As pioneering New Yorkers venture further out on subway lines seeking affordable accommodations, they are discovering neighborhoods like Brooklyn s South Park Slope, which is experiencing a small development boom.
While little land is available for development in Park Slope proper, South Slope, an area whose boundaries who are fluid, but are generally seen to stretch from 9th Street to Greenwood Cemetery and Fourth Avenue to Prospect Park, is rich with vacant lots and plenty of potential for developers. Some landowners between 9th and 15th streets may have benefited from an April 2003 rezoning that makes building smaller apartment projects easier.
“There s a lot of wonderful things going on in the South Slope right now,” said Eric Brody of the Corcoran Group s Development Division, who lives in the neighborhood. “Quite a few projects are currently on the market or will be coming to market shortly.”
Along 15th Street, 16th Street, 21st Street and 22nd Street new small apartment buildings, projects under construction or vacant lots with building permits slapped on their plywood fences pepper both sides of the thoroughfares.
The increase in development is a natural progression in a neighborhood that has remained a stable enclave of middle-income families, many of them Eastern European immigrants living in ranks of frame and brick rowhouses and the odd Victorian brownstone, even while other Brooklyn neighborhoods became slums in the 1960s and 1970s.
Susan Franks, who moved to New York a year and a half ago from Seattle, said she didn t even bother to look in Manhattan, but sought out South Park Slope right away.
“I had a friend of a friend who lived here and said it was really nice and kind of quiet and safe and just a good neighborhood to live in,” said Franks, who pays $1,100 a month for a studio apartment that might cost her $1,800 in Manhattan. “I have a dog, and I wanted a bit more space for my money.”
Value for money is exactly what s driving people to South Park Slope, said Billy Stephen, senior vice president in the Brooklyn office of the Corcoran Group and a Park Slope resident.
“In Center Slope, the minimum you re going to pay is over $500 per square foot,” he said. “So here we re getting a product that s about $460 per square foot to as low as $375 per square foot for larger apartments.”
Those figures reflect the past year s preconstruction sales in a pair of eight-unit buildings on 21st Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. Two-bedroom, 650-square-foot apartments with high-end kitchen finishes in stainless steel, granite and maple, with marble baths and terraces sold for $299,000, while 1,000-plus square-foot garden duplexes went for $374,000. Two more eight-unit buildings in the complex will come to market this spring with construction finishing by the fall, Stephen said.
While those who bought in the first two buildings were single professionals, young couples and students, after the buildings sold out people seeking to purchase the apartments for investment began contacting Stephen, and prices are likely to climb, he said.
Patrick Brennan, a broker with Aguayo & Huebener, said a restored Victorian frame house at Webster Place between 17th Street and Prospect Avenue recently sold for $1.1 million, which may be a record for South Slope.
While North and Center Slopes have been populated for years by young professionals working in Manhattan, South Slope is seeing that element arrive en masse. With easy access to the F train, it s possible to commute, though Franks said the trek to her Manhattan job takes an hour.
Other neighborhood attractions include a lower population density, more available parking, and retail shops and restaurants along both Seventh and more recently Fifth Avenue, now a lower budget cousin of Brooklyn s trendy restaurant row on Smith Street. Gyms are opening, especially along 15th Street, and shopping in the area is done at Eagle Provisions, a large European-style supermarket that has served the neighborhood since Park Slope South s days as a hub of Polish immigration.
A disused National Guard armory along 14th and 15th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues is slated to become a community recreation center, though Stephen said the project has been discussed since the 1970s. Aguayo & Huebener are now marketing Park Pavilion, a five-story 30-unit condominium complex on 15th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Three other lots on the block have apartments under construction or planned, Brody said. Further down on 15th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the Corcoran Group will start selling a 24-unit complex shortly.
Franks said she plans to stay in the neighborhood. Others who ve made the switch from renter to buyer in the area are pleased they did. Paul Tainsh bought his three-story frame house on 16th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues 18 years ago for $250,000. He has no intention of selling, but fears that rapid development is changing the South Slope character especially with reports of a 22-story tower going in at 200 16th Street, which was actually due to a misprint on a building permit, according to Sam Lowinger of C & H Development, the contractor for the more modest five-story building.
Tainsh said he worries that about the quality of new construction, and fears that public services needed for a larger population may lag behind the construction boom.
“I wonder what the impact will be if the condominium market goes flat,” he said. “While the development may have a positive impact on house prices, it could also have a dampening impact on rents. If there are just not that many people who want to spend $500,000 on a studio or a one-bedroom apartment, people will be forced to rent them out. That will put a lot of new apartments on the market.”
Roslyn Huebener of Aguayo & Huebener said even with rapid development, much of the neighborhood won t change.
“It can t change overnight,” she said. “The development just stabilizes the values. It s not going to displace people who are here, because they own their homes already. It brings more young people into the mix younger, hipper families, who would ordinarily seek prime Park Slope, but can t afford it.”
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