Search Results for: gentrification

February 7, 2017

Massive Sendero Verde project will bring 655 affordable ‘passive house’ rentals to East Harlem

A massive, mixed-use development is moving ahead in East Harlem, reports Politico, as the city has selected Jonathan Rose Companies to work with L+M Development Partners on the 751,000-square-foot project. Dubbed Sendero Verde ("green pathway"), the site is located on the block bound by East 111th and 112th Streets and Park and Madison Avenues, and it will create 655 affordable passive house apartments, as well as a YMCA, job training center, 85,000-square-foot DREAM charter school, space for the local non-profit Union Settlement, a grocery store, restaurant, and preventative health care facility run by Mount Sinai.
All the details ahead
February 7, 2017

Five chances to live in burgeoning East Harlem for $985/month

With the Second Avenue Subway sending Upper East Side real estate prices climbing as far north as 96th Street, East Harlem's upward trajectory is sure to only heat up. The former El Barrio has been on the cusp of gentrification since a 2003, 57-block rezoning that increased density allowances along First, Second, and Third Avenues, spurring a bevy of new residential projects. One such development is 2139 Third Avenue, a modern, 21-unit rental at the corner of 117th Street, which just launched its affordable housing lottery for five $985/month one-bedroom units, available to one- or two-person households earning no more than 60 percent of the area median income.
Have a look at the interiors
January 23, 2017

Map: Here’s where you can afford to live in NYC in 2018

For New York home buyers, a lot can change in a year. A neighborhood that was considered affordable can all of a sudden become out of reach, whether it be from new developments like a subway or good old fashioned gentrification. For this reason, Fast Forward Labs created an interactive map that predicts the price of real estate in 2018. As Google Maps Mania explains, "The map allows you to input a housing budget and see how likely it is that you will be able to afford to buy a property in different New York neighborhoods during different future time periods."
More on the map here
January 20, 2017

Whole Foods will open a lower-priced ‘365’ store in Downtown Brooklyn

Downtown Brooklyn is quickly becoming one of NYC's most desirable commercial hubs. On top of hosting a lengthy roster of big name retailers and entertainment centers—which include a new Target, Trader Joe's, Century 21, Apple store, Alamo Drafthouse cinema, and Barclays Center—the neighborhood will also welcome a brand new, lower-priced Whole Foods concept store called "365." According to a press release, the store will open in early 2018 at Two Trees' 300 Ashland Place, and be set up as a no-frills version of the grocery giant.
more details this way
January 10, 2017

Gowanus Alliance reveals plans to bring Kentile Floors sign to new park

Two summers ago, the Gowanus Alliance teamed up with Gowanus by Design on their vision to transform the land underneath the elevated subway tracks on 10th Street between Second and Third Avenues into a public park that would serve as a home for the iconic but dismantled Kentile Floors sign. Now that the MTA has completed its repairs on the tracks above, Brooklyn Paper reports that the group has tapped Loci Architecture for preliminary renderings of what this space, dubbed Under the Tracks Playground, could look like.
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January 5, 2017

High-income renters on the rise in the Bronx and Queens

In November, 6sqft shared an analysis from RentCafe that showed the number of high-income renters in NYC has tripled over the last decade, with the number of renter households earning more than $150,000 annually increasing by 217 percent between 2005 and 2015, from 551,000 to 1.75 million. Now, DNAinfo has asked the site to break the data down further by neighborhood, and what it tells us is that Eastchester and Baychester in the Bronx and East Elmhurst and Jackson Heights in Queens saw the largest increase in wealthy renters.
Learn more and explore RentCafe's interactive charts
January 4, 2017

New York Times names the South Bronx one of the world’s top travel destinations for 2017

In addition to far-flung and exotic locales such as Kazakhstan, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, Sikkim, India, and Marrakesh, Morocco, the New York Times has added to its list of "52 Places to Go in 2017" several cities across the U.S. on the cusp of gentrification or about to make a comeback. One of these is the South Bronx, subtitled as "an industrial neighborhood's revival." They point to the 'hood's declining crime rates, wave of new development, and, of course, burgeoning foodie scene.
Read the whole travel blurb here
December 23, 2016

Rent the East Village party pad where Bret Easton Ellis wrote ‘American Psycho’

The East Village loft owned by novelist and literary bad boy Bret Easton Ellis is available for rent for $5,900 per month. Ellis has been renting out the studio apartment since he decamped for Los Angeles a decade ago; he told the Observer he's been holding on to the 950-square-foot, second-floor condo in the American Felt Building at 114 East 13th Street as a back-up plan, "if Los Angeles just doesn’t work out." The "American Psycho" scribe says he spent the late '80s living in the lofty studio–in his early 20s at the time–writing the iconic 1991 novel of late 20th century privilege, materialism and delusion and throwing massive Holly Golightly-esque bashes packed with his contemporaries back in the day in an East Village very different from today's.
Check it out
December 16, 2016

