UPPER MANHATTAN

Two seemingly similar buildings flank 123rd Street on Madison Avenue in upper Manhattan. They were both built in the late 1990s, and they both started life as affordable co-op housing under the umbrella of the city’s Housing Development Corporation (HDC) and department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). They even have similar names: Maple Plaza and Maple Court.

But these two co-ops have taken sharply different paths. Maple Court recently refinanced its HDC mortgage and continues to live by the restrictions and protections that come with it.

Across 123rd Street, Maple Plaza decided to break away from its affordable-housing origins and pursue life as a conventional co-op. Here’s why.

The average price of an apartment in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods is now higher than that of Manhattan co-ops and condos, according to a StreetEasy study cited by Crain's New York Business. While the magazine notes the "obvious caveat" of comparing neighborhoods with an entire borough — where apartments in Inwood and other upper-Manhattan locales sell for far less than in such luxury area as Central Park South or Tribeca — at least two Brooklyn spots blow Manhattan's $890,000 median out of the water: DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Underpass), at $1.5 million, and the Columbia Street waterfront, running through Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, at $1.147 million. DUMBO, in fact, averaged less than just a half-dozen Manhattan nabes. On the bright side, Kensington is still very affordable.