You and Kurt Russell are running down an abandoned Downtown Brooklyn side street – you have a hook for a hand and ominous vaporwave music is playing in the background. “All of them, empty,” Kurt says, shaking his head and looking up at the vacant apartment buildings looming over you, “if only the developers had anticipated such a glut of apartment construction, we may have been able to save this city from total renter abandonment.”
While experiencing a real life Escape From New York is a bit more extreme than the predictions, according to a new report by Ten-X Commercial Real Estate, New York City “rents will slide as thousands of apartments in new buildings come on the market,” the Wall Street Journal reported. It’s not in your head that there’s been an unprecedented amount of construction around the city in recent years – capitalizing on a booming rental market, developers have been building all hell out of their air rights citywide.
As these construction sites wrap up, and shiny new apartments become available, the forecast foresees landlords, with so much competition for renters, being unable to get the same high rents they’ve enjoyed in recent years. The industry, however, is far from agreement about the likeliness of this happening. Some argue that, should Brooklyn rents drop, new renters will fill the vacancies, flocking here from out of borough, out of state. Detroit’s the new Brooklyn, and Brooklyn’s the new Connecticut, folks.
[H/t: Wall Street Journal]