New Construction vs Prewar Apartments in Brooklyn

What prewar gives you

Start with the case for the old buildings, because it is a strong one and it is not only sentiment.

Character you cannot rebuild

Plaster ceilings, moldings with a century of paint in them, pocket doors, brick laid by hand. Parlor floors in brownstones carry ceiling heights that no current pro forma would approve, and the volume of the room is the thing you feel first when you walk in. Staging cannot reproduce it.

Blocks that took a century

Prewar stock clusters in the neighborhoods people photograph: Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill. A run of matching stoops under mature trees is a streetscape nobody has figured out how to build new at block scale. You are renting the block as much as the apartment.

What a new building gives you

Now the other side, which is less romantic and more about the hours in your week.

Systems that work

Cooling you control from inside the apartment rather than from a radiator valve that only has two settings. Wiring built for the number of devices a household now runs. Windows that were manufactured this century. None of this is glamorous, and all of it is what you notice in August and February.

Shared space you would otherwise buy

A gym, a roof, a package room, bike storage, a garage, somewhere to work that is not your kitchen table. Priced separately, several of those are a monthly bill each. In a newer building they are part of the rent, which is a real part of the comparison and is routinely left out of it.

Quiet

Current code sets requirements for sound transfer through floors and party walls. Buildings from the 1910s were built before those rules existed, and no amount of rug solves it. If you work from home, this one item may outrank everything else on the list.

The comparison, feature by feature

These are tendencies of each category, not promises about any particular building. Every line here is a question to ask about the specific apartment you are standing in.

What “new” means in code terms

The word new is doing a lot of work in most listings, and it is worth knowing what it maps onto. New York City rewrites its energy code on a cycle, and the version a building was filed under is a real fact about how it performs.

NYC Buildings states that enforcement of the 2025 New York City Energy Conservation Code began on March 30, 2026, that applications filed on or after that date are subject to it, and that complete applications filed on or before March 29, 2026 remain under the 2020 code. A building filed in 2015 sits under an older version again. None of that is visible from the sidewalk, and all of it shows up in the envelope, the glazing and the winter bill.

The practical version of this for a renter is simple. A building finished in the last decade was designed under a code written for current expectations of insulation, air sealing and mechanical efficiency. A building finished in 1912 was designed before any of those rules existed and has been adapted since. Neither statement is a judgement. They are different starting points, and they explain most of the comparison table above.

Lead paint, and the rules that follow the year

This is the part of the prewar conversation people skip, and it is the part with actual legal machinery behind it. HPD’s lead-based paint guidance sets it out.

• Which buildings. Local Law 1 of 2004 covers buildings built before 1960, and buildings built between January 1, 1960 and January 1, 1978 where the owner knows there is lead-based paint.
• What the owner must assume. In a covered building the owner must presume the paint is lead-based unless it has been tested otherwise, monitor painted surfaces, and repair peeling paint properly in apartments with children under six, using certified firms and workers who follow prescribed safe work practices. Records have to be kept for at least ten years.
• The January notice. Owners send an annual notice every January asking whether a child under six routinely spends ten or more hours a week in the apartment. HPD asks tenants to return it by February 16. It is a real form with a real deadline, and it arrives in the month everyone is ignoring their mail.
• Federal disclosure. Separately, federal law requires a seller or landlord to disclose known lead-based paint and provide a hazard pamphlet for housing built before 1978. The EPA explains the disclosure rule. Ask for it in writing.

None of this makes an older building a bad place to live. It does mean the year a building went up determines a set of obligations you should expect to see honored, and a landlord who has never heard of the annual notice has told you something useful.

Rent stabilization sits mostly on one side

The NYC Rent Guidelines Board describes itself as mandated to set rent adjustments for approximately one million dwelling units subject to the Rent Stabilization Law. That is a large share of the city’s rental housing, and older buildings are much more likely to be in it than new ones.

What this means for a renter comparing two apartments is that the renewal rules can be completely different. In a stabilized apartment, the annual increase is set by the Board rather than negotiated: guidelines for leases commencing between October 1, 2026 and September 30, 2027 were adopted on June 25, 2026, and the orders are published on the Board’s own site. In a market-rate apartment, the renewal is whatever the owner offers and you accept.

