If you’ve moved back in with mom and/or dad, you’re the very height of recession chic, according to today’s gut-roiling employment news from the Census Bureau. (If you haven’t read the rest… oy… don’t.) According to the LA Times:
In the spring of 2011, 5.9 million young adults ages 25 to 34 (14.2% ) resided in their parents’ household, compared with 4.7 million (11.8 %) before the recession
….Young adults ages 25 to 34 and living with their parents had an official poverty rate of 8.4%, but if their poverty status was determined using their own income, 45.3% had an income below the poverty threshold ($11,344 a year) for a single person under age 65.
This isn’t great news, but we like to keep things on the bright side around here, so we are duty bound to posit that maybe, possibly, this isn’t all bad. More people in a single house is sorta greenish, isn’t it? And aside from free utilities, other perks of shacking up with the ‘rents may include furniture, heat and possibly superior cooking to your own. Disadvantages are obvious, starting with your sex life and the hampering effect of your childhood boy band posters and your father snoring in the next room. What else? Are you, or were you ever living with your parents long after you thought you would be? How bad was it?
Photo via Brownstoner
These public auctions that pop up now and then are always good for a glimpse of what kind of home just might, conceivably, be a remote possibility at some point in our lives. A Kings County Real Property Auction is set for next Tuesday, Dec. 7, and Brownstoner picks out a few items that are likely to pique considerable interest. There’s a three-story MacDonough St. brownstone starting at $295K, a Park Slope brownstone at $950K and a place in Bed Stuy for $290K. But take a look at the full auction ad, and you’ll see some intriguingly cheap listings, with a handful starting around $100K. We’re not sure where some of these places are, but they’re real houses in Brooklyn. And those price tags are hard to ignore. What do you think, would you head to one of these auctions with 10 percent in hand for a shot at a building of your own? The full ad’s here.
via Brownstoner
Latimer Reef Lighthouse
It’s not often we get to bring you a chance to buy your own island for $10,000, but if this doesn’t count as living really big on small… ish change, we want to know what does. The U.S. government, in a last-ditch effort to rid itself of some obsolete, money-sinkholes-of-properties, has put three working NY-area lighthouses up for auction. The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. tried to give away the structures, all built between 1884 and 1901, to NY State, local governments and non-profits, but that there were no takers. Now the nautical beacons are up for grabs, and all it takes is a few grand to be able to start every conversation with “I have a lighthouse. How are you?” Read the rest of this entry »
Find out how Emily Farris got a huge room in Windsor Terrace for $200.
We’re down in Austin for SXSWi interactive this week, on a panel called The Broke Diaries. (Thanks for inviting us, Nichelle!) One of our fellow misers is Emily Farris, the lifestyle editor of the Kansas City Free Press who used to live in Brooklyn and now rents a room in Windsor Terrace for $200 a month. Better still, she found this crazy deal on Craigslist.
Here’s a pic of her ridiculously spacious room, and how she wangled it: Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Alan Dickson
As we enter a new decade it’s important to look back on the past one and remember the good the bad and the ugly, and boy was there some ugly in Brooklyn. We’re talking, of course, about the detritus of the real-estate boom: the half-completed glass towers, the ham-handed “luxury” details, orphaned construction sites covered with scaffolding and graying plywood. Owing to the economy, that era in Brooklyn history is mostly past, and to cap it, we’ve decided to put together a little Brokelyn Ugly Buildings Contest pool on Flickr.
Is there an aggressively tacky edifice on your block that deserves a spot in our architectural hall of shame? Take a snapshot of that eyesore, and upload it to the pool. Enter as often as you’d like, but please stick to the subject at hand. Read the rest of this entry »
For those who missed it yesterday, the Sunday Times had a fascinating piece on how shrinking trust funds are clobbering the Williamsburg real-estate market:
Ross Weinstein, a managing partner of the Union Square Mortgage Group, has worked with hundreds of Williamsburg apartment buyers in the past two years… In the boom years, Mr. Weinstein said, 40 percent of the mortgage applications he reviewed for buyers in Williamsburg included down-payment money, from $50,000 to $300,000, from parents. About 20 percent of the applications listed investments that gave the young buyers $3,000 to $10,000 of monthly income.
What are those formerly well-funded kids doing now? Moving back in with mom and dad, the article says.
But why hightail it back to Westchester when they can stay in Williamsburg and get a job? There are plenty to go around: Velvet Lounge needs a cigar girl, Thank Dog needs someone to mop floors and pick up after dogs and a yoga studio needs an “enthusiastic front desk person” —at 6:30 a.m. OK, that is a lot to ask of a trustafarian. But it probably beats being a nanny to four-month-old twins. Or, there’s always more school.
A humble little slice of the Catskills dream: 576 feet, 3 acres, $54,900.
