right on time from the daily news today:
Neil deMause: Brooklyn is dead; long live Brooklyn
BY NEIL DEMAUSE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, October 15, 2016, 5:00 AM
http://www.aecom.com/swbrooklyn/wp-c...klyn-Study.pdf
Tomorrow’s Red Hook and Sunset Park? (AECOM)
When the construction firm AECOM proposed a sea of new apartment towers for Red Hook last month — and an extension of the 1 train under the East River to better connect the subway-inaccessible neighborhood to transit — it raised eyebrows, even in today’s go-go Brooklyn. Building 45,000 new units would be the equivalent of adding the population of Albany to a neighborhood that not long ago was best known for public housing and rotting piers.
It’s all part of Brooklyn’s incredible metamorphosis from cheap-but-run-down outer borough to pricey destination, a process that’s brought consequences both good — fresh lobster rolls! — and troubling — displacement of longtime residents, and soaring rents for those who remain.
But why Brooklyn, and why now? There’s no one answer. Rather, several interlocking factors have helped bring about the New Brooklyn:
Inequality. To have $4,000-a-month rents, you need renters who can afford to pay them. We’re in the midst of a massive concentration of wealth: Thanks in part to falling tax rates on the rich, the top one-tenth of 1% of Americans now control nearly a quarter of all wealth, more than twice their share in the 1970s. This not only creates an overflow of well-off New Yorkers looking for housing — Brooklyn households earning more than $200,000 a year nearly doubled between 2005 to 2012 — but a flood of families looking to buy investment properties for their children.
Changing values. After decades of the young and affluent fleeing cities for the suburbs, we’re now in what’s been dubbed the Great Inversion, with cities from Miami to Detroit swelling with young people. Part of it involves changing attitudes around lifestyle: Bikes are cool now, cars not. But part stems from a pioneer mentality that has newcomers envisioning themselves less as rejoining their parents’ urban would-be neighbors than reclaiming lost territory. (Seen at its most blatant with the Bushwick condo called Colony 1209, which advertised for “like-minded settlers” to “Brooklyn’s new frontier.”)
Changing attitudes about race. Brooklyn lost much of its white population in the 1960s and 1970s, in part thanks to fear of the new neighbors, though much of this was filtered through fear of crime and of falling property values. Younger generations of moneyed whites, to their credit, aren’t as fearful of living near people who don’t look like themselves; unfortunately, in many neighborhoods those seeking “diversity” have found themselves part of an incoming wave that only ends up erasing what they came for.
Rezoning. Not every changing neighborhood has been the subject of a city-sponsored rezoning, but the most rapid transformation has taken place in areas like Williamsburg and downtown Brooklyn, where zoning maps were redrawn to allow high-end high rises to replace existing buildings, and existing New Yorkers. It’s a process driven all too often not by residents but by developers seeking new conquests: The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership that helped redraw Brooklyn’s skyline has been a revolving door of former city officials and real estate investors.
Branding. This is perhaps the hardest factor to define, incorporating everything from the workings of the New York Times real estate section (whose features on hot new neighborhoods have set many a realtor’s heart aflutter) to TV shows like “Friends” and “Sex and the City,” which helped sell the idea of New York as no longer a place to flee (think “Welcome Back, Kotter”), but a playground for the young and affluent.
Together, these forces can transform a neighborhood at alarming speed — and rapid change is the hardest for existing residents and small business owners to adapt to. Addressing any one in isolation won’t resolve the others, a reason why Mayor de Blasio’s plan to build our way out this mess by flooding the market with housing supply is running into resident opposition, because every new building also rebrands neighborhoods for those city-loving newcomers.
It took a complex set of forces to create the New Brooklyn; we’ll need to address all of them if we hope to make a borough that’s livable for all, not just for a few.
DeMause is author of “The Brooklyn Wars: The Stories Behind the Remaking of New York’s Most Celebrated Borough,” available at brooklynwars.com.
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