In a sign of just how desperately constrained New York City’s property market is, a building permit has just been filed to erect a new apartment building on what is the smallest developable piece of land we’ve seen in the five boroughs.
On Friday, a permit was filed for a new five-story building at 284 West 127th Street, on a plot that measures a mere 30 feet by 25 feet.
284 West 127th Street, map from ZoLa
The five-story building, near the intersection of West 127th and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, will have just two units. But unlike the ultra-luxury boutique projects with just a handful of apartments sprouting elsewhere in Manhattan, these units won’t be massive – the entire building will contain just 2,166 square feet of residential space. Each unit will be a duplex, and the building’s footprint will be a mere 609 square feet, covering 80 percent of the 761-square foot lot.
The apartments will sit atop a 600-square foot retail space on the ground floor.
The project is being developed by Vertigo Ventures LLC. The firm picked up the tiny slice of Harlem in May, for just $145,000 – barely more than $50 per buildable square foot, reflecting the difficulty inherent in developing such a tiny site. That’s still more than the $85,000 that the seller paid for the lot, though, back in 2005, which is wedged in between a tenement and a row of brownstones, and across the street from the Saint Nicholas Houses.
The designer listed on the permit is Bahary Architecture, whose ground-up multifamily portfolio consists largely of modest brick buildings in the outer boroughs.
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