Wall Street people with $300,000 salaries are buying all the brownstones

Ah, the dream of home ownership, specifically brownstone ownership. Having a place to call your own, a place where you set the terms, where you can paint the walls whatever color you like. Or smash them with a hammer, whatever, it’s your damn wall. Anyway, now that you’ve had that brief daydream, put it back in the garbage where it belongs, because an increasing number of people with $300,000/year salaries are buying all the brownstones, and you don’t make that kind of money, right? We mean, you’re reading the news on a website called Brokelyn, for Christ’s sake.

So remember that thing about how having a yearly salary of $66,167.27 is the minimum you need to afford a home around here? That is of course great in a vacuum, but we don’t live in one of those. DNA Info found a report by Ideal Properties that studied just who’s buying all the real estate in North Brooklyn, and it turns out that the percentage of people with $300K/year salaries buying properties has gone from 7% of buyers to 30% (a 316% jump), in just a single year. So you’re competing with all of those people.

Can we blame Wall Street? Yes, let’s blame Wall Street, because the biggest chunk of people buying property in North Brooklyn, 23%, work in finance and accounting. If you have a better idea, like one that actually focuses on a way to rebuild America’s gutted middle class and make cities affordable again, we’ll gladly listen. In the meantime, don’t mind us, we’re just buying a bunch of scratch-offs.

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