New York City Luxury Rental Blog Archives for June 2010

It's not exactly news anymore that the Financial District has been pretty thoroughly reinvented from a center of international commerce into a very desirable Manhattan residential neighborhood... that also happens to be the center of international commerce. But for all the top-notch apartment listings in the Financial District -- and there are many, from pre-war rental apartments like those at 37 Wall Street or 71 Broadway or The Crest to the ultra-luxe new construction rental apartments at 90W -- one thing the neighborhood has lacked is, for lack of a better word, the things that make Manhattan neighborhoods feel like Manhattan neighborhoods. Slowly but surely, though, that's changing. With the announcement that the Financial District's Andaz Hotel will be sponsoring a new Financial District Greenmarket, FiDi foodies will finally have a place to get the fresh local produce, meat and seafood their neighborhood has been missing. And an ambitious plan to reimagine traffic-saturated Water Street as a green byway suggests that more neighborhoodiness could be in the offing for the Financial District. This is good news for a bunch of reasons.

There's a lot to like about Tribeca, which is home to some of the most distinctive-looking blocks in Manhattan, as well as some of NYC's finest restaurants, shopping and art galleries. All of which makes it even more of a pity that there are relatively few rental listings in Tribeca, relative to its neighbors. But while the existing building stock in Tribeca -- much of it a century old and safely landmarked -- will probably prevent it from becoming a luxury rental listing mecca like the Financial District (Tribeca's neighbor to the south) or Soho (its neighbor to the North), a long-awaited plan to re-zone the largely industrial northern part of Tribeca to allow for more residential development is beginning to make its way through the Dpeartment of City Planning and Community Board 1. If approved, the re-zoning of Tribeca could make for a boom in Tribeca apartment listings, and thus make it easier to find a place to live in one of Manhattan's coolest residential neighborhoods.

New York City and New York City real estate have a way of focusing the mind -- this is a tough town, as you might've heard, and an interesting one. For those of us who care about NYC and the market for rental apartments in NYC, the ebbs and flows of the Manhattan real estate scene can come to seem like the most important news in the world. If you're searching Manhattan rental listings, it might well seem like it, but the national real estate market is plenty interesting in its own right. That's the reason -- well, mostly it's that we sometimes like to ogle North Carolina mountain homes and South Carolina golf homes, but also that -- why your Luxury Rentals Manhattan blogger often finds himself checking in with Southeast Discovery, a full-service real estate site serving, yes, the Southeast.