Borough Confirms It Is Now So Expensive That the Word ‘Authentic’ Has Been Priced Out and Replaced With ‘Curated Authenticity’ at a 340 Percent Premium
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
BROOKLYN, NY — Borough President Antonio Reynoso announced Thursday that Brooklyn has completed the gentrification of all previously ungentrified neighbourhoods, making it the first NYC borough to reach “full gentrification saturation” — a condition in which median apartment prices exceed median income by a factor of four or more in every zip code simultaneously, and in which the concept of “up-and-coming” can no longer be applied because every neighbourhood has up-and-come, several multiple times. Reynoso said the borough was forming a Blue Ribbon Commission on Post-Gentrification Identity, charged with answering what Brooklyn is now that it has stopped becoming anything.
The Timeline of Full Saturation
The Borough President’s office released a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood gentrification timeline: Park Slope in the 1980s, Williamsburg and Fort Greene through the 1990s and 2000s, Bushwick, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, and Gowanus through the 2010s, completing with East New York, Brownsville, and Canarsie in the early 2020s. No Brooklyn zip code now has a median two-bedroom rent below $2,400. The timeline includes a chart tracking the three indicators the office uses to measure progress: the first coffee shop charging more than $6 for a latte, the first “wine and charcuterie concept,” and the first resident who moved from Manhattan describing Brooklyn as “more real.” All three are now present in every zip code.
What Brooklyn Means After Authenticity
The Commission on Post-Gentrification Identity will grapple with questions that urban sociologists identify as genuinely unresolved. What does Brooklyn mean culturally when the people who built that culture can no longer afford to live there? What happens to the concept of Brooklyn style when it is available only to people with Columbia degrees and SaaS salaries — who are, by most definitions, not the origin of Brooklyn style? Sociologist Dr. Sharon Zukin of CUNY Graduate Center, who spent four decades studying urban authenticity and anticipated most of what is happening in books that planners have cited and not acted upon, said the Commission was addressing a “real and important cultural question” and that its findings would be interesting regardless of whether anything could be done about them. She said she remained engaged because the alternative was worse. The Brooklyn Paper noted the post-gentrification condition is harder to write about than gentrification because it removes the narrative of change, leaving only a static expensiveness that is harder to organise around. The charcuterie is excellent. That is the tragedy.
All New York cultural satire at Bohiney Magazine and the neighbourhood comedy at The London Prat.
The charcuterie concept is very good. McSweeney’s has published seven essays about this.
Who Brooklyn Is For Now and Whether That Is Anybody’s Decision to Make
The hardest question the Post-Gentrification Commission will face is whether the transformation of Brooklyn is a problem to be solved or a condition to be managed, and what the difference between those two framings means in practice. If it is a problem, the solutions involve rent stabilisation, community land trusts, anti-displacement tenant protections, and affordable housing production at a scale that requires political will and public investment that has not materialised at the required level. If it is a condition, the policy response involves managing the transition, supporting displaced residents in their new locations, and accepting that the economic geography of a city changes and that the change is not fully reversible. Most housing researchers say it is both simultaneously, which is intellectually honest and politically paralyzing. The NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy has studied gentrification in New York for two decades and describes its effects as mixed — producing neighbourhood improvements and services while simultaneously displacing long-term residents who bear the costs of those improvements without enjoying most of the benefits. The Commission will presumably document this finding and recommend actions. Whether the actions will occur is a different question from whether they are documented. Brooklyn has been documented extensively. The documentation has not made it cheaper.
The Cultural Geography of Displacement: Where Do People Go?
One dimension of Brooklyn’s post-gentrification story that the Commission will need to address is what happened to the people who were displaced in the gentrification process — and where they went. Research by the NYU Furman Center tracks displacement patterns in New York and finds that residents displaced from gentrifying Brooklyn neighbourhoods moved primarily to outer Queens, the Bronx, and suburban New Jersey — areas with lower rents, longer commutes, and reduced access to the urban amenities and social networks that made Brooklyn valuable in the first place. This displacement creates a second geography of loss that is less visible than the original displacement because it happens off the map that most cultural observers are drawing. The neighbourhood changes. The displaced residents leave the frame. The neighbourhood is subsequently described as having transformed, which is accurate. What is less often said is that the transformation involved the replacement of one community with another and that the replaced community exists somewhere, commuting longer distances to lower-wage jobs and maintaining connections to the original neighbourhood through the kind of social ties that survive displacement for a generation before attenuating. The Commission will document this. Whether it will produce policies that prevent it happening again elsewhere is the question that follows from the documentation.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/brooklyn-fully-gentrified-post-saturation/