Welcome to the borough.

Here's your complementary hairspray, gold-dipped name pendant, rat-fur coat and souvlaki on a stick.

Quizeens repraZENT!

until the day they load the hipsters onto trains to take them to reeducation camps

Oh, don't tempt me.

I think for the plural, a douchebag of hipsters would confuse no one.
...Except, of course, for the hipsters, seeing as it's a straight ahead sentiment devoid of irony.

Fort Greene is the same, I have seen the change in ten years span, and in two occasion I lived there. 1996-97 1 large bedroom go for $850 , in year 2000 a studio for $1000, and now a two bedroom goes for 1800 bucks at least.

But all along I saw this pattern, people of the community complaining about the gentrification and therefore the rise of living costs, one minute, and a minute later talking on the cellphone with a possible buyer or tenant of their property.

So, yeah, it's suck to see this phenomena growing when the money from jobs isn't there ( thank you Free Traders ) and that community leaders are in bed with developers and that gang of real estate barons...

What to do?

save money and buy a piece of it?
change the lock and buy a shotgun?
move to another nayboohood?

Well Hosing is a serious issue.
This is an election year so...
Bring it on.

Dana , I will help you making buttons.

The Great Leader
of ASTORIA

HOUSING... not HOSING Ah@!!!

Hosing hasn't been a serious issue since Bill Clinton ran for office.

Housing, on the other hand...

By the way, Dana, you've inspired a rant on my site.

Vidiot, that *is* a good rant. It's like mine, only less bloviating, with more pertinent examples and proper sentence structure.

The Great Leader and I will be going in on a "Compound" upstate, if anyone wants to get in on the ground floor.

Will this be the kind of "Compound" where you stockpile guns and commit depraved sexual acts?

I'm so there.

I'm too po' to get in on the ground floor, but I'd be happy to patrol the grounds like an attack dog.

I'll make some kool-aid.

Welcome to Queens and please spare us another imbecilic pissy rant in a year or two about how the neighborhood you choose is becoming more expensive because people like you want to move to it. Like the world owes you a place to live. Sheesh.

So who did the Hasidm drive out of Williamsburg when they swarmed into the neighborhood???

Peter, Welcome to my website and please spare us another imbecilic pissy rant about how the blogs you read aren't producing the content you want. Like the world owes a nosepicking software engineer out in Long Island a place to post useless anonymous screeds. Sheesh.

Or, as they say over on metafilter, get your own blog, fuckwit.

Welfare keeps your rent up and landlords all over America rich.

Think about it: The housing market is untenable, as you say. There's no affordable housing. Why is that?

Because landlords are charging too much.

Why are they charging too much?

Perhaps it's because they can. Perhaps it's because the government has artificially inflated the market by subsidizing the rents of poorer people.

No landlord in his or her right mind would consider renting for less than he/she could get from the government in Section 8 subsidies.

One of these days, a President is going to have to sit all the CEOs of banks down and say "Lissen up here... The housing market is untenable, so you're going to have to forgive all the landlords who don't pay mortgages, because Americans can't afford to pay their own rent!" Then he can cut welfare, and end the subsidies to fat landlords who grow rich in untenable markets.

Or I could be wrong. :)

Jason, you're sorta right and sorta wrong. I live in a very untrendy neighborhood in a very untrendy city in SW Pennsylvania. My neighborhood is filled with Section 8 people, but for the most part they pay about the same amount in rent as I do. The only difference between my landlord and and theirs is that my landlord doesn't want to have to deal with the type of person who *generally* goes on Section 8. In other words, he wants no trouble. Greed would certainly come into play if the city/neighborhood suddenly became ground zero for hipsters, (or rich people, as the case may be) because greed is inherent in human nature. Which explains the Hasidic Jews charging above-market rents in N W'burgh as well the Gentiles. See how that works?

it sucks that rents can rise so quickly, and i'm somewhat sympathetic with the hassids who have been living in the neighborhood so long, but can they really expect that things would never change? and good point, jason, about how section 8 may factor in to all of this. i'm currently living in the east village, and as soon as my lease is up i'm getting out and moving to a cheaper, far less stylish neighborhood. it's just not worth the financial strain.

I have been a rent refugee from the East Village, LES, NoHo--and I ain't yet even forty! Five short years ago, the missus and I ditched The Rock (Manna Hatta) for Leonia, NJ, and haven't looked back. Gotta love Leonia, gang! One-time home to Pat Boone and Sammy Davis, Jr, to Enrico Fermi and Robert Ludlum. Presently, it's a lot of musicians, Columbia U. staffers and regular folks. NO Starbucks, NO strip-malls, NO McDonalds, NO Gaps--what NYC nabe can make that boast? I walk or ride a motor scooter to the post office, the grocery store, the hardware store, bank, take-away food, etc. I'm a fifteen minute bicycle ride to the Manhattan side of the GWB cycle path--a ride so easy, even a Manhattanite-cum-Brooklynite with a pack-a-day Gauloise habit can do it; a 20 minute drive gets you to the USS Intrepid (under optimal conditions).

You can all whinge about the greedy landlords, but sitting around waiting for City Hall to act on your behalves (?), instead of siding with the loveable developers, is ridiculous. It's funny, but even in a time of supply-side "solutions," demand is still the engine of economy. And demand is pricing you all out of your adoptive homes. Besides, so many of you complain about borgie amenities and yuppie stroller pilots. Why the fuck are you so stressed out about living among them. Blaze a trail. Leonia and other similar burgs are calling you. Bring your "hipness" (yeah, pfffft!) to us, where it will be appreciated at face value, instead of hijacked as a sign of a neighborhood's up-and-comingness.

