battery park city

Likely it will take longer than it will for the rest of the city. Financing is also complicated by the fact that all apartment buildings are land leases. There is pressure building to change that because it results in very, very high common charges. Sublets will vary by building. Most of the buildings in BPC are condos so the financing can be less restrictive than for coops, although another poster, 30-years-in-REO, once pointed out in another thread that landlease buildings suffer more in downturns and are helped more during RE runups.

Barring a change in ownership of the land, which given the city's fiscal outlook seems unlikely to me, I think we are looking at a long time horizon before appreciation happens in BPC.

And (one would assume and hope) a change in land ownership would mean govt. selling the land to private owners at its fair market value, so the coops or the BPC Authority would need to get a mega-mortgage anyway. So it's an "own (with mortgage) vs. rent" tradeoff. Except you know they'll refinance the mortgage for the rest of eternity, rather than ever try to pay it down.

Yeah. It's a frightening proposition. In BPC, I'm pretty sure prices will still come down somewhat because of these ongoing issues.