It’s become a generally accepted fact that living in New York City is more expensive than ever. Rents and home prices have reached sky-high levels in the city, especially in Manhattan, which boasts some of the highest prices in the world. Ultra-luxurious residential towers continue to pop up on the NYC skyline, but the exorbitant prices they command means that the average New Yorker will never get a chance to live there. On the other hand, there are plenty of billionaires out there who are willing to shell out mind-blowing amounts to own a Manhattan condo with exquisite views and amenities.
Over the past decade, NYC has grown tremendously. In Manhattan, countless new residential towers have crowded the borough skyline, and the development craze has started to take over Brooklyn and Queens, as well. Some neighborhoods that are thriving today were practically non-existent 10 years ago. Take Hudson Yards, a $25 billion, massive mixed-use development that broke ground on its first structure in 2012. In just 8 years, it’s practically become the new business core of NYC, with the glossy, state-of-the-art towers at Hudson Yards commanding even higher office rents than the Plaza District. The luxury residential towers that took shape here are drawing buyers like a magnet, and we haven’t seen the end of it yet - all of this is just Phase I of the development project at Hudson Yards.
We wanted to see which were the NYC neighborhoods that developed the most from 2010 to 2020, by looking at how much home sale prices increased during this period. In order to do that, we compared home prices recorded throughout 2019 with those recorded in 2010, with the help of data from the NYC Department of Finance. We’ve extracted the top 30 neighborhoods that saw the highest jump in median sale prices, and we ranked them according to the 2010-2019 price difference. Check them out below:
Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill Records 117% Rise in Home Prices From 2010 to 2020
Surprise, surprise - the first neighborhood on our list is not in Manhattan, as you might expect, but in Brooklyn. Cobble Hill is the NYC neighborhood to record the biggest difference in median sale price from 2010 to 2019. This charming residential neighborhood lined with cobblestone streets is one of the best places to live in Brooklyn and went from boasting a median sale price of $1,150,000 in 2010 to commanding $2,500,000 at the end of 2019 - a 117% increase.
Cobble Hill was also the sixth-priciest neighborhood in New York City in 2019, and the most expensive destination for Brooklyn homebuyers. Think of it this way if you will: in 2019, Cobble Hill was more expensive than the Flatiron District, the Upper West Side or Greenwich Village in Manhattan.
In fact, 19 of the 30 neighborhoods on our list are in Brooklyn. This goes to show how much this borough has evolved over the years; there was a time when Brooklyn’s neighborhoods offered a much more affordable alternative to Manhattan, with many New Yorkers flocking over the bridge to rent or buy property here. Today, the situation has changed dramatically, with luxury development thriving in the borough, fueled by an influx of well-educated, tech-savvy Millennials.
Tribeca Homes Command $1.1 Million More in 2020 Than They Did in 2010
In Manhattan, the biggest spike in home prices in the past decade was recorded in Tribeca. Mind you, this trendy Midtown South neighborhood was pretty expensive in 2010, with a median sale price of $1,914,349, but that’s nothing compared to the $3,085,000 it commands today. The neighborhood was also the third-priciest area of NYC for homebuyers in 2019, surpassed only by Soho and Civic Center. Luxury developments like 70 Vestry or 111 Murray Street were extremely popular throughout 2019, with units selling like hotcakes despite the crazy asking prices.
One neighborhood in Queens also made the cut, landing at #24 on our list with a difference in median sale prices of $500,000, or 111%. That neighborhood is Ridgewood, a historic area of Queens that borders not only the Maspeth, Glendale and Middle Village neighborhoods, but also those of Bushwick and East Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Median home prices here went from $450,000 in 2010 to $950,000 at year-end 2019, signaling that homebuyers are slowly starting to move away even from Brooklyn and heading towards Queens or the Bronx, where the dream of owning your own home is still an attainable one.
In Greenwich Village and Chelsea, Home Prices Are Lower Today Than They Were in 2010
While combing through the data to extract our list of neighborhoods with the highest jump in home prices since 2010, we came across a few areas where the median sale price is lower today than it was 10 years ago. Take a look below at the 10 neighborhoods that saw the biggest drops in home prices:
The biggest decrease recorded over the past decade was in Greenwich Village-West, where home prices actually went down $190,000. The median sale price for a home in this Manhattan neighborhood was $1,430,000 back in 2010, but nowadays, it’s decreased to $1,240,000. Surprisingly, Chelsea is also more ‘affordable’ today than it was a decade ago, with home prices dropping $150,000, from $1,250,000 in 2010 to $1,100,000 at the end of 2019. That’s not to say that these neighborhoods are cheap in any way, but it goes to show that home prices in Manhattan didn’t skyrocket overnight, and homes were expensive 10 years ago, too.
Data sources: NYC DOF Rolling Sales Data