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July 8, 2009
In Summer Hideaway for the Rich, Slump Is Visiting, Too
By GERALDINE FABRIKANT
NANTUCKET, Mass. — On a winding road, down a white shell driveway, sits a rambling gray-shingled home with a view of the harbor, where beige lounge chairs ring an amoeba-shaped swimming pool and the living room is filled with pristinely white sofas, plumped, pillowed — ready for the next owners.
The 7,500-square-foot house has been on the market for a year with no takers. “We had some good offers,” said the owner, Paul C. Steinfurth, who runs a Miami real estate business and bought the house for $5.4 million in 2004. “Then Lehman happened and they put their hands in their pockets.”
So Mr. Steinfurth is resorting to a risky tactic new to the real estate market here: next Tuesday he’ll offer the house at an “absolute auction.” The highest bidder wins, no matter how low the bid.
The sale is testimony to just how drastically the market has turned and how severely the economy has hurt even the country’s most exclusive enclaves.
About 600 properties, or 6 percent of all those on the island, are for sale, but almost nothing is selling. “The damage is huge,” said Flint Ranney, a real estate broker on the island for 30 years and president of Denby Real Estate. “The market value of the real estate on the island was about $20 billion in 2008. Now it is about $14 billion. This is much worse than 1987. That decline came from the savings and loan crisis and it was more contained. This is the stock market and it affects everybody’s wealth.”
While some real estate agents say things are picking up, Mr. Ranney disagrees, pointing out that just four homes sold in March, four in May and about the same last month, according to data his firm keeps on all transactions. The dollar volume of all transactions is down 48 percent, according to his firm’s data.
In recent decades, Nantucket has attracted wealthy families who have built a rash of multimillion dollar homes. Its residents include Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and his wife, Wendy; General Electric’s former chief executive, Jack Welch; David M. Rubinstein, of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm; along with hundreds of lesser-known money players at other prominent investment and private equity firms.
The island’s airport, Nantucket Memorial, was jammed with private planes and its 240-slip marina, a destination for big yachts, helped fuel the local economy. When newcomers could not get into the old Sankaty Head Golf Club, they built the Nantucket Golf Club. A posh new yacht club, planned six years ago in the days of easy money, opened last Wednesday with its membership roster just 78 percent full.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/bu...%20rich&st=cse
July 8, 2009
Mapping a Bird’s-Eye View of Foreclosure Misery
By PATRICIA COHEN
When it came to representing the sprawling nature of the foreclosure crisis in New York City, the artist Damon Rich figured out that the best thing to do was to shrink it down to size.
And so he used the 9,335-square-foot Panorama of the City of New York, the intricate architectural model built for the 1964 World’s Fair, and hundreds of neon-pink triangles to demonstrate just how the city has been marked by economic troubles.
Each plastic triangle represents a block where there have been three or more home foreclosures. Visitors on the balcony walkway that surrounds the Panorama, at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, can see in a single glance precisely where subprime lenders wreaked the most havoc.
Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two.
This mapping of the 45-year-old Panorama is part of a larger exhibition about housing, in which politics intersects with art.
“I hope that my work operates on a principle of opening up a set of issues for exploration,” Mr. Rich said.
Titled “Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center,” the show includes photographs, models, drawings and sculptural installations — like a large, three-dimensional wooden graph of interest rates over the past 70 years — that offer an explanation of how the private housing market works, beginning with the federal government’s involvement during the Depression.
Mr. Rich said the exhibition provided a “physical experience” that engages people in a way that a book, a Web site or a television show cannot. “In some way, I hope my exhibitions function as strange educational playgrounds for adults,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/ar...eyeview&st=cse
The 7,500-square-foot house has been on the market for a year with no takers. “We had some good offers,” said the owner, Paul C. Steinfurth, who runs a Miami real estate business and bought the house for $5.4 million in 2004. “Then Lehman happened and they put their hands in their pockets.”
So Mr. Steinfurth is resorting to a risky tactic new to the real estate market here: next Tuesday he’ll offer the house at an “absolute auction.” The highest bidder wins, no matter how low the bid.
The sale is testimony to just how drastically the market has turned and how severely the economy has hurt even the country’s most exclusive enclaves.
About 600 properties, or 6 percent of all those on the island, are for sale, but almost nothing is selling. “The damage is huge,” said Flint Ranney, a real estate broker on the island for 30 years and president of Denby Real Estate. “The market value of the real estate on the island was about $20 billion in 2008. Now it is about $14 billion. This is much worse than 1987. That decline came from the savings and loan crisis and it was more contained. This is the stock market and it affects everybody’s wealth.”
While some real estate agents say things are picking up, Mr. Ranney disagrees, pointing out that just four homes sold in March, four in May and about the same last month, according to data his firm keeps on all transactions. The dollar volume of all transactions is down 48 percent, according to his firm’s data.
In recent decades, Nantucket has attracted wealthy families who have built a rash of multimillion dollar homes. Its residents include Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and his wife, Wendy; General Electric’s former chief executive, Jack Welch; David M. Rubinstein, of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm; along with hundreds of lesser-known money players at other prominent investment and private equity firms.
The island’s airport, Nantucket Memorial, was jammed with private planes and its 240-slip marina, a destination for big yachts, helped fuel the local economy. When newcomers could not get into the old Sankaty Head Golf Club, they built the Nantucket Golf Club. A posh new yacht club, planned six years ago in the days of easy money, opened last Wednesday with its membership roster just 78 percent full.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/bu...%20rich&st=cse
July 8, 2009
And so he used the 9,335-square-foot Panorama of the City of New York, the intricate architectural model built for the 1964 World’s Fair, and hundreds of neon-pink triangles to demonstrate just how the city has been marked by economic troubles.
Each plastic triangle represents a block where there have been three or more home foreclosures. Visitors on the balcony walkway that surrounds the Panorama, at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, can see in a single glance precisely where subprime lenders wreaked the most havoc.
Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two.
This mapping of the 45-year-old Panorama is part of a larger exhibition about housing, in which politics intersects with art.
“I hope that my work operates on a principle of opening up a set of issues for exploration,” Mr. Rich said.
Titled “Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center,” the show includes photographs, models, drawings and sculptural installations — like a large, three-dimensional wooden graph of interest rates over the past 70 years — that offer an explanation of how the private housing market works, beginning with the federal government’s involvement during the Depression.
Mr. Rich said the exhibition provided a “physical experience” that engages people in a way that a book, a Web site or a television show cannot. “In some way, I hope my exhibitions function as strange educational playgrounds for adults,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/ar...eyeview&st=cse