Jim Bob, you gave me an idea:
I am going to call our compound "LEADERONIA".

bed stuy's next (i'm on the border of clinton hill and bed stuy - just moved here last november after getting priced out of my own neighborhood of ten years (williamsburg, embarrassingly enough). as much as i'd like to think i'm open minded you couldn't tear me out of brooklyn for queens or jersey.

my entire block is under construction, although it will be years before they can really do anything to tart this up too much - as it stands i've got a methadone clinic downstairs and an abandoned building next door and there have been many nights i've had to walk through a group of drug dealers 10 strong to get upstairs to my roach-infested, gigantic and dirt-cheap old apartment. but there's also a local clothing designer with a beautiful boutique downstairs and a new restaurant across the street opened up by a young husband and wife team from bed stuy. at least the beautification over here is, largely, coming from within (i'd hate to feel like i was, even slightly, responsible for yet another tide of idiots invading a neighborhood that was once a community). the sense of community over here is ridiculously strong, something i never personally felt in williamsburg (tho it *IS* and has been evident with organizations like El Puente, for example, which existed far before the tide of hipsters). people want diversity over here, they want community - they want it cleaned up but they don't want it to become ft. greene (sadly, there are just too many brownstones in bed stuy for it to not happen eventually). and it will *always* happen in new york city - the only way to avoid the damage happening to you, personally, is to get in early and deal with some shit you'd never want to deal with otherwise while you sit it out - then years later when your next door neighbors are paying three times what you do in rent, you can think about doing it again. or, you can enjoy the bourgeois little paradise that's built up around you (and why not? everyone deserves a little bit of it here and there - no need to constantly be a pioneer or you'll kill everything in your path).

but yeah, a day doesn't go by that i don't meet someone now living in bed stuy where ten years ago you didn't go there in daylight. it's either an artist, or it's someone who bought a brownstone and is restoring it. it should have been expected tho - remember the jogging white yuppie in Do The Right Thing? That came out in 1989...

Fuck all y'all. It's only going to get worse before it gets better. So your best option is to ask yourself, How fast can I learn a new language? You need one which is spoken in a cosmopolitan world city where they have cheap rents, lots of restaurants, and let people smoke in the emergency room. Pick someplace with lots of artists and homosexuals and writers and several minority groups, particularly if they have good-tasting food which can survive half-hour delivery times.

Then, when you master that language, buy the shit out of real estate there. I'd suggest southwestern Morrocco. There's a rebel movement which keeping real estate prices rilly, rilly low.

You can all whinge about the greedy landlords, but sitting around waiting for City Hall to act on your behalves (?), instead of siding with the loveable developers, is ridiculous.

I want to make something perfectly clear: I'm not whinging about ME being priced out of the housing market in Wbgh. I'm expressing my outrage that the people who need housing the most are being completely priced out of the neighborhoods they've lived in for decades.

Dori's right abt the sense of community in Bed-Stuy. And I think there's a chance for the neighborhood to be restored to its past glory--when it comes right down to it, some of the best architecture exists there--without it being totally gentrified. IMO, this will likely only happen if the government starts offering urban renewal grants to people who currently rent there to encourage home ownership and restoration.

And I *like* Leonia.

Oh, also, peripherally related: One of the things that supremely pisses me off is the fact that Williamsburg's architecture--exterior AND interior-- is such shite, yet the rents are equivalent to the tonier neighborhoods. I think people would be willing to pay the lofty rates if we didn't live in formstone castles with crumbling wood paneled interiors.

I do have my own blog. I'm not linking to it because I don't want to be accused of trying to hijack the thread. And I don't get all huffy when commenters disagree with me. If you don't want people commenting on your site, don't allow comments, fuckwit.

Aw, baloney. You're purposely using a false email address because the commenting system won't allow "anonymous" posts. You're trolling. Clearly, you didn't even read a) the article I linked to or b) anything I wrote because if had you'd note that I'm not bitching about the world owing *me* a place to live.

I've never lived in New York, but what you're all talking about sounds suspiciously similar to what happened in San Francisco, which I moved out of not long ago (though nowadays the economy's tanking over there so who knows if the process is heading in the other direction). It totally sucks but, well, that's life.

If anyone were to ask me my opinion, I'd probably say that you shouldn't worry too much about pushing out the people who "need" housing more. Like it or not, all of the economic opportunities are in the suburbs, and the fact that that's where all the immigrants are going these days shows it. Sure, some kid from Raleigh NC just outbid some Latin American immigrant family for some Brooklyn apartment. So what? That family can just move to that kid's old hometown and become a part of the fastest-growing hispanic community in the country, make more money than they would in NYC, have a better quality of life, and live in large, cheap (yet market-rate) housing where they can have a big family. What can I say? Just because artists and bohemians think NC is crap doesn't mean it's not good enough for working-class immigrants with entry-level jobs.

cities don't run on paintings and poems.

i just moved to bed stuy clinton hill, too.

It kind of bugs me when the hasidim community complains about hipsters moving into williamsburg and bushwick. Every hipster I've ever met has a hasidim landlord, and my landlord has mentioned many times that he and his friends only rent to white people. The buildings were bought from Latino people, and then the rents were raised. I know when I lived in East Williamsburg I was