Thanks to Gowanus Lounge, I am now happily aware of Adventures of a Gal. The blogger has lived in a Carroll Street apartment for five years, and is now looking with her husband, for a house or apartment in Jersey City. Here’s a post about the pain of being priced out of where you want to live.
I guess you get to a point with anything — when the love just stops. I have been thinking about it and I think Brooklyn has stopped loving me (for now). That’s not to say that we won’t eventually come back here because we love Brooklyn, I think it’s just the time to leave for a bit. It seems many others are having the same problems as we are and hence, the same thoughts.
When you are getting priced out of your own hood (happening a lot lately in my fine borough) it makes it hard to move on with future plans for your life. Yes, it’s convenient to travel to our jobs, but is that enough? It’s finally a time in our lives when we can buy a property and it’s hard to give that up just because the place we live is too overpriced and inflated to buy anything.
Park Slope, Red Hook, Williamsburg, DUMBO and BoCoCa have been referred to as Brooklyn’s “Creative Crescent,” do to a high volume of self-employed creative professionals. Park Slope is in first place with over 3,500 self-employed creative pros reported in 2003. Now, there are many more. Recently, with the strange shift in the NYC real estate market, this group is getting priced out of Brooklyn. Not long ago, many of people like these professionals and a large number of artists were priced out of Manhattan. It didn’t take long to price the whole population out of Brooklyn. This crisis is being called the “single largest challenge facing New York’s creative core.”
What would New York be, – hell, what would BROOKLYN be – without this “creative core”? If all of the artists and designers, etc. keep being priced out of this town, where will they go? We are going to Jersey City, but where are all the others going? And what will this borough be in a few more years? Without culture, without art (or maybe just without the artists)… Whatever the case may be, the prospect seems bleak.
Okay, so how about Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Kensington, Midwood, East Flatbush? Unless you are looking in the real hinterlands of Jersey City, I can’t imagine how that could be cheaper than the entire borough of Brooklyn, especially with the NJ real estate taxes…
Anne, actually I could not afford to buy in Bed Stuy, Crown Heights or Flatbush. These neighborhoods, by their proximity to where the rich have taken over, alone are enough to drive up the ridiculous prices.
Though I think it’s a horrendous turn of events that the very people who made the northern neighborhoods ‘hip’ in the first place – the artists and creative types – are being priced out, unfortunately this is the common arc of real estate. At one time, artists moved to the empty factories below Houston street for cheap rents and large, raw spaces to do their work. Now? The area’s a pricey, trendy mall for tourists. I’m not saying the Slope, et al, will suffer the same fate, though DUMBO might.
A commentor also asks where will the people that the creative types displace go. This is also all too familiar, in New York and elsewere. People in neighborhoods all over Brooklyn have been displaced, or felt like they were, for decades.
Also, it’s kind of the height of arrogance and myopia to ask what will become of Brooklyn without them. Brooklyn is also a borough of many immigrant neighborhoods, bedroom communities for Manhattan, and long-time residents who were here way before the artists came. Brooklyn will survive with or without you.
It’s important to remember that there is more to Brooklyn than just the neighborhoods mentioned here. Creative professionals are not getting priced out of the entire borough, they are just being forced to consider neighborhoods other than the ones they made hip enough for millionaires to want to buy in. Plenty of people priced out of Park Slope and Williamsburg and Fort Greene are now going to Bed Stuy, Crown Heights, Flatbush, etc… which of course raises the question of where the people THEY displace will go.