Las Urbanistas

DETERMINED TO STAY LaToya Cantrell, president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, rallied residents to move back and rebuild after a commission threatened to raze homes.

NEW ORLEANS

Joshua L. Halley for The New York Times
DIVERSE NEIGHBORHOOD After the levees broke, water surged through Broadmoor’s homes, which include an array of architectural styles like bungalows and Craftsman.

Joshua L. Halley for The New YorkTimes
Many homes, like the one above, remain empty, but the hope is that by year’s end 80 percent of the houses will be rebuilt.

Joshua L. Halley for The New YorkTimes
Kathy Flowers paints the window trim of her house.

FOUR months or so after Hurricane Katrina, and just as residents of the Broadmoor neighborhood had begun moving back into their water-logged homes, a rebuilding commission set up by the mayor delivered another shock.

If Broadmoor did not bring back half its residents within four months, their homes could be razed and the land turned into parks. So Broadmoor took action.

Three days after the commission released its plan, residents of Broadmoor, which is west of downtown, held a protest rally. A meeting was called to work out a plan, and more than 600 people attended, many of them driving from Baton Rouge and Houston. For them, their neighborhood’s future could not be left to someone else. This was where they had grown up, married and had children.

“We love our neighborhood, and we had to do something,” said LaToya Cantrell, the president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association.

Ms. Cantrell estimates that two-thirds of the 2,900 homes in the economically diverse neighborhood have been repainted and restored. The hope is that by year’s end, 80 percent of the houses will be rebuilt.

Although only 55 percent of its former residents have returned, new residents are moving into Broadmoor, the group says, many attracted by the neighborhood’s spirit and low home prices. (Before the August 2005 hurricane, the average home price for Broadmoor and the surrounding area was $255,750, compared with $167,500 last year, according to Real Property Associates in Metairie, La.)

While New Orleans haggles over a master redevelopment plan, people in some neighborhoods like Broadmoor have been rebuilding on their own. They are forming partnerships with companies, universities and nonprofit organizations to help gut homes, assemble volunteers and find pumping equipment.

“I think what has happened is the government has pursued a very laissez-faire approach,” said Thomas Murphy, a senior fellow with the Urban Land Institute in Washington. “There’s been no strong redevelopment authority to date; that agency doesn’t exist.”

Rebuilding has not been easy. For those who choose to stay, sky-high insurance premiums and rising crime rates await them. Insurance payouts have been slow, and a state rebuilding program has paid only a small fraction of applicants. In a city that often did not run smoothly before Katrina, some residents are growing frustrated and leaving. But others, like those in Broadmoor, refuse to go.

The flood waters and the hurricane damaged 71.5 percent of the city’s homes, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Flood depths in the city ranged from 4 to 20 feet because much of the city sits below sea level. In Broadmoor, when the levees broke, 8 to 10 feet of water surged through homes after the local pumping station flooded. High winds and helicopter rescues also damaged roofs. Then looters took over.

“Everything was dead,” said Ernie Osteen, a Broadmoor resident who visited his home a week after the storm. “I was in the military and the smell reminded me of dead bodies.”

Before the storm, Broadmoor resembled much of New Orleans. More than two-thirds of its residents were African-American, and most residents were lower-middle-income. About half were homeowners.

Designated a historic neighborhood, Broadmoor had much to lose in the storm. Many of the homes, which include Spanish colonials, bungalows, classical mansions and double-shotgun houses, were built by the early 1950s.

Working out of a doublewide trailer at a local church, residents surveyed Broadmoor and designed a database on the area’s 7,000 residents and selected block captains to monitor the area. Meetings were held on the best ways to revitalize the neighborhood, like deterring crime and reopening the local elementary school.

At the time, many people were juggling full-time jobs and community work while they renovated their homes. Ms. Cantrell lived in a downtown Marriott hotel for months until she finished gutting and renovating her house. Others lived on the second floor of their homes while they gutted the lower floors.

Even though their neighborhood group was strong, the residents knew they couldn’t do it all themselves. They appealed to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for help in writing and carrying out a rebuilding plan. (Initially, Harvard students showed Broadmoor the template for a development plan and told them about the kind of data and statistics they would need to write one. Harvard later sent students from the schools of law, design and education to help put together a database, pass out fliers, call residents to see if they were returning and start a training program for block captains.)

