Only In East New York, Kids, Only In East New York

They act as if this is somehow strange:

Brooklyn’s housing market is so through the roof that families are forking over $625,000 to live next door to one of the city’s most dangerous housing projects, The Post has learned.

A new community called Spring Creek Estates, which will feature 40 two-family luxury homes, is in the process of being built along weed-strewn lots in East New York near the infamous, crime-laden Louis H. Pink Houses.

The first five houses are already up on Pine Street and recently sold for between $479,000 and $579,000, brokers said. And with marketing for the next 10 homes under way, two families have already signed contracts to pay $625,000 without a shovel hitting the dirt.

“Everybody knows about the reputation of the Pink Houses, but we’ve had no problem marketing the new development,” said Cecilia Calcagnile, a Centruy 21 broker arranging the sales. “We’ve had phone calls off the hook and are selling houses right off the blueprints before we even break ground.”

The 4-acre Spring Creek Estates is expected to be complete by 2008. It will run along parts of Stanley, Worthman and Euclid avenues and Crescent and Pine streets in one of the city’s highest crime areas.

Despite seeing a 57 percent drop in crime the past decade, the 75th Precinct last year led all police precincts in the number of murders (29) and ranked third out of 76 in the number of reported crimes (3,479).

Business Had Been Slow, But One Day This Dame Walks In And Hands Me One Of My Biggest Cases . . .

The New York Press doesn’t do much to make you think that real estate brokers don’t deserve to be ripped off:

They were understandably deflated. We were walking to Astor place having the usual, “call us if anything exceptional or perfect comes up” conversation, when I noticed a strange and peculiar look come over them.

I had heard about this before: rental dementia. Tired, beaten and finally worn out by the process, they had seen enough and were willing to accept how little they would get for their money. During this “phase” you could rent them almost anything.

I had to think quickly: The shock can apparently wear off, and this is how most people come to live in Jersey City, or on Roosevelt Island.

I mentioned a spot I knew of on Lexington and 26th. It wasn’t even a three bedroom, but rather a really big two bedroom that they could convert. Originally, they were adamant about living below 14th and having three bedrooms. We were already on the 6 train headed to 23rd when it started to wear off — like drunks who had passed out in the bathroom and then belligerently demanded to know how they got there.

“Does it get good light?” they asked. I’d say, “It has a few windows.” “How many bathrooms?” “Yes,” I’d say, and then shake my head in confusion. “Can we put a wall up?” “It already has some walls, why not?”

The door to the questionable apartment opened. I let them go in first. It’s the moment you wait for in this business. You see the crazy look in their eye almost immediately, and you know they want it. It makes all the wasted and frustrated time worth it. More than just liking it, they were worried that somehow they wouldn’t get it. When they were this excited and nervous, you knew there would be no stalling or negotiating with the fee. I’d whack them for 15 percent without even a discussion.

It took them less than two minutes to decide they’d take it, and another 20 to decide where the wall would go and who would get what bedroom. They faxed applications that afternoon and signed leases less than a week later. I had to split the commission with the listing broker, which really hurt because he never even showed up (the doorman had let us in).

One split with the listing broker, another split with my broker, and I walked away with $1,400. I’d get to keep my apartment for yet another month. I’d also bought myself another month in the real estate game.

See also: What Would Randy Cohen Do?

Oh But You Should Have Seen This Neighborhood Before The Condo Conversions, Or Blight, Like Obscenity, Really Turns Some People On

The big question facing proponents of the Atlantic Yards project is how to convince people that an area with million-dollar homes can be “blighted”:

Of all the real estate jargon, bureaucratic buzzwords and plain old insults exchanged over the proposed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, no term has evoked quite such unruly passion as “blighted.”

During the last two years, the word has hung like a scythe over the 22-acre site, most of it on the northern edge of the Prospect Heights neighborhood, where the developer, Forest City Ratner Companies, hopes to build its $4.2 billion project.

For the developer, it is a fitting description of the abandoned auto-repair shops, collapsing brownstones and gloomy vacant lots that blemish the area, and of the eight-acre railyards that slice through the neighborhood just south of Atlantic Avenue. For many of the several hundred people who still live there, “blighted” is a term of abuse, one that ignores the sleek, recently renovated buildings on Pacific and Dean Streets, the bustling neighborhood bar, and other signs of revival. Even some supporters of the project, like Assemblyman Roger L. Green, disagree with the description.

“That neighborhood is not blighted,” Mr. Green, whose district includes the Atlantic Yards site, said at a hearing last year. “I repeat, for the record, that neighborhood is not blighted.”

The long-running blight debate took a major turn in favor of Forest City Ratner last week, when the Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s lead economic agency, formally declared the project site blighted. It was the first step in a process that could eventually allow Forest City to acquire, through eminent domain, the few remaining parcels that the company has not been able to acquire privately over the last few years.

