Private equity firms have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last few years buying up smaller apartment buildings in gentrifying — or already gentrified — neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.
One such firm, the Carlyle Group, has purchased more than 150 apartment buildings, largely in the trendy Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods in Brooklyn, since 2020, The New York TimesOther private equity-backed real estate investment companies, including Conway Capital and Peak Capital Advisors, have bought up a similar number of buildings in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Williamsburg, and in Ridgewood, Queens.
Dozens of tenants in these buildings are concerned with sharp rent increases and slow response to maintenance issues they've experienced, the Times reported. Smaller buildings in Brooklyn are particularly attractive to private equity firms because their apartments are in high demand in a very hot housing market, and they often have limits on property taxes and aren't rent stabilized, according to the Times.
Private equity firms own a very small, but growing, fraction of American real estate. Institutional investors bought