Photo by Ellen J. Cohen.
May 20, 2019 Weather: Sunny, with a high of 88 degrees.
Notices:
Concerts, readings and many other local events are on our calendar.
News:
NYCHA tenant Jennifer Calcano says she was sexually harassed by a worker who was supposed to be fixing her apartment. After she reported the harassment, he was transferred, but apparently not for long. “Now, they say he’s back working in the complex on West 90th Street with no explanation from the city. So a formal complaint was filed at NYCHA’s offices last week.” The agency says the complaint is under investigation.
More “suburban” amenities are coming to the UWS, one columnist writes in the Times. Case in point: the new Dahlia at 212 West 95th Street. “One of the Dahlia’s biggest selling points? It has its own parking garage. ‘You can pull in with your S.U.V., unload and take your things in a private manner,’ said Shlomi Reuveni, the president of the company that is handling sales for the building. ‘That’s very appealing.’ And very suburban.”
A three-bedroom home that just hit the market for nearly $25 million was designed by a “paleo power couple” to help you live your healthiest life. “Located near Lincoln Square on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the roughly 4,300-square-foot property has a lighting system that changes color and dims in the evening, to sync with the body’s circadian rhythms and promote better sleep. It has a triple-osmosis water filtration system for ultraclean water and UV-light blocking windows. Materials like paint, finishes and sealants were chosen to avoid contaminants and chemical additives.”
NYCHA is racking up quite the dossier on W90th.
Do the advocates for “affordable housing” understand the conditions in which NYCHA tenants live?
Where is the clamor for maintaining the existing “affordable housing”?
Plenty of buildings in the neighborhood have a garage.
212 West 95th Street. Isn’t this the same building with private outdoor space WSR profiled several weeks ago. IIRC that piece brought out no end of snide remarks along the lines of “there goes the neighborhood”.
In any event private garages for Manhattan multi-family is hardly something new. All sorts and types of buildings have them going back to things built in 1960’s or before. IIRC per zoning some buildings must have a certain amount of onsite parking.
“Of course, these new buildings are designed for a very narrow slice of the population — those who can afford to spend multiple millions of dollars on a home — but it’s a slice of the population whose purchasing decisions affect all city dwellers.
Amit Bhandari, a 40-year-old who works at a financial institution, recently purchased a condo at the Dahlia, the Upper West Side building. He and his wife, a public-school teacher, have a 10-month-old baby and are planning to expand their family. He says they went to open houses in suburban New Jersey, near where he grew up, but decided to buy three blocks from where they live now once they realized that the new building would make their lifestyle almost just as easy as living in the suburbs” Welcome to The New Upper West Suburbs!
It’s wonderful, isn’t it? It’s nice that we’re able to keep families from fleeing the city, don’t you agree?
That four million is just the beginning.
Anyone who has planned and or compared moving to the suburbs from NYC, in particular Manhattan knows the drill.
You can find very nice homes in great areas of NJ, LI and even Westchester on good sized lots that tick all the boxes for much less than four million. Heck even much less than two million.
See: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Maplewood-NJ/pmf,pf_pt/52635186_zpid/39616_rid/globalrelevanceex_sort/40.748427,-74.23904,40.711158,-74.293457_rect/13_zm/?
Such homes will give a family all the space they require. However the kicker comes in taxes, of which you’ll pay huge sums every year. The above linked property has RE taxes alone of nearly $20k per year.
OTOH NYC’s property taxes on single through three family homes, co-ops and condos is comparatively low. Depending upon location taxes on brownstones/townhouse or even mansions are also rather low compared to suburbs. So what makes people move? In a word services.
For all that money in taxes paid living in suburbs you get great to excellent local public school system (K-12). These schools are also packed with every sort of extracurricular activities and or the town provides at low to nil cost.
NYC public school system, well to be frank for most part stinks. K-5 and even middle school is highly dependent upon where one lives (and BdeB along with others are moving fast to change this). As for high schools least said the better. Outside of the specialized few are high or middle ranked.
Thus high income families who elect to remain in NYC (especially Manhattan), usually send their kids to private for all or part of their primary and secondary education. Good private schools in this town cost money, and thus all the number crunching on choosing to remain in city or leave for suburbs.
Yes, there are plenty of other benefits; husband/father or even both parents have shorter commutes to work. Thus no longer leave on the 7:15AM train and return sometime at or even after dinner time. But that and other benefits usually are below the children’s education on list of priorities.
This is why many families who buy into these high end condo buildings end up selling when the kids start nearing first grade age.
Those that remain elect to put themselves (and children) through the hassle, trauma and stress of navigating entry into our very best private schools. Or having the same in efforts to get into any of the better public middle and high schools.
From the NYT:
“As land costs rise, developers can make more money building at the top end of the market and ignoring the middle.
At the Dahlia, a 38-unit building under construction on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, developers say the idea is to set up condos large enough that they could reasonably replicate the feeling of a house in suburbia. The building has no studios or one-bedrooms. The largest units, with four bedrooms, are around 2,100 square feet with prices starting just over $4 million.”
Always well-moderated discussion at the nyt.
“Always well-moderated discussion at nyt”
If ensuring that no real, formidable dissent from the orthodoxy enforced by the NY Times ever gets is one’s idea of “well-moderated”…
Most telling is that The New York Times has a discussion with almost 400 Comments, while the WWSR has censured more comments than it’s printed.
WSJ should have perhaps pointed out that this piece regarding suburbs appeared in last Sunday’s NYT “Week In Review” section as an opinion, not actual news story.
That being said comment regarding rising land and other costs is spot on.
Back in 2015 price for new condo construction below 96th street in Manhattan reached $1,851 per square foot.
Things have gone up and down since, and while land still is expensive in much of the city, those high costs are starting to affect deals. https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/new-york-city-land-prices/
B.B. Did you intend to comment at The Deal and mistakenly commented on WSR?
But never WSJ.
“WSJ” should have been “WSR”.
There really should be a preview before posting function on forum. *LOL*