Brooklyn and Queens are still cheaper boroughs to live than Manhattan, but, according to a new report, both Ridgewood and East Williamsburg have inched their way onto a list of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City.
The new data comes from a report put out by a real estate data startup called Property Club earlier this year, which ranked neighborhoods in the city based on median sales price based on sales in 2020. Both Ridgewood and East Williamsburg made the cut of the list’s top fifty, with the neighborhoods paired for 44th and 45th spots on the list, respectively. Median sales in Ridgewood and East Williamsburg even brought the neighborhoods above familiarly expansive Manhattan locales, like Union Square and the East Village. (46th and 48th, respectively.)
Sales in Bushwick and nearby Crown Heights however, were not far behind. Though the neighborhoods managed to evade the list’s cut, Property Club told Bushwick Daily on Monday that median sales in Bushwick made the neighborhood only the 65th most expensive neighborhood in the city, with Crown Heights was just one notch above that ($910,000 and $920,000, respectively.)
Property Club’s methodology of counting sales skews the numbers upward just a bit–sales of entire buildings would probably land higher numbers then the price of condos but, since most people rent, the number’s values are primarily comparative. And the story they tell is obvious to most: it’s getting more expensive to live in Brooklyn. Only the deep Brooklyn enclaves of Brighton Beach and Coney Island made the company’s list of cheapest neighborhoods. Nineteen in Brooklyn made the top forty, including Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Fort Greene where median sales all notched above $1 million. (Only slighter more affordable than Fort Greene is Dumbo, at 24th on the list and whose skyrocketing sales have been certified as a cultural cliche by Jay-Z in “The Book Of O.J.”)
Nor are the real estate wonks at the Property Club the first such wonks to rank Ridgewood among the city’s high-price locales. Subway advertising mainstay StreetEasy listed Ridgewood as the only Queens neighborhood where median sales managed to top $1 million back in 2019. Another report from Property Club last year discovered that the price of the average home in Ridgewood went up 111% between 2020 and 2010.
It’s notable, also, that sales prices seem to remain on the rise even though rents are being kept somewhat in place by the pandemic. (A report from StreetEasy last June placed the median asking rent at $2,550, a slight 1.7% decline from the year before. Bushwick saw a similar 1.9% decline in asking rents.) The end of the pandemic may not mean the end of rent strikes.
Top photo credit: Andrew Karpan
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