In New York City and elsewhere, at least over the last few decades, a certain pattern has emerged. GLBT men and women (often those who have fled other parts of the world where they have felt less welcome) arrive in New York City looking for decent jobs and inexpensive housing. Because Manhattan is so expensive, they end up moving into neighborhoods that had been thought of as dangerous, bad, or uncool. (As someone who was once a poor NYU student in Greenwich Village, I know about moving to those neighborhoods, although in my time–the early 1990s–the West Village was already pricey.)
But over time, thanks in no small part to those GLBT pioneers, those neighborhoods come to be seen as cool. Investment follows, as do visible improvements. Restaurants, condominiums, businessess… the whole thing changes. Real estate prices go way up. And boom, next thing you know those young people who are new to the city can’t afford to live there anymore, so they settle in some other uncool neighborhood and make that tasteful, optimistic, and booming.
Guess what? There’s hardly any of Manhattan left!
It’s no secret that the epicenter of that GLBT culture (the gay rights movement is widely said to have been touched off by some police brutality that resulted in riots at the Stonewall Tavern) has long been the West Village, so it should be no surprise that the West Village is one of the most delightful areas of the city–even if it has become much less a center of gay culture and is now seen mainly as one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Manhattan.
Part of that comes from the reality that is a destination–not a place to pass through. Literally… thanks to the narrow streets (some cobbled), lots of pedestrians, and countless tiny back streets, this is not a place to drive through on your way somewhere else.
The streets of the West Village defy the grid system. The conventional logic of Manhattan navigation to not apply here. For instance, in most of Manhatthan, 4th street would be six blocks south of 10th street. In the West Village, it is too, at one point. But there is also part of the West Village where those two roads intersect. And another part of West Fourth street is eight blocks to the north of West Tenth.
Take away message: don’t drive around the West Village without someone who knows what they’re doing.
But on the other hand, if you have some time, why not? You’ll see some amazing stuff. Cobbled streets, private, gated courtyards, and that rarest of Manhattan sites: well-tended window boxes, with flowers tumbling down towards the street.
The restaurants are amazing. Doug’s wife Kate is an editor at Food & Wine magazine. She reports there are "LOTS of very good options in that area." Her recommendations include:
Some of the newish (2 years or less), really awesome places are: The Spotted Pig (I’m nuts about this place), Little Owl, and Fatty Crab. Other great places are: Mary’s Fish Camp, Maremma, August, Wallse, and Crispo.
The Hudson River Park has given the West Village some wide open riverside greenspace to compliment various smaller parks like Washinton Square and James J. Walker Park. In addition, Mayor Bloomberg recently broke ground on the redevelopment of more than a mile of elevated railroad track, known as the Highline, which will become public space. The southern end of the Highline is in the West Village. (Learn more about the Highline here.)
The story shot yesterday, largely in the TrueGotham Mini Cooper, is playing on TV today, and allegedly you can watch the video online although it seems to be gimpy at the moment. (UPDATE: The video worked all along, but it turns out you need a fairly current version of Real Player.) There is also a written version online, by Cheryl Wills. Here are some excerpts:
After lackluster summer sales, real estate broker Douglas Heddings feared the city’s housing prices had taken a turn for the worse. He even started advertising his blog on his mini-cooper, but turns out he didn’t need to.
"Many of us thought the market was going to continue to slow and there would be the opportunity for even more buyers, but the fourth quarter proved us totally wrong," said Heddings.
Low interest rates and sky-high record bonuses on Wall Street pushed apartment prices in Manhattan higher than ever before…
And the footprints set in the last quarter of 2006, seem to have set a strong path for the New Year.
"I, and many of my colleagues already, have more transactions in the books for the first four to eight weeks of 2007, than the first six to nine months in 2006," said Heddings.
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Doug spent much of today in that car driving the streets of Manhattan, talking into New York One’s cameras as he assessed the local real estate market. The story will be on the air tomorrow, and we’ll have a link when it’s up.
Josh Barbanel reports:
The new quarterly numbers led brokers and market analysts to conclude that the Manhattan real estate market — with its legendary high prices — appeared to have so far escaped the worst of the real estate market excesses, like large price cuts by developers, reported across the country.
“It shows us that we hit the soft landing that a lot of people were hoping for,” said Gregory J. Heym, an economist who prepared market studies for two brokerage firms, Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead Property.
In the immortal words of Gomer Pyle, surprise surprise surprise! 2006 did not see the Manhattan real estate market crash like some predicted. Not only didn’t the market crash, but reports released in the past few days are showing average prices up 6% for the year and median prices up as much as 11%.
