REAL ESTATE TOMORROW
The construction site at 350 St. Nicholas Ave. where a 17-story apartment building is set to rise Photos by Max Parrott
RISING RIDGEWOOD
Community copes with higher
rents and self-preservation
BY MAX PARROTT
While recent reports indicated
that rent may have
dipped this past year
in Ridgewood, make no
mistake, rent inflation is coming
rapidly to the Queens side of
the Brooklyn border.
Ridgewood is the next stop for
development on the L train route
aimed at millennials pushed
further down the transit corridor
by slightly cheaper rent.
While the expectation of the
L train shutdown explain part
of the reason for the rent dip
over the past year, it doesn’t
tell the whole story.
The neighborhood’s distinctive
yellow-brick Mathews Flats
buildings, each containing six
individual units, have helped
temporarily stymie rent inflation
by keeping Ridgewood’s
rental market flexible. According
to StreetEasy, Ridgewood
has been able to nearly double
the units relisting on the market
compared to neighborhoods
like Cobble Hill and Prospect
Heights, where rents are rising.
However this trend of the
neighborhood’s growing rental
stock doesn’t bear out as a
long-term trend according to
census data, which shows a
3% increase in homeownership
and corresponding dip in
renter-occupied units within
the Ridgewood and Glendale zip
code from 2010 to 2017. Rental
stock has been slowly but surely
shrinking over the past decade.
To the dismay of Ridgewood’s
property owners associations
and tenants groups
alike, most of the neighborhood’s
recent construction has
taken the form of large luxury
towers by developers hungry
to capitalize on the neighborhood’s
newfound trendiness.
According to Vincent Arcuri,
the chairman of Community
Board 5, the new class of Ridgewood
homeowners are the ones
who are most likely to push the
limits of property speculation
“Newer owners, so to speak,
Traditional apartment houses in Ridgewood
have been trying to push out the
lower income, lower rent tenants
and take advantage of the
newer residents that are willing
to pay $2,500–$3,000 where
people were paying $750–$950.
The old time owners are getting
reasonable rent. The new
ones that bought these properties–
they paid big money for the
property, so they're looking for
big rents,” said Arcuri.
As opposed to the development
happening in as-of-right
commercial zoning districts
that don’t require a community
board or City Council review
process, the construction of affordable
housing is much more
fraught. For the past several
years, developers hoping to rezone
properties in order to build
mixed-use housing in Ridgewood
have encountered the
resistance of two community
groups: homeowners who could
not afford to buy in the current
market and a fierce group of radical
tenant activists.
At a recent community forum
on the tentative rezoning
of 1590 Gates Ave. that would
expand the number of units
and add affordable housing, its
developer Avery Hall Investments
brought up another recent
as-of-right development as
the type of project they would
like to avoid. That other development,
the Ridgewood Towers,
a 17-story planned at 3-50
Saint Nicholas Ave. is in the
construction after developers
decided against working with
10 QUEENS TOMORROW 2019