Does the New Crown Heights Starbucks Threaten Small Neighborhood Businesses?

By Irene Chidinma Nwoye Thu., Oct. 16 2014

The coffee tension brewing in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, started after Starbucks opened a new location right beside a four-year-old coffee shop, the Pulp and the Bean. Owner Tony Fisher is not necessarily scared of the competition. But he believes Starbucks will usher in even more commercial chains, causing the rent prices in the already expensive neighborhood to continue to soar. While Fisher appears visibly unfazed by Starbucks' presence, the anti-big-business slogans occasionally scrawled on chalkboards in front of his stores betray his fears about working next door to a corporate Goliath.

On September 25, only about five days after its neighbor began operations at 341 Eastern Parkway, the Pulp and the Bean's chalkboard read, "Everytime coffee is not bought here, a baby crys [sic] somewhere in the world." On a different day, the board at Fisher's other store, Bob and Betty's (an organic-foods market on the other side of the Pulp and the Bean), read: "Support big families not big business. Buy local."

There is no shortage of Starbucks in New York City. Last year, there were 283 Starbucks in the city (up from 272 in 2012 and 245 in 2009), according to the Center for an Urban Future, a NYC-based think tank that traces economic growth in New York State for policymakers. New Yorkers have grown accustomed to seeing a Starbucks every quarter of a mile, and the coffee company has evolved into a socioeconomic symbol.

Starbucks is often regarded as the last phase of gentrification in neighborhoods in the city. According to one Business Insider reporter, a new Starbucks suggests that a neighborhood is "up-and-coming," "a smart real estate bet." And the real estate part is one of the reasons Fisher is concerned. Rent prices in Crown Heights have risen in recent years.

"Two years ago [the rent was] $35 per square foot on Eastern Parkway," Fisher says. Now it's valued at $100 per square foot. "Starbucks will attract other corporate entities and rents in the neighborhood will go up," he adds.

Full article on The Village Voice Blogs

Why Zoning for Greater Density Will Fail to Make Housing More Affordable

by Jim Russell

Gentrification is an urban policy problem in need of a theory. Instead of theory, we have the geographic illusion of local: The current landscape is the result of community decisions. Gentrifiers, outsiders who move into a neighborhood, cause real estate prices to appreciate and displace more tenured residents. One way to make housing more affordable is to increase supply in the gentrifying neighborhood. Rising demand is a market signal to build. To make the market model more sophisticated, we can consider household income. The quantity of people seeking to live in a certain neighborhood isn’t appreciably greater than previous years. But the quality of income migrating into a neighborhood may be much greater than most residents earn. Regardless, supply and demand is still local. Conceivably, poorer residents could access better paying jobs in order to compete with newcomers for housing.

Full article in Sustainablecitiescollective on 8 July 2014

Brooklyn now the borough of kingly prices

BY DOYLE MURPHY

An $18 million triplex penthouse for sale in the Clock Tower Building in DUMBO is part of the increasingly expensive condo offerings in Brownstone Brooklyn and the trendy neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

Move to Brooklyn — and bring your checkbook.

The average cost of condos in the borough’s most popular neighborhoods has topped $1 million for the first time, a new report shows.

Sales prices for the second quarter crested that watermark as the supply for townhouses runs low, forcing homebuyers to dig even deeper into their deep pockets for an alternative.

“I wish we all had crystal balls to see what happens next,” said Aleksandra Scepanovic, managing director of Ideal Properties Group, the brokerage firm responsible for the analysis.

The report tracks sales over the past three months in Brownstone Brooklyn and the red-hot neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, increasingly home to the city’s tastemakers.

Buyers in the two trendy nabes were willing to pay, on average, more than $1,000 a square foot to live along the treelined streets or in repurposed warehouses. That’s a steal compared with the luxury listings popping up in the borough.

A stunning, six-bedroom penthouse at 360 Furman St. overlooking Brooklyn Bridge Park is being marketed by Sotheby’s for an asking price of

$32 million. The amenities include a movie theater, a wine cellar and a master bath the size of a studio apartment.

Too much? The second most expensive condo is a 7,000 square-foot triplex in DUMBO’s iconic Clock Tower Building listed at $18 million.