HPD’s tenant rights page puts it plainly: if your apartment is subject to rent control or rent stabilization, DHCR and the Rent Guidelines Board determine what your landlord may increase the rent by. Ask which category an apartment is in before you sign, not at renewal.

How to look a building up yourself

Four steps, twenty minutes, and you will know more about the building than the listing intended to tell you.

1. 01

   Find the year it was built

   The City’s ZoLa map and the PLUTO dataset both carry a year built for every tax lot in New York City. Two minutes here answers the question the listing was vague about, and the year drives several of the rules below.

2. 02

   Read the building’s housing record

   HPD Online holds the housing maintenance record for a building by address. Look at what has been filed and, more usefully, at the pattern: a handful of closed items is ordinary, a long run of repeats in the same category is a description of how the building is run.

3. 03

   Ask the age question out loud

   When was the roof done, when were the boilers replaced, when was the electrical service last upgraded. A leasing agent who knows the answers is telling you something, and so is one who does not.

4. 04

   Ask the super, and ask a resident

   If the super is around, this is the most useful conversation available to you and it takes three minutes. Ask how many buildings they cover, whether they live on site, and what hours they work. Ask what breaks most often here. Ask what happens at 9pm on a Sunday when a pipe goes, and who you would actually be calling.

   Then catch someone coming out of the lobby and ask about water pressure on the top floor, heat in February, and how long a repair request usually takes. Thirty seconds of that is worth more than the previous three steps put together, and nobody has ever minded being asked.

Costs that never appear in the listing

A cheaper rent line can be the more expensive apartment. Price these six things for yourself before comparing two homes, using current local prices rather than any figure published in an article.

• Laundry. Wash-and-fold or self-service, every week, plus the hours. Get a quote from the nearest laundromat to the apartment you are considering and multiply by twelve.
• Window air-conditioners. You buy them, you install them, you store them, and they draw more power than a system sized for the space. Price the units and add a realistic summer electricity increase.
• Moving into a walk-up. Movers price stairs. Ask for a quote for the actual floor before you fall in love with a fourth-floor apartment.
• Older infrastructure. Water pressure, drainage and pest control are the three recurring complaints in older stock. Ask current residents, not the listing.
• Pre-1978 disclosures. Federal law requires owners to disclose known lead-based paint in housing built before 1978 and to provide a hazard pamphlet, and New York City layers Local Law 1 of 2004 on top of it. The section above sets out what both actually require.
• The commute, priced. If the cheaper apartment is on a single subway line and the dearer one is on three, that is a difference in reliability rather than in minutes. The MTA lists the fare at $3 per trip, so two trips a day five days a week is a line item you can add to either side.

Run those numbers and a prewar apartment that looked a couple of hundred dollars cheaper can land level with, or above, a newer building that includes the same things in the rent.

How to decide

Skip the question of which is better. Ask which compromises you will still accept in month six of the lease, in the season you like least.

Where 875 Fourth Avenue sits

875 Fourth Avenue is on the new-construction side of this comparison, and the useful thing to say about it is what is confirmed rather than what sounds good.

• Kitchens have stainless steel appliances and quartz countertops. Every residence includes a dishwasher.
• Apartments use split-system A/C units. Confirm controls and the heating setup for the specific residence with EXR leasing.
• Ask EXR leasing to confirm the laundry equipment and setup in the specific residence you are considering. This is the honest answer rather than the category answer, and it is worth asking of every new building you look at.
• The building has a resident fitness center. The fitness center is open daily from 6:00 AM through 11:59 PM.
• The building has a resident co-working lounge. Shared space also includes a furnished rooftop terrace, bike storage, a package room and an on-site garage with 21 parking spaces. Current availability, pricing, eligibility, and assignment terms must be confirmed with EXR leasing.
• Doorman service is provided from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, seven days a week.

Ceiling height, windows, closets, outdoor space, and the view vary by residence; ask EXR leasing to confirm them for the specific home you are considering. The building sits on Fourth Avenue between Sunset Park, Greenwood Heights and Park Slope, near the 36th Street D, N and R station. Current homes, layouts and pricing are on the availability page, which is the only place on this site where those numbers are current.

Common questions