Cobble Hill Is Officially More Expensive than Manhattan
Handsome streets lined with stately trees and brownstones, just a few F stops from Manhattan; an increasing number of high-end retailers like Rag & Bone; an entire store dedicated to giving sugar fixes to children, called Sugar Shop; and one of the city’s best restaurants—La Vara—and most charming green spaces—Coble Hill Park—all, as expected, make Cobble Hill an outlandishly expensive place to buy a home. And now this has become so true that market rates in Cobble Hill have surpassed those in Manhattan.
Let’s talk numbers, which, of course, are measured in feet. According to NeighborhoodX and as reported by DNAinfo, the average home listing in Cobble Hill in August broke down to $1,008 per square foot—again, that’s the average price per square foot. So there’s better (still unaffordable but not as laughably so), but there’s also worse (jaw-dropping/good-for-a-laugh unaffordable). The priciest square foot in Cobble Hill in August was $1,215—and it’s this number that surpasses rates across the river. Current listings in lower Manhattan parallel Cobble Hill’s high-end rates, according to the founder of NeighborhoodX, Constantine Valhouli. Valhouli, stating the obvious, added: “You’re not getting a bargain so you’re really choosing aesthetic and lifestyle,” when choosing Cobble Hill over Manhattan. “It’s no longer a question of economic necessity. It’s a question of choice.”
Of course, a comparison with Lower Manhattan is just to tell you that, even in expensive Manhattan neighborhoods, Cobble Hill has Manhattan beat. Yes, in other words, there are other Manhattan neighborhoods that are considerably more affordable than Cobble Hill. For example, says DNAinfo, the average listing in Inwood is *just (*in a world in which “cheap” is also, objectively, still expensive) $619 per square foot—or, cheaper than Cobble Hill’s *cheapest listing (*same caveat).
This trend holds for Cobble Hill retail rents, too, on the neighborhood’s busiest thoroughfare, Court Street, where the price per square foot is not so much inching as, maybe, jogging toward the $200 mark (it is $175 per square foot currently compared to $162 just last fall; this doesn’t threaten the astronomical $350 average on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, but it’s not hard to imagine a not-so-distant future in which that could happen). As expected, Cobble Hill residential rentals follow suit. DNAinfo says that a rent increase in two bedrooms is a sign that even more families than before are moving to the neighborhood already rich in children. For their part, hopefully they inherent not only family money, but the money-makig skills of their family, if they ever care to plant their own roots in the neighborhood of their youths.
