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April 17, 2009
The Brooklyn real-estate bust continues
The Brooklyn Paper
by Ben Muessig
Brooklyn is for sale — but nobody is buying.
The collapsing economy is being blamed for a 35-percent drop in the number of properties sold in the borough’s once-booming housing market in the first quarter of this year compared to the last part of 2008.
Worse, the first quarter of 2009 is off 57 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008.
The bad news — contained in a new report from the real-estate consulting firm Miller Samuel, which conducted the study for the Prudential Douglas Elliman real-estate firm — follows a trend that started last year, when the economy imploded, mostly because of a housing market bust.
...The drop in sales was caused in part by unrealistic asking prices, according to researchers.
With loads of new Brooklyn condos sitting empty, one wonders how Bruce Ratner and the ESDC can make the numbers work on Atlantic Yards. Could they be planning to just sit on the empty lots for a few decades?
Well...
Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, Does 2037 Work for You?
But the biggest implications are for the time frame of the rest of the project. All of the promised community benefits--affordable housing, jobs, greenspace, and so on--aren't likely to arrive as briskly as the tardy arena, and will probably await further installments of the project.
And when is that likely to happen in the Ratner world of receding timelines? While not strictly comparable--in the sense that the current AY plan is primarily residential--new research on the future of the World Trade Center buildings gives a sense of what kind of truly remarkable dates are possible in the brave new world of post-meltdown New York real estate. The forecast: One World Trade Center, which the Port Authority is building, will not be fully occupied until 2018. Tower 2 will not be completely rented until 2025 and Tower 3 will not be fully leased until 2037.
The timeline of Atlantic Yards needs a similarly clear-eyed reassessment. The use of eminent domain and public subsidies are based on promised benefits on a certain timeline--and it would be useful to at least know approximately which decade we're talking about.
Posted by eric at April 17, 2009 6:31 PM