Brooklyn is officially the most unaffordable housing market in America
Brooklyn is officially the most unaffordable housing market in America
When you hear the word “Brooklyn,” you probably think “hipster.”
But you should really think “staggeringly unaffordable housing.”
As New York magazine and Bloomberg report, the borough has become the least-affordable housing market, relative to income, in the US.
In Brooklyn “a resident would need to devote 98 percent of the median income to afford the payment on a median-priced home of $615,000,” Bloomberg reports.
That’s higher than between 2005 and 2008, at the height of the housing bubble.
The data comes from RealtyTrac, the real-estate-information company. San Francisco and Manhattan are the second- and third-least affordable, respectively, according to that data.
Brooklyn’s wallet-destroying real-estate surge comes thanks to a few factors, but the biggest one is the saturation of Manhattan.
The world’s super rich have started to use Manhattan as the new Swiss Bank Account. Since 2008, a reported 30% of condo sales in large Manhattan developments have come from overseas. This is pushing the slightly less super-rich to Brooklyn.
And they are ready to buy.Shutterstock
Ninety-eight townhouses in Brooklyn sold for over $3 million in 2014, most of which were in the swanky neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, and Park Slope, where a historic brownstone went for a record-breaking $10.78 million.
Other trickle-down effects are more socially devastating.
“What’s a frustration for ¬middle-class buyers amounts to a desperate crisis for poor renters,”