‘SoBro’: High Quality of Life, Low Price Tag
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The Bronx is the last housing frontier, says Willie Kathryn Suggs, a prominent Harlem real estate broker who has crossed the river and expanded her business into the South Bronx. “It’s insane to pay Harlem prices of over a million when you can buy in the Bronx,” she adds. “The prices are low – you can get a house for under $500,000 – and banks want to give you the money to invest.”
Building permit numbers suggest the Bronx is indeed coming back. Issuance of new permits jumped to 4,924 in 2004, up from 2,935 in 2003. (Over that same period, permits decreased in every other borough except Queens.) The borough’s population has increased at least 2.5% and probably more since the 2000 Census, according to the Department of City Planning. Even the Zagat 2006 Dining Guide shows that something exciting is happening, recommending 25 restaurants in the borough, up from 12 last year.
One developer, Don Capoccia, who has done several projects in the Bronx, calls the borough “pro-development,” saying “everybody up there – residents, elected officials, community boards – wants development to happen and happen now.”
Yet house prices remain low, in part because the Bronx comeback is still tentative. While planning decisions of the last 10 years have generally been productive, they have often been impeded by decisions made in the 1960s.
Take Port Morris, for example, an area of handsome old warehouses left over from the 19th-century deepwater port. Situated between the Bruckner Expressway and the East River, Port Morris started attracting Manhattan artists and youngsters in the late 1980s, earning the name “SoBro.” A Giuliani administration rezoning in 1997, which encouraged the legal conversion of old industrial space to residential and commercial uses, helped create the now flourishing arts and antiques district. A recent Bloomberg rezoning of 11 more blocks is intended to encourage residential renovation of empty, privately owned buildings, producing between 300 and 400 units, the Bronx planning director, Purnima Kapur, said. Port Morris seems to be a success. But just beyond the historical district, on the other side of the Bruckner – a road made famous by Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” – lie vast stretches of huge public-housing buildings, blocking until recently what should have been the natural path of investment moving inland.
These days, investment is jumping those massive buildings, as small contractors, developers, and home-seeking families buy houses in rough-looking neighborhoods. “You get your better deals in areas that aren’t quite as desirable,” says a Willie Suggs broker. “I like your basic desolate, industrial area for a bargain,” he says, pulling up in front of a small, yellow frame house in Port Morris, on East 134th Street, which is lined by factories on the north and tidy houses on the south. “We’re three blocks from the East River and four blocks from the no. 6 subway line, which means two stops from Manhattan’s 125th Street.”
The small-ish, three-family house, built in the 1890s, has been gutted, renovated, and listed at $535,000. An owner-occupier could cover much of the mortgage from the rental income of the other two units. The very similar but unrenovated house next door was bought on October 5 for $310,000 by a young carpenter, Charles Caines, who is doing the conversion work himself. This is his first investment project, he says as he shakes himself free of construction dust. He intends to move into the ground-floor unit and rent the upstairs to a family. The next house, represented by Robert Taylor at Century 21, is listed at $420,000, with rental income of about $3,000.
Ms. Suggs says the numbers work. “The rock-bottom minimum rent for a two-bedroom in the Bronx is $1,200 a month,” she says. “The backyard garden will bring in another $100 to $200. If you’re renting out two units, you’re going to have no trouble covering a good chunk of your $400,000, 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. If you do an adjustable loan at, say, 2%, you’ll have to pay $370 a month for every $100,000 you borrow. So your $1,480 will get covered easily. That’s why everyone’s buying the twos, threes, and fours – because the tenants pay your mortgage.”
The area, which retains its mixed-use heritage, still welcomes new industrial investment, as seen by the lavish 430,000-square-foot New York Post plant a few blocks away, which opened in September 2001, as well as the older businesses such as Zaro’s Bread Basket factory and Shlepper’s Moving & Storage.
Indeed, even highly residential Bronx neighborhoods often have commercial uses mixed in to a degree not seen in the other boroughs. Not far from the once renowned Grand Concourse is the small, dense neighborhood of Mt. Hope, served by Lebanon Hospital. A large, three-story-plus cellar frame house at 243 E. 175th St. sold last month for $379,000 – $30,000 more than the original list price. Its original features, including fireplace mantels and a carved ornate staircase, highlight just what a bargain the Bronx can be. The doctors, nurses, and health aides moving to the neighborhood can walk to work – an advantage particularly prized by Latinos, who constitute nearly 50% of the population in the Bronx, according to the 2000 Census.
The Bronx reminds some real estate professionals of Washington Heights. “Five years ago, there were only a few parts of the Bronx that were really strong – Riverdale, Norwood, a bit of the Northeast Bronx,” a principal with Kingsbridge Development Partners, Paul Travis, says. “But now, all over the Bronx, we’re seeing development that’s like what happened in Washington Heights. Local incomes have gone up, spurring renovation and new construction. It’s the typical New York story: Immigrants come in. The second generation gets more money and wants to stay in the neighborhood, but in better housing. Plus, people are moving in from Manhattan. A lot of the neighborhoods are still edgy, but changing very fast.”
An example of edgy but changing fast is Morris Heights, served by the no. 4 subway line. A renovated two-family, two-story-plus cellar brick house from the 1930s at 1686 Davidson Ave., which runs parallel to Jerome Avenue, just sold for $459,000 after a bidding war. The house has a side drive, a two-car garage, and a 60-foot back yard. The street opens to a spectacular view of Manhattan in the distance. As the broker locked up, a neighbor asked him what was happening. “The house has been sold to a good man,” he said. “Someone I know from Harlem. A man who’s going to take care of it.” The neighbor smiled warningly and said, “Glad to hear it, because we’ll be watching out.”
Mr. Travis is particularly optimistic about neighborhoods like University Heights, close to Morris Heights, that he says “always should have been good.” The housing stock stayed sound but crime and dirt in surrounding sections scared people. As a result, almost no market-rate housing had been built in the Bronx until very recently. The basic costs of new construction were too high, Mr. Travis says, in relation to what anyone was willing to pay. The true sign of a Bronx comeback will be new market-rate construction.
Thus he’s eager to see what will happen with a 96-unit, 13-story rental building being built on Sedgwick Avenue, opposite Highbridge Park, overlooking the Harlem River. It’s mostly but not fully market rate, since it has some financing from the city’s Housing Development Corporation, which means some units will be subsidized. The developer, the Beechwood Organization, intends to rent the one-bedroom apartments (590 square feet) for $1,050 and the two-bedroom apartments (814 square feet) for $1,250.
“The reason they can put up a good building on Sedgwick Avenue is that the quality of life is again high in the Bronx,” Mr. Travis says. “The old issues that kept development from happening have been resolved. Crime is down, the streets are clean, the schools aren’t a total war zone.”