Brooklyn So Expensive, 56 Thousand People Compete to Live Affordably Near Superfund Site
For starters, this: A residential high-rise set to open this winter at 365 Bond Street in Gowanus—home of one of the country’s most toxic waterways—received 56,058 applications for, hilariously, 86 affordable apartments. Good news, for the less than two percent of these applicants who will be granted one kind-of-reasonably-priced unit next to the Gowanus Canal, their future waterfront esplanade home will come with a giant sponge system to keep all of those pollutants at bay.
Yes, to live affordably here, we must embrace fetid waterways as en-suite backyards. Actually, to be fair, even more people—58,832—applied all the way back in 2014 to live in one of 105 affordable units in a luxury condo building in Greenpoint. Current market rate rents in the building average of $3,706.
What’s the lesson here? In any given affordable housing lottery in Brooklyn, more than 98 percent of the people who apply to live in one of them will not succeed.
But don’t fret! Whereas last year, kindly developers gifted Kings County with only 969 new apartments, they will be far more beneficent this year. Forbes reports that 6,073 new units will be hitting the market in 2016 (more than a 600 percent increase offering compared to last year!).
So actually, it’s our lucky day. With 6,073 new apartments available—and accounting, roughly, for developers’ standard deal that 20 percent of those units will be affordable—2016 Brooklyn will boast (again, roughly) 1,215 brand new affordable units. For something like 700 thousand new hopefuls.
H/T Free Williamsburg, DNAinfo