Any hope for 29th and Broadway?

i saw that one too. the block is just too nasty to make it worthwhile. it's a permanent cab driver hangout at night and the wholesale district by day.

and the package situation (for security reasons mind you) is ridiculous. run don't walk away.

The problem is that we've already gone through the peak of gentrification: in other words, all the neighborhoods which were going to substantially improve due to the boom already did (and in some cases, did and didn't, like FiDi). So I think the chances of this area, which has remained pretty constant for a VERY long time improving until at least the next upswing (which is probably a fairly long way off) is fairly small.

30yrs, exactly. Hell's Kitchen and the East Village come to mind. Back in the day when everything was booming retail took off, but it took awhile for residential to make any progress. Then boom, and things went very, very quiet for a long, long time. The east village is a a bit different story due to zoning political issues that Bloomberg's administration decided upon, but Hell's Kitchen took off, relatively. But how many years later?

This time will likely be worse.

Re; East Village: do you remember the amazing short life cycle of the East Village Art Gallery scene? blink, blink. There was a very short but STEEP boom, and lots of acrimony (I forget the name of the group but is was something to do with Anarchy" who was spray painting new developments with "die yuppy scum" and the like; and things like the famous siege of the squatters on 13th street. And Christadora House became a HUGE story with the same type of "WTF?" original prices as we see in FiDi and other places today. I bought a unit in the Rotunda in the 90's for like $45,000 and flipped the contract for like $108,000 for a minuscule 1 BR (with great park views). the unit resold a couple of years later for like $250,000 and today would be around $600,000 (interestingly, I can't find any evidence of prices having gone down at all in the building yet). I remember taking over the sales at 214 E 9th when Columbia Savings was taking out the Sponsor and made an agreement to have me sell the units at "the right numbers" post 1987 crash and still being able to move units at the right prices. Even had a few bidding wars on the penthouses.

But just a few years later, everything had changed: I remember getting a call from a buyer looking specifically in the East Village (you could tell they were hard core East Villagers because they said they would be willing to go to the West Village: all the way up to Third Avenue. I had to cover the phone receiver and bite my lip). Well, I found them a nice place on East 7th between C & D, which was actually a very good block, legend having it that it had been "colonized" by a bunch of school teachers. So, of course they started referring their friends to me since i was the only one who listened to them and only showed them what they wanted and bought. The problem was that by that time things had gotten so bad that I couldn't find any listings to show anyone because "everyone knew" you couldn't sell anything in the East Village so they had given up trying and there wasn't anything to show except REO, and a that time REO was in it's height of back-door filthy kick-back under the table (should I go on?) dealings.

30yrs, the product available sucks in the east village. far worse than any other "desirable" (that's just got to crack us ancients up, even if we love the neighborhood) location. the prices are stickiest here, which would be both logical and counterintuitive. Very small market with very little available and still high demand. but potentially at risk because still fringe location.

yes i do recall the east village scene. but I was young and stupid and happy (oh for the days) and didn't mind the Pyramid Club, King Tut and Danceteria taking root.

one thing which make East Village rentals VERY expensive throughout the 80's is that EVERY kid who came to NYC from Japan ONLY wanted to live in the East Village and the prices they were willing to pay with a strong Japanese economy (remember they were buying Rock Center and anything else they could get their hands on) "made the market" and "crowded out" almost anyone else. later on, a similar thing happened in the few new rental buildings in the hood which were - smartly - among the first in the city with high speed internet access and were occipied by the young, wanting "hip cred" dot-com-ers.

I think one of the biggest reasona for the boom in the Grand Street "Coop Village" apartments is that they were the closest substitute for East Village digs.