Photo: The Living Room at 605 West 42nd Street A new year has begun and rental predictions for NYC real estate in 2016 are already dynamic seedlings of thought. Although the city is a shapeshifting landscape with equally elusive intangible and concrete trends, it’s still fun to forecast the future.

North Brooklyn’s landscape has changed considerably over the past decade. Williamsburg, and the area around it, saw the introduction of several huge developments to meet surging popularity, especially around the waterfront. While glass high-rises are taking a more prominent place in North Brooklyn’s real estate, these five luxury apartment buildings keep things low-key.

This week, former governor Eliot Spitzer announced plans to move forward with his large-scale project for South Williamsburg, three 24-story towers at 420-430 Kent Avenue on the East River waterfront. Kent Avenue has gained notoriety for into its Gold Coast for all the ultra-modern, futuristic development that’s been taking shape on the rezoned land; and Mr. Spitzer’s project will further foster this reputation.

As we’ve written many times before, Brooklyn is more than exciting enough to rival Manhattan’s popularity; but whereas Manhattan is increasingly defined by its skyscrapers, Brooklyn’s new construction rentals take on contextually aware low-rises.  Here are three of our favorite new rental projects in Brooklyn in the works right now.

On Monday, Two Trees’ conversion plans for the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg received approval from Community Board One’s Land Use Committee in Brooklyn. Two Trees will propose the plan to the full community board in the near future.

So, you’re back from vacation, and you want to know what news you missed out on during the summer months. Before we look ahead to the upcoming fall season, let’s take one look back on some of the biggest news to hit the New York City luxury rental market in the summer of 2013.

Well, renters of New York City, we have some good news and some bad news. The Williamsburg at 373 Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg (of course) has finally began leasing. The 11-story Karl Fischer-designed building has 88-units of studios, one- and two-bedroom apartments. The Williamsburg is located in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in all of the city, so it’s expected to reach occupancy extremely quickly.

The rental market keeps blooming throughout Brooklyn and so does the number of subway riders. In Williamsburg for instance, the number of commuters has gone up almost 45% at the Lorimer/Metropolitan station. Hence the need to improve transportations with the G train probably being the next target. 

Apartment hunters in New York City let out a collective groan earlier this month when a new survey on the city’s rental market declared that the average rent of an apartment in the city has reached a whopping $3,017 per month—that’s three times the average rent of an apartment in America. Once again, it is the city’s low vacancy rates that are being blamed for this meteoric rent rise, with landlords taking advantage of the high demand to shoot up the asking prices of their apartments. But all is not lost—at least not yet. As hard as it may be to believe, there are still apartments on the market that are asking for rents less than the current average in the market. We went through our extensive database to find out apartments that have asking rents of less than $3,000 a month, and we have listed below some of our favorites (read as: the least expensive picks) from that select collection of available apartments.