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Your 2015 forecast: Don’t you know the rent is going up, up, up, up, up

Get ready for more of this, and more rent increases.
Get ready for more of this, and more rent increases.

Sick of all the good news in your life? Well great, you’ve found the right story to bring you down. After a year of fretting about rent increases from Bed-Stuy to Bay Ridge, you might be wondering if the insane real estate fever gripping Brooklyn might break and go down soon. NOPE! A report from MNS Realty looking at the year in Brooklyn real estate in 2014 not only went over how much rent up around the borough, but predicted rents are only going to go up more in 2015. Well, there’s always 2016 (haha, no there isn’t).

So, first the present bad news. Overall, average rent in Brooklyn went up 4.5% from 2013 to 2014, jumping from $2,562/month to $2,676. If you’re looking for an individual neighborhood gut punch, look no further than Crown Heights, where the average rent for studios went up 22% in a single year.

Now for the worst bad news: things aren’t going to get better anytime soon. According to the MNS report, we’re getting a bunch of new luxury buildings because God hates you and enjoys watching you squirm. Or as the report itself puts it a little more clinically, 2015 will bring “a large number of luxury new development buildings with partial to full amenities arising in 2015, rental prices are expected to drive up even further, continuing the growth pattern of previous years.” So is there no hope at all? Well, probably. We couldn’t tell you how exactly you thread the needle of increasing housing supply, not making it all luxury housing and not upzoning everything so that we wind up with skyscrapers looming over brownstones leading to some kind of Midgar situation. We’re people who make jokes on the internet, not esteemed housing economists.

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