By late March 2006, Mayor C. Ray Nagin scrapped the rebuilding commission’s recommendation and said that people could rebuild wherever they saw fit — but that they would be doing so at their own risk. It didn’t really matter to Broadmoor, though, because the residents had already seen it was possible to resurrect their neighborhood.

“The city did us a favor” with the original commission decision on razing homes, said Kelli Wright, who heads the neighborhood’s repopulation committee.

Broadmoor’s residents kept pushing ahead, contacting former residents scattered across the country. Many were eager to return, but they wanted to ensure that they wouldn’t be the only ones on their block. Others needed help in gutting homes, finding doctors and looking for temporary residences. So the group set up a database to track what people needed and to connect them with people who could help.

“They didn’t know who to call or what to do,” said Marilyn Crump, vice president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association. “Information was crucial because it wasn’t really available.”

In July, Broadmoor released its blueprint and became the second neighborhood in the city with one; the other is Gentilly. They hoped that it would encourage more people to return and that it would bring in other donors. Within a few months, the neighborhood received $5 million in pledges from the Clinton Global Initiative — an annual event in Manhattan started by the William J. Clinton Foundation that brings together corporate and individual philanthropists who pledge to help different causes.

Randy Poindexter, who was living in Lafitte, south of New Orleans, vowed to return to the city to help it recover and picked Broadmoor, she said, because of its “tremendous will to survive.” She bid on five houses and finally bought the sixth for $139,000 in June. She later spent $50,000 to renovate the flooded first floor.

“I felt like they had a fighting spirit,” said Ms. Poindexter, 59, who is an artist. “I wanted to be a part of it. It’s the greatest sense of community that I’ve ever experienced.”

There remains much left to accomplish. The elementary school and library are still closed, crime is a problem and the local pumping station needs a generator. Some families are living on their front lawns in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, while others are scrambling to paint their homes and landscape their yards. Salt infuses the lawns and the grass is dead. (Residents who have spent at least $100,000 renovating a house sometimes find it difficult to put more into landscaping.)

But despite the difficulties, Ms. Crump, the association’s vice president, said, “We always said we’re coming back, and we’re coming back better.”

Although redeveloping their neighborhood can seem daunting, residents are focused on doing what they can. They are trying to turn the library into a community center, and they won approval this month to open a charter school next year. Crime is a top priority, and they have recently increased neighborhood patrols and started a housing assistance program to encourage police officers to move into the area.

Their first returning police officer, Nancy Parker, who rented a house in Broadmoor before the storm, expects to move in within the next two weeks. Ms. Wright, who is also a real estate agent, helped Ms. Parker improve her credit, get her title fees waived and negotiate the selling price down $50,000, to $225,000, for her three-bedroom house.

“I’m a first-time home buyer, and I didn’t know the first thing about buying a home,” Ms. Parker said. “They pretty much held my hand through the process and sent us everything we needed. Kelli has worked miracles.”

After living in a government trailer outside New Orleans for the past nine months with her husband, two children and a dog, Ms. Parker said she was thrilled she can finally come home. “I really am happy,” she said. “They gave me a chance to go back home to an area where I’m comfortable, to neighbors I know.”

THAT’S IT! Dr. Carl Gerardi concluded it was time to buy when the rent for his current apartment, left, went to $6,000. For Candice Spielman, right, the deciding factors were outgrowing her 150-square-foot studio and losing her storage space.

WHETHER they preferred apartments uptown or downtown, walk-up or doorman buildings, and old or new construction, many New Yorkers agreed on one thing about the Manhattan real estate market in the last year: it was safer to rent than to buy.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times, top; Robert Wright for The New York Times, bottom

MOVING IN When Marc Brewster’s rent in this Stuyvesant Town building, above, hit $2,400, he moved to a $1,500-a-month apartment, bottom, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Robert Wright for The New York Times

MOVING ON Candice Spielman found a 470-square-foot studio in the Cocoa Exchange building downtown for $510,000 and expects to pay about $2,500 a month for her mortgage and common charge.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Dr. Carl Gerardi is buying a $2.6 million apartment now under construction at 101 Warren Street.

