Three Hot 'Hoods
It takes an almost magical convergence of jobs, housing, good eats, and retail for a neighborhood to experience a renaissance and become the next big thing. (Having a famous person from the neighborhood doesn't hurt either.) Here are three coastal 'hoods where you should start scouting land sites:
BOSTON: Downtown Crossing
One of Boston's oldest neighborhoods, Downtown Crossing had the life drained out of it for decades, burdened by the perception that it was fatally uncool, Boston Redevelopment Authority senior planner Jonathan Greeley (above) tells us. (It was the neighborhood equivalent of your parents chaperoning your prom.) Now, $4B in private real estate investment, including nearly 2,000 new housing units being developed in walking distance, has turned Downtown Crossing into a comeback phenomenon. New York-based Millennium Partner's' $210M Millennium Place mixed-use residential project that opened Q2 last year tested how housing would fare in the heart of this commercial neighborhood. All of its 256 condos sold by year-end priced from $550k to $3.5M, proof that buyers would put down stakes in the CBD. When construction is completed in ’16, Millennium Partners' 625-foot, $630M Millennium Tower complex will be Boston's tallest residential high-rise.
NYC: Hudson Yards
Sitting among the already-humming neighborhoods of Chelsea, Tribeca, and Hell's Kitchen, the new Hudson Yards District can support even more high-profile multifamily projects, we learned at Bisnow’s Future of Manhattan’s Far West Side event. Moinian Group development director Oskar Brecher and World Trade Center Properties Janno Lieber (above) work for companies that had long-term visions for the area. Janno's boss, Larry Silverstein, bought the parcels for the River Place and Silver Towers apartments on 42nd in 1984. Related’s Stephen Winter tells us that within Related's resi portfolio, the High Line-hugging Caledonia is pulling in the highest rents and the Upper East Side is getting the lowest, an unimaginable dynamic 10 years ago.
LA: Century City
Century City, the seventh top-earning ZIP code in the US with a median income of $652k (says CNN), has become a hive of multifamily activity, we learned at Bisnow's Future of Century City event. Related SVP and director of West Coast sales Mary Ann Osborn (above) says the company was trying to recreate estate living vertically (and perhaps lure some movie stars) with its latest 42-story condo tower, The Century. Unlike the Wilshire Corridor, the site doesn't abut other buildings, and you can walk to dining and shopping. "We thought with the acreage and being behind guard gates that we would attract people out of these large estates in these local areas, and we've been very successful in doing that." In fact, the new buyers tend to be friends of existing residents. (It's like a 42-story cocktail party.)
