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Back in heady days of 2007, real estate developers followed a simple algorithm: add the city's finite housing supply with the massive demand for housing and you could make money by building a condo on just about any property. Though the recession certainly changed that equation, seemingly out-of-place condo developments continue to pop up across the city as a result of that practice — and few seem more out of place than a luxury building in Gravesend at the corner of West 11th Street and Avenue V, just one block away from a housing project.
The blog Sheepshead Bites has a message for the builder:
I don’t care how good the market was back then, that’s just dumb. Those projects ain’t goin’ anywhere. It’s the Marlboro projects — been there since ‘58 and has almost 4,000 people living there. They not movin’. You really thought people would want to shell out $429,000 and up for your parquet floors, elegant kitchens, and ambient gunshots in the background? Get real, man.Yeah, at least you put indoor parking. But holy fuck, man, really?
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not to mention that in addition to living near the marlboro projects, you would also be living in gravesend?
Gravesend is not bad at all and has rather good transit. What it is not (yet) is hip nor trendy.
But the projects are the projects. Their like a heaping helping of the movie "Candyman" waiting to be explored.
The neighborhoods around the Marlboro houses, the Nostrand houses, or the Gowanus houses are nice, neat and quiet places. But the moment you approach the adjacent streets that face toward the projects, everything suddenly get's very ugly very fast. (Loitering outside bodegas, baby-mama dramas, chinese food places with bullet proof glass, et cetera.)
This developer and his backers really don't know the first shit about real estate.
I live in Gravesend ( for past 17 yrs) and it is definitely one of the better neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
There is a great bit of gentrification going on with all the sephardic/syrian jews expanding from their huge mansions by ocean parkway and all the old Italians and Irish residents moving out.
I dont know who is dumb enough to buy into the new development by the MP's but chances are it is probably going to be some fujianese people that are quickly building up their ranks in the surrounding neighborhood.
These developers knew EXACTLY what they were doing. Building near the project means the city will fund them continuously as long as they are serving the "community". Hard economic times simply gives them more incentive to do so.
This was all planned from the beginning. Bloomberg and the billionaire kosher mafia plays on the ignorance of the general populance to pull this grand heist on the middle class.
exactly - there was a story a few weeks ago about the city renting out luxuary condos in Crown Heights for the homeless - the rich dont lose - they control the game, they cant lose.
this is nothing compared to the HUGE building on 11th ave and 30th st, in Manhattan, which was built in a neighborhood w/ NOTHING around it. No stores, no services, no public transpo, and yet it is a huge building that they expect people to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to live in. What a joke.
Someone should point out that it's a block from L&B Spumoni Gardens... squares worth donning a flak jacket for.
This is nothing new by the way, there are tons of condos in East Harlem that are directly across the street from projects.
Here's a strange idea: How about if people who live in projects worry about their own lives rather than be pissed off at the people who can afford to live in a building down the block.
Come on. You know that will never happen. The very foundations of project life consist of playing the blame game and refusing to acknowledge a little something called personal responsibility. That being said, I don't think the person criticizing the development is a PJ dweller.
Some of the hottest buildings in New York City are built cheek by jowl with the projects. Look at at 8th and 9th Aves all the way from the teens into the 30's. It's starchitecture wrapped around a core of projects.
SkyView Parc in Flushing is across the street from a housing project. The developers are smart. They know that there are enough suckers out there willing to buy.