Apartments for Rent on Church Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

Часто задаваемые вопросы

• How many apartments for rent are available on Church Avenue right now?

  The housing changes character three times along this one avenue, which is unusual even by Brooklyn standards. At the Kensington end you are looking at pre-war walk-ups and two-family houses; through the middle the avenue forms the edge of Victorian Flatbush, where the stock is large freestanding houses divided into floors; and toward East Flatbush it shifts again to larger 1920s and 1930s apartment buildings along the numbered blocks. Roomster currently lists 20 apartments for rent along the corridor. What a listing is worth depends far more on which of those three it belongs to than on the street name it shares.

• How much does it cost to rent an apartment on Church Avenue?

  Three markets, three answers. At the Kensington end one-bedrooms run around $2,800 with two-bedrooms averaging near $2,550. In Flatbush the numbers jump: studios around $2,690, one-bedrooms near $3,218 and two-bedrooms about $4,315, averaging $3,380 across the neighborhood. East Flatbush is the cheapest, averaging about $2,566. You can find one-bedrooms under $2,500 a month at the East Flatbush end near Nostrand Avenue, on the blocks toward Clarkson, and in the older Kensington buildings off McDonald Avenue, while anything facing the Victorian blocks sets the top.

• What is Victorian Flatbush, and can you rent an apartment there?

  You can, though what you rent is usually a floor of a house rather than a unit in a building. Church Avenue forms the northern boundary of the Prospect Park South historic district, which runs down to Beverley Road between Buckingham and Stratford Roads, and which the developer Dean Alvord laid out from 1899 on forty acres bought from the Dutch Reformed Church and the Voorhies estate. The result is freestanding Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Tudor and Italianate houses on park-like streets, most of them long since divided into two or three floor-through apartments. Expect generous rooms, original detail, porches and gardens, and in exchange expect no elevator, older systems and heating bills that reflect a large wooden house.

• Why have Flatbush apartment rents risen so sharply?

  Because the middle of this corridor has been discovered in a way the ends have not. The average Flatbush rent is reported up close to 20 percent year over year, one of the steeper moves in Brooklyn, driven by renters moving south from Park Slope, Prospect Heights and Windsor Terrace toward the Victorian blocks and the fast B and Q ride into Midtown. The practical consequence for your search is that the middle stretch now clears quickly and often above asking, while the Kensington and East Flatbush ends have moved far less. If Flatbush prices have outrun your budget, moving one station in either direction along the same avenue is a more effective adjustment than dropping a bedroom.

• Are there apartments for rent near Church Avenue's transit and commute routes?

  Every apartment on this avenue is near a Church Avenue station; the question is which one. The B and Q from the Flatbush stretch are the fastest into Midtown and generally the reason the middle of the corridor prices highest. The F and G from Kensington serve Sixth Avenue and downtown Brooklyn, and the G is useful only if your work is in Brooklyn or Queens. The 2 and 5 from the East Flatbush end run up the East Side and serve the hospital complex on Clarkson Avenue directly. Before you compare two apartments on Church Avenue, work out which line each sits on and time your actual commute, because the rent difference between them often reflects exactly that.

• What should I check before renting an older Church Avenue apartment?

  Ask about heat, floor and layout, in that order, because nearly all of this stock is old and each stretch fails differently. In the Kensington walk-ups the usual issues are top-floor summer heat, no elevator and small kitchens. In the Victorian Flatbush houses the questions are how the house is heated and split, whether you control your own thermostat, and who handles the yard and the porch. In the larger East Flatbush buildings, ask about the boiler, hot water reliability and whether the apartment faces the street or an interior court. Across all three, confirm whether any bedroom was created by a partition, since an interior room with no window to outside air is not lawful.