COBBLE HILL

Instead of affordable apartments, more luxury condos coming to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

The city’s amenities race has officially jumped the shark.

Residents of Cobble Hill are giving a resounding thumbs down to the high-rise condo towers that Fortis Property Group has proposed to build in the former Long Island College Hospital site. Locals believe the towers "would cause a drastic surge in population density and traffic congestion in the quaint neighborhood," reported DNAinfo. One of the proposals includes one tower that would be "at least" 40 stories high built between Pacific Street and Atlantic Avenue, along with 19-, 14- and 11-story buildings. The other proposal, which would require rezoning, "would put a 40-story residential building at Hicks Street and Atlantic Avenue closer to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway with 30- and 20-story buildings at the LICH site." Locals say both proposals are "out-of-scale" and that the tallest structures are at least twice as high as they think they should be. They are also "particularly anxious over the influx of new residents that the development would bring." They should also be concerned about that "at least 40 stories" — residents of the Lower East Side got a nasty surprise after a proposed tower they already thought was too tall at 56 stories got the okay to rise to up to three times higher than the Manhattan Bridge.

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.