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Brooklyn is officially the most unaffordable housing market in America

Jan 31, 2015, 00:27 IST

When you hear the word Brooklyn, you probably think hipster.

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But you should really think staggeringly unaffordable housing.

As New York Mag and Bloomberg report, the borough has become the least affordable housing market -relative to income - in America.

In Brooklyn, "a resident would need to devote 98 percent of the median income to afford the payment on a median-priced home of $615,000," Bloomberg reports.

That's higher than between 2005 and 2008, at the height of the housing bubble.

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The data comes from RealtyTrac, the real estate information company, who find that San Francisco and Manhattan are the second and third least-affordable.

Brooklyn's wallet-destroying real estate surge comes thanks to a few factors, but the biggest one is the saturation of Manhattan.

The world's super-super-rich have started to use Manhattan as the new Swiss Bank Account - since 2008, a reported 30% of condo sales in large Manhattan developments have come from overseas. This is pushing the slightly-less-super-rich to Brooklyn.

And they are ready to buy.

Ninety-eight townhouses in Brooklyn sold for over $3 million in 2014, most of which were in the swanky neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, and Park Slope, where a historic brownstone went for a record-breaking $10.78 million.

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Other trickle-down effects are more socially devastating.

"What's a frustration for ­middle-class buyers amounts to a desperate crisis for poor renters," reports Andrew Rice in a New York Mag feature on gentrification in East New York.

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