Ditmas Park

Ditmas Park: Westminster Road and Albemarle Road.  (Photo: Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao)

Ditmas Park looks less like Brooklyn than it does the inner-ring suburbs of another city: Bethesda, say. “It’s country in the city,” says longtime broker Mary Kay Gallagher. “People say, I didn’t know Brooklyn was like this!” You’d expect Victorian stand-alone houses and good schools to have driven up prices, but the median house price per square foot, per StreetEasy.com, is $363, which is barely half of Park Slope’s ($633) and a third of Brooklyn Heights’s ($970). Corcoran’s Laura Rozos, who lives here herself, says she has begun to see brownstone Brooklynites selling their townhouses, “putting a lot of money in the bank, and then buying houses here.” It remains a diverse (economically, socially, culturally) community, and P.S. 217 and 139 have good infrastructure and attentive parents. The dining scene grows richer by the day, too: Rozos has two restaurateurs actively seeking space.