Bushwick

Rents zoom in Bushwick, says survey

March 8, 2013 By Raanan Geberer Brooklyn Daily Eagle
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If, even 10 years ago, someone said that Bushwick would be the Brooklyn neighborhood with the greatest increases in rent during a two-month period, that person’s sanity would have been severely questioned, since Bushwick was just beginning to recover from being a burned-out, crime-ridden slum.

But that is precisely what is happening now, according to the MNS Brooklyn Rental Market Report for February 2013, just issued.

The report shows that from December to February, the rental prices of studio apartments increased 15.42 percent, one-bedrooms in Bushwick went up 21.43 percent, and two-bedroom apartments there rose 22.75 percent.

As one-time Bushwick resident Jackie Gleason might have said, the rents have zoomed “to the moon!”

For some time now, artistic and creative young people, priced out of Williamsburg, have been moving east, into East Williamsburg and then Bushwick. The report also credits the “low inventory in Bushwick” compared with demand, and the recent construction of a high-end building at 949 Willoughby Ave.

MNS, a large real estate company, has been compiling data for these reports since 1999. The firm eliminates ultra-high-end properties to avoid skewing the data.

Other notable trends, according to the report, are that for studios, those in Williasmburg are the most expensive, at an average of $2,726 per month. The least expensive are in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, at $1,200.

The most expensive one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments are both in DUMBO, at $3,579 and $1.448, respectively. And the least expensive one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms are both in Bay Ridge, at $4,817 and $1,780.

The report includes a wide swath of areas stretching from Bay Ridge to Greenpoint, Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg to Bedford-Stuyvesant.

However, it doesn’t include eastern Brooklyn neighborhoods such as East Flatbush and Canarsie, or southern Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Midwood and Brighton Beach.

One surprising drop in prices has taken place in Boerum Hill, where average rentals for studios dropped from $2,100 in September to $1,700 in February. Boerum Hill was an early and integral part of the trendy “new Brooklyn” in the 1970s and 1980s.

However, one-bedroom and two-bedroom prices were fairly static in that neighborhood.

Another are that experienced a sharp drop in prices was Fort Greene, where average rents for studios plunged from $2,341 in January to $1,831 in February. One-bedrooms there experienced a more mild drop, while two-bedrooms were basically the same.

Prices in the majority of Brooklyn neighborhoods covered by the report –Brooklyn Heights, Clinton Hill, Crown Heights, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Park Slope and Cobble Hill – experienced little change.

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