BUILD YOUR OWN.(The Talk of the Town)(house in New York, New York)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 19-JAN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Here's a way around the city's increasingly impossible real-estate market: build your own house. Granted, it's the road less travelled--if indeed it's travelled at all. (In the last thirteen years, according to Buildings Department records, only one new single-family house has been built in the West Village.) Last month, however, construction began on a town house at 829 Greenwich Street--a small patch of land that sits on the dividing line between the West Village and the meatpacking district.

The owners of the property are a young English couple with two small children who moved to New York in the spring of 2001. "We looked at brownstones in the West Village," the wife said recently. "But we didn't have the budget to buy...

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