When Jongmin Park and his wife Soye moved from Battery Park City to a condo at 90 William Street three years ago, the conversion of the Financial District into a 24-hour retail and residential neighborhood was just beginning.

When they first arrived, all the restaurants and stores closed on the weekends and the neighborhood turned into a “ghost town,” he said. Things have changed so much since then that Mr. Park’s biggest complaint about living there is no longer a lack of amenities, but the nearly constant din of construction.

“This place used to be geared towards billionaires,” Mr.  read more »

It's been over three years since the city passed a contextual rezoning of Bay Ridge to limit "out-of-character development" in the low-rise neighborhood, but tensions between nostalgic residents and developers who continue to squeeze three- and four-story apartment buildings into plots once occupied by single-family homes show no signs of abating.

The "Green Church" looks like it is slated for demolition despite the last ditch-effort of local activists; a seven-story apartment building will soon rise from the site of the Bay Ridge Funeral Parlor; and the board of the Bay Ridge Jewish Center is shopping for a buyer.

To Bay Ridge lifers like Steven Diahy, these developments and the squat, tightly packed generic brick buildings scattered among the rowhouses off Third and Fourth avenues signal the neighborhood's transition from a sleepy, suburban community into a mini-Manhattan, and, equally important, make finding a parking spot nearly impossible.  read more »

Enough already!

That's the clarion call of Amity Shlaes, economic historian with the Council on Foreign Relations and Brooklyn Heights resident, who argues, with the help of Nobel laureate and economist Edmund Phelps, that Americans need to stop obsessing about the "housing crisis" and focus on things more integral to our economic health -- like, oh, say, productivity?

"It used to be said that the business of America was business,'' Mr. Phelps told Ms. Shlaes, in her column for Bloomberg News. "Now the business of America is homeownership.''

Ms. Shlaes elaborates:

Like an apartment building, the Phelps argument works on multiple levels.

 read more »

I just signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea and my relief at having finally found an acceptable living space on Tuesday after I had all but given up has been somewhat tempered by the sheer absurdity of the whole rental experience.

I assembled my financial information on Wednesday morning and my application was approved that afternoon. The broker that I had spent all of one hour with was giving me serious guilt about dropping his fee from 15 to 12 percent, but I told him that I could not take the apartment otherwise and had worked with another broker, with access to the same apartment, who had volunteered to the same reduction.  read more »

With apartments fetching an average price of $7,500 per square foot, Fifth Avenue ranked third place in a new survey of the top 10 most expensive residential streets in the world from Barclay’s Wealth Bulletin. But if you thought top-tier residential prices in Manhattan were stratospheric, take a look at the two most expensive streets on the survey.

Avenue Princess Grace in Monaco ranked No. 1 in the survey with homes fetching an average of $17,750 a foot.

“Properties on the avenue change hands for up to $41 million – and many of them are fairly modest four-bedroom apartments,” the report said.  read more »

It's more or less an open secret, but we've learned that the Top Chef cast has definitely been living for about two weeks now in a terraced duplex penthouse in Williamsburg overlooking McCarren Park.

So far, the chefs have pretty much kept to themselves, said an extremely well-placed source, leaving around 8 or 9 in the mornings for a soundstage in Greenpoint and coming straight back in the evenings.

“They’re not allowed to talk to anyone, really, or even do their own thing,” the source said. They’re trying to keep things under control before the paparazzi start camping out.”

Luckily, it sounds like they have the typical luxe reality show digs, complete with a private roof deck and a sweeping view of the city skyline, to occupy them when they are not shopping, cooking or shooting.  read more »

The Plaza and 15 Central Park West better watch out, because a new ultra-luxe condo is coming to town and its developers are already claiming they will have the edge with an emergent, but increasingly lucrative, segment of the residential market: the Russians.

Earlier this week, Lev Leviev's Africa Israel Investments announced that it had contracted Versace to spearhead the interior redesign of the Clock Tower Building and convert the former MetLife headquarters at 5 Madison Avenue into a 55-unit condo.

Versace, of course, ranks high on the list of residential amenities, but we couldn’t help but feel a brief pang of déjà vu.  read more »

Funny lady Amy Sedaris appears to have an ambivalent relationship with New York City.

On the one hand, she seems to appreciate the little urban conveniences that you can't find anyplace else--for instance, last October, she told The Observer about her "good memories" of getting pot delivered to her house--but will just as quickly complain about the noise pollution from the West Village Halloween Parade.

Back in October, she complained to New York magazine “that the people who we moved [to the city] to get away from are coming here and changing it — and not for the best.  read more »

For the most part Manhattan remains a brutal market for renters this month, especially if you’re set on living below 23rd Street. But economic uncertainty has brought bargains (in the New York sense of the word) to some neighborhoods in the middle of a season when rents usually peak, according to the June rental report (PDF) released today by The Real Estate Group New York.

The good news is you can still find a market-rate apartment for less than $2,000 a month on the island of Manhattan, if you’re willing to live without a doorman in the borough's sleepier neighborhoods.

Average June rents for non-doorman studios were below $2,000 on the Upper East Side ($1,831), the Upper West Side ($1,968), Harlem ($1,287), and Midtown West ($1,984).  read more »

In an interview with New York magazine today, Rockstar Games mogul Dan Houser talks about his inspirations for the godly New York video game Grand Theft Auto IV: "You've got the angry sleeping-pill-popping sort of Sex and the City type woman, you know, whose looks are just beginning to fade ... The people in Soho are expensively dressed and into shopping and vacuous in their own way."  read more »