Real Estate 38 lic courier • april 2013 • www.queenscourier.com by david dynak David Dynak is a real estate broker at First Pioneer Properties and an LIC resident. He’s lived in Western Queens since 1993. ARTS EVENTS Calendar Courtesy of Plaxall Long Island City 2013 MoMA PS1 Noguchi Museum 22-25 Jackson Ave., LIC, NY 11101 718.784.2084 MoMAPS1.org 9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard) Long Island City, NY 11106 718.204.7088 • www.noguchi.org Plaxall.com LICProperties.com Museum of the Moving Image 35 Ave. at 37 St., Astoria, NY 11106 718.777.6800 www.movingimage.us APRIL Sculpture Center April 22 - July 22, 2013 Better Homes Jonathas de Andrade, Neïl Beloufa, Keith Edmier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Robert Gober, Tamar Guimarães, Anthea Hamilton, E’wao Kagoshima, Yuki Kimura, KwieKulik, Paulina Olowska, Kirsten Pieroth, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, Martha Rosler, and Günes Terkol You will express yourself in your house, whether you want to or not....” - Elsie de Wolfe, The House in Good Taste, 1913. Better Homes brings together a group of artists who examine the construction of the interior through design and homemaking from critical perspectives. As the notion of home shifted in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and interior space was being redefined and redecorated according to the aspirations of modernity, the interior became integral to the construction of the subject. Interiors were an extension of identity, representing gender, fashion, and class, and re-establishing what constituted the private and the public. Now, in the 21st century, interior design has been professionalized and packaged for the mass market. With the proliferation of department stores and publications instructing consumers on how to make the best dinners, living rooms, and lifestyles, how has the notion of domestic space, and all it encapsulates, been redefined in contemporary culture? What are the impacts of shifting ideas of family, identity, politics and consumerism in the private realm? Touching on the history of the interior to its present iterations, the artists in the exhibition examine displays of domesticity, as constructed through spaces and things. Better Homes is curated by Ruba Katrib, SculptureCenter Curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a full color publication with a text by Katrib and a contribution by poet Ariana Reines. 44-19 Purves St. LIC, NY 11101 718.937.0727 www.sculpture-center.org EXPO 1: New York on view May 12 Sunday April 21, 2013 SUNDAY SESSIONS presents Jace Clayton’s The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner Saturday April 27, 2013 ROCKAWAYS: VW Dome 2: Stand Clear of the Closing Doors Sunday April 28, 2013 SUNDAY SESSIONS with Laurel Nakadate and Ultra-red Sunday April 28, 2013 ROCKAWAYS: VW Dome 2: Rockspot Historical Bike Tour Saturday May 4, 2013 ROCKAWAYS: VW Dome 2: 7th Annual Earth Day Rockaway EXHIBITION Spectacle: The Music Video April 3–June 16 Spectacle: The Music Video is the first museum exhibition to celebrate the art and history of the music video. From early examples of music in film to the work of music video masters such as David Bowie and Madonna and contemporary artists such as The White Stripes and Kanye West, the exhibition reveals the enormous influence music videos have had on contemporary culture over the past 35 years. INSTALLATION A Tribute to Heather February 27–June 30 In the Lobby Organized by Jason Eppink, Associate Curator of Digital Media Artist Evan Roth (b. 1978) reappropriates public space, popular culture, and digital techniques to create surprising and illuminating works both on and off the Internet. A Tribute to Heather consists of ten new entries in his ongoing series, One Gif Compositions. For these works, Roth embeds a single animated GIF in a website hundreds of times to produce a rich tapestry of color and motion. The URL of each Composition serves as its title, describing the repeated animation and the background color. Because file load times vary every time a One Gif Composition website is accessed, each viewing is unique. Hammer, Chisel, Drill: Noguchi’s Studio Practice Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - Sunday, April 28, 2013 This exhibition explores Noguchi’s working process through a handful of studios that he kept beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the Long Island City and Mure Japan studios that he split his time between until his death. The exhibition illuminates Noguchi’s practice during five studio periods over the course of his career including: the MacDougal Alley studio in New York (where he experimented with his slate and wooden interlocking sculptures in the 1940s); his