But for all the freight the word carries around Prospect Heights these days, “blighted” is a word with no fixed definition, legal or colloquial.

It is not unlike Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous remark about pornography — “I know it when I see it” — said Joseph M. Ryan, a land-use lawyer who has consulted for the development corporation before but has no involvement with the Atlantic Yards project. “Usually it’s a high crime rate, debilitated buildings. Often you’ll have pollution, or inadequate usage of land.”

Under past court rulings, for example, an area can be declared blighted even if particular parcels within it are not. Similarly, a given plot of land can be declared “underutilized” if what is built there is smaller or shorter than zoning laws would otherwise allow, even if the building in question is not dilapidated. Moreover, it is largely up to government officials to decide how prevalent a condition must be — how much crime, for instance — in order to label an area as blighted.

“There are no hard and fast rules regarding blight,” said Jessica Copen, a spokeswoman for the development corporation. “There’s a large area of subjectivity in evaluating the indicia of blight.”

Throwing Urine Is An Ineffective Way To Protest The Forces Of Gentrification*

This is sort of like drenching the messenger:

Erich Fuchs is a real pisser, according to his landlord — and for that, he’s getting evicted from his prewar Upper West Side building.

The cantankerous tenant’s alleged penchant for tossing urine from his 10th-floor balcony has landed him in Housing Court in a dispute that illustrates tenants’ rising frustrations over a nerve-racking condo conversion under way at 230 Riverside Drive.

Built in the 1930, the elegant doorman building, with sweeping views of the Hudson, has recently gone through substantial renovations — changes that have made possible an $800,000 price tag for a one-bedroom apartment.

The redone lobby, which one resident dissed as “bordelloesque,” now features gleaming white mosaic tile and a new chandelier.

But the dust and noise from the construction has annoyed many of the rent-control tenants who moved there before Manhattan real estate went sky high.

And though tenants have been edgy over the changes, things never got physical until last September, when Fuchs began throwing urine and other things off his balcony onto construction workers, officials claim.

Though cops were called on several occasions, no charges were filed, the building’s lawyer said.

Last month, according to construction workers, Fuchs threw a bucket of urine off his balcony — drenching one of the workers.

“He hates the construction,” one building employee said. “He’s been battling it for a long time.”

The lawyer for the building management claims that by throwing urine at the workers, Fuchs violated his lease and is subject to eviction.

All of which points to the importance of reserving the right to toss urine out the window when signing one’s lease . . .

*For that you need a symbol — like Clinton, for example!

What Would Randy Cohen Do?

I wonder if he’d consider the practice of ripping off brokers a form of civil disobedience:

For some renters, the temptation is just too great.

With a broker’s help, they have found a perfectly suitable apartment. Then, depending on their moral compass, tolerance for risk and financial standing, they may be tempted to double back and try to close the deal alone — thereby saving 15 percent of a year’s rent, the fee typically charged by rental brokers in Manhattan.

With the median rent for a one-bedroom in a doorman building now at $2,450 a month, according to Citi Habitats, that $4,410 fee could buy a fine flat-screen television set.

An informal survey of Manhattan rental agencies confirms that while backdoor maneuvers remain rare, they are growing in what is the tightest rental market in more than a decade. Vacancy rates stand at a microcosmic 0.56 percent, and the number of apartments for which the owner pays the broker’s fee has dwindled. Surging rents are commensurately swelling the dollars-and-cents translation of 15 percent and the incentive to avoid paying a fee.

The risk of cheating the broker — who I suppose is not entirely a parasitic drain on the economy — can be severe if you’re dealing with one of the thuggier ones:

So if you are a renter with the stomach of a street fighter and the situational ethics of a reality-show contestant, what, exactly, are the risks of cheating on your broker?

They run the gamut from tribal to litigious.

“A broker can make a person’s life very miserable if they want to,” said David Francis Calderazzo, the director of leasing for William B. May Real Estate. “All you have to do is spread the word that these people are no good in the building, that they’re deadbeats. No one likes the cold shoulder.”

“A couple of years back,” said Mr. Calderazzo, a former actor, bartender and bouncer, “I showed an apartment to someone who was from one of my corporate accounts but had to pay his own fee. It was a $3,800 one-bedroom on the Upper West Side for him and his dog.”

The client dropped out of sight after looking at the apartment. But two months later, during a routine 411 check on vanished clients, Mr. Calderazzo discovered he had been double-crossed.

“I confronted him, and he basically hung up on me,” Mr. Calderazzo recalled. “Then, he calls me up two or three weeks later. He said he had to get his locks changed three times because someone put Krazy Glue in them. That the super and the doorman paid him no mind.

“It wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything. I believe in karma. But I know people in the building. He figured out maybe it’s because he didn’t pay me my fee. He mailed me a check for 15 percent ASAP.”