24 Clinton Street
24 Clinton Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn
BBL 3002380061 · BIN 3001935
- Year built
- 1926
- Type
- Cooperative
- Units
- 60
- Floors
- 6
- Landmark
- No
- Flip tax
- 15% of the seller's profit (sale price less price originally paid), payable at closing; proprietary lease Paragraph 16(h) as amended at special shareholders' meeting July 29, 2004; proceeds to Capital Improvement Reserve Fund
- Pied-à-terre
- Not permitted - residency requirement; only occupants may be named on the stock certificate and proprietary lease, parents may act as guarantor only
- Washer / dryer
- Prohibited - 'No washing machine is to be used in any apartment' (House Rule 14)
- Pets
- Permitted unless expressly disapproved in writing by the board in each instance (House Rule 12); dogs carried or leashed in public areas
Compiled by The Roebling Research Desk from the building’s offering plan, amendments, and related building documents (primary source dated 2010-2017 documents). Reported and subject to confirmation. Board policies can change by amendment — confirm at the offer stage.
Most Brooklyn Heights cooperatives were made by sponsors. This one was made by its tenants, and the paper trail is among the most unusual in the district.
The building went up in 1926, in the decade that gave the Heights nearly all of its prewar elevator stock — six stories of brick on the Clinton Street spine, with an elevator, a superintendent, a courtyard, and the compact one- and two-bedroom rooms that define the neighborhood's middle tier. Its ownership history then took a turn almost no other Heights apartment house shares. On September 16, 1976, the property passed by deed to the City of New York through in rem tax foreclosure — the fate of thousands of buildings in the fiscal-crisis years, and a rare one for an address this good. The tenants stayed, organized, and entered HPD's Tenant Interim Lease program, which handed management of in-rem buildings to tenant associations, trained them to run the building, and pointed them toward buying it outright.
They did. The corporation was incorporated on September 1, 1984; the tenant-sponsored plan went on file with the Department of Law under number NY840044, with amendments in September 1985 and September 1986; and on January 12, 1987 the City deeded the building to the corporation. The total consideration was $250,000 — $63,500 in cash and a $187,500 purchase-money note and mortgage held by the City, with a further HPD rehabilitation mortgage of $166,169 recorded that June. For a sixty-unit elevator building three blocks from the Promenade, those numbers are the reason this cooperative's cost basis, governance culture, and transfer-fee structure all read differently from the 1980s sponsor conversions around it.
The City's mortgage came with conditions: for as long as the purchase-money note and mortgage remained in effect, seventy-five percent of the profit on any resale of shares was to be directed at HPD's discretion to repayment of the City loan or to a building repair fund, with the restriction inscribed on every stock certificate and proprietary lease, and the corporation was organized under Article XI of the Private Housing Finance Law. That is the standard architecture of a Tenant Interim Lease conversion, and a buyer's attorney should establish which of those provisions still attach to a specific apartment's shares today.
The more recent record shows a corporation a long way from its starting point. By the August 31, 2017 audit the balance sheet carried no mortgage payable at all — roughly $1.29 million in assets against $43,571 in liabilities — with a capital improvement fund and separate reserve funds together holding close to $870,000 in cash. In 2004 the shareholders voted their own 15 percent transfer fee on profit into Paragraph 16(h) of the proprietary lease, and that fee has since produced six-figure annual revenue: $139,500 in fiscal 2016 and $128,845 in fiscal 2017, against roughly $484,000 in maintenance. A transfer fee producing that kind of income is the clearest evidence available that shares here change hands, on the open market, at real gains.
For buyers, the practical picture is a debt-free, shareholder-run, union-staffed prewar elevator building on one of the Heights' best-connected streets, with a strict residency requirement, a no-washing-machine rule, and the steepest flip tax in the district's mainstream inventory. For sellers, the 15 percent is the number that governs the deal, and it should be modeled from the first pricing conversation.
Architecture and unit composition
The building presents as a six-story brick apartment house built to the Heights' mid-1920s formula: a masonry street wall scaled to the row houses around it, an elevator, an interior court that brings light and air to the rear lines, and apartments organized on the prewar plan of entry foyer, separated kitchen, and defined rooms. No architect attribution survives in the public record — the lot sits outside the historic district, so the Landmarks Preservation Commission's building-by-building research does not reach it, and the conversion documents name engineers and counsel but not a designer.
Unit composition is where the diligence work sits. The 1984 plan covered 58 apartment units, city records carry 60, and the fiscal 2017 audit describes 56 residential apartments. That drift, in a building tenant-owned since 1987, is the ordinary result of combinations approved over decades, and it makes the specific apartment's share allocation, layout, and renovation state a more reliable guide than line-to-line comparison. The corporation also carries at least one apartment as a rental, with apartment rent recorded as other revenue alongside laundry income.
Because the building is outside the historic district, exterior work does not require Landmarks approval — a meaningful operating difference from most Heights co-ops of this age. The corporation replaced all of the building's exterior windows under a contract priced at $271,120, running from fiscal 2013 to completion in fiscal 2016, without landmark-grade review.
