(Photo: James Leyne/Corbis)

Upper East and West Side Family Apartments
If you’re looking for shelter in a real-estate storm, hide out in a classic six. In general, family-size apartments—essentially those with two or more bedrooms—on either side of Central Park are fairly bubble-proof simply because they’re so in demand. “The more square footage you have, the better, because space is rare,” says Corcoran’s Emilie O’Sullivan. During the nineties, when the market was in a tailspin, two- and three-bedroom co-ops and condos in these neighborhoods depreciated just like everything else, but managed to avoid crashing. Nowadays, as fewer couples desert the city when they have children, they’re powerfully in demand. “Good schools and families make an area more stable,” says Susan Abrams of Warburg Realty, and the Upper East and West Sides certainly have plenty of both—not that they were exactly rough turf to begin with. Still, some properties will hold value better than others. On the West Side, the prime pockets are the West Seventies and Eighties, and West End Avenue, Riverside Drive, and Central Park West; on the East, you can’t go wrong with Carnegie Hill, East End Avenue, or anything west of Lexington. Though for years prewars were universally considered better investments than postwars, that’s no longer the case, says appraiser Jeff Jackson. Today, better space wins out. If you live in a postwar three-bedroom with a gracious layout and drop-dead views off York Avenue, your property won’t depreciate as much as will a light-deprived maisonette with a claustrophobic plan off Madison. And a full-service high-rise with a gym and a concierge trumps one without the perks.

Risk Factor: 2.5