1) Another new big building for the gentrifying Lower East Side? This one being built on the former site of a Boys & Girls Club? Where's the affordable housing, Mr. Mayor?! Oh, the 263 rental units in The Lee will be for low-income locals, homeless people struggling with mental illness and young adults transitioning out of foster care? Well, never mind then. [Posting/'Morphing on East Houston']
2) A Manhattan couple looking to make their first buy (2BR, priced under $1 million) head to Brooklyn, where their offer for a unit at our old friend 110 Livingston gets accepted, then rejected. Crushed, they end up exceeding their budget for an apartment at One Brooklyn Bridge Park. Says the male half: "within a year we should have a whole park outside our backyard." That's only kinda-sorta true. [The Hunt/'Competing Visions']
3) Someone who has done 10 years of time in Williamsburg (and for this, we salute you) muses on gentrification's affect on McCarren Park. Is the stadium-lit track and field New York City's biggest melting pot? And will the Top Chef contestants living there make a dish out of it? [The City/'Lush Life']
4) Newark may carry a stigma of being a shit hole, but all the luxury developers of Eleven80 had to do to lure in rental tenants was print up thousands of coffee cup sleeves, add lights to the building's exterior and give tenants a bowling alley. [In the Region/'Selling Cities Despite Bad Images']
5) The emotionally crippling hunt for a rental may leave you thinking that there are no decent apartments in this town, but it turns out the statistics are on your side: "The current vacancy rate in Manhattan for all residential rental buildings with five units or more is 3.6 percent, according to Property and Portfolio Research, a real estate research and advisory firm. That translates to more than 15,000 available apartments." There has to be one good one in that crowd! ['What You Need to Know Before You Rent']
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