Actress and Montana native Michelle Williams has been ahead of the New York real estate curve over the years. But her latest triumph in Ditmas Park takes the cake.
According to our new friends at the fabulously hyper-local Ditmas Park Corner blog, who confirmed this big real estate tidbit, Williams and her daughter, Matilda, will be moving into Ditmas Park, one of NYC’s fastest-selling neighborhoods. Williams, 34, is looking forward to a suburban-like city neighborhood with great access to an express subway line.
What did Williams buy? It’s a 1910 Colonial Revival at 1440 Albemarle Road with 8 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms built for a lumber dealer. The 6,500-square-foot home was designed by architects Robert Bryson and Carroll Pratt, whose influence is seen all over Prospect Park South. Williams’ new home has a two-story front porch with fluted Ionic columns, affectionately known by neighbors as the “Gone With The Wind” house, or the “Tara of Prospect Park South.’’
“Tara” is in need of an overhaul. However, for the $2.45 million purchase price, Williams should have plenty of equity left over from the $8.8 million townhouse she sold in Boerum Hill, which was about $1.3 million over the $7.5 million list price for the home she had shared with Heath Ledger. Plus, Williams was highly motivated to relocate to Ditmas Park, in part because of her friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Ditmas Park resident David Lindsay-Abaire.
According to The Ditmas Corner, this Prospect Park South section of Brooklyn is a real neighborhood that’s beginning to grapple in earnest with being the hot new housing market. And according to the New York Post, news of Williams’ move to Ditmas Park has created a swell of interest from other prospective buyers.
Here’s the lowdown from Ditmas Park Corner blog editor Anna Gustafson, who told StreetEasy about the mood in that Brooklyn neighborhood.
So, there’s a ton of change happening in the Ditmas Park/Flatbush area right now — rents are increasing pretty dramatically in the area and a lot of longtime neighbors are leaving because they can no longer afford to live here.
You can see a lot of the kind of debate that’s happening over this in the comments section in this post on our Ditmas Corner blog.
There’s, of course, many reasons as to why there’s an influx of people moving into the area, but I think there’s an increase in interest in this area in part because rents are still more affordable than, say, Park Slope. See this article about Park Slopers being priced out of their neighborhood and moving to Ditmas Park.
We have a growing restaurant scene (for example, Bashi Channel is a popular restaurant that just opened on Cortelyou Road and a new Austrian restaurant is set to open on Coney Island Avenue), we’re close to Prospect Park, etc.
And while people are happy with the new restaurants and shopping, there’s major concern over what that means for residents who are being priced out of the neighborhood.
Because landlords are able to get more for their rents, they are being accused of ramping up efforts to illegally push current residents from their houses, including by pretending to lose rent checks and taking tenants to housing court and withholding repairs. As you probably know, if a landlord is able to increase a rent-regulated unit’s rent to $2,500 (well, or now $2,700 I guess with the recent rent laws passing), he can change that unit to a market-priced one — which, again, tenant advocates have said provided incentive for landlords to use illegal or, if not illegal, aggressive tactics to boot rent-regulated tenants from homes.
Because of this, the Flatbush Tenant Coalition – which represents more than 11,000 people in Flatbush, East Flatbush and Prospect Lefferts Gardens – said about 3,500 rent-regulated apartments were lost in Flatbush between 2008 and 2011 – and that statistic is several years old so that number has of course increased.
We’ve covered this extensively, including a piece on the Flatbush Tenants Coalition, and on affordable housing.
As for housing prices, that too has increased, with an increasing number of homes being sold/listed for more than $2 million (including Michelle Williams’ home, this home and this home).
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