#The charming, tree-lined cobblestone streets of the West Village are known for their low-rise properties and sky-high prices. Neither figures are changing any time soon.
While brokers report that sales prices for most West Village units have leveled out as prices have in the rest of the city, developers are fighting over remaining building sites following a downzoning of the area last year. The change in zoning laws allow for small-scale development, but builders and marketers will take anything they can get in the neighborhood.
While new condo development moves forward, West Village rentals are also hot, with prices moving up faster than sales and rising at least 30 percent in the last year, according to some accounts (see sidebar below).
Jon Capobianco, a broker with the Corcoran Group, said that the area’s inherent charms and relatively recent introduction of luxury retail mean the little real estate haven located south of 14th Street, west of Seventh Avenue and north of Houston Street will keep its buzz for a while.
“The West Village is very hot because the listing inventory is so tight,” Capobianco said. “It’s quaint and it seems more gentrified with better shops and better restaurants — and it is not as crowded as the central Village. Once your street is anchored with triple-A tenants like Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren [as they are on Bleecker Street], it only goes up from there.”
Jorden Tepper, managing director of Manhattan Lofts, said that sales and rental clients take what they can get in the West Village’s cut-up townhouses and prewar units.
“You see a lot of pricier small apartments,” Tepper said. “People are still willing to sacrifice space for uniqueness and the quaint aspect of the neighborhood.”
Even while the overall market is moderating, prices for luxury and notable properties — especially those on high floors with protected views — are still strong, brokers say.
Units in the waterfront Richard Meier-designed towers on Perry Street are commanding $3,000 per square foot. For less celebrity-driven properties, West Village sales prices range from $1,700 to $2,000 per square foot, brokers say. This compares to $1,200 to 1,400 per square foot in the central Village.
A rezoning of the West Village approved last year by the City Council bars high-rise residential towers in a 14-block area bounded by Horatio Street to the north, Washington Street to the east, Morton Street to the south, and West Street on the west. Two grandfathered-in exceptions remain — at 150 Charles Street and at Bethune and West streets, where the Witkoff Group and the Related Companies are building residential high-rises, respectively.
Fierce community opposition — spearheaded by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation — makes even conversions difficult. An expected deal to convert a warehouse at 775 Washington Street and add a modest 80 feet on top was met with a battle cry from the society, according to New York magazine, with the society’s executive director Andrew Berman pointing out, “We’re willing to fight for this site. Warehouses are an essential part of what makes New York New York.” If developers were to get approval from the Landmarks Commission, they could knock down the existing building and build from the ground up, though, the magazine reported.
Still, other major projects are going forward or are proposed (see chart and map).
Of course, all this would have been unimaginable until recently, Capobianco said. Bleecker Street came into its own only a few years ago — about the time Carrie Bradshaw extolled Magnolia Bakery’s wonders on “Sex in the City.” (On the show, the brownstone in which Bradshaw, played by actress Sarah Jessica Parker, lived was on Perry Street.)
And prices of $3,000 a square foot off the West Side Highway would have been even harder to fathom. “Ten years ago, Jane Street was filled with prostitutes over by the river,” Capobianco said.
It’s not Tribeca pricey, but rents rising steadily in West Village
When it comes to rentals, Marcy Bloomstein, senior vice president at brokerage DJK Residential, said that the West Village rental market is incredibly strong, with studios and one-bedrooms in short supply.
Amid a tightening rental market throughout Manhattan, a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village now commands rents of $4,000 to $5,000. A year or two ago they went in the $3,000 to $3,500 range, she said.
A monthly report by Citi Habitats, though, arrived at more moderate results. It found the average rental price in the West Village in March at $2,898.
That figure was less than the average rent for apartments in Tribeca and Soho — $3,650 a month — though Tribeca’s typically larger loft apartments might account for some of the difference. The West Village was still much higher than the overall average Manhattan apartment rent in March of $2,250 a month, down slightly from $2,300 in February, Citi Habitats reported.
Jorden Tepper, managing director of Manhattan Lofts, said he is preparing for a strong rental market this summer, in the West Village and elsewhere. “Rentals are heating up now,” he said. “We’re preparing for a very, very hot summer.”
Go to map and chart: Despite rezoning, new West Village projects sprout