Some feared that if they bought, the market would fall. Others simply put off the hassle of buying for as long as they could. Not surprisingly, the situation has given landlords the upper hand, and the opportunity to raise rents significantly on market-rate apartments in the face of one of the tightest markets in many years.

Now, many tenants are crying uncle. If they don’t want to buy, they are fleeing to Brooklyn and the other boroughs. If they want to stay in Manhattan, they are deciding that with rents climbing, it makes financial sense to take the plunge. In some cases, they are buying after outgrowing their current apartments. In other cases, they are buying with the hope that they can sublet if their lives change.

In the last year, rents for market-rate apartments in Manhattan have jumped as much as 20 percent, or nearly three times the standard 5 to 7 percent increases seen each year in the last 15 years, said Fritz Frigan, the director of sales and leasing for Halstead Property. “Rents heated up so much that people said, ‘At this level, we’re better off buying,’ ” Mr. Frigan said.

Dr. Carl Gerardi, a 39-year-old urologist in private practice in Manhattan and Westchester County, lives in a one-bedroom apartment in TriBeCa. But when the rent jumped late last year to $6,000 a month from $5,000, he decided that he had had enough.

So he struck a deal with his landlord, Rockrose Development, to pay $5,800 a month to stay in his apartment at 666 Greenwich Street for one more year, and then he bought a two-bedroom apartment for $2.6 million at 101 Warren Street, which is still under construction.

“It pushed me over the point where I should buy,” Dr. Gerardi said. “This is ridiculous. For $6,000 a month, you can get a million-dollar mortgage.”

Georgia Kaporis, Dr. Gerardi’s agent at Citi Habitats, said that she first showed him apartments that cost about $1.2 million, translating into about $5,000 to $6,000 in monthly carrying costs. She said that he was willing to pay more to get more for his money, especially after taxes.

“When you buy, you’re expecting to pay a little bit more because you want better for yourself,” she said. “When you include the tax write-off, it came closer to his rent.”

Dr. Gerardi said he would put down about $1.3 million on the new apartment to keep his monthly housing costs at roughly the same level.

The dividing line between buying and renting, as always, is whether you can afford the down payment and closing costs and whether you want to make a long-term investment. The difference now is that, with rents rising, monthly costs are balancing out.

“It’s getting closer to being a tossup,” said Gary Malin, the chief operating officer of Citi Habitats. “If you think you’re going to buy and flip, you have to think about it differently. The ‘pie in the sky’ attitude that my apartment is going to escalate 15 percent a year is gone.”

In October 2002, so many people abandoned the rental market to buy homes that Manhattan’s apartment vacancy rate hit a high of 3.8 percent that month, according to Citi Habitats, which tracks about 50,000 Manhattan rentals. That compares with an average rate of 2.25 percent over the last five years.

Some landlords filled empty apartments by offering free rent and by sprucing up abysmal kitchens and bathrooms. Others took advantage of the hot real estate market by selling off more than 8,000 apartments to condominium developers.

Then, by early 2006, New Yorkers who were scared about buying in an uncertain market flooded back into the rental market and found that there were fewer units to choose from. So by last May, the vacancy rate in Manhattan had shrunk to a record low of 0.43 percent. The vacancy rate was even lower in some neighborhoods, like Murray Hill and the West Village, and people were offering to pay more than the asking rents or to put down a year’s rent upfront.

But by late last year, landlords had tried to raise their prices so much that some renters started to balk. By January, Manhattan’s vacancy rate had inched up to 0.97 percent, but rents show no sign of dropping, according to Citi Habitats.

For nine years, Candice Spielman, a 37-year old freelance television producer, lived in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side that measured about 150 square feet if you count the sleeping loft she had built over her refrigerator and desk.

As she stretched her arms across a five-foot-wide section of the living space, she spoke about how she learned to tolerate the rattling in the walls when her neighbors watched television and how she saved room by keeping most of her belongings at her mother and stepfather’s house in New Jersey.

Then they decided to sell the house, and Ms. Spielman realized she would have no place to store her bed, dressers, photo albums and jars of multicolored beach rocks.

She decided that after years of paying $1,086 a month or less, she wanted room for a couch and for her bed at her parents’ house.

Sitting in her old place, Ms. Spielman described how she managed all those years. “You can never fully relax because you can’t sit down on a couch,” she said. “You’re always sitting in a straight chair.”

