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Jewish World Review March 3, 2005 / 22 Adar I, 5765 For a measly $1 million, you could live rent free By Lenore Skenazy
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
You know your real estate situation is getting desperate when you're at the kid flick "Because of Winn Dixie" and you find yourself staring longingly at the home the little girl shares with her mutt.
It's a trailer.
"Looks pretty good, doesn't it?" I nudged my friend Marla who, like me, is in the hideous predicament known as "renting."
She nodded. Oh, to own a little piece of something — anything! Who cares about indoor plumbing? — as New York's real estate market zooms from the stratosphere into the gazillosphere.
As the Daily News reported last week, apartments in once-modest Manhattan neighborhoods like Washington Heights have soared 333% in the last 10 years. In '95, the average price of an uptown apartment was $82,693. Now it's $358,657.
In the outer boroughs, it's just as harsh. My friend Sabrina went to see a fabulous "duplex" near Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery last week. She arrived to find a single bedroom with steps leading down to a basement nook. All for the bargain price of $380,000, take it or leave it.
Wisely, she left it. But who knows? Next year it could be listed as a "charming floor-thru" and go for twice as much. Very few people seem to be predicting a screeching slowdown in local housing prices.
That's too bad because in below-Harlem Manhattan the prices are already so nutty-in-extremis they make sense only in Monopoly money. The average apartment there is now $1 million — and we're not talking dream homes with solid gold spigots. We're not even talking about two-bedrooms!
"There are very few [quality two-bedrooms] out there under $1 million," says Martha Friedricks-Glass, senior vice president at the Corcoran Group.
So my question is: WHO IS BUYING THESE APARTMENTS? WHO IS BUYING THESE APARTMENTS? WHO IS BUYING—
Er, please excuse my obsessive behavior. WHO IS BUYING THESE —
Sorry. It's just hard to think about anything else when you're a renter. So finally I asked the experts: WHO IS BUYING ... oh, you get the picture.
According to Friedricks-Glass: It's kids whose parents can afford to give them a down payment of at least $200,000.
It's also Wall Street honchos, their lawyers and ad execs enjoying an upswing in the economy, says Matt Martin of Economy.com.
And the reason anyone is willing to pay so much for so little, adds Alex Schwartz, chairman of urban policy at the New School's Milano Graduate School, is that, "The amount of desirable land is limited, and you have a lot of demand." So if you want to own a piece of the rock, with a smaller piece of the rock off the living room where you can actually fit a table, you've got to pay.
Or move, of course, even though you've made it your home.
Or just keep bringing up the topic like something's going to change. I sure hope that technique works.
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