New York City Real Estate | NYC, NYNew York City Real Estate | NYC, NYNew York City Real Estate | NYC, NYNew York City Real Estate | NYC, NY
  • ABOUT
    • ABOUT SCOTT
    • ABOUT THE TEAM
    • PRESS
  • BUYERS
  • SELLERS
  • VIDEOS
  • LISTINGS
  • JOIN OUR TEAM
  • BLOG
  • CONTACT
  • CALL SCOTT NOW

More Suburban Creep into NYC

    Home Newsletter More Suburban Creep into NYC
    NextPrevious

    More Suburban Creep into NYC

    By admin | Newsletter | Comments are Closed | September 23, 2014 | 0

    If a thief were to break into an apartment in a doorman building, what would he steal?
    The flat TV is bolted to the wall, and costs $1000 to purchase new.

    One can watch TV on a computer or phone, anyway.

    The CD’s and DVD’s are all either in the Cloud or on a hard drive, and Pandora is free, and Spotify is free online.

    YouTube is also free for music videos.

    Books are on a Kindle.

    Art can’t exactly hop off the wall and out of a doorman building.

    Perhaps jewelry, perhaps a laptop, purse, or pair of shoes?
    If that thief were to roam through a subdivision of single-family homes, would he find substantially more material?
    It seems

    that current pleasures are captured less in stuff than in experience, and it may follow that houses, with garages and attics and many rooms for accumulation,

    are less

    necessary to

    nesters than the vitality of their neighborhoods.
    Today’s apartment is less and less about things,

    with more emphasis on space and convenience.

    Increasingly, it is compatible with

    comfort, not limited by

    walls.

    Priorities seem to have shifted toward an appreciation of the negative (empty)

    space, light, views, openness – the experience of the space more than the practicality of it.

    Yes, people need bedrooms, a certain number of baths, but the loftiness of Downtown living has moved Uptown, creating real constraints on what can be achieved with the current housing stock.

    All of this fits in a hard drive now


    Let’s call it the Suburban Effect, as nothing is

    new,

    really,

    about an interest in gracious and spacious

    rooms

    – that focus simply hasn’t been as central to City living, in recent history.

    And the Suburban Effect is

    just as much about Baby Boomers moving into the City or back into the City as about

    the

    children of their generation,

    who have taken their experience growing up and moved it to New York City.

    Complemented by technology integrating every part of our lives and creating incredible convenience and efficiency, this suburban creep pushes into the City at a time when City living has never been better.
    As I think of it, this Effect can be seen and felt in a number of ways.

    First, there is a blurring line between the lives of the suburbs and the City, created by Baby Boomers moving back into the City full-time or part-time.

    Much of the experience of suburban living, and perhaps a little of the fantasy of it, has moved into NYC with these empty nesters snapping up City apartments and townhouses.

    The recent $47mm Downtown listing brokers (including my colleague) went so far as to agree that people want to “replicate suburban living in the city.”

    Meanwhile, Baby Boomer kids (Gen X, Baby Busters, etc.) also are working to recreate childhood homes without leaving the City,

    to varying degrees of size and success.

    We can see this desire in the layouts and finishes popular right now in new development.
    A statistic I am in some ways surprised to see: there is a net loss of 238,000 children in NYC, putting the City very low on the list of cities with kids.

    This sounds like something from another time – I mean, walk down the street anywhere in the City – and this statistic is saying that New York is a “kiddie desert”?
    The article from Bloomberg that cites this makes me question everything else I am hearing about the demand for public and private schools in the City, the waiting lists for public schools such as PS 199, where “zoned” children can’t get into their neighborhood school.

    Or private school – is the demand for spots artificial?

    It would not appear so.
    But, if I accept the number, then we’ll look at it as a second part of this Suburban Effect, the flip side, with both

    empty nesters and growing

    young families vying for a diminishing number of larger apartments.

    Two generations are competing, and the Baby Boomers often are winning, using these large apartments as slightly smaller

    replications of the homes that they owned outside of New York.

    Of course, we’re simplifying things a bit here.

    Some young families can’t rise to the prices of these apartments,

    and some just won’t pay for them.

    Some buyers, of course, must want a real backyard, a great public school system, a larger space, and the real conveniences of suburban living.
    Third, older cooperative housing stock is

    leaving much to be desired in this quest for “open space,” despite many apartments

    offering much to satisfy

    the needs of both groups.