Traditionally, townhouses had been king in neighborhoods like Park Slope, Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, but there just aren’t enough of them to keep up with demand, Scepanovic said.

The same is increasingly true of condos as some buyers switch gears. Open houses routinely draw 100 people or more, and overall prices jumped 27.5% during the past 12 months, according to the report.

“We’ve got condos that we’re selling for $300,000 and condos we’re selling for $10 million,” Scepanovic said.

“The question is, where is that middle ground?”

Defining ‘affordability’ upward

By Ryan Hutchins

It was late April and Helen Rosenthal—Upper West Side progressive, City Council freshman—was not pleased with what she was hearing.

TF Cornerstone had brought plans for its latest Manhattan megaproject, with more than 1,000 units in Hell’s Kitchen, to the City Council’s Land Use Committee for approval. Planning officials clearly hadn’t wrung enough value out of the developer, Rosenthal believed, and decided more could be done.

And so it was. The Council generally defers to the local members on such matters, so Rosenthal was able to cut a deal with TF Cornerstone. It meant more “affordable” housing, to the tune of 10,000 square feet, and a guarantee that a preschool would be built on the site, which is now expected to cover some 900,000 square feet.

But Rosenthal looked at the neighborhood surrounding the West 57th Street development and thought it wasn’t enough. She felt there was a need for moderate-income housing that could go to people who live in the community now. Extell Development’s massive Riverside Center South project on the Hudson River, between West 59th and 72nd streets, is already slated to include hundreds of units for lower-income families.

So, in an unusual move, Rosenthal told TF Cornerstone that the threshold to qualify for the least-expensive units—the ones that would be set-aside for some of the poorest New Yorkers—should be raised.

She increased the eligibility cut-off from 40 percent of area median income, or A.M.I., to 60 percent. That means a family of four making about $33,500 per year would have met the threshold under the original plan, but that same family would need to make at least $50,300 to qualify under Rosenthal’s revisions.

“I said to the developer, ‘we’re done with the [40] percent lower income,’” Rosenthal recalled recently as we lunched at a Lenny’s near City Hall. “‘We’re giving you a break, because we’re going to make it at 60 percent A.M.I., not [40] percent. So you’re going to get a little more rent from these people.’”

That allowed her to negotiate more “affordable” units for much-higher-income families. Rosenthal told the developer to dedicate 10,000 square feet, or about 20 more units, for moderate-income households. She said all those apartments had to be big enough for families. “I don’t want any single-bedroom ones,” she said. Those new units will be dedicated to households making between 175 percent and 230 percent of the A.M.I.

Those numbers are so high they’re off the chart in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing plan, quite literally. The plan defines “middle income” up to 165 percent. What does that actually mean? The range encompasses families of four earning between $147,000 and $193,000 per year.

Full article on Capital (30 June 2014)

Neighbors Win Fight to Have a Towering Eyesore Demolished

The owner of a house in Homecrest, Brooklyn, requested permission from the city to make “a horizontal and vertical enlargement to an existing two-story, one-family residence.”

More than eight years later, what began as a humble brick bungalow, perching modestly between its low-slung brick and wood neighbors, has swollen into a five-story skeletal tower that looms over the street and smothers the collapsed bungalow below. It is half-finished, with a rib cage of metal beams exposed beneath temporary white cladding and gaping windows punched out in front, but it looks instead as though it had been half-demolished by an errant torpedo.

In the words of one neighbor: “It’s the ugliest thing I ever saw. Who in the world builds a house like that?”

The city said this week that a lawyer for the owner, Joseph Durzieh, had, at long last, agreed to accept the Buildings Department’s demands that the structure be demolished. But neighbors remain skeptical that the scourge of their quiet block will finally meet the wrecking ball.

Over the past decade, those neighbors have endured the mice that scurried into their kitchens. The raccoons rummaging through the garbage. The stray cats colonizing the front yard-turned-junkyard. The flies.

But most maddening of all, the neighbors said, was the seeming inability of any authority — despite years of complaints, departmental audits and a stop-work order — to rid them of the eyesore that is 1882 East 12th Street.

Full article in the New York Times (1 May 2014)