This we did not know until we were turned on to the addictive new real estate blog Upstater, which has a weekly budget-friendly house roundup called Five-Figure Fridays, featuring rock-bottom Catskills properties. To be sure, not all are beauts, but there are some cute finds. In the latest FFF roundup, “at least three of them seemed inhabitable,” Upstater writes. “A couple of them could probably transform into something closer to adorable with a little love.” The favorite: a 576-foot cottage on three acres of land. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve moved back in with mom and/or dad, you’re the very height of recession chic, according to today’s gut-roiling employment news from the Census Bureau. (If you haven’t read the rest… oy… don’t.) According to the LA Times:
In the spring of 2011, 5.9 million young adults ages 25 to 34 (14.2% ) resided in their parents’ household, compared with 4.7 million (11.8 %) before the recession
….Young adults ages 25 to 34 and living with their parents had an official poverty rate of 8.4%, but if their poverty status was determined using their own income, 45.3% had an income below the poverty threshold ($11,344 a year) for a single person under age 65.
This isn’t great news, but we like to keep things on the bright side around here, so we are duty bound to posit that maybe, possibly, this isn’t all bad. More people in a single house is sorta greenish, isn’t it? And aside from free utilities, other perks of shacking up with the ‘rents may include furniture, heat and possibly superior cooking to your own. Disadvantages are obvious, starting with your sex life and the hampering effect of your childhood boy band posters and your father snoring in the next room. What else? Are you, or were you ever living with your parents long after you thought you would be? How bad was it?
Photo via Brownstoner
These public auctions that pop up now and then are always good for a glimpse of what kind of home just might, conceivably, be a remote possibility at some point in our lives. A Kings County Real Property Auction is set for next Tuesday, Dec. 7, and Brownstoner picks out a few items that are likely to pique considerable interest. There’s a three-story MacDonough St. brownstone starting at $295K, a Park Slope brownstone at $950K and a place in Bed Stuy for $290K. But take a look at the full auction ad, and you’ll see some intriguingly cheap listings, with a handful starting around $100K. We’re not sure where some of these places are, but they’re real houses in Brooklyn. And those price tags are hard to ignore. What do you think, would you head to one of these auctions with 10 percent in hand for a shot at a building of your own? The full ad’s here.
via Brownstoner
Latimer Reef Lighthouse
It’s not often we get to bring you a chance to buy your own island for $10,000, but if this doesn’t count as living really big on small… ish change, we want to know what does. The U.S. government, in a last-ditch effort to rid itself of some obsolete, money-sinkholes-of-properties, has put three working NY-area lighthouses up for auction. The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. tried to give away the structures, all built between 1884 and 1901, to NY State, local governments and non-profits, but that there were no takers. Now the nautical beacons are up for grabs, and all it takes is a few grand to be able to start every conversation with “I have a lighthouse. How are you?” Read the rest of this entry »
Find out how Emily Farris got a huge room in Windsor Terrace for $200.
We’re down in Austin for SXSWi interactive this week, on a panel called The Broke Diaries. (Thanks for inviting us, Nichelle!) One of our fellow misers is Emily Farris, the lifestyle editor of the Kansas City Free Press who used to live in Brooklyn and now rents a room in Windsor Terrace for $200 a month. Better still, she found this crazy deal on Craigslist.
Here’s a pic of her ridiculously spacious room, and how she wangled it: Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Alan Dickson
As we enter a new decade it’s important to look back on the past one and remember the good the bad and the ugly, and boy was there some ugly in Brooklyn. We’re talking, of course, about the detritus of the real-estate boom: the half-completed glass towers, the ham-handed “luxury” details, orphaned construction sites covered with scaffolding and graying plywood. Owing to the economy, that era in Brooklyn history is mostly past, and to cap it, we’ve decided to put together a little Brokelyn Ugly Buildings Contest pool on Flickr.
Is there an aggressively tacky edifice on your block that deserves a spot in our architectural hall of shame? Take a snapshot of that eyesore, and upload it to the pool. Enter as often as you’d like, but please stick to the subject at hand. Read the rest of this entry »
For those who missed it yesterday, the Sunday Times had a fascinating piece on how shrinking trust funds are clobbering the Williamsburg real-estate market:
Ross Weinstein, a managing partner of the Union Square Mortgage Group, has worked with hundreds of Williamsburg apartment buyers in the past two years… In the boom years, Mr. Weinstein said, 40 percent of the mortgage applications he reviewed for buyers in Williamsburg included down-payment money, from $50,000 to $300,000, from parents. About 20 percent of the applications listed investments that gave the young buyers $3,000 to $10,000 of monthly income.
What are those formerly well-funded kids doing now? Moving back in with mom and dad, the article says.
But why hightail it back to Westchester when they can stay in Williamsburg and get a job? There are plenty to go around: Velvet Lounge needs a cigar girl, Thank Dog needs someone to mop floors and pick up after dogs and a yoga studio needs an “enthusiastic front desk person” —at 6:30 a.m. OK, that is a lot to ask of a trustafarian. But it probably beats being a nanny to four-month-old twins. Or, there’s always more school.
If you’ve moved back in with mom and/or dad, you’re the very height of recession chic, according to today’s gut-roiling employment news from the Census Bureau. (If you haven’t read the rest… oy… don’t.) According to the LA Times:
