Like the variegated patchwork of historic brownstones and low-cost apartment buildings on which it relies, Bedford-Stuyvesant’s housing market is showing signs of both strength and vulnerability.
A high sales volume and rising prices have made the neighborhood a stronghold in northern Brooklyn’s real estate market, while foreclosure rates well above New York City and Brooklyn averages continue to limit progress.
“Bed-Stuy is an anomaly,” said Michael Corley, executive vice president of Corley Realty Group, a brokerage agency that focuses on real estate in northern Brooklyn. “It has become the neighborhood where we get the lion’s share of business, both from regular and distressed sales.”
That reputation of exceptionality is in large part due to volume of sales. According to data from the Department of Finance available on StreetEasy.com, 178 sales were recorded in Bed-Stuy within 60 days of Nov. 3. In that same period, the contiguous neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Clinton Hill and Prospect Heights recorded a combined 179 sales.
In the north-central area of Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy was second only to Williamsburg, which, despite its reputation as one of the hottest and most rapidly gentrifying spots in the borough, recorded just two more sales.
According to Corley, Bed-Stuy’s success is a product of its innate physical and historical attractiveness.
“A lot of that [success] has to do with the fact that no other neighborhood in New York City can match its concentration of historic brownstones,” he said. “New housing doesn’t have the craftsmanship and intrinsic value of the brownstone. So it is the actual construction–the physical character–of Bed-Stuy that is driving it as an anomaly.”
The typical brownstone townhouse—slim and tall, its facade adorned with embellishments in bas-relief, its front door raised majestically above the city streets—has long been desired by potential home-buyers. But Bedford-Stuyvesant’s reputation as a high-crime neighborhood negated much of that attraction through the ’80s and ’90s.
There is still crime, but it is down. The neighborhood’s 79th and 81st precincts reported a combined 29 murders in 2010, compared with 120 in 1990, according to NYPD crime statistics. Rape, robbery, assault and burglary have all fallen.
“Do or Die Bed-Stuy, that was always the reputation,” said Lance Freeman, an associate professor in Columbia University’s urban planning program. “But as crime has declined across the city, the focus has shifted from the reputation to the reality of Bed-Stuy’s housing stock.”
Despite the continuing safety concerns, the veil of pervasive danger has been lifted to reveal a residential neighborhood whose most desirable blocks are lined with trees and picturesque row houses. In Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s 2011 Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest, an annual appraisal of “streetscape gardening, tree stewardship, and community development in the borough of Brooklyn,” according to competition’s website, Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Bainbridge Homeowners and Tenants Association was a second-place winner in both the residential category and the “Best Street Tree Beds” category. The neighborhood received more combined wins and honorable mentions than any other in the borough.
And so Bed-Stuy is a community teetering on the cusp of gentrification—a place where housing stock and cost meet at a rare middle ground. As Corley puts it, “people can find brownstones in Harlem, but they don’t want to pay a million dollars.”
Which brings up the matter of prices.
The immediate outlook is positive. The median sales price for homes in Bedford-Stuyvesant from July to September 2011 was $400,000, a 6.7 percent increase compared with the previous quarter, according to Trulia.com. Median sales prices in Brooklyn as a whole increased only 2.9 percent over the same period.
But the recent upswing comes within the context of a larger and grimmer narrative. The deleterious effects of the housing market’s collapse, and the Great Recession it helped to spawn, still weigh heavily on Bed-Stuy’s real estate market. Sale prices have decreased 31 percent over the past five years.
Tethered to the neighborhood’s price index—and dragging it down like a pair of cement shoes—are frequent and ubiquitous home foreclosures.
According to Realtytrac.com, which collects nationwide foreclosure data, one in every 2,339 housing units in Brooklyn received a foreclosure filing in September 2011—the second-highest proportion in the city behind Staten Island.
And Bedford-Stuyvesant owns a substantial chunk of the foreclosure market. Four hundred and eighty foreclosed homes were listed for sale in the neighborhood as of Nov. 3. Brooklyn’s 11221 ZIP code, which includes the central-eastern portion of Bed-Stuy, saw one in every 947 housing units receive a foreclosure filing in September 2011—the third-highest proportion in the borough.
“About a third of the available industry [in Bedford-Stuyvesant] has been distressed sales, focused on foreclosures,” Corley said.
That, according to Freeman, is reason to temper if not stifle optimism.
“If sales are up and prices are rising some, that’s good. But if foreclosures are keeping prices down from what they could be, to call it a positive situation would probably be too simplistic,” he said. “It’s complicated.”
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