This is the Sound of Gentrification in Crown Heights
When people start saying things like "Williamsburg has moved over here," it's time to check up on a nabe's gentrification status. So it is with Crown Heights in today's Sun, via the major thoroughfare of Franklin Avenue, which is calls "an increasingly powerful magnet for recent college graduates and young professionals seeking affordable rent and access to mass transit." It's bye-bye bodegas, hair salons and fast places and hello to organic markets, cafés and boutiques. As if the description isn't enough to convince that the G Word is at play in the neighborhood, a local business owners offers that comment that "Williamsburg has moved over here." (The story quotes average rents for 1BR apartments around $1,200 a month.) And finally, there's the co-owner of a recently opened beer garden who says of Franklin Avenue: "Over the next five years, it's going to become like Boerum Hill's Smith Street or Park Slope's Fifth Avenue." Case closed.· Franklin Avenue Changes as Crown Heights Attracts New Residents [Sun]· Crown Heights Gentrifiers Pine for Cafes, Boutiques [Curbed]
BoogieDowner's take:
Why oh why must we hear of talk of a gentrified Crown Heights before that of any neighborhood in the Bronx? I swear, if a white person takes a poop in any neighborhood in Brooklyn besides Park Slope, Cobble Hill, BillBurg, Bushwich or DUMBO, the whole city has to talk about how that hood is the next "it" place to be and be seen. I'm sick of it! While apartment hunting and trying to find something in our price range a year and a half ago, my husband and I checked out Crown Heights. Guess what? It's scary and thugged out. I'm calling a big, fat real estate bluff on this report. Crown Heights hype will be similar to Red Hook hype... Yes, restaurants, wine bars, white people, and boutiques all moved in. And then they realized they were all alone and moved back out. Move to the Bronx.
~ErLu
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