The Right Price and the Right Connections
Posted by Sheila Redick on March 13, 2006
Our good colleague, Otis White, writes Civic Strategies E-Newsletter, one of the very best resources for urban leaders. Otis is also a weekly commentator on "Smart City." Last week he caught this item on gentrification in The New York Times Magazine...
How does neighborhood gentrification get started? And why does the transition from desolate to hip happen so fast in some places while taking so long in others? A recent article in the New York Times Magazine gives us some clues: It has to do with transportation connections, a group with a pioneer spirit and the right price. And, of course, it needs real estate agents and developers intent on discovering the "next new neighborhood" and moving in ahead of competitors.
The article looked at Brooklyn's Bushwick, a neighborhood that was about as far down in the early 1990s as any in New York. How far down? In the 1977 blackout, when the electric grid failed and the city plunged into darkness, Bushwick was a scene of some of the city's worst rioting and arson. Later it was ground zero for the crack cocaine epidemic, and even today the median income there is about $22,000 and 20 percent of residents are on welfare. Curb appeal remains next to zero. There are, the article says, "soot-cover stores, forgotten (for the moment, anyway) tenements, forlorn housing project, factories that may or may not be empty, auto-repair shops," and on and on. So what makes real estate agents so sure this will be a hot neighborhood soon?
Because the artists have moved in. Bushwick is filled with dancers, sculptors and painters who came a few years ago in search of live-in studios with cheap rents. And they've, in turn, attracted the hip restaurants, bars and groceries that are starting to lure young stock brokers and corporate middle managers who can afford nicer places with higher rents. Hence, the near-certainty among developers and agents that, in a few years, Bushwick will be the next new neighborhood.
What caused the artists to move to desolate Bushwick in the 1990s? That's easy; it was cheap. But why Bushwick and not some other neighborhood? This is where it gets interesting. Bushwick is on the L line of the New York subway system, and the L train passes through two neighborhoods that artists settled years ago, the Lower East Side of Manhattan and Brooklyn's Williamsburg. By the mid-1990s, rents were climbing in those areas, so the artists did what suburbanites do, they moved a little farther out for more house (and studio space) for their money.