Now everyone who reads this blog knows that I don’t believe that Manhattan is immune to an economic downturn in our housing market. I do maintain that our island remains a bit of an anomaly and as this article (interesting “look back” at 2007…yes 2007!) points out it is better compared to international cities like Tokyo and Paris rather than American cities like Chicago and Boston.
My perception of all of this… I can only say that I and many of my colleagues have a considerable amount of business in the pipeline for the first 4-8 weeks of 2007 as the last quarter of 2006 indeed saw an increase in sales volume. Many buyers have regained confidence in the market as prices have become more realistic and interest rates have remained low. Additionally, and I believe this is the primary reason for a buoyed Manhattan market, NYC remains the greatest city in the world to call home and there are a lot of people with a lot of money who agree with me. 2007 should be a good year as well… it certainly is starting out that way.
Here’s a funny thing about architecture: Tribeca is highly prized as a residential community, in large part because the buildings weren’t designed to be residential. The appeal is in the industrial warehouse feel: those high ceilings, big open spaces, loading docks with enormous garage doors, and massive windows–people pay through the nose to live in buildings. Tribeca prices are about as high, per square foot, as anywhere in New York City.
Not that long ago, it really was industrial. In my lifetime even, the titans of the neighborhood were sponge wholesalers and the like. Now it’s all Bobby DeNiro and his film festival and restaurant investments that started in the late 1980s. The place is flooded with celebrities like Mariah Carey, Scarlet Johannson, Gisele Bundchen, Harvey Keitel, Josh Hartnett, sometimes David Letterman… the list goes on and on.
And the flood of investment and downtown rebuilding post-9/11 has changed the feel of the place yet again. One of my favorite aspects is the nicely developed Hudson River esplanade–a massive swath of bike paths, trees, lawns, incredible playgrounds, and river views that extends more or less the entire length of Manhattan. Tribeca has especially benefited, with all kinds of activities in easy walking distance, especially in the warmer months.
In recent years there are more and more strollers all over Manhattan, but they stand out more in this neighborhood which had been all about hipsters and nightlife for more than a decade. Tribeca is also now home to the pride of Manhattan public schools–PS 234 and the gleaming Stuyvesant High School–are in Tribeca. (If you don’t know about Stuyvesant, watch the video.) (Just for fun, you might also want to watch Conan O’Brien’s two part graduation speech.)
This is another neighborhood with lots of big name restaurants, like Nobu, Bouley, and Chanterelle. But I’m a sucker for the comfortable, and can’t argue with the breakfast at Bubby’s Pie Company–another place where prices are reasonable, and a table can be hard to find.
By the way, in case you don’t know: it’s called Tribeca, because it’s a TRIangle BElow CAnal street. Check out the map. Find Canal Street. See the triangle? That’s Tribeca.
This week on TrueGotham, we’re going to be talking about some of my favorite New York City neighborhoods, starting with the one where I live: the Upper West Side.
To me, at this juncture of history, this is one of the most amazing places in the world for a family to live.
Certainly the Upper West Side has all the stuff anyone would expect from a family friendly Manhattan neighborhood: essentially limitless good food both prepared and not (Fairway, Zabar’s and a thousand restaurants, unfortunately most are only mediocre–more on that later), culture (the American Museum of Natural History, the Children’s Museum, the Beacon Theater, Symphony Space, Lincoln Center, and now Dizzy’s and the Rose Theatre at Time Warner), and dozens of great schools of every kind (with, depending on your definition of the Upper West Side, Columbia University as the headliner).
But to me, the thing that makes this the best place to live is how easy it is to feel like you’re not in Manhattan at all. Almost the entire neighborhood is sandwiched between two of the biggest and best parks in New York City: Central Park to the East, and Riverside Park to the West. Living in New York is intense. It’s not for everyone. But if, a few blocks from wherever you may be, you can go jogging, biking, roller-blading, sunbathing, playing softball, swinging, ice skating in either of two Central Park rinks, or reading the Times and sipping coffee on a bench under the trees–well, how hard can life be? For those of us with children, the carousel in Central Park and Victoria Gardens Amusement Park at Wolman Rink in the Summer provides plenty of stimulation for the whole family. Those parks are central fixtures of my life, and without them I imagine I’d be spending a lot more on psychotherapy.
