brompton’s developer.

. . .

Stephanie Coontz, the director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research group in Chicago, described this as an “hourglass economy” with more rich people at the top and more poor people at the bottom. At the top, the superrich are finding that there are so many “merely rich” people that they have to find new ways to distinguish themselves. They are able to set themselves apart by having larger families and larger combined apartments to house them.

“You’ve got this incredible wealth at the top, and more people jockeying to put themselves at the top of that,” Ms. Coontz said.

There are at least two acts in there somewhere (some enterprising whippersnapper needs to supply the third):

The Carroll Gardens widow who fought to die in the home she’d lived in her entire life, won a Pyrrhic victory this month — dying in the apartment on Aug. 12 and defeating a developer’s two-year-long quest to evict her.

Angelina Visconti, 88, died of natural causes at Long Island College Hospital, though she was still a resident of the Cheever Place rowhouse.

“She got her wish, and that was what it was all about,” said Leonard Visconti, her son. “She always said she was born here, she wanted to die here.”

Visconti’s residency became an issue in 2005, when her nephew Joseph DeLeonibus, the son of Visconti’s late twin sister, tried to evict her so he could make a killing in the booming Carroll Gardens real-estate market.

The house was eventually sold for $1.13 million to developer Wayne Warnock, who picked up the eviction proceedings where DeLeonibus left off.

Earlier: Notices To Quit Thicker Than Blood.

In the recession years of the early 90s Harlem’s real estate was in much better shape compared to that of the East Village simply because of Upper Manhattan’s excellent subway access, something people on Columbia Street in Brooklyn are realizing today:

Two years ago Freddy Saint-Aignan and his wife, Angelika, found the perfect location for their fledgling bar/restaurant, the Sugar Lounge: Columbia Street in Brooklyn.

The building was just the right size, had a spacious backyard garden and sat beside Upper New York Bay. The city had big plans for the area: green space and parks, cruise ship piers a few blocks away

The Columbia Street Waterfront District, as it is called, was going to be resurrected to its past stature as a social and commercial hub. It was going to rival Smith Street in Boerum Hill, which had gone through a renaissance, attracting high-end boutiques and specialty stores, restaurants and a steadily swelling flow of shoppers and diners.

But that was two years ago, and instead of a silver lining along the Manhattan skyline, which the Saint-Aignans can see from the lounge’s front window, they see the outstretched arms of backhoes, cranes and industrial containers. Where there was to be a park across the street there is shredded earth, construction vehicles and exposed sewer pipes. The sidewalk is dirty and ragged, and aside from the occasional dog walker, jogger or in-line skater (along smoother stretches) there is very little foot traffic.

At night, the street outside the lounge is dark, the street lights dimmed by damage and disrepair. The promises of better days for Columbia Street have crumbled like the sidewalk in front of the Sugar Lounge, Mr. Saint-Aignan said yesterday.

“Smith Street has everything,” Mr. Saint-Aignan said from his cozy lounge, pointing out the contrast with Columbia Street. “With all the construction, there is no place for parking. We have no access, no subway, no buses. At night we have no lights.”

The Columbia Street corridor has struggled to propel itself into the orbit of the Brooklyn revival. Depending on whom you ask, the Columbia Street commercial strip is in Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens or — more recently — Red Hook. It is bordered on the west by New York Bay, on the east by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, on the north by Atlantic Avenue, and on the south by the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

Mr. Saint-Aignan, formerly the general manager of Bar Tabac on Smith Street, said he had had to take on two other jobs to stay afloat.

The wishful thinking about Columbia Street’s being the new Smith Street goes only so far. The magical combination that makes one street hot and another tepid can seem elusive, but not here, where the reasons for the stalled revival are painfully clear. Continuing construction, a sense of geographic isolation and waning buzz continue to hush the “pop” that speculators had predicted.

For a while, “everyone wanted to come,” said Frank Manzione, who owns a real estate company on Columbia Street. “There were new condos being built, more people were moving in. A lot of the stores that were closed up started to get rented.”

New York is Tijuana for the European middle classes and now Cabo for the Euro-rich:

Meanwhile, the housing market everywhere else in the country is morbid, Wall Street is skittish and even Mayor Bloomberg says pricing here should be coming down. “You might think we were being set up for some major reversal,” said Prudential Douglas Elliman senior vice president George W. van der Ploeg.

