Expanded ferry service on New York City’s East River brings a surge of interest in riverfront development. Not surprisingly ferry stops are raising land values in adjacent neighborhoods. Read more…
Ferries Prompt a Rising Housing Tide
By Stefanos Chen
New York Times
December 3, 2017
Excerpts:
The East River ferry is enjoying a revival thanks to a recent expansion and is luring developers to a long-neglected stretch of the city’s industrial waterfront, from western Queens to south Brooklyn.
About seven months after the city expanded and subsidized the privately-run ferry service – reducing the fare from up to $6 to $2.75, the same as a subway ride – ridership is up and so are rents in neighborhoods that were one harder to reach. After decades of little change, there are now thousands of new apartments coming to the shores of the 16-mile strait, about a quarter of them reserved for lower-income renters. The ferry, with its romantic appeal and on-time service, is playing a key role in that growth.
The Economic Development Corporation said the ferry service is averaging about 12,000 passengers a day, and it expects ridership to climb, as about 500,000 New Yorkers live within a half-mile of a ferry stop.
“The moment they announced the ferry, we bought as many things as we possibly could,” said Brett Harris, a founding partner of AKI Development, which has six projects near the Astoria landing. Local rezoning that made it possible to build more housing on the mostly commercial waterfront in 2010 brought AKI and others to the area, but the ferry kicked things into high gear, he said.
Evidence of the ferry’s effect can be seen at other stops along the East River, said Grant Long, senior economist at the real estate site StreetEasy. In an analysis of rentals within a 10-minute walk of the ferry service, rents grew about 1.5 percent faster in the last year than those up to a half-hour away. “This is as close to causation as you can get,” Mr. Long said.
Comment:
In densely settled New York City ferries are an extension of the transit system, not a link in the highway network as experienced in smaller communities. It is not surprising that evidence of land value uplift documented in a multitude of studies of transit impacts is also manifest in passenger ferry transport.
Access to transportation services is capitalized into property values. Recapturing some of that added value for public benefits such as affordable housing is a legitimate function of local government.
