Park Slope/Prospect Heights

If Park Slope makes you think of brown-rice living, tree-lined blocks by the park, and Victorian brownstones bought at half the price of most Manhattan apartments, you haven’t been out there lately. While $900,000 would have guaranteed a townhouse just off Prospect Park five years ago, today’s buyers are paying upwards of $1 million for houses closer to the Gowanus Canal. — EMILY GITTER

Richard Lazarus, an 81-year-old broker who has lived in Prospect Heights since 1956, still can't get his mind around the rise in real-estate prices in that neighborhood over the past three years. "The jumps have been fantastic," he says. "Brownstones that sold for $400,000 to $450,000 three years ago are going for $1 million today." The revitalization of the neighborhood began in the late eighties with the restoration of abandoned apartment houses by private developers, and continued in the late nineties with city-financed conversions for middle-income tenants. As housing prices have risen, the median age of the population has fallen. But Prospect Heights remains an ethnically diverse, family-oriented area where many residents have held on to their homes for decades. "People want to come to Prospect Heights now, and nobody's selling," explains Lazarus. — LAURIE SANDELL

In our archive
• Best of New York: Brooklyn (March 25, 2002)
• Real Estate 2002: Prospect Heights (March 11, 2002)
• Real Estate 2001: Park Slope (March 12, 2001)
• Positively Fourth Avenue (August 27, 2001)