September 1, 2016

Brooklyn: From shortage to saturation

From the New York Times, with some relevance for Vancouver:

‘The Market Is Saturated’: Brooklyn’s Rental Boom May Turn Into a Glut

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There are 19 residential towers either under construction or recently completed along the 10-block section of Flatbush stretching from Barclays Center north to Myrtle Avenue. When all of them are finished, they will have added more than 6,500 apartments — overwhelmingly rentals — to New York City’s housing stock. Another four buildings on Myrtle Avenue will add almost 1,000 more units.
There are so many new apartments in the neighborhood — roughly one-fifth of all rental units expected to become available in the city in 2016 and 2017, according to Nancy Packes Data Services, a research firm — that the Brooklyn rental market seems poised to zoom right past boom, to glut. …
In at least one older building — meaning it went up in 2011 — the landlord is offering existing residents three-year leases with no increase in rent for the first year in order to keep tenants who may be drawn to newer buildings.
“It’s pretty astonishing,” said Gabby Warshawer, director of research at CityRealty, a research firm. “Clearly there’s a lot of supply right now. We’re seeing longer lease terms, which is fairly new. And months of free rent.” …Developers and consultants are not predicting that rents will plunge, but they do expect them to stagnate and perhaps ease in the short term. …
Jonathan J. Miller, president and chief executive of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraisal and consulting firm, contends that the problem is not so much “too many units.”“It’s too many units skewed to the upper end of the market,” above $3,500 a month in rent, he continued. “The top of the market is soft for both rentals and condos. That’s where the bulk of the new supply is coming.”
But nearly one-quarter of the apartments — a total of 1,654 units — in the Flatbush corridor are reserved for low-, moderate- and middle-income tenants under the city’s 421-a housing program, which offered developers generous property tax breaks for setting aside 20 percent of a project’s apartments for such tenants. …
Some housing advocates, however, say there are still not enough apartments for the low-income tenants being driven out of the area by gentrification. They point out that the developer Forest City Ratner got 80,000 applications for 181 subsidized apartments at 461 Dean Street in Pacific Park.
Others complain that developers are not building the infrastructure required for such a large influx of residents. …
And now 12 years after the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning, some developers are finally moving forward with plans for several office projects as well.
Brooklyn

Brooklyn Skyline 

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