Biggie Shoulda Been Buying Real Estate Instead Of Going To Industry Parties

Okay, I complain allllllllllll the time about this, but I really wish someone would explain to me how an area goes from being a neighborhood to becoming a fucking EVENT.

WAY back in 1995, I BEGGED my mom to buy something on my block and she LAUGHED at me. And I remember the time Biggie told me he had to move quick or he'd wind up getting killed on the street one night (because everybody knew where to find him and besides, he wanted to raise his daughter somewhere "safe, like Croton Falls," which i thought was an odd choice of towns for him to pick). And when Pratt students were "too shook" to walk two blocks over this way, drawing an invisible "Pratt student safety zone" boundary at Lafayette.

(and -while i'm waxing nostalgic- when there were literally 5 bomb-ass weed spots on a two-block span of Fulton Street. one of which, Pyramid, had one of those little 24-hour carousel take-out windows. and the Ave. was paved in gold. just kidding. but still...)

Now look at it. Biggie's block has condos on it. I don't even know the people who live in my 4-apartment brownstone (espeically the parade of Pratt students that've passed through the top floor over the past couple of years)- and they don't know each other either, so it's just not me being cranky. And the weed spots have been replaced by... nothing too spectacular, truth be told. "Into the Big Leagues?" I am so out.

And if (as they note at the end of this article) the median income in this area is a bit over 40grand, and the median price for a small-ass condo is half a million and it's over a million for buildings, who's buying property here now? And what does that bode for the neighborhood's celebrated "economic and cultural diversity?"

You know what I see when I walk around here now? Tons of not-exactly-fresh-outta-high school Pratt students (getting an MFA must be the same as getting an MBA was 20 years ago). Rich white dads with baby backpacks. People standing in front of the Clinton Washington stop asking for directions to Myrtle Avenue. Nannys wheeling children in expensive strollers. And lots and lots of Volvos. They're already swarming. I've gotta get out of here.


FROM THE NY TIMES REAL ESTATE DESK:
LIVING IN/Clinton Hill, Brooklyn; Into the Big Leagues, With Prices to Match
By SUZANNE HAMLIN

SANDWICHED between Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill in Brooklyn might just be the quintessence of urban living in New York City. It is affluent and not so, seedy and grand, ethnically diverse, a magnet for artists, musicians and filmmakers, and so rich in architectural style that even now, with escalating property prices, a new group of buyers is prowling its landmarked blocks in hopes of finding an overlooked gem.

''Like the rest of brownstone Brooklyn, we've had a huge surge of buyers this past year, particularly from Manhattan,'' said Merele Williams-Adkins, a broker with the Corcoran Group who lives in Clinton Hill with her husband, Terry Adkins, a sculptor and a professor in the graduate school of design at the University of Pennsylvania, and their two children.

One-time Manhattan residents, the Adkins moved to Clinton Hill in 1995 from the East Village, and bought a Classic Six co-op for $155,000. They sold it in 2001 for $577,000, and bought, for $610,000, a 4,000-square-foot brownstone on Grand Avenue, a property that is probably worth well over $1 million today.

However, based on Corcoran's just-released year-end report, ''well over a million'' might be a low-ball figure for a substantial property in this part of Brooklyn. According to the report, the rise in the combined prices for condos, co-ops and town houses, from 2003 to 2004, in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill averaged 35 percent. For town houses alone, the increase was 59 percent.

Once considered ''secondary neighborhoods,'' Fort Greene and Clinton Hill have traditionally been the fallback choice for buyers shut out by price in Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Park Slope (and, more recently, Carroll Gardens and Boerum Hill). And while they may be lumped together by brokers, the neighborhoods can no longer be considered the housing equivalent of a brand-name warehouse sale.


Roslyn Huebener, the co-owner of Aguayo & Huebener, a Brooklyn real estate firm, just closed on her ''retirement house,'' which cost $2.15 million and faces Fort Greene Park.

''But then in 1985, people thought I was crazy when I bought five houses in Clinton Hill for $225,000 each,'' she said.

Both neighborhoods can claim proximity to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Fort Greene Park, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and is midway through a restoration. But Clinton Hill is farther away from the commercial streets of downtown Brooklyn, making it, to many of its residents, the better choice. It is also farther removed from mass-transit hubs, although street parking, fiercely contested in Fort Greene, is somewhat easier in Clinton Hill.

Centered on the five square blocks of Pratt Institute, the venerable art and design school founded by Charles Pratt in 1887, Clinton Hill today seems very much like the thoughtfully planned community it was intended to be when it was conceived almost 170 years ago.

Originally a large parcel of land owned by the Dutch, Clinton Hill became a neighborhood in the 1800's, a rural retreat for some of New York's most prominent industrialists, who built their imposing mansions along Washington and Clinton Avenues. In 1875, Charles Pratt, an oil executive and philanthropist, built a mansion on Clinton Avenue, followed by one for each of his four sons as they married. Subsequent neighbors included the Bristols (of the Bristol-Myers company) and the Underwoods (of typewriter fame).

