The gentrification train keeps roaring its way up to Harlem and Morningside Heights, or should we say "SoCo."

Today Curbed posted two items that spell trouble or progress, depending on your point of view. W Hotel's parent company Starwood is building a branch of its new Aloft brand on Frederick Douglass Bpulevard and 124th Street. Aloft Harlem is slated to open in June 2010 next to an old carriage house that perhaps not coincidentally was long-rumored to be the site of a W hotel before it was recently converted to lofts.

And if the 125th Street rezoning, a luxury boutique hotel chain, and Columbia's expansion were not enough to seal upper Manhattan's fate, brokers have coined a pretentiously trendy name to attract young people to the nabe: "SoCo."  read more »

I decided to do a little recreational house-hunting on Sunday afternoon to see if the Manhattan housing market is really as resilient as it's cracked up to be.

My experience hunting for a rental apartment downtown in August had been thoroughly depressing—I did not see a single inhabitable apartment for under $3,000 a month and even then, the choice was between living in a shoebox or in a grungy, amenity-free condo. After reading all the 2007 year-end market reports released by the brokerage firms during the past few weeks, I braced myself for the house-hunting malaise familiar to most New Yorkers. But it never came.  read more »

The Real Estate Board of New York threw its annual awards gala for residential brokers on Thursday night. We weren't invited, and we don't why.

But Halstead Property sent us a release about how the brokerage cleaned up:

• Dean Feldman and Edith K. Meyer, West Side brokers, won the top Deal of the Year Award.
• Linda VanderWoude, a Brooklyn agent, finished second.
• Halstead President Diane Ramirez received the Henry Forster Award, which honors not only professional achivement, but ethical conduct and charitable efforts.

 read more »