But New York is unfallen: This autumn’s new batch of listings will trek onward and upward.

According to two sources, Roger Barnett (CEO of natural products company Shaklee) and his wife Sloan (cellphone billionaire George Lindemann’s daughter) have begun to quietly ask around $62 million for their 125-year-old neo-Georgian town house. The 33-foot-wide mansion at 16 East 69th Street, designed by Peter Marino, was bought less than seven years ago for $11.5 million.

. . .

No townhouse in New York City has ever been officially listed for more than the Barnett place. Likewise, no apartment had sold for $50 million before two spreads in the newly made-over Plaza broke that sacred ceiling this summer.

Our city knows its real estate is monstrous and anarchic, and that the sales price of an average apartment has tripled over the past decade. But that stat is trivial compared to the high-end’s dazzling rise. There are more big-ticket buyers around who are willing to spend their money on “fine art” real estate, even if prices are so much vaster than last decade’s.

“The disparity between the rich and the superrich is becoming ever greater,” Mr. Henckels said, “and until that reverses itself, the prices at the very high end are safe.”

Downtown is getting in on the superrich action too. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson sold his family’s West 10th Street townhouse this March for $33.15 million, though he reportedly paid $7.35 million in 2000. And a full-floor penthouse at 200 11th Avenue, with an en-suite car garage space, will go on the market this September for around $18 million, which listing broker Leonard Steinberg at Douglas Elliman said will be the biggest Chelsea listing ever.

In an e-mail, Mr. Steinberg cited demand from “the NOUVEAU nouveau riche” — homegrown but especially foreign.

“Everyone with euros or pounds,” said Kathy Sloane, the Clinton family broker and another Brown Harris director, “thinks we’re giving real estate away.” She said she’s broken records at every building she’s sold in this year.

. . . but there’s something about those views:

Meanwhile, rumors are circulating that [Richard] Goldring and his associates might be looking to unload the sprawling 10,000-square-foot stripper-plex on West 28th Street, which last sold for $10 million in 2004 and now could go for four times that sum.

“At the right price, it’s available,” said Manhattan nightclub broker Alex Picken of Picken Real Estate, who’s been marketing several other nightclub properties in a rapidly changing West Chelsea.

A converted parking garage, the Scores West building on West 28th Street sits along a former industrial strip that was recently rezoned to allow for new residential development.

Could condos soon replace the beleaguered pole-dancing palace? Would each condo come equipped with its own stripper pole?

If Manhattan’s vacancy rate is really under one percent, then why are developers struggling to outdo each other in terms of amenities? Apparently it’s about “feeling successful”:

A golf simulator that lets residents imagine they’re playing the 18th hole at St. Andrews in Scotland.

A penthouse party room with sweeping city views where residents can entertain, say, 50 of their closest friends.

Swimming pools, yoga studios and massage rooms that would satisfy even the most driven New Yorkers.

And finally, the one thing that should make any apartment dweller’s heart skip a beat: a washer and dryer, even in a 450-square-foot studio.

These are the kinds of amenities that developers are using to redefine the term “luxury rental” in Manhattan, and, perhaps more to the point, to justify a whole new level of prices for people who want the feel of a high-end condominium but don’t want to buy.

With rental vacancies hovering at less than 1 percent, developers are confident that the rental market is strong enough to absorb thousands of new apartments, even if they come with rents that are two to three times current averages. That means studios that rent for as much as $3,500 a month, one-bedrooms for $6,000, and two-bedrooms for $11,000. These are, incidentally, the kind of prices that owners of high-end condos might get if they rented out their apartments, brokers say.

In recent years, developers have been focused more on condo development than on rental construction, but at least nine rental buildings have opened within the last year, and at least a dozen more are scheduled to open in the next two years. Most of these buildings are high-rises, which means that thousands of new apartments will become available in the next 18 months.

“Builders are realizing that they can build rentals with high amenities and real wow factor because people are willing to pay for it,” said Gary Malin, the chief operating officer of Citi Habitats. In many ways, the market for new rental buildings is merely following the lead set by the condominium market in the last five years, when developers raced to find the most talked-about new amenity.

The developers of these new rental buildings are also giving them a Club Med vibe. Some even have created the land-based equivalent of a cruise director — someone to organize Halloween parties, a softball team and the occasional ski trip or scuba diving lesson. All with particular renters in mind, of course.

“These are people who know how they want to feel when they walk into their lobby and their home,” said Cliff Finn, the managing director of new development marketing at Citi Habitats. “It’s about feeling successful.”

Oh yeah — I remember the golf simulator.

Only in New York is it somehow unusual and newsworthy that someone squirrels away his or her modest income in order to buy a modest apartment:

When Janey Lee and Pablo Agüero were struggling freelance Web designers, buying an apartment in Manhattan seemed like a dream, one clouded by credit-card debt, student loans that had to be repaid and the bills for their wedding.

But now, five years later, they are about to move into a $445,000 two-bedroom condo in Hamilton Heights, in Upper Manhattan, with their 5-month-old daughter, Matilda. Their combined salaries of just over $100,000 qualified them for a mortgage, but it took a lot more for them to come up with the down payment.

In a city synonymous with luxury and spending, Ms. Lee, 30, and Mr. Agüero, 35, decided to do without.

They gave up smoking to cut costs, they stopped meeting friends after work for beers, they didn’t buy new clothes, and they stashed away tax refunds and as much of their earnings as possible. Whenever they wanted to buy drinks, gadgets or cookware, they asked each other: “Do I want an iPod or a house? Do I want a latte or a house?”

“It would be absurd for me to buy things when I wanted a place rather than a frying pan,” Ms. Lee said as she fed Matilda a post-nap bottle.

More impressive, perhaps, than their willpower was that they were able to save $90,000.

Still, Ms. Lee and Mr. Agüero are part of the shrinking pool of New Yorkers who have been able to buy apartments for less than $450,000, and the even smaller group who have done so without help from their parents or a Wall Street bonus.

“Most people that I’m working with are getting some kind of familial assistance,” said Tracie Hamersley, the Citi Habitats broker who helped Ms. Lee and Mr. Agüero find their apartment. “They were unusual in that they were doing this on their own.”

How contentious is Manhattan real estate? Just look what it does to even Hare Krishnas:

It was supposed to be a spiritual place free from anxiety, but the Hare Krishnas’ East Village Sanctuary has become the target of an ugly legal battle between two groups of devotees.

Last month, one group of Hare Krishnas who claim they make up the legal board of directors in charge of the building served eviction notices to other Hare Krishnas who say their building has been “hijacked” by outsiders who never worked for the place or belonged to their organization.

“It’s like you invite guests into your home and they start taking over your kitchen and locking you out of your bedroom,” said Sachit Hariyogam, 41, who faces eviction along with his two brothers, two cousins and his sister-in-law.

A splinter sect of the Hare Krishnas called the Interfaith League of Devotees founded the Sanctuary in 1998. Led by their guru Kirtanananda Swami, Interfaith devotees raised funds to purchase a six-floor warehouse building at 25 First Ave. for $500,000 and turn it into a temple and living space with a vegetarian restaurant on the ground floor.

Hariyogam and his family have been Interfaith members for most of their lives. They say they joined an Interfaith Hare Krishna temple in Malaysia as teenagers, and after raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to help establish Sanctuary, they were invited to America to work in the Sanctuary restaurant in exchange for free room and board and $50 per week.

Four out of the five alleged Interfaith board of directors, in contrast, became involved with Sanctuary only about two years ago. They belong to another Hare Krishna sect, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON.

ISKCON excommunicated Kirtan­an­anda Swami in 1986 after the guru was charged with child molestation, conspiracy to murder and racketeering. But after serving eight years in federal prison for racketeering, the guru let bygones be bygones and invited ISKCON devotees into his building as paying guests.

. . .

Now the so-called “Interfaith League of Devotees Landlord” has served a 30-day notice demanding that Hariyogam and his family move out by July 31. And Interfaith’s lawyers filed a complaint in State Supreme Court in early June charging that commercial and residential leases signed by Hariyogam’s cousin, Nark Palliandy, are not valid.