    Are

    co-ops

    losing steam?

    From the looks of it, from statistics of what’s on the market, and given that 70% of the housing stock is still cooperatives, it would appear that co-ops will continue to provide the canvas for much City living, whether people like it or not.
    But in the desirability game, condos are winning: whether because the older layouts are no longer simpatico with the wants of today’s buyer, or the board rules are archaic, or the cost and headache of renovating older apartments outweighs the cost of more expensive new condominiums built to revised and updated sensibilities.
    We’ll use some examples of a couple of new developments that I saw recently, 252 East 57th Street and 210 West 77th Street, to illustrate:

    The Thanksgiving Kitchen at 210 w 77th street


    These apartments emphasize the experience of city living over the experience of the accumulation of stuff.

    These are homes for Thanksgiving, and cooking it, not watching the parade and the game on big screens. These are homes with double ovens, closets for suburban-sized Costco trips, and

    huge 100-bottle Miele wine refrigerators – stocked for entertaining and family dinners.

    They have combined living and dining rooms –

    Great Rooms, to be

    sure; lots of building staff for small unit count; parking spaces and/or a porte-a-cochere to make arrival and departure that much easier.
    Here are incredibly posh kitchens, as much trophy items as functional ones – directly lifted from the suburbs.

    Will they see as much action as the restaurants I see packed across the City every night?

    Color me skeptical.

    It’s all Upside –

    252 East 57th street


     
    Across the City, inventory year over year is still down about 3% (August 2014 – 4,440 vs. August 2013 – 4,538), despite new properties hitting the market.

    Some markets are slightly more active,

    such as

    the Upper West Side, where inventory is

    up nearly 5% (660 apartments in August 2014 vs. 605 in 2013),

    but I chalk these

    rises up

    to overpricing more than to anything else, and to very small sample sizes (it’s only 55 more apartments on the UWS,

    after all).
    Still, buyers are paying top prices

    and calling for the same changes, so their power is leveraged

    in

    insisting that every apartment satiate the urge for home. New development is modeling units in this image, and co-ops, which have the

    historic benefits of exclusivity and tradition, must also maintain their curb appeal – refreshed lobbies and halls,

    and such – while modernizing, with

    renovated kitchens

    and opened layouts, and options to combine and refresh.
    Is it possible that these suburbs-to-City buyers, both retirees and young families who would have nestled elsewhere, in another time,

    will push out the normal City folk?

    Let me know what you think!

    sharris@bhsusa.com, 646-504-5710

    No tags.

    NextPrevious

    Recent Blog Posts

    • (VIDEO) Celebrating 150 Years In Residential Real Estate- And my 20th Anniversary, too. January 31, 2023
    • How to Make An Extra $1mm on the Sale of Your Townhouse January 30, 2023
    • What’s Going To Happen To All The Office Space In NYC? January 30, 2023
    • NYC, Manhattan, and The US: A Reversion To The Mean January 30, 2023
    • The Best Lead Measure in The NYC Housing Market Right Now January 30, 2023
    • How To Think About Mortgage Rates Right Now January 30, 2023
    • Are You In, or Are You Out Of New York City? The End Of Ambivalence. December 22, 2022
    • Mortgage Math- How To Spend LESS on Your Mortgage Right Now – What No One Is Telling You December 22, 2022
    • Selling To An Insider Could Cost You $150,000 December 22, 2022
    • The Unintended Consequences Of Higher Loan Limits on “Conforming Loans” November 30, 2022

    Archives

    Call us: (646) 400-0769
    Email us: sharris@bhsusa.com
    Visit us: Brown Harris Stevens
    1926 Broadway
    New York NY 10023

    © 2023 The Harris Residential Team. All rights reserved.
    • About Scott Harris
    • About the Team
    • Press
    • Buyers
    • Sellers
    • Videos
    • Listings
    • Blog
    • Contact
    • Call Scott Now
    • Brown Harris Stevens Fair Housing Policy
    • ABOUT
      • ABOUT SCOTT
      • ABOUT THE TEAM
      • PRESS
    • BUYERS
    • SELLERS
    • VIDEOS
    • LISTINGS
    • JOIN OUR TEAM
    • BLOG
    • CONTACT
    • CALL SCOTT NOW
    New York City Real Estate | NYC, NY