THE real estate markets of the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island are suffering from the housing downturn that has afflicted much of the country, and yet they still have some pockets of strength.
Due Diligence
- PropertyShark.com
- ResidentialNYC.com
- StreetEasy.com
DOING HER HOMEWORK IN BROOKLYN Ailene Quinlan rented in Clinton Hill to be sure she liked it before she bought a one-bedroom apartment under construction.
In parts of Brooklyn, buyers are still paying top dollar for coveted brownstones, and in some neighborhoods in Queens, the market is buoyed by immigrant buyers who won’t let a housing slowdown blindside their dreams of homeownership. And yet in the Bronx, foreclosures are rising in poorer neighborhoods. In Staten Island, prices are flat and foreclosures are up. At the top and bottom of the market, houses are still selling.
The markets in these four boroughs are more varied than those in Manhattan and the suburbs. Manhattan co-ops and condominiums are still getting record prices; the average sales price in the first quarter reached a record $1.7 million, although activity seems to be slowing. Suburban home prices are declining.
Figures released by Standard & Poor’s/Case-Schiller showed that prices for single-family homes in the New York City area dropped by 5.8 percent from January 2007 to January 2008.
At first glance, much of the market in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island looks as sluggish as in the suburbs, according to data from several sources. PropertyShark.com says that the median sales price fell by 27 percent in Queens from February 2007 to February 2008, by 6 percent on Staten Island and Brooklyn, and by 2 percent in the Bronx.
There are serious signs of a slowdown. Fewer people are buying: sales volume in Queens dropped by 25 percent from February 2007 to February 2008, 31 percent in Brooklyn, 36 percent on Staten Island and 50 percent in the Bronx.
Then there are foreclosures. In the four boroughs, 895 homes were lost to foreclosure in the first quarter of this year, compared with 529 in the first quarter of 2007.
But based on interviews with more than two dozen real estate brokers, the weaker sales figures don’t tell the entire story, because prices vary by neighborhood and within neighborhoods.
Part of the question is: How do you define a slowdown? Some Staten Island brokers see a rising number of foreclosures, while their counterparts in Brooklyn see fewer bidding wars on co-ops in Fort Greene. In both cases, this represents a changing, and slower, market, but it also represents very different realities.
The brokers all agreed that real estate prices and sales volume aren’t what they used to be. “It’s taking longer to sell anything,” said Bill Shepherd, a 15-year broker with Brown Harris Stevens who hasn’t closed on a house in Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn since October. “What might have taken a month to three months, it can take three to six months.”
Brooklyn
In Brooklyn, prices have been holding relatively steady and there has been only a small rise in foreclosures. The median price for a home sold in Brooklyn fell to $392,313 in February 2008 from $418,700 in February 2007, according to PropertyShark.com. These numbers reflect the high prices being paid for brownstones in neighborhoods like Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights. In other areas, like East New York, homeowners are facing foreclosure. In fact, foreclosures in Brooklyn rose to 140 in the first quarter this year, compared with 129 in the same period a year earlier.
Brokers find themselves trying to keep up with an increasingly confusing market. In February, Marty Ellman, a broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman, closed on her first short sale, a $785,000 home in Prospect Heights. (A short sale occurs when the sales price is less than the amount owed on the mortgage.)
But in March, she mediated a bidding war among 15 buyers for a two-bedroom apartment in Fort Greene that got $50,000 more than the asking price. At this point, she sees more bidding wars than short sales. “Properties are flying off the shelf,” she said.
For the right price, buyers are also still buying in less affluent neighborhoods like East Williamsburg and Clinton Hill, said Highlyann Krasnow, executive vice president of the Developers Group, a real estate marketing company. Her company sold 20 of the 24 one-bedroom condos at 223 Maujer Street in East Williamsburg at prices that began at about $360,000. She said that before the housing slowdown, prices would have been $40,000 to $50,000 higher.
“Most of our buyers are still coming from Manhattan,” she said.
But these buyers are doing more homework, and they want good deals.
They could learn from the experience of a broker who did a lot of research before buying her own place in Brooklyn.
In January, Ailene Quinlan, a 34-year-old broker with the Developers Group, signed a contract on a one-bedroom condo at 111 Steuben Street in Clinton Hill.
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NEW YORK'It's hard to believe the 27-year-old sitting in the Borders Bookstore coffee shop, looking like the students beside him cramming for exams, is the same person whose childhood is chronicled in a book a few shelves away.
Ishmael Beah is humble, articulate, with a smile that captures half his face when he flashes it. If publicists were to create the perfect spokesperson to discuss the plight of child soldiers and road to recovery, they could do no better than the real-life Beah.
In his book, A Long Way Gone, Beah reveals his teenage self as a ruthless child soldier, co-opted by the government. "The idea of death didn't cross my mind at all and killing had become as easy as drinking water," Beah wrote in his 2007 bestseller. "My mind had not only snapped during the first killing, it has also stopped making remorseful records, or so it seemed."
