REAL ESTATE
Moving to the Bronx
By C. J. HUGHES MAY 27, 2016
The number of home sales in the Bronx soared in the first quarter of this year by 35
percent, far outpacing Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
In Staten Island, sales also jumped 35 percent, but activity there has been
inconsistent over the past several years, whereas the Bronx has experienced a steady
climb.
Although the number of transactions in the Bronx compared with the rest of the
city is still relatively small, the increase in deals may indicate that the borough is at
last living down its roughandtumble reputation. Brokers say the sales were not
only to buyers moving within the Bronx, but also to people who had been priced out
of Manhattan and other areas.
Peter Segalla, an associate broker with Houlihan Lawrence, last summer traded
one address in the Bronx, a riverfront condo in Riverdale, for another, a coop on
Pelham Parkway. Transplants from “elsewhere,” Mr. Segalla said, referring to
Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, are increasingly common, although getting
people from outside the borough to consider the Bronx is “a slow educational
process,” he said.
“Friends of the buyers tell them: ‘What? You’re moving to the Bronx? What are
you thinking?’ ”
“The Bronx is the new Brooklyn,” he added, “and anybody in the know is
certainly aware of that.”
Anca Vasiliu, an architect and former Manhattanite, said that when she and her
husband went apartmenthunting, they found that agents were “very skittish about
proposing the Bronx to buyers” from outside the borough.
But having moved in January to a twobedroom coop in an Art Deco building
on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, she said, “you feel like you have breathing room.”
Ms. Vasiliu, who had lived in the East Village for two decades, added that “there are
things that are still here that have been kind of lost in other parts of New York.”
Many of her neighbors have spent their whole lives in the area, which makes it feel
less transient than other parts of the city, she said.
Despite the overall residential stability, there certainly have been a lot more
properties changing hands.
In the first three months of this year, 989 marketrate coops, condos and
houses sold in the Bronx, up from 732 in the same period last year, for a 35 percent
increase, according to data prepared by the Real Estate Board of New York, a trade
association.
In Staten Island, which had 1,195 transactions, sales also jumped 35 percent in
the first quarter, but analysts at the real estate board say its data for the borough is
less reliable than for the other boroughs, and that activity there has been up and
down over the past several years.
Queens, which had the third strongest growth, posted a distant 6 percent
increase in sales volume.
Meanwhile, sales volume in Manhattan and Brooklyn declined slightly over the
same period, according to the board. In Manhattan, 3,053 sales took place in the
first quarter, down about 2 percent from 3,107 in the yearago quarter. And
Brooklyn had 2,806 sales in the first quarter, down from 2,911 a year ago, for a 4
percent dip.
While housing buzz has been focused recently on parts of the South Bronx,
including Mott Haven and Port Morris, the latest flurry of sales occurred largely in
other parts of the borough, including Parkchester, Woodlawn and Country Club,
according to the data.
Of course, the arrival of new residents is not good news for everyone, prompting
some longterm Bronx residents to fear they will soon be priced out of their
neighborhoods. But according to a housing report released this month from NYU
Furman Center, which studies real estate and urban policy, gentrification is not
widespread in the Bronx, affecting only pockets. But that report’s data cutoff is
2014, so it may not present an uptodate picture of the pace of change.
Of the 15 lowincome New York neighborhoods experiencing the sharpest
increases in rent from 1990 to 2014, the report said, two were in the Bronx: rents in
Mott Haven/Hunts Point climbed 28 percent, and in Morrisania/Belmont by 23.5
percent. The report attributed the spike to gentrification, specifically the arrival of
more young, white, collegeeducated residents.
Soughtafter Brooklyn had seven neighborhoods that made the list, with rents in
Williamsburg/Greenpoint soaring nearly 79 percent.
Some in the Bronx are anticipating change, and soon. “Maybe we aren’t
Williamsburg yet,” said Susanna Blankley, the director of Community Action for Safe
Apartments, a Bronxfocused tenant group. “The reality is, there’s nowhere left to
live in Brooklyn, even if you’re making $45,000 a year.”
Ms. Blankley, who is currently focused on a proposed city rezoning of Jerome
Avenue in the Bronx, which she worries is going to displace longtime residents,
acknowledges that gentrification is tough to stop. But, she said, it can be managed,
with affordable housing requirements.
“We want new jobs to come in. Of course, we also want quality housing,” she said.
“But it needs to be affordable to those who live here.”
Ms. Blankley’s group is affiliated with an affordable housing portfolio, the New
Settlement Apartments. She said the landlord, New Settlement, is regularly
approached by buyers hoping to snap up its 17 apartment buildings, which are in the
Mount Eden neighborhood of the west Bronx.
Most buyers in the Bronx purchased houses; the borough’s outlying areas often
resemble the suburbs they brush against. In total, 699 one to threefamily dwellings
traded in the first quarter, the real estate board said. And the submarket that had the
lion’s share, or 125, was the eastern Bronx, a waterfront area by Westchester County
including neighborhoods like Country Club, Throgs Neck and City Island.
Properties can have stuckintime prices, with 12 of 13 Bronx submarkets
averaging less than $500,000, according to the board. Plus, tax bills on those houses
can be a quarter of those in Westchester, said Teddy Montee, a salesman with DJK
Residential, who lives in the area.
“I never thought I would ever live in the Bronx,” said Mr. Montee, who was
renting on the West Side of Manhattan a couple of years ago and househunting in
Westchester County when City Island materialized on his car’s navigation system.
The island, with restaurants with names like the Lobster Box and mailboxes
shaped like lighthouses, wound up being a fortuitous detour.