Kita Kamakura studio in Japan (the origin of much of Noguchi’s bri ef experimentation with ceramic work in 1952); the 10th Street studio in Long Island City (his headquarters in New York for the last 25 years of his life); the Pietrasanta and Querceta studios near the Henraux quarries in Italy (where he rekindled his appreciation for direct stone carving in the mid- 1960s); and the studio at Mure, Japan (where from 1969 onward he spent half of his year working with hard stone). Just like that, we skipped spring and saw a real glimpse of the summer. Sort of like what we’re seeing in the residential real estate market… yesterday’s recession and worst housing market decline ever suddenly seems like a bad dream. If the tech bubble and 9/11 were merely speed bumps in New York’s mostly uninterrupted growth and appreciation of the 90s and 2000s, the “great recession” and Sandy, in retrospective, now seem more like distant nightmares than doses of reality, and certainly not the corrective forces that were going to reverse forever the illusions that “real estate never goes down.” Sure, thousands if not millions ruined their credit or lost homes and all assets, and a good percentage of population has been out of work for years now, but you would not know it judging by what is happening in the condo and apartment markets the past few months. In Manhattan, almost everything goes at close to asking price, and it is once again very common to have a deal today and be the lowest bidder the next morning – the result of aggressive bidding by buyers and growing confidence among sellers. “It’s 2007 again,” a downtown agent told me the other day, “only at higher prices!” In Long Island City, if you waited out the past four years of uncertainty, hoping for continuing price reductions to score a “deal,” you missed the boat - badly. New growing families and neighborhood renters entering the purchase market today will find that $700,000 no longer buys you a two-bedroom condominium west of Court Square. I’ve written about difficulty of finding two-bedrooms in the $600K range before, and how mid $700Ks was the new lowest range less than a year ago. Suddenly $800,000-plus is the new starting point for small to medium two bed rooms, and we’re seeing low-floor, around 1,200-square-foot apartments listed in the $900,000 range. My colleagues who specialize in LIC’s condo and new development game talk about $900 per-square-foot sales market for Hunters Point. $900! In Queens! What’s happening, people!? Have we lost our minds or sense of reason? What are the market forces that pushed prices of real estate above peak levels less than a year after first declarations of recession’s end? Developers talk about demand for housing outpacing supply. Have we lost whole blocks of buildings, or experienced an unrecorded birth boom recently, or influx of new immigrants with deep pockets? Where did all these buyers chasing few buy opportunities live in the past 20 years? Is there really a huge segment of affluent foreign buyers with legal and financial means to purchase apartments so desperate to own a piece of New York? Or is it the forever-declining mortgage rates that are too good to pass, therefore driving folks to choose buying over renting. But then, the apartment rental market is not slacking either. Wouldn’t all these first-time buyers cause a sudden surge of vacancies in rentals? None that we’ve heard. Final theory heard oftentimes – there is a lot of cash “out there” and nowhere to invest it so people buy real estate in hope of beating paltry rates of return on cash assets. But isn’t the stock market at an all-time high? All of these causes are mentioned but none has been proven to be the answer. As yet another new residential building goes up in LIC, restaurant owners cry that there is no lunch business to speak of, except in Court Square, because “there is no one here during the week.” We need more businesses to make this neighborhood more balanced around the clock. We need offices, gyms, neighborhood retail and services, small businesses and entertainment establishments to bring daytime spenders while residents are out to work in Manhattan. No, this neighborhood never will be, nor would we want it to become Midtown, but we ought to expect more of it commercially than where we’ve gotten thus far. We may not understand the market forces that drive this or any area’s growth or decline until years later, but this much is clear: logical or not, New York’s real estate has never been hotter as an asset. Everyone still wants to work, live, own or at least visit here, and as long as that is the case, we will always outpace most other cities for price appreciation. MYSTERIOUS MARKET FORCES
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