And, when it comes to food: sure there are lots of big-name places, like Ouest, Jean-Goerges, and Per Se. But the one restaurant I couldn’t live without? It’s not expensive at all, and it doesn’t take reservations. Celeste is always jam-packed, but the homemade pasta is more than worth the effort of getting a table.
There’s a bunch more worth getting to know on the Upper West Side:
Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the convicted kidnapper-killer of the Lindberg baby, worked as a carpenter in the Majestic Apartments on that corner at the time of the crime. Later, mob bosses Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello all lived in the Majestic. Costello was shot (not fatally) in the lobby in 1957. And across the street, John Lennon was murdered in front of his home in the Dakota Apartments in 1980. This also happens to be the corner where poor Mr. Bliss met his fate (see previous item).
TrueGotham’s own Douglas Heddings will be a speaker at Inman’s Real Estate Connect 2007 that takes place Jan 8-10th at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan.
Doug will be part of a Blogging Roundtable on January 9th. First session is 2-3PM and second is 4-5PM.
Check out the list of speakers. Not bad. Not bad at all.
TrueGotham will be taking it easy for a few days over the holidays. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with some deep (and noticeably British, like my copy of the the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations they all came from) thoughts about real estate:
"Well! Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property."
–Maria Edgeworth from The Absentee
"Property has its duties as well as its rights."
–Thomas Drummond, from a letter to the Earl of Donoughmore
"Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common."
–R.H. Tawney from Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
"I have heard of a man who had a mind to sell his house, and therefore carried a piece of brick in his pocket, which he showed as a pattern to encourage purchasers."
–Jonathan Swift from The Drapier’s Letters
"A house is not a home."
–Polly Adler, book title
"But a house is much more to my mind than a tree,
And for groves, O! a good grove of chimneys for me."
–Charles Morris from Country and Town
"Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter
My sober house."
–William Shakespeare from The Merchant of Venice
"Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? The stables are the real centre of the household."
–George Bernard Shaw from Heartbreak House
New York City now has a housing bubble blog and the New York Times is simultaneously reporting two stories: record Wall Street bonuses and approximately 1,100,000 foreclosures expected in the next two years.
Whoa. What does this all mean? Let’s try to understand.
I have long maintained that New York City is a bit of an anomoly when it comes to national housing statistics, particularly when you take into account the amount of money that is made and spent here.
However, I’m not so naive as to think that our great city is immune to every negative housing trend.
That said, it is practically impossible for me to believe, based on recent market activity and discussions that I have had with family and friends who will be the beneficiaries of those big Wall Street bonuses, that our market is in fact a "bursting bubble." I wish that blogger luck, and I’m all for a diversity of opinions–a lot of people believe I have been excessively negative. But it’s a tough case to make at this point.
Furthermore, in selling real estate in Manhattan for 15 years, I have come to learn that the New York City buyer is very savvy indeed and I would go out on a limb and theorize that a small percentage of New York City buyers (at least, certainly, the Manhattan market that I serve) are less likely to get themselves into mortgage products that would result in foreclosure. Perhaps I am way off base, but this "problem" strikes me as one that is more predominant in other parts of the country where the average housing price is $200,000 and buyers have selected "low payment" mortgage options in an effort to "get in the housing appreciation game."
I could be setting myself up to eat a whole mess of crow in a year or two. Of course, it’s possible that everything will be worth 30% less than it was two years ago, but I really can’t imagine that. It was just 6-9 months ago where I believed that that was indeed a possible scenario, but I have once again watched as a pent up demand from buyers has continued to stabilize the housing market and I believe that the sentiment of those who are receiving those big bonuses combined with the powerful bonuses themselves are going to further stabilize the market in the next 6-9 months.
Here I sit the week before the Christmas/New Year’s break and I and my team are busy showing property to new buyers, many of which have entered the market in the past 30 days hoping to close on a home in the next 60-90 days. With mortgage rates still low, an increase in demand to offset the increase in supply, and the anticipation of a flood of money into the housing market in early 2007, it looks like the NYC housing market is not a bubble at all but will remain stable well into the new year.
I feel like I have to make a disclaimer here that I’m not trying to sell New York City as an infallable and always strong housing market because I saw it in the early 1990’s. That said, I just can’t ignore the reality of the level of business that is happening now and that which is anticipated in early 2007. I continue to be amazed at the strength of our market even as it has cooled.
The one big question I have left is: what’s with our economy? Isn’t it odd that Wall Street is having, by many measures, its best year ever at a time when a record number of Americans appear to be headed for financial disaster? Who can explain that one to me?