When she tried to rent something larger, she found most studio apartments with a similar amount of space cost more than $2,000 a month. One downtown apartment listed at that price had a bathtub so filthy that it had turned black. While she was leaving a Lower East Side apartment that cost $2,300 a month but had no living room, a rat jumped over the broker’s foot.

At this point, Ms. Spielman realized she had to buy. By saving and investing all of the money her grandparents had given her over the years, along with what she saved by living in a cheap rental for so long, she had put away more than $100,000.

She put down 20 percent on a $510,000 apartment, a 470-square-foot studio in the Cocoa Exchange building downtown, and expects to pay about $2,500 a month for the mortgage and common charge.

“Everything I was looking at was at least $2,000,” Ms. Spielman said. “So for a little bit more I could own and invest in me.”

In some parts of the Brooklyn real estate market — like the town houses in Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights — brokers say that buying has actually become cheaper than renting.

Leslie Marshall, a broker with the Corcoran Group, advises most clients that since rents for town houses or large apartments in Brooklyn Heights or Cobble Hill run about $9,000 a month, they are better off buying.

She cites this example: she has a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment in an elevator building in Brooklyn Heights that’s listed at $1.6 million. She estimates that after taxes and a 20 percent down payment, the buyer will pay roughly $7,300 a month.

“For the larger spaces, it’s always better to buy because you throw so much money away in rent and because there’s very little inventory in Brooklyn for renting a large space,” Ms. Marshall said. “If you want to rent a house, there may be one or two at a time in Brooklyn Heights or Cobble Hill.”

In neighborhoods like Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, brokers say that clients are finding they have more bargaining power when buying rather than renting. Rents in these neighborhoods are now higher than they have been in five years, and there’s little incentive for landlords to compromise, said David Maundrell, the president of Aptsandlofts.com, a brokerage firm in Williamsburg.

At the same time, prices for apartments listed for sale in these neighborhoods have dropped by nearly 12 percent because so many new buildings or conversions are being completed. According to data compiled by Halstead, Greenpoint and Williamsburg combined have about 1,150 apartments under construction and another 6,430 units in the planning stages.

Mr. Maundrell said some developers were negotiating on prices and paying part of the closing costs or transfer taxes. “If you’re a single person or a young married couple renting for $3,500 or $4,000 a month, you should seriously consider buying an apartment,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean that Mr. Maundrell thinks that every renter should run out and buy, especially if they expect to sell within less than five years.

“There’s too much product coming out in the next two years,” he said. “In five years, people who are buying today should see a bit of appreciation.”

That means renters who don’t know where they will be living in five years or don’t have the down payment may be better off renting than stretching to buy.

Marc Brewster , 34, a native of London and an engineer in the SoHo office of the Mill, a visual-effects company based in London, received notice last fall that the rent on his one-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town was being raised to $2,400 a month from $2,080.

He refused to pay that much, so he had two options. To raise money for a down payment to buy a place in New York, he could have sold the London apartment he currently rents out. Instead, he moved to Williamsburg, taking a one-bedroom apartment with sloping floors that rents for $1,500 a month.

He leveled out the stove and the bed, bought new blinds and repainted the dirty cream bedroom walls a matte white.

He says that he may buy when he decides how long he will stay in New York. “If I get to the point where I’m looking for a green card, I may take on a mortgage,” he said.

Of course, some buyers who don’t know how long they will be in New York City are hoping they can sublet their apartments if they have to.

When Hans Heer, a 47-year-old general manager for the Food Emporium, moved to New York last April from Cologne, Germany, he planned to rent for a few years. He first moved into an $8,000-a-month furnished apartment on East 12th Street near Broadway. It was so infested with mice, he said, that he spent his nights trying to trap them in the closet. They always seemed to break out. He had mice “jumping around my bed,” he said.

After looking at about 100 rental apartments that cost more than $4,000 a month and lacked basic features like updated electrical wiring, Mr. Heer decided to buy because he believed that the apartments for sale were of much better quality.

He bought a $980,000 one-bedroom condo at 20 Pine Street that he will move into later this year. He says that even if he does not remain in New York and cannot find a buyer, he will be able to rent it out — $5,500 unfurnished or $7,500 furnished.

“It’s a lot of money for one big loft,” he said, “but as an investment it could be quite good.”