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Back in 2000 I bought a lovely tudor townhouse and sold 6 years ago and now can't afford to buy it back! The home I bought back in 2000 has increased in value from 400k to nearly 800k now. :P
And it's not just FH either. A relative of mine recently bought a 2 family home in Middle Village for 750K and still had to put in about 100k in renovation! Many of these 700-800k homes are not the most updated either!
With median income per person in the 50k range, how are people able to afford to buy a property in Queens?!?
Back in 2000 I bought a lovely tudor townhouse and sold 6 years ago and now can't afford to buy it back! The home I bought back in 2000 has increased in value from 400k to nearly 800k now. :P
And it's not just FH either. A relative of mine recently bought a 2 family home in Middle Village for 750K and still had to put in about 100k in renovation! Many of these 700-800k homes are not the most updated either!
With median income per person in the 50k range, how are people able to afford to buy a property in Queens?!?
They have 10 working adults paying the mortgage or they rent out 80% of the home at crazy rents. But MOST people in Forest Hills and surrounding hoods such as Kew Gardens and Rego Park, have been there for years.
kimchee, where have you been in the last 2 years? we have 1 of the worst recession in history due to this huge housing bubble, you sounded like you just came back from Mars
Very beautiful location and VERY EXPENSIVE.....back in the day it was very Jewish. you can still find a lot of wonderful jewish delis, bakeries butchers etc.
we may have had one of the worst recessions in history but home prices are still pretty damn high. I don't know how most people can afford to buy a house in those areas...coops and condos seem like the only alternative. And even then...some coops are the price of a house!
Russians are buying a lot of properties in that area.. They have A LOT of money more then the native Ny'ers...Some say a lot of the russians are Russian Mafia which is possible.
Didn't prices double everywhere in the same time frame ? Why would Forest Hills or Kew Gardens be an exception ? Would you have expected prices to double in Brooklyn and The Bronx but have stayed the same in Kew Gardens/Forest Hills ?
It's a desirable area and if anything prices have started inching up again there.
It's all relative.If you have been priced out of the market there you will have to settle for living in a market that you can afford.
Don't waste time wondering how some people can afford to live in a neighborhood that you can't afford.It's too complex and it doesn't matter.Just go and look in a neighborhood that you can afford.
Don't waste time wondering how some people can afford to live in a neighborhood that you can't afford.It's too complex and it doesn't matter.Just go and look in a neighborhood that you can afford.
The answer is actually incredibly simple. It's GENTRIFICATION.
The price of Real Estate(or rent) in any area actually has nothing to do with the incomes of the people who live in the area.It has to do with the incomes of the people moving into the area.Whenever you have a situation where people are paying much ,much more for something than the people who already live in the area it means only one thing.The people doing the buying and moving in have a lot more money than the people who are already there and it's called GENTRIFICATION no matter where it occurs.
The dynamics are no different than hipsters moving into Williamsburg or Yuppies moving into Harlem.Most of the old time residents in Harlem can't afford million dollar condos .
People don't think about it much but essentially the entire city,almost every nook and cranny has been undergoing a process of GENTRIFICATION for decades.It's not only going on in poorer parts of Harlem,Brooklyn and parts of THE Bronx.It's going on even on the Upper East Side today.How many tens of thousands of people do you think live on the Upper East Side today who could never,ever afford to live there if they hadn't bought their apartments for $50,000 back in 1980 ?
No neighborhods in the city are going to stay the same for long.They are either going to go up or go down.There was a long period from the 60's until
the 90's when almost everything went down.Nobody wanted to live in NY.That has been reversed and now it seems as though everyone wants to live in NY. They are flocking here from everywhere ! Midwesterners bored with life in Iowa,Southerners trying to escape the bible belt,empty nest suburbanites from Westchester and LI ditching their big expensive houses and yards and Europeans with pots of money. They all want to live here now and as long as that goes on there will be gentrification going on everywhere because when people get priced out of one neighborhood they just go price someone else out of a neighborhood they can afford.It's not intentional.You just do what you got to do.
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