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About
This blog will follow our search for a home, and also musings on real estate, community, art, design+architecture, and other inspirations.
Things We Like
Ball and Chain jewelry Brooklyn Based Contemporist Gone To The Farthest Shore Inhabitat John Jacobsmeyer Katrina Balling Live Modern Michael Prettyman Red Hook CSA Red Hook BK RomanLeo Photography Transmaterial Word On Columbia
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Widening the Net
It’s been awhile since our last post…we are continuing our search, and may have found a potential building, but nothing is confirmed yet.
This is exciting news, but it’s also somewhat sad news for myself and the others since we’ve decided to widen our search outside of Red Hook. There just aren’t any available buildings that suit our needs and budget, and the myriad of vacant lots are rotting the neighborhood from within, like, well, rot. Owners are clutching onto their lots with the dream of scoring Big and selling to a developer for millions. They think the zoning will change to allow towers like Williamsburg or 4th Avenue. I have a secret for them: it won’t.
In the mean time, all the vacant lots keep Red Hook impoverished both economically and aesthetically. It’s a self-defeating cycle: the vacant lots prevent further development, but at the same time the lot owners are waiting for more development to raise property values before they sell. See the problem?
If I were in charge of things (and why not?), the NYC Finance Dept would seize any land that has unpaid taxes and auction the lots off in a lottery to residents of the neighborhood. No developers, no absentee owners. Allow appropriate residential and commercial growth, owned and built by residents of Red Hook for the benefit of the neighborhood. A girl can dream, can’t she?
After many frustrating attempts to contact land owners or find an existing building that works for us in Red Hook, we realized we had to start looking outside the neighborhood if we want to find anything. We are not in a huge hurry, but at the same time we don’t want to wait for a year, two years, three years or more to find a place in the neighborhood. The market is favorable for buyers now, but in a year or two, who knows?
We are still hopeful that something may turn up in Red Hook, but we are not putting all our eggs in one basket, even if they are Red Hook Poultry Association eggs (http://tinyurl.com/3xrtuxw).
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The Gross, The Bad, and the Ugly
Okay. We’ve been looking at buildings and houses for a few months now. We’ve probably seen at least a dozen, and folks let me tell you: it is not pretty out there. As with most things in life, especially New York Real Estate life, money buys you freedom and choice. And unfortunately, this is something we don’t have much of. Even by joining our finances together, the properties we can afford are generally at the margins of desirable areas, or just plain not in good areas. And there’s always a trade off: more space = worse location; empty lot = higher financial risk; good existing conditions = higher initial cost; fixer upper = lower initial cost but longer renovation time. It’s enough to make me play the lottery for the first time in my life.
Through it all, the group has kept an open mind and has been patient with each other, but there are occasional minor misunderstandings, and the nature of making a decision with 6 people involved is sometimes slow at best. The key to our success in making it this far is openness, respect, and trust. Too bad some owners and realtors don’t hold the same values.
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Could Red Hook use a hemp-based house?
Click the link for an article on www.hemp.org about all the various hemp-based building materials that are available.
Here’s another link to some hemp building info: http://tinyurl.com/27gzsng
Sounds good to me (or maybe I should say smells good to me): what do you think?
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Vacant lot culture of Red Hook: Take 1
by John J
In Red Hook it is difficult to distinguish between a vacant unkempt lot and one that is being nurtured, cultivated, prepareded for development or used for storage. Because in Red Hook, there’s a culture of ’let it do its thing’ that permeates the neighborhood’s derelict buildings and gardens alike. As we search for a lot to build on, I’m hoping we can approach our green space with that kind of acceptance of accident, non sequitur and whim of nature. I just started these four paintings based on Red Hook lots. I’ve turned the architecture and sidewalks into pine plywood as though they were temporary constructions (as in construction sites or club houses). The next step will be to paint the lots’ wild foliage en plein air.
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Why Red Hook?
by Michael
I thought I would write a few words for those followers of this blog who are not from Red Hook on why we love Red Hook enough to hunt for a building here. After all, Red Hook is a relatively small contained (some would say isolated) neighborhood with real-estate prices that are kept high because of a vanishingly small inventory of real estate.
I had these thoughts as I was walking home on Van Brunt Street with my wife on Saturday morning after picking up our vegetables at Added Value and looking for vacant lots near the water front. There are a lot of them, mysterious in a city so dense as to defy belief, but there nonetheless, weedy, fenced off and available. The Added Value Farm started as one of these lots, and is now a full fledged local food source, growing an amazing variety of vegetables in 18 inches of trucked in topsoil. All this in a 3 acre abandoned lot and atop a cracked field of asphalt.
If they can grow food in a blighted lot, why can’t we grow ourselves a home in another such place?
(photo from Red Hook CSA)
A person could be forgiven for devaluing our neighborhood for it’s weedy lots and mysteriously boarded buildings, but to enough of us, these places have represented not blight, but opportunity. The six of us have lived here long enough to have seen
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Who We Are
As part of our search, we decided that it would be useful to know what’s most important to each couple and what they’re looking for in the new space. The one requirement that is the same for all of us is that the place must be affordable. Our budget limit is approximately $1 million, or $350,000 per couple. Beyond budgetary constraints, we all have slightly different needs and wants, so, here are our…(drum roll, please) Top 5 Lists!
John + Katrina
John is an artist and teacher, and Katrina is an artist and jewelry maker
They met at University of New Hampshire, and were married in Red Hook
John moved to Red Hook in 2000; Katrina joined him in 2003
They are the proud owners of Snorkel and Lucky
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