Manhattan apartment rents will likely exit the summer as high as—if not significantly higher than—they entered it. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, of course: Everything was going to change because of the flaccid local economy, wilting under the strain of Wall Street layoffs and inflated living costs. Deals would abound.

But the layoffs have been gradual: about 2,000 in the city’s financial services sector in the past year, according to the state’s Labor Department; and the number of private sector jobs increased annually just 0.6 percent. The city’s unemployment rate in June was up to a seasonally adjusted 5.  read more »

In May 2005, the City Council passed a rezoning of 175 blocks of Williamsburg and Greenpoint that The New York Times rightfully called “the last major hurdle to the city’s most ambitious redevelopment effort in decades.” The city designed the rezoning to foster residential development, with incentives to encourage developers to build moderately priced housing.

The land rush was on.

Over the three years since, the state approved thousands of new for-sale housing units for Williamsburg and Greenpoint, mostly market-rate condos. Developers would request permission to build 1,154 new units in 2007 in the two neighborhoods, accounting for more than 20 percent of all Brooklyn requests that year, according to The Real Deal magazine. In 2006, the percentage was similar. Over half of the developments with these new units fell within the rezoning.  read more »

Luxury apartment prices dropped in Manhattan in the second quarter of 2008, and sales were down in the first six months of the year compared to the two six-month periods immediately before. The end of an era in Manhattan luxury?

Not bloody likely. There are at least four apartments on the market in 15 Central Park West for $80 million or more, according to various sources and scuttlebutt, including one “quietly” asking $150 million (the city’s biggest listing ever), according to Douglas Elliman mega-broker Dolly Lenz. That’s just one example of the particularly heated luxury market that has seemed all these years, even during the hottest times of the hottest housing market, rather rarefied and detached.  read more »

A younger New Yorker could be forgiven for running up debt: Real wages for 20-something professionals in New York haven’t changed since the early 1970s. At the same time, the number of college grads competing for white-collar jobs has increased—as has the cost of everything from real estate to beer to MetroCards.

In 1970, the median annual wage for New Yorkers in their 20s was $35,385, according to a census sample analysis by Queens College sociologist Andrew Beveridge published in the Gotham Gazette. In 2005, that median wage, adjusted for inflation, had decreased to $32,597.

In 1970, 19.  read more »

The migration of Manhattanites into Brooklyn hit a decade-high point in 2006 that may not soon be duplicated, as the two boroughs’ real estate prices begin to mirror each other.

More than 3,700 Manhattanites moved to Brooklyn from 2005 to 2006, according to an Observer analysis of I.R.S. data from 2001 through 2006, the last year it was available. That’s the most this decade, and the most since 2001 to 2002, when nearly 3,500 Manhattanites resettled across the East River.

Manhattan was the only one of the boroughs to send more residents to Brooklyn than it took back annually.  read more »

The logic remains nearly sacrosanct: Wall Street layoffs equal falling apartment rents and sales prices across New York City.

Oh, really?

A laid-off Bear Stearns investment banker, one of at least 7,600 pink-slipped from the defunct firm in May, explained his financial outlook thusly: “We have nothing in terms of figures; the salary continues for approximately 8 to 12 weeks.”  read more »

New York apartment rents remain at or near records. This spring, many current city tenants are facing that Hobson’s choice of staying put or moving.

It’s cheaper for landlords and tenants if nobody moves.  read more »

The price of beer has risen at least 4 percent in the past year, according to reports, as the prices of two main ingredients, hops and barley, have increased. A six-pack of craft brew costs $1 more, generally, than it did last spring.

The chance of major hurricanes hitting the U.S. this year has jumped. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this month forecasted a 65 percent chance of an above-average hurricane season, which starts June 1, with as many as five major storms.  read more »

It’s on again: the spring hunt for Manhattan apartments, and, according to the numbers, this season should be as grim for new tenants as the last one. A new report shows average monthly rents in many Manhattan neighborhoods, including perennial favorites the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, virtually unchanged from the same period last year, despite the intervening economic worries.  read more »

The Long Island housing market is often held as a mirror to the Manhattan one. The reflection’s been presciently accurate as of late.

Home sales—from the playgrounds of the Hamptons through the bedroom communities of western Nassau County—dropped sharply in the first quarter of 2008 from the louder boom times of early 2007.  read more »