Sunset Park renters face tight supply and rising costs

Tania Barnes had lived for eight years in a three-family brownstone on 45th Street in Sunset Park with her husband and son. The family had known the owner planned to sell, but once the building went into contract, they found themselves scrambling to find a new home before Sept. 1.

“It happened so fast,” Barnes said. The family had a month-to-month lease and a move-out date of Sept. 1.

“I hadn’t really been paying attention to the rental market,” Barnes said. The family wanted to stay in Sunset Park, where her husband, Lorenzo Tijerina, founded the Sunset Post and where they have longstanding community ties.

They searched StreetEasy and Zillow and reached out to friends and neighbors. Barnes said desirable lower-priced listings disappeared quickly, and many inquiries went unanswered.

“It was so distressing,” she said. Some apartments they saw cost more than their existing home while offering significantly less space or light. At one point, the family rode bicycles through the neighborhood looking for “for rent” signs advertising apartments that might not be listed online.

Many New York landlords use an income screening standard of roughly 40 times the monthly rent, although it is not a legal requirement. At $3,000 a month, that benchmark would mean $120,000 in gross annual income.

“For a while, I was just like, we’re just gonna go into the sea. I don’t know what we’re gonna do,” Barnes said.

Data from NYU’s Furman Center puts Sunset Park’s rental vacancy rate at 2.8% in 2024. Citywide, the 2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey found vacancy rates below 1% for apartments renting for less than $2,400.

Barnes asked neighbor Warren Holstein, a real estate salesperson who has lived in Sunset Park since 2010, for help.

“I always tell people to try to do it on their own,” Holstein said. He described the rental search as “exhausting” and “very competitive.”

Holstein said the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which capped rental application and credit-check fees at $20, made it easier for renters to apply to multiple apartments. He said desirable or lower-priced apartments can receive large numbers of applications and that renters sometimes bid above the listed rent.

He also pointed to high interest rates, which can keep would-be homebuyers in the rental market longer. Industry City and Costco, he added, have also increased awareness of Sunset Park among people looking for housing.

“Land is really expensive and hard to find, especially if it’s privately owned and people want to extract as much profit as they can from land,” said Michelle de la Uz, executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a nonprofit that works on affordable housing in South Brooklyn.

De la Uz said another obstacle to building affordable housing is the limited amount of government and rental subsidy available compared with the demand.

“There’s just not enough government subsidy or rental subsidy to go around, to meet the level of need,” she said. “You basically get in line for your subsidy and the line right now is four or five years long.”

The Fifth Avenue Committee has built two fully affordable housing projects in Sunset Park in recent years. De la Uz said Sunset Park Library & Apartments, with 50 affordable apartments, received about 60,000 applications, including about 7,000 from Community Board 7.

She also pointed to Sunset Park’s many small, family-owned two- and three-family buildings, some of which have long functioned as relatively affordable housing without formal regulation. As those properties change hands at much higher sale prices and interest rates, she said, new owners can face larger mortgages that put upward pressure on rents.

Furman Center data show Sunset Park had 48,234 housing units in 2006 and 43,431 in 2024. In inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars, the median sales price per unit for two- to four-family buildings rose from $236,650 in 2000 to $731,670 in 2025.

“As people get priced out of neighborhoods like Park Slope or South Slope, they’re going to keep going south,” de la Uz said. “You’re going to have higher-income people competing with lower- and moderate-income people for the same units. And so that is a form of gentrification.”

Kiyoko Fuchimoto, a licensed real estate salesperson who has worked in Brooklyn for 13 years, raised another concern about the FARE Act. The law, passed in 2024 and effective in June 2025, prevents a broker representing a landlord from charging that broker’s fee to the tenant.

“I really don’t know at the end if it really helped renters, because when this law went into effect, the landlord started increasing the rent,” Fuchimoto said. She said some landlords appeared to raise rents to absorb the broker cost. “The rent doesn’t come down when they pay off the broker’s fee.”

“Historically, Sunset was very, very affordable,” Fuchimoto said. “So people are coming to Sunset now.”

After weeks of searching, Barnes signed a lease for a smaller apartment on 40th Street in Sunset Park for $2,750 a month, $550 more than the family’s previous rent.

“From what we were seeing, that was actually not a bad price,” she said.

“I just don’t know really where that’s gonna come from,” Barnes said. “I already feel like I live very frugally, and I don’t really know what else to cut.”

Still, she said, “we’re going to make it work.”