The Urban Lens: Langdon Clay’s 1970s photographs of automobiles also reveal a New York City in decay

6sqft’s ongoing series The Urban Lens invites photographers to share work exploring a theme or a place within New York City. In this installment Langdon Clay shares photos from his new photo book "Cars — New York City 1974-1976." Are you a photographer who’d like to see your work featured on The Urban Lens? Get in touch with us at [email protected]. New York as a grimey, crime-ridden metropolis sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel, particularly as we sip our soy lattes and brush artisanal donut crumbs from our lips. But as photos from Langdon Clay's book "Cars — New York City 1974-1976" show, 40 years ago, Manhattan was more about crowbars and break-ins than cronuts and Airbnb. In the 18 years Clay lived as a young man in New York City, he spent three of those years exploring the streets of Manhattan in the middle of the night alone. During those wee hours Clay took to some of the city's most dangerous streets with his Leica camera and a few rolls of Kodachrome, snapping photos of the colorful cars he saw parked against the forlorn urbanscape. Ahead Clay shares with 6sqft some of his favorite images from that time.
Explore the series and hear from Langdon
December 13, 2016

Interactive map reveals the income gap that divides NYC’s richest and poorest

According to a 2016 Pew report, the middle class is shrinking in 90 percent of U.S. cities. It's the first time in our nation's history that the middle class doesn't make up the economic majority. Instead, the highest- and lowest-income households combined comprise over 50 percent of the population. And in New York City, the divide is startling. One in five New Yorkers live below the poverty line, while the upper five percent of Manhattan residents earned more than $860,000 in 2014. GIS software company Esri has created a series of interactive maps that visualize this wealth divide in NYC and across the country, revealing where the richest and poorest live and the new economic divisions that are forming in our major metropolitan areas.
Maps, this way
December 2, 2016

State seeks proposals for massive development above South Bronx rail yard tracks

As the city's land costs rise, interest has been focused on the South Bronx, including the potential for a huge waterfront development above the MTA's Concourse Yards, as 6sqft previously reported. Now, Crains reports that Empire State Development (ESD) has invited developers to present offers for leasing or purchasing a 13-acre South Bronx rail yard along the Harlem River just north of the Willis Avenue Bridge and decking it over to build a residential or mixed-use project.
Find out more
December 2, 2016

How 100 years of zoning has shaped New York City

In October, city officials unveiled plans to rezone a large swath of East Harlem. The major thrust of the rezoning initiative is to bring more high-rise buildings to a corridor running several blocks along Park, Second, and Third avenues. By building up, city officials hope the neighborhood will increase its housing stock, including its affordable […]

November 23, 2016

Proposed towers could bring 500 apartments to Crown Heights, including 140 affordable units

Crown Heights is a neighborhood undergoing rapid change, but the western area south of Eastern Parkway has remained relatively quiet and unaltered by new development. However, it appears that could soon change. As The Real Deal reports, Cornell Realty Management is hoping to rezone two parcels at 40 Crown Street and 931 Carroll Street, just one block from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, to make way for a pair of towers that would house more than 500 residential units.
more here
November 9, 2016

Target opening a store in new Hell’s Kitchen condo

Over the summer, Chinese developer Xinyuan Real Estate filed plans to build a seven-story, 105,305- square-foot condominium at 615 Tenth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, their second NYC project after the Oosten in Williamsburg. The address had formerly been home to a Hess gas station until Xinyuan bought the site last January for $57.5 million. Their new 82-unit project, dubbed Hudson Garden, will also have a 29,000-square-foot retail base along the western blockfront between West 44th and 45th Streets, for which the Post reports Target has signed a lease.
More details
November 3, 2016

Apple will open second Brooklyn store at 300 Ashland Place

Apple opened its first Brooklyn store on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg over the summer, which many felt was the final nail in the coffin of the neighborhood's gentrification. The company has now set their sites on another rapidly developing part of the borough, as The Real Deal reports they've inked a 10-year deal for a 12,000-square-foot space in the ground floor Two Trees Management's 300 Ashland Place in Downtown Brooklyn's BAM Cultural District. It was an off-market deal, so there's no asking rent, but sources say the going price for the 32-story rental tower's retail space is $150 per square foot.
More details ahead
October 27, 2016

Former juvenile jail in Hunts Point will be replaced with $300M mixed-use affordable housing complex

The Spofford Juvenile Detention Center (later renamed Bridges Juvenile Center) was built in 1957 in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, quickly gaining a reputation for its poor conditions--the Daily News once described it as "vermin-infested" and said it "held about 100 youth in dark cells with no air conditioning." It was closed in 2011, at which time urban revitalization consultant Majora Carter began her quest to have the site transformed into a mixed-use housing complex. The city eventually stepped in, and today officials announced plans for the Peninsula, an affordable housing development that will rise on the five-acre site and offer 740 apartments, 52,000 square feet of open and recreational space, 49,000 square feet of light industrial space, 48,000 square feet for community facilities like health care providers, 21,000 square feet of retail, and 15,000 square feet of artist space, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Find out more right this way
October 26, 2016

