It keeps coming up again and again. In conversations on Seventh Avenue, on the radio, in the local media. It’s definititely on my mind: the reality that New York City has become a rich person’s town. If you don’t make a gazillion dollars a year, you can’t live here anymore. Well, you can live here – but you can’t buy a house or an apartment where you wanna be. Those of us who have chosen career paths far away from Wall Street – in the arts or in the non-profit sector –  are being squeezed out of this city.

I find myself feeling marginalized even in my own neighborhood where real estate is on everyone’s lips. It hurts to have been one of the early settlers in Park Slope and to feel like there’s no place left for me.

Back in ’91, when we moved here, we were priced out of Manhattan. I, for one, had to  be dragged kicking and screaming to our first apartment on Fifth Street. You see, we needed three bedrooms because we had a new baby, a boy who is now nearly 14 years old. Our needs exceeded what we could afford and find on the other side of the river. We didn’t buy because we weren’t sure we’d even like it here. It was
Brooklyn afterall.

But Brooklyn enchanted.  The red brick, the brownstone, the afternoon light on the dogwood-lined streets really struck a chord with me. I fell in love with the scale of the neighborhood, its architectural integrity, its beauty.

So here we are all these years later: enthusiastic members of this community. We’ve had our financial ups and downs and downs but we’ve still managed to make a satifactory life for ourselves. Our kids are in the local public schools, we’re card-carrying members of the Park Slope Food Coop, and we buy most of our books at the Community Bookstore.

But times are a-changing here: Brooklyn is, once again, in transition. Only rich refugees from Manhattan can afford to buy a gorgeous limestone, or fill all those new condos along Fourth Avenue. Everything is up for grabs: Sunset Park, the Atlantic Rail Yards, Kensington, Fourth Avenue, that crazy garage on First Street and Fifth, the Gowanus. Everything that made this neighborhood special is now just a real estate developer’s dream. It’s a land grab out there and everyone’s got a price, an offer they can’t refuse.

I wish we could say that we’d had the foresight to invest. Wish we had good real estate karma. But we don’t and I guess it wasn’t meant to be. And that makes me sad…

I never thought I’d say it, let alone think it: but even I, diehard New Yorker born and bred, may be getting fed up with this town. Even I am losing my taste for a city that’s built on greed.