That’s Water Street, Brooklyn, Not Water Street, Manhattan

DUMBO may not have a lot of amenities, but it is home to a rising number of lawyers:

“We’re getting more conventional tenants,” said Chris Havens, director of leasing for Two Trees Management, the area’s main property owner. “Four years ago we had two law firms. Now, we have eight. Though some of the firms moving here have a little bit of edge and are a little more informal.”

Of Dumbo’s 1.5 million square feet of commercial space, roughly half is rented by artists and the rest is now being used for office space, Havens said. “We’re still renting to artists. The change is that these are people who are selling art.”

Court Street has hundreds of attorneys, Havens said. “Costs are really going up there. So, if they’re not running back and forth all day to court, then they can come down to us.”

Three financial firms recently leased space at 45 Main St., including a consulting group that has offices in Lower Manhattan, an investment banking firm with offices in Rockefeller Center and a Brooklyn Heights-based asset management company. Also, a Scandinavian bank opened backup trade space.

“That wouldn’t have happened five years ago,” Havens said. “The buildings weren’t as renovated. Dumbo didn’t have the reputation.”

Location Scout: DUMBO.

Ask A Whore About Losing Her Virginity . . .

. . . or listen to the broker describe his first time looking for an apartment in the city:

It was 1995 and my girlfriend and I were looking for our first apartment in NYC. A few people suggested we look in the outer boroughs, but the appeal of Manhattan — and the idea that somehow living outside of the island meant we were sub-New-Yorkers, prevented us from even considering it. Naïve and excitable, what did we know? We still thought the Village ended on a street named after a city in Texas.

It was before the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Alphabet City, Astoria, Harlem, Washington Heights or Red Hook became habitable, at least in the mind of the new renter. The boundaries were significantly tighter and limited to Manhattan below 96th street and above the Financial District. West of 9th Ave. was a no-man’s land as well. (Unfortunately, for some, this is still true.) And with the crime rate double what it is today, the demarcation lines were in place for good reason.

. . .

I distinctly remember looking at one perfectly square box in midtown with brick wall views and a pull-man kitchen. It was dusty with filthy windows and cracked floors, even the ceilings felt too low. The broker confidently stood in the doorway and never said a word. I looked it over, “You got to be kidding me.” He smiled and shrugged. I left and, in the stairwell, passed three more people on their way up to see it. Had I possessed any business acumen whatsoever, I would have jumped into the business right then.

A couple weeks ago, we thought Carter had a great film pitch. Really, though, this is book material (some editor should get on this!), and this column is probably the first chapter:

Like all fruitless, frantic searches, we eventually found a great little place on the Upper East Side through a friend of a friend. It was a five-floor walk-up, but sunny, good sized and no-fee. For three months, I was perfectly happy there. My relationship didn’t last and, as everything moves quickly in this town, our break up was equally accelerated. Still unbelievably new to the city, I was once again on the hunt for decent and affordable housing. Eleven years later, I’m an expert.

On to Chapter 2!

The Double Meaning Of “Building Momentum”

New building starts are up:

Fueled largely by a housing boom, construction across the city is hitting a record level this year, with $20.8 billion worth of new apartment buildings, office towers and public projects under way, a new study has found.

The building boom’s estimated value is $2 billion more than last year’s, which was a record in itself, according to projections released yesterday by the New York Building Congress. The industry group predicts construction spending will top $21 billion next year.

“Given that World Trade Center construction activity won’t begin to peak until 2009 and that major development projects such as Atlantic Yards are slated to commence in that time frame as well, it is quite possible that the building boom could continue well into the next decade,” said Building Congress President Richard Anderson.

The industry group calculates that 30,000 units of new housing will be built annually this year through 2008, averaging $5 billion in construction costs each year.

. . . just in time for housing prices to start slumping:

Third-quarter market reports released today by the city’s top four real-estate companies show that apartment prices have dropped, while two of the surveys say prices have sunk below last year’s third-quarter numbers.

Following a record run of year-over-year double-digit price increases, the second half of 2006 appears to be a turning point moving in sympathy with the negative national housing market.

“My phone has nearly stopped ringing,” said one high-end broker who requested anonymity. “It’s a scary time in this business.”

A chilling report by Brown Harris Stevens shows the average sale price for cooperative apartments slid by 4 percent in the past 12 months to $1,003,945, while condos fell 6 percent to $1,196,930, compared to the third quarter of 2005.

Halstead Property notes that the average apartment price is $1,087,982, which is 4 percent less than a year ago, and 10 percent lower than the second quarter 2006.

Weighing particularly hard on the market is the average sales price for a Manhattan co-op, which has dropped 16.1 percent in just the last quarter, from $1.296 million to $1.088 million, according to figures by Prudential Douglas Elliman.