In early 1993, Beah was separated from his family during the Sierra Leone civil war. When he discovered his two brothers and parents had been killed by the rebel army, he became a teenage soldier for the government, killing rebels and civilians alike.
Now Beah is a UNICEF ambassador, the world's most famous former child soldier. He has spent the last year travelling, talking about his plight and recovery.
In February, when UNICEF protested the trial of Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was 15 years old at the time of his capture, Beah started looking into Khadr's case. Beah struggles to understand why he has been embraced despite the crimes he committed , while Khadr is being prosecuted by the U.S. with Canada's support.
"I think one of the problems with this case is the reason people don't have compassion for Omar Khadr, but have compassion for people like me. (It) has to do with how removed it is from people's lives. It's easy for people here to say, `Oh we forgive child soldiers,' because it's not affecting them directly," he said in a recent interview.
"But you can't say that one person's life is more valuable. So, if a 15-year-old kid in Sierra Leone, in Congo, in Uganda, in Liberia, if they kill somebody and shoot somebody in the war it's fine, but as soon as that kid kills an American soldier or ... they are no longer a child soldier, they are a terrorist."
The Pentagon has said Khadr's age is not a factor in his prosecution for war crimes since the Military Commissions Act does not specify a minimum age for trial. Prosecutors allege Khadr had the maturity and wisdom to know what he was doing.
But Khadr's lawyers argue that because he was raised by a father, an Al Qaeda follower and ideologue, Khadr was too young to be held responsible for his actions. They have filed a motion arguing that his charges should be dismissed because international law protects minors captured in armed conflicts. If Khadr's trial goes forward this year it will be the first time since WWII that a minor has been prosecuted for war crimes.
Khadr's age was hotly debated in Ottawa this week. In an exchange Monday in the Senate , Senator Rom??o Dallaire pressed Conservative Senator Marjory LeBreton to justify government support for Khadr's U.S. military trial.
"Will the Prime Minister come forward and say something credible and tangible about a Canadian child rotting in an illegal American jail?" Dallaire asked.
"I think the characterization of this young man rotting in Guantanamo Bay is a little over the top," LeBreton said. "Canadian officials have visited him on several occasions. There is no evidence he is being mistreated in any way, shape or form. A legal process is underway. For the moment, we must allow that legal process to make its way through the courts."
Dallaire continued: "We are talking about a 15-year-old who was shot twice, indoctrinated into war by a parent who has another perspective on life and has now wasted six years of his life in a jail, with oppressive conditions that are at the limit of what the Red Cross has accepted as tolerable. That may not be `rotting,' but that is pretty close to totally destroying the life of this individual. Perhaps some individuals do not count as much as others because they have done something we consider worse than others have done in the context of international law, such as child soldiers. Mr. Khadr shot an American. That is worse than if he had shot 15 Somalis, Sudanese or Darfurians."
Khadr has spent almost six years in Guantanamo Bay. He is on trial before a military commission for five war crimes, including the alleged murder of Delta Force soldier Christopher Speer in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. Khadr will appear next week in Guantanamo for a pre-trial hearing.
While Canada continues to support Guantanamo, serious questions are now being raised about the prison's future. Both U.S. Democratic presidential candidates say they will close Guantanamo if elected this fall and Republican John McCain recently agreed.
Which means it is possible that at some point soon, Khadr could return to Canada.
Ottawa security consultant Thomas Quiggin has already sent advice to Khadr's military defence lawyers about possible rehabilitation programs.
"Omar Khadr is of an age where a well-structured religious rehabilitation program may be effective," Quiggin wrote in his report.
Both Singapore and Saudi Arabia have successful rehabilitation programs that combine intense religious and psychiatric counselling and Quiggin argues Canada should develop something similar.
Manuel Fontaine, the head of UNICEF's Children and Armed Conflict section, said he, too, has spoken with Khadr's military lawyers about his organization's programs for reintegrating child soldiers.
"One of the important aspects of reintegration is having role models. Given the fact that he has been under isolation for so long, it's probably going to be important for him to have someone to coach him," Fontaine said.
"He needs to be in an environment that is non-partisan in certain ways, get him a job and be part of something else, rather than go back to the family which might use him and continue push him in the wrong direction."
Beah agrees that if Khadr were to be released he could not be put back into society immediately.
"I would never recommend a child soldier to come and just be thrown into normal society. It's not going to work," he said as he reflected on his years in rehabilitation.
"When I came from the war, I still didn't think what I had done was wrong. I thought what I had been a part of was absolutely the right thing, that we were part of the right group, we did the right work, we were proud of it. Obviously anyone who comes from (war) still has that mindset It requires a lot of time to undo that mindset but you have to be given the space to do that."