An article in the Observer details how 220 St. Nicholas Avenue went from foreclosure to market rate rents as high as
$8,000 $7,000 a month just in the past couple of years. Anyone living on FDB below 125th Street probably remembers how these condos did not sell and stayed unfinished for years but by 2013, it was taken over by a new team who turned it into luxury rentals. Now 220 St. Nicholas has been all rented out and there is even a fancy hat store moving into the lower commercial space. With the equity on this now successful property, the new owners have started buying more property uptown in hopes of duplicating the same success:
LINK
As positive a sign it is that they were able to turn the building around, this quote from the article is particularly frightening to me as someone who lives just a few blocks away and likes my neighborhood just the way it. “We are confident that the neighborhood has been 100 percent absorbed by the Upper West Side,” said Justin Gorjian, echoing that booster-y chorus that many developers and brokers in the area have long sung.
ReplyDeleteUggh ... agreed ... I do not want to be swallowed by the Upper West Side. We can have better restaurants, cleaners streets - and hopefully better schools eventually - but if I wanted to live on the Upper West Side, I would ....
ReplyDeleteI agree GG.
ReplyDeleteHarlem will transcend the UWS by every measure.
you guys are kidding me.. you can still be swallowed up by the UWS and still maintain the character of a micro-neighborhood.. Either you want the Harlem of the past with no services at all , boarded up buildings and constant danger on the streets or you can have the "better restaurants, cleaner streets and better schools" You can't have it both ways.. The fact is that South Harlem sits directly next to the UWS and such a blending will naturally occur when South Harlem raises it's level - especially because there are no housing projects on this Avenue , Manhattan Ave or Morningside Avenue..
ReplyDeleteAnon - To me, swallowed up means losing its character. The no projects comment is inacccurate - large swaths of St. Nicholas and Adam Clayton Powell are Section 8 housing, which isn't going anywhere, so if it's poor people you are trying to avoid, I hope you didn't buy into Harlem thinking it will have the same demographic as the UWS. I disagree you can't have it both ways - we already have better restaurants and even a handful of good public school options in Harlem (Teacher's College Community School, Hugo Newman, but we need more). How to encourage other schools to get better is another issue (hint: add a G&T program to one of the other Harlem schools to get more middle class families to use the school, which will eventually improve the entire school, as has happened at many schools in the city). Nytimes ran an article on how the best way to improve schools for lower income kids is to have a greater mix of middle and upper income kids - even the lower income kids do better. But there are great thing about Harlem too and I like to think my brownstone blocks has the best of both - people clean up litter, but many of us have adopted the habit of hanging out on ojr stoops and we actually know one another. So I respectfully disagree ...
ReplyDeletea high end hat shop. All sociology concerns fade in the face of a high end hat shop.
ReplyDelete