The next frontier.
It’s been a long time since I paid attention to rental prices in the neighborhood; I’d been too distracted by watching my dream of home ownership soar well out of my reach with the escalating prices of the past 7 years. But now that I’m on the lookout for a new apartment, I’m amazed by how! expensive! everything has become. Fort Greene is out of the question, and I’ll be lucky to hang on in Clinton Hill by a fingernail. And it’s not just this area; no longer can you say, “Oh, I guess I’ll look in Kensington,” or “Maybe I’ll check out Midwood.” Sunnyside? Nope. Inwood? Forget it. ‘Cos apparently Masters of the Universe, highly paid DINKs, and affluent students able to pay $1,000 a head for a share are ponying up deep into Brooklyn, Queens, and upper Manhattan, too. Freelance, single-income, or limited-income households don’t stand a chance. MotherSister Brooklyn might become MotherSister Albany, at this rate.
So it was with great interest that I read this week’s New York magazine article on the degentrification of Red Hook, if only because it’s a distracting intellectual exercise to consider what might make a supposedly “hot” neighborhood stall along the way to having its streets paved with Starbucks and Gaps. A sidebar in the article points to Philly, Buffalo, and Baltimore as up-and-comers, but it seems like that’s been the word for several years now. Besides, what do you do for a living when you move to one of those cities? Isn’t the point of being in New York to take advantage of opportunities — professional, social — that don’t exist elsewhere?