Mr. Montee, 33, and Reagan John Rada, 35, also a real estate salesman, bought
a fourbedroom woodframe 1899 house on a treelined street. In December 2014, it
cost $545,000, Mr. Montee said, though this year, in a reflection of the market’s
robustness, it was appraised for around $650,000.
Overall, houses in this area, which includes the bikepathlined Pelham Bay
Park, sold for an average of $457,000 in the first quarter, significantly less than the
average Manhattan home, which sold for $911,000 in the same time frame.
Houses traded relatively briskly in other parts of the Bronx, too. In the
Woodlawn/Williamsbridge area in the north Bronx, 113 houses sold this winter,
while in Westchester Square and Soundview in the southeast Bronx, 105 did. Both
areas posted 30 percent gains in activity over 2015, according to the data.
Middleclass Bronx families in search of upgrades drove some of those sales,
brokers said. But investors hoping to make a quick profit from undervalued
properties after doing minimal renovations have also been active, said Allison Jaffe,
the brokerowner of Key Real Estate Services, who has sold homes in the Bronx for
the past 12 years. “The guys who are flipping are back in full force,” she said. These
investors, who are often buying in the Bronx because they have been priced out of
other boroughs, are a sign that the borough is recovering from the housing
downturn, she added.
With large tracts of public housing and affordable rentals throughout the
borough, the Bronx does not offer as many opportunities for marketrate home
buyers as other boroughs. In the Bronx, the 989 homes that changed hands in the
first three months of the year, for instance, were dwarfed by 3,784 sales in Queens.
In addition to singlefamily homes, the Bronx also has its share of coops, many
of them in Riverdale, the affluent enclave in the northwestern Bronx. In the first
quarter, 112 Riverdale coops sold, versus 74 in the first quarter of 2015, according to
the real estate board.
And with prices smashing records in the 212 area code, the motivation to move
to a place like Riverdale may never have been greater. The average coop price there
was $282,000, compared with a firstquarter average of $1.2 million for Manhattan,
according to the real estate board.
And in the Melrose/Morrisania area, in the South Bronx, 50 marketrate coops
sold in the first quarter compared with 16 in the same time frame last year. The
average price was $190,000, the data show.
Major investors are also arriving, scooping up apartment buildings. The Related
Companies, the developer that built the Time Warner Center and is now working on
Hudson Yards, recently added hundreds of apartments to a portfolio it owns in
partnership with the city’s pension funds. They plan to preserve the apartments as
affordable work force housing. And in March, York Equities and Harbor Group
International spent $140 million for 38 buildings with 935 mostly rentregulated
apartments.
The buildings, in areas including Belmont, Crotona Park East and
Williamsbridge, are to undergo upgrades to their stores and residential interiors,
said Matt Jones, the director of acquisitions for Harbor, a Virginia firm that had
never before made a residential investment in the Bronx.
While the South Bronx has been the subject of a great deal of attention, with
developers announcing major plans for Mott Haven, near Manhattan, buyers coming
across the Harlem River from points south are not necessarily sticking close to the
border.
Ms. Vasiliu, for instance, the buyer on Pelham Parkway from the East Village, is
several miles away in the central Bronx.
By 2014, the East Village “had reached a tipping point, where gentrification was
not fun anymore,” Ms. Vasiliu said. For starters, it was crowded. “We started going
to bad restaurants because we knew we could sit down,” she added.
In her new neighborhood, which is sometimes called Bronxwood, Ms. Vasiliu,
40, and her husband, Michael Behrman, 38, also an architect, found a place that
reminded them of the pregentrification New York, with perks including the parklike
New York Botanical Garden a short walk from their home.
In 2014, Ms. Vasiliu and Mr. Behrman bought a onebedroom for $169,000 in
their current building, which features terracotta detailing on its facade and animal
mosaics in the lobby, then upgraded to a twobedroom, which has a dining room and
more than 1,200 square feet, at the beginning of this year. It cost $235,000.
While coops, many in the Deco style, pop up for sale across the Bronx, condos
are rarer.
In Parkchester, 47 sold in the first quarter, up from 23 in the previous year,
according to the real estate board. The neighborhood is home to a brick condo and
rental complex also called Parkchester, with more than 12,000 apartments in 171
buildings. Developed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the complex,
which resembles Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan, another development by the
company, also contains gardens, stores and offices.
In the neighborhood, the average condo price in the first quarter was $145,000,
down a bit from the $151,000 average in 2015.
More condos are on their way, such as on City Island, where On the Sound, a
fiveacre waterfront complex from the developer Greystone, has sold 29 of its 43
units since February 2015, according to Sona Davidian, an owner of McClellan
Sotheby’s International Realty, which is handling sales.
The average sales price has been $355 a square foot, said Ms. Davidian, who
added that the units still available start at $698,000 for a threebedroom. Moveins
start this week.
Similarly, Tahoe Development, a Queens firm, is planning a sevenstory, 48
unit gray brick condo, with mostly onebedrooms, many having terraces, in Mott
Haven. Stores will wrap the base.
Groundbreaking for Tahoe Towers is expected in early June, said Anthony
Gurino, the firm’s president, with prices of $600 a square foot and up. Though the
offering plan has yet to be approved, onebedrooms are expected to start around
$339,000, he added, with twobedrooms from $599,000.
Currently, old factories and auto businesses line the area, but it may be only a
matter of time before they’re replaced. “The neighborhood is on the upswing,” Mr.
Gurino added. “It’s a nobrainer.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 29, 2016, on page RE1 of the New York edition with the
headline: North to the Bronx. |
