Canarsie, Brooklyn – Homey, but No Haven From Hard Times
Even years ago, back when she rented in East Flatbush, Ismay Gardner knew she liked Canarsie, a quiet suburban community on Brooklyn’s south shore with row upon row of detached houses and neat lawns. When she decided to buy a house, Canarsie was the first place she looked, and even when she moved — twice — it was within Canarsie.
Now, Ms. Gardner, who is 58 and has two grown children, believes she may finally have reached the end of her time in the neighborhood. Partly because of a feeling that the area is not quite as tidy as it used to be, and partly because she is simply restless for something new, she has decided to sell the two-family house on 103rd Street, in a leafy corner of the neighborhood, which she bought just last year to live in with her son and daughter.
Her timing, people who follow real estate in the neighborhood say, is less than ideal. Hit hard by the mortgage crisis, Canarsie is one of the city’s trouble spots for foreclosures. A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, released in January, found that the 11236 ZIP code, which includes Canarsie and the adjacent Flatlands neighborhood, had the highest number of subprime mortgages in the city, 1,930, and that lenders had initiated foreclosure proceedings against 12 percent of them.