McCarren Park Pool’s impact on property values trumps Barclays Center’s

McCarren Park Pool and the Barclays Center
McCarren Park Pool and the Barclays Center

Brooklyn’s Barclays Center is rocking the surrounding neighborhoods with massive change, but the McCarren Park Pool renovation on the edge of Williamsburg and Greenpoint is Brooklyn’s most transformative project on area property values, Crain’s reported.

Both spots have experienced huge growth over the past two years, with the price of land and buildings doubling. But the McCarren Park Pool’s surrounding area has outrun Forest City Ratner’s Barclays in terms of land sales and multi-family sales. The only area in which Barclays did better, unsurprisingly, was retail.

Within a half-mile of McCarren Park, there were 14 land sale deals over the last two years, with an average price of $10.8 million, according to Eastern Consolidated data cited by Crain’s. Barclays’ surroundings fetched 10 deals, averaging $2.6 million.

The volume of multi-family property sales hit $95 million in both 2011 and 2012 in the area around McCarren Park, with an average price of $490 per square foot. The area around Barclays saw $85 million in multi-family property sales in 2011 and $41 million in 2012, at an average of $400 per square foot.

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While the area around McCarren Park lagged on the retail front at $600 a foot versus Barclays’ $650 a foot, retail space around the park was up from $400 a foot in 2011.

“Despite the bad press early on, I think the pool has really helped solidify the transformation of Williamsburg from a neighborhood that had been a big hipster hangout to a more family friendly place,” Barbara Byrne Denham, chief economist with Eastern Consolidated, told Crain’s. [Crain’s]Julie Strickland