A modernist townhouse on a Clinton Hill corner that attracted a guerrilla plaque installation and sparked discussions about the city’s housing crisis has sold after more than a year on the market. Lucy Perry, a Compass broker who had the listing, tells me a buyer closed on 272 Greene Avenue on Tuesday, paying $3.85 million, a hefty chop down from the $5.2 million asking price. “It was a tough one,” Perry says of the sale. “If this had been in California, it would’ve been a different kind of sale. People are more open to modern architecture there.”
The two-family home, designed by the Swiss architect Inès Lamunière, with a severe white stucco and glass façade, highlighter-orange doors, and twisting form, stood out in a neighborhood of 19th-century brownstones and multifamily brick buildings. It is perhaps what attracted the tagger, who, as the New York Times reported last year, placed a museum-style plaque on the front of the building that read “New York City Housing Crisis, 2025.” The plaque also noted, with some inaccuracies, that the vacant building’s multimillion-dollar price tag “asks us to consider the tension between NYC’s historically low apartment vacancy rate (1.6%) and the price of this vacant duplex ($5.2 million).” Perry wasn’t a fan. “That was kind of nasty PR,” she says, adding that the criticism was unfair because the 1,300-foot lot was zoned for only a one- or two-family home and nothing more. “It wasn’t going to solve the problem of housing.”
But perhaps the mixed publicity was also a bit of a boon. Perry says the property caught the eye of several architects and rubberneckers. “Every open house I would have three types coming in,” she says. “One of them would be an architect, another would be a family, and another would be someone who was curious.” Pratt students stopped by, as did an artist from Beijing whose son lives in the city and was looking to buy; he said he has a similar concrete country home in China. The property’s unorthodox form also proved to be useful during the NBA Finals in June, when a pizzeria projected games onto the side of the building.
Perry declined to go into too much detail about No. 272’s buyer, but mentioned that the owner is a father of three coming from the city’s suburbs. When asked what drew him to the place, she explained that he felt like the price was “a good deal,” plus he was a fan of the property’s inner courtyard, which can be seen from the kitchen (a rare feature in a neighborhood of more traditional backyards, to be sure). His plan, she says, is to convert the property from its current two-family setup — consisting of a triplex and duplex unit — into a single-family home (and perhaps a slight point in favor of the property’s anonymous critic). Still, the buyer seems pretty pleased with his unconventional choice. “He said to me one of the first times we met, ‘You know, I’m never going to sell this house,’” she says.
