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Tag: Flatbush (Brooklyn

  • They Upsized to a Single-Family House in Brooklyn for Less Than $900,000. But Where?

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    When Crissy Spivey bought herself a large one-bedroom, one-bath co-op in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park neighborhood in 2018, she had all the space she needed. Shortly before she closed, she met John Richie, who had just moved to New York from New Orleans. Before long, he joined her in the apartment.

    The following year, the couple’s daughter was born and they transformed the place into a two-bedroom with a small office. During the winters, they were joined by Ms. Spivey’s mother, Annie Spivey, who lives most of the year in Syracuse, N.Y.

    [Did you recently buy a home? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com. Sign up here to have The Hunt delivered to your inbox every week.]

    Having tripled, and sometimes quadrupled, the population in the apartment, Ms. Spivey and Mr. Richie felt increasingly cramped. They craved more room, another bathroom and even a little outdoor space.

    “I’ve lived in New York for 22 years and never had a stoop to sit on — nothing more than a bench,” said Ms. Spivey, who works in advertising. “I never even had a fire escape that felt safe enough to stand on.”

    So they decided to search for a single-family home, setting a budget of up to $900,000. The couple, both in their mid-40s, hoped to remain in or near Ditmas Park. They knew they couldn’t afford one of the neighborhood’s gorgeous Victorian houses. But they wanted to be close to their daughter’s school and the Q train.

    Even the places they could afford needed a lot of work. “We saw things that were like a time capsule,” said their agent, Rachel Skumanich of Compass.

    Ms. Spivey did much of the online hunting, while Mr. Richie pounded the pavement. “I would go through some of the neighborhoods and look for for-sale signs,” he said.

    Off-street parking was an important detail. During the pandemic, the couple bought a car so they could drive to Syracuse and New Orleans. Now they use it to chauffeur their daughter to assorted activities. “If you have swim lessons over here or dance lessons over there, it’s hard with public transportation,” said Mr. Richie, a documentary filmmaker who is in graduate school to become a therapist.

    As they hunted, they also needed to stage their apartment for sale and clean up for every open house, which they found stressful. “We had to remove the life from our life,” Ms. Spivey said.

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    Joyce Cohen

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  • She Returned to Brooklyn With $300,000 and a Dream

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    Though a native of Chicago, Faith Pennick considers herself a New Yorker. She lived in the city on and off for two decades, renting in different Brooklyn neighborhoods.

    “I was unable to purchase an apartment in Brooklyn during the 1990s,” said Ms. Pennick, 56, who had student loan debt after earning degrees from the University of Michigan and New York University. “If I had done that, I would be sitting pretty right now. I know I have to get over that, but I probably never will.”

    [Did you recently buy a home? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com. Sign up here to have The Hunt delivered to your inbox every week.]

    Ms. Pennick, who is a filmmaker and writer — her book about the R&B star D’Angelo’s album “Voodoo” came out in 2020 — refers to herself as a “quasi-starving artist.” She currently works as an advertising copywriter in SoHo.

    Unemployed at the start of the pandemic, Ms. Pennick returned to Chicago and lived with her mother. She landed a job and saved diligently for a down payment, always planning to return to New York. “This city is the place where I can be my authentic self,” she said. “Plus, my friends and church home are here. I am of the ‘New York or nowhere’ ilk.”

    She knew she couldn’t hunt from afar. “The way something looks on Zoom and FaceTime is not the same as being in the space and opening up the cabinet doors and all that,” she said.

    So she’d fly in from Chicago for months at a time, staying with good friends — a couple from her church in Fort Greene, Brooklyn — who had an extra bedroom. In her price range of $200,000 to $300,000, she wanted a one-bedroom co-op, though a large studio would do. Ideally, she’d find a move-in-ready place with a dishwasher and decent closet space, in a building with a live-in super and a laundry room.

    She considered the Bronx, but couldn’t find a suitable place close to a subway station, which was a priority. Anyway, the Bronx was far from friends, church and work. So she focused on central Brooklyn, which had more subway options.

    Ms. Pennick couldn’t afford to put more than 10 percent down, which she knew limited her options. (And she wasn’t eligible for first-time homebuyer programs, which she called “ridiculously rigid and unrealistic with their income cutoffs.”) She was referred to Natalie McCormack Richards, an independent broker, who steered her away from co-ops requiring 20 percent.

    Find out what happened next by answering these two questions:

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    Joyce Cohen

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