Building operations
30 Clinton Street Tenants, Inc. runs as a shareholder-controlled corporation with professional bookkeeping and a light management fee — $16,000 a year in the fiscal years audited, a self-directed board's fee structure rather than a full-service agency arrangement. Fiscal 2017 operating expenses ran to roughly $205,000, dominated by payroll and union costs; real estate taxes of about $207,000 were the single largest line in the budget, against total revenue of roughly $703,000 and an operating surplus for the year.
The reserve posture is the strongest argument the building makes in a lender's file: at the 2017 audit the corporation held a capital improvement fund of $513,057 and reserve funds of $356,319 against essentially no debt. The auditors note that management has not commissioned a formal reserve study, so the reserve is discretionary rather than engineered — worth asking about, along with the Local Law 11 façade cycle and any assessment history since the window project.
Service level is the district's standard at this scale: elevator, resident superintendent, basement laundry, assigned storage, and house rules routing service complaints in writing through the managing agent or the board — plus the texture of a self-governing building, from an elevator-padding protocol for move-ins to an 80 percent floor-covering requirement and a requirement that every shareholder leave keys with the superintendent.
Recent sales
The retrade record
Lines that have traded more than once in the public record — the building’s appreciation arc, apartment by apartment.
Recent transfers at this building, sourced from NYC Department of Finance records. Apartment-level detail (line, condition, asking-price context) verified upon consultation request.
| Date | Unit | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 1, 2025 | 3B | $680,000 |
| Oct 6, 2025 | 1E | $599,000 |
| Mar 21, 2025 | 2AB | $1,499,000 |
| Feb 1, 2022 | 5D | $1,205,000 |
| Jan 13, 2022 | 4J | $610,000 |
| Dec 16, 2021 | 6E | $585,000 |
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 3-00238-0061) and verified listing data. Apartment-level facts (line, condition, asking-price context) curated and cross-verified by The Roebling Team research desk. Not all transactions cross-verify with ACRIS records — sponsor and LLC purchases sometimes record at stipulated values rather than market price.
What to know if you’re buying
Model the flip tax on your exit, not just the seller's. Fifteen percent of profit is the steepest transfer-fee structure in the Heights' mainstream co-op inventory. It does not affect your purchase price, but it will affect your eventual net, and it belongs in the hold-period math from day one.
You have to live here. The residency requirement is explicit and enforced at the application stage. If the plan is a pied-à-terre, an investment purchase, or a parent buying for a student, this building is not the one.
Have counsel confirm what survives from the HPD chapter. The 1987 City deed carried a profit-recapture restriction tied to the life of the City's purchase-money mortgage, and the corporation was organized under Article XI of the Private Housing Finance Law. The audited financials show no mortgage payable and the shareholders adopted their own transfer fee in 2004, but which restrictions still attach to a specific apartment's shares is a title-and-counsel question worth asking directly.
Confirm the unit count, the share allocation, and the laundry rule. Sixty units in city records, 58 in the plan, 56 in the audit — price the shares on the specific apartment and confirm any combination approvals. And House Rule 14 prohibits washing machines in apartments, a threshold issue rather than a negotiating point for many buyers.
What to know if you’re selling
Lead with the balance sheet. A debt-free cooperative with a capital improvement fund and separate reserves is an underwriting asset with lenders and buyers' attorneys alike; most competing prewar listings in the Heights cannot say the same.
Set price with the transfer fee already in the model. A 15 percent fee on profit is unusual enough that the other side will not price it in for you. Run net proceeds first, then position.
Frame the building fully. The tenant-purchase history is a distinctive story and sophisticated Heights buyers respond to it — but it comes with questions about residency, transfer fees, and the HPD chapter that are better answered in the marketing than discovered at contract.
Price against the district's non-doorman elevator tier. The right comparables are Heights prewar co-ops with an elevator and a superintendent, not the full-service Montague and Pierrepont corridor buildings whose maintenance runs heavier. The absence of landmark jurisdiction is worth naming: buyers who have been through a Landmarks window application elsewhere in the Heights understand what it saves.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 24 Clinton Street, also evaluate:
- 40 Clinton Street — the 1964 co-op immediately south on the same block and same side of the street; postwar scale and staffing against 24 Clinton's prewar rooms
- 130 Clinton Street — the 1925–26 tower at Joralemon, converted 1976; the Clinton Street spine's landmark-district alternative
- 99 Clinton Street — the ten-unit church conversion at Remsen; boutique scale on the same street
- 114 Clinton Street — mid-size Clinton Street co-op south of Pierrepont
- 22 Monroe Place — the 53-unit 1927 prewar co-op on the same tax block, inside the historic district
- 21 Monroe Place — small converted apartment house on the block's quiet side street
- 123 Pierrepont Street — the two-house Greek Revival co-op at the block's Pierrepont corner
- 75 Livingston Street — 1926 office tower converted to a 105-apartment co-op in 1981, at the Downtown seam
- 38 Livingston Street — 24-unit 1914 prewar co-op converted 1986; the smaller-building comparison at the district's eastern edge
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