These grand properties, looking today much as they did then, rarely change hands, although one of the grandest, the 12,000-square-foot mansion built by the Pfizer family at 280 Washington Avenue, is expected to come onto the market in early February, priced at $3,595,000, according to Paula Hollins, the listing broker at Corcoran.

Row houses followed on the surrounding streets, built in an eccentric smorgasbord of styles, something for every fantasy and taste. Along with Victorian brownstones and limestones, there are block after block of Italianate town houses, imposing Romanesque properties, graceful antebellum frame houses and possibly the greatest collection of carriage houses in the city.

Apartment houses were built beginning in the early 1900's through the 1940's, many to house families connected to the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard. In 1954, Robert Moses razed a five-block area for urban renewal, and in the 1950's and 1960's, many one-family houses became rooming houses.

By 1979, when Naida McSherry bought a ''darling house on St. James Place for $43,000,'' Clinton Hill was considered well off the map.

''Almost every house was still full of original details but neglected,'' she said. ''Not because the owners didn't care, but because they didn't have the money to fix them up.''

Once a home furnishings designer who moved from Greenwich Village to Brooklyn seeking space, Ms. McSherry became so enamored of Clinton Hill that she became a real estate broker, retiring last year after 25 years in the business.

Ms. McSherry said the one thing she tried not to do as a broker was sell to investors.

''I wanted people who bought here to live here,'' she said, ''and to get involved in the neighborhood.''

Clinton Hill does not have a huge supply of housing on the market. Rentals, in two- and three-family houses, are filled almost immediately by Pratt students and faculty members.

In the last year, condos, co-ops and houses in the $900,000 to $1.5 million range have sold, often with full-price offers or above, within a couple of days of coming on the market.

In the early part of the 20th century, Italian-American families made up the largest part of Clinton Hill's population, which has expanded today into a polyglot community that includes Caribbean immigrants, blacks and Hispanics.

Hundreds of often vibrantly plumed Pratt students are also highly visible members of the community, as are artists, designers, architects, writers and photographers drawn by the physical beauty, quirkiness, rough edges and energy in the neighborhood, and the quality most residents cite as Clinton Hill's most precious -- its diversity.

There is no problem with where to hang out in Clinton Hill anymore. Both Fulton Street and the once-seedy Myrtle Avenue are filling up fast with take-out places, casual restaurants and shops. In the middle of it all is the Pratt Institute, which in the last decade under its president, Thomas F. Schutte, has notably increased its community involvement, always a hallmark of the school.

Clinton Hill's weak spot has always been its underperforming elementary and high schools, and many parents send their children to private, alternative or parochial schools.

St. Joseph's College, headquartered on Clinton Avenue, houses the Dillon Child Study Center, which has highly sought-after preschool and kindergarten programs. And Public School 11, because of increased involvement by parents, is coming on strong.

''It is thrilling to watch,'' Ms. McSherry said. ''It used to be that young people would move here, but then they would have children, and as soon as they were old enough for grade school, they'd pack up and leave.''

Local preservationists are keeping an eye on other changes.

''All we fear now is the developers,'' said Sharon Barnes, a resident of Clinton Hill since 1986. She is co-chairwoman of the Landmarks Preservation Committee of the Society for Clinton Hill, a community group that monitors major condo conversions and new high-rises, many of which, she says, seem to go up overnight, in spite of opposition.

Not all of Clinton Hill is landmarked. Some blocks, identified by their brown street signs, are protected from high-rise development, while others, not yet designated, are open to change. Besides changing the landscape, many in the community feel that real estate prices will drive out many less-affluent residents.

''Clinton Hill has been one of the few communities in New York City to maintain its level of racial and economic diversity,'' said Ron Schiffman, a professor at the graduate center for planning and the environment at Pratt. For 42 years an expert on community development, Professor Schiffman was instrumental, with Robert F. Kennedy, in forming the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, still considered a model for community development.

''Watchdogs are needed, though,'' he said. ''What is Clinton Hill's greatest strength, its diversity, may now be its most vulnerable aspect.''



POPULATION: 24,364
AREA: 0.56 Square Miles
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME: $40,735.99
MEDIAN PRICE OF A TOWN HOUSE: $1,060,000
MEDIAN PRICE A YEAR AGO: $668,000
MEDIAN PRICE OF A CO-OP: $310,000
MEDIAN PRICE A YEAR AGO: $229,000
MEDIAN PRICE OF A CONDOMINIUM: $502,000
MEDIAN PRICE A YEAR AGO: $431,000
DISTANCE TO MIDTOWN: Five miles
ZIP CODE: 11238