The Federal Reserve Board’s second district, which encompasses New York state and portions of Connecticut, is showing some strengthening in its economy according to the Fed’s Beige Book report released today. But while hiring activity appears to be picking up so far this year, the report says, the housing market in the district has weakened somewhat. “Housing markets appear to have softened in early 2010, after hints of a pickup in late 2009,” the report says. The commercial market was even worse, according to the Fed report, with Manhattan commercial rents down this February an average of around 20 percent from a year earlier. TRD

The new Spruce Street school

From the February issue: Newcomers are moving Downtown for a host of reasons, from deals on apartments to historic surroundings. And increasingly, another lure is good schools. They seem to be such a selling point that many of them are now seriously overcrowded. “They play a huge part in bringing people here,” said James Attard, an associate broker with the Tribeca-based Tabak Real Estate, who’s been selling homes there for six years. Top-ranked P.S. 234 on Greenwich Street, which many call a neighborhood jewel, appears to be significantly boosting property values, even when compared to P.S. 89 in Battery Park City, which is itself prized. Indeed, from 2006 to 2010, homes in the P.S. 234 zone were listed at prices about 30 percent higher than those near P.S. 89, according to StreetEasy, the real estate data company, though other factors may be at play. That may explain why even residents who don’t have children are upset over plans by the city to alleviate the overcrowding by reassigning kids from P.S. 234, which is jam-packed, to other District 2 schools through a large-scale rezoning. Adding two schools and carving up the neighborhood into new districts is meant to address crowding. Temporary rezoning was instituted last spring; a controversial rezoning was finalized in late January.

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