My 630sqft: Inside ‘Store Front’ photographers Karla & James Murray’s East Village home of 22 years

You might not immediately recognize their names, but there is no doubt you know their work. Photographers James and Karla Murray burst onto the scene back in 2008 with the release of their seminal book "Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York," a work culling hundreds of images of the bygone retail graphics that once covered the city—and jointly, the mom and pop businesses that vanished alongside them. Since then, the Murrays have released two more tomes of the same vein, and collected countless awards and accolades for their documentary work along the way. In fact, their photographs can now be found in the permanent collections of major institutions around the world, including the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the New York Public Library. Their images also decorate the homes of countless celebrities, among them Sarah Jessica Parker, Ralph Lauren, Alicia Keys and Roseanne Barr. In this week's My sqft, 6sqft visits this warm and spunky husband-and-wife team in their East Village home to talk about their tenure in the city (they moved downtown in the 80s—though Karla is from the Bronx) and their ongoing efforts to chronicle what remains of "old New York." We also get a peek inside their studio apartment/workspace of 22 years, which as Karla and James share ahead, has some crazy stories of its own.
go inside their home here
October 19, 2016

East Harlem rezoning would allow for towers of up to 30 stories tall

In 2003, East Harlem received a boost when the Bloomberg administration pushed through a plan to rezone a whopping 57 blocks of the neighborhood. The initiative (the first of its kind in 40 years) allowed for increased density along First, Second, and Third avenues, while preserving the lower slung mid-blocks in between. Following the change, the area saw more than a dozen buildings of 8-12 stories sprout up along its busiest stretches. Now, the de Blasio administration is looking to build even bigger, and on Tuesday officials presented their latest upzoning proposal (pdf), a plan that would allow towers up to 30 stories tall to be constructed in the area.
more here
October 12, 2016

Peek into the rooms of millennials around the world (PHOTOS)

While it's certainly fun to admire listing photos for pristine homes dressed up by famous designers, those images are nowhere near as interesting or insightful as getting a raw, unstaged look at how people really live. In a news series called "My Room Project," French filmmaker and photographer John Thackwray takes us into the private spaces of one of the world's most misunderstood groups: millennials.
inside 21 rooms this way
October 7, 2016

The Urban Lens: Attis Clopton documents New York’s fleeting moments and faces

6sqft’s ongoing series The Urban Lens invites photographers to share work exploring a theme or a place within New York City. In this installment Brooklyn resident Attis Clopton offers us a look at his stunning portraits. Are you a photographer who’d like to see your work featured on The Urban Lens? Get in touch with us at [email protected]. If you ask Attis Clopton what his day job is, he'd quickly respond "musician." However, the drummer, who's travelled the world recording and performing, would be remiss not to mention his impressive photography skills. Though not formally trained, Attis has developed an eye and the ability to capture subjects in a way that many professional photographers struggle with throughout their career. But what may set Attis apart from his contemporaries is his openness, his curiosity and his unpretentious disposition, all of which help him lock into the moment and keep his photos from looking overthought or overdone. Ahead he shares some of his recent favorites with 6sqft.
more this way
September 30, 2016

The Urban Lens: Photographer Bob Estremera captures vestiges of the Lower East Side’s early days

When Bob lived briefly on the Lower East Side in 2011, he loved "walking its crumbling sidewalks and admiring it’s equally crumbling architecture." But the neighborhood's gentrification was already underway: "Tucked away among the little stores, restaurants, apartments and barber shops, upscale boutique restaurants were making themselves felt with prices and menus that could only be supported from clientele outside the neighborhood," he describes. So he decided to return to the LES and capture what he feels is the area's essence. In this resulting black-and-white series, he turns our attention to vestiges of the early days, "the decayed store fronts and once proud architecture and businesses that have vanished and others still clinging barely to life."
Hear more from Bob and see all the photos
September 30, 2016

Darling one-bedroom townhouse flat in Greenpoint asks just $660K

It's hard not to fall for Greenpoint's mix of waterfront loft energy and quaint, leafy old-school ethnic enclave. On a typically twee and tree-lined block in a prime spot between McCarren and McGolrick Parks, this one-bedroom-with-possibilities co-op at 100 Newel Street, asking $660K, is on the parlor floor of a totally charming building and has great prewar bones; the 800-square-foot apartment's layout, though, is somewhat in need of an update.
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September 26, 2016

Inside the Art Deco banking halls of 20 Exchange; new app will let taxis act like Uber

Take a tour inside the off-limits banking halls of Art Deco skyscraper 20 Exchange Place, now a rental property, but formerly the City Bank-Farmers Trust Building. [Untapped] Victoria’s Secret Model Isabeli Fontana finally sold her Central Park South pad for $2.5 million. [LL NYC] Gentrification is playing a starring role in new NYC-based television shows like “High Maintenance,” “Mr. […]