So is this whistling past the graveyard, as they say? Need more data:

If you have been waiting to buy a Manhattan apartment until after prices come tumbling down, you may have to wait a little longer.

Manhattan co-op and condominium prices sagged a bit last quarter, in the usually slow summer selling season, but by most measures they remained healthily above prices reported a year ago, according to a number of competing market reports released yesterday.

The conclusion of many of the brokerage firms releasing reports was that after a large advance in prices over the last few years, followed by several quarters of uncertainty, the market was essentially stable during the last quarter, despite the fact that apartments from a wave of new construction are coming on the market and there was continuing uncertainty about the direction of interest rates and the economy.

The Times then goes on to repeat the same numbers as the Post . . .

Nitwit, Now You’ve Got Us Feeling Bad For Developers!

As a renter, you know your landlord-tenant dispute is flimsy when even the Village Voice makes you seem unsympathetic:

Two years ago, his landlord, Larry Tauber — by accounts, neither a sleazy slumlord nor a chummy pushover — offered Peckham $75,000 to leave his $1,007-a-month West 21st Street one-bedroom, so that he could begin a gut renovation of the building to convert it to swanky rentals. Peckham’s refusals led Tauber to up the offer; by this summer, he’d tried to tempt the tenant with an $800-a-month lease governed by rent-stabilized guidelines on a renovated one-bedroom on West 69th Street between Columbus Avenue and Broadway, a five-minute walk away from the apartments of Steven Spielberg and Bruce Willis.

. . .

“It’s your business,” one of Peckham’s West 20th Street neighbors in a Tauber-owned building told him when they ran into each other the other day, “but if I were you, I wouldn’t be holding out for any southern exposure. If you can get an apartment at a decent rent in a decent building, take it.” Had the neighbor known of the apartment Peckham has refused to take — at a rent less than half what its previous tenant paid — he surely would have shared his shock at Peckham’s seeming greed.

Dude, for the benefit of every other renter in this city, take the fucking deal!

Real Estate Brokers Agree — Follow The Lesbians

Sure, blame it on the strollers:

As the Park Slope mommies, daddies and Bugaboos multiply, a fringe group that once dominated a piece of the neighborhood has taken itself back to the fringe.

. . .

The southward shift of the lesbian community is far from surprising.

One obvious reason is the skyrocketing cost of living in Park Slope. On average, men earn 21 percent more than women, an income discrepancy that becomes wider for women-only households. But finances are only part of the neighborhood’s waning desirability among lesbians.

In the end, the real turnoff may be simply too many people who look like one another.

“I went to the Tea Lounge the other day and it totally freaked me out,” said Gabrielle Belfiglio, a lesbian who once lived in Park Slope, but has since moved to Windsor Terrace. “Everyone looked like they were part of the same photo shoot, posing with a laptop or a baby.

“There used to be a sense of diversity that isn’t there anymore,” she added. “You can walk around Windsor Terrace and Kensington and see a Hassid next to a woman in hijab next to a Jamaican kid. You can be who you are in that mix of people.”

It’s great to feel comfortable in a “mix of people” . . . do the Hassids and women in hijab feel the same?

And although I like the idea of tying the decline of lesbian community in Park Slope to the male-female economic gap — interesting theory! — this story isn’t exactly new, is it? Even the Times was writing about the exodus from “Dyke Slope” back in January 2005:

When Emily Haddad moved to New York shortly after finishing college in 2001, she didn’t know much about the city, but being gay, she knew she wanted to live in a gay-friendly community.

Her neighborhood of choice? Park Slope.

“It seemed like lesbian central in New York,” said Ms. Haddad, 24, whose unaccented speech belies her North Carolina roots.

Park Slope was the neighborhood where she marched in the Brooklyn Pride Parade during her first summer in New York. She spent another afternoon at the Rising Cafe, a lesbian coffee shop on Fifth Avenue, and ended up in a spirited discussion with some women from Dyke TV, a weekly television show. It was also the neighborhood where she volunteered at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, on 14th Street near Prospect Park. The Archives, and by extension Park Slope, became her adopted home.

But she never did make Park Slope her actual home, nor did any of her lesbian friends. “Dyke Slope,” as it is affectionately called by many lesbians, was too expensive for them, as it has become for many other New Yorkers. Instead, Ms. Haddad found a cheap, newly renovated two-bedroom apartment in a rowhouse on 51st Street, deep amid the residential sleepiness of Sunset Park. She splits the $1,500 monthly rent with a female roommate, who is straight.

(In fact, it’s such old news that the Brooklyn Paper story even features a picture of someone who was interviewed in the Times piece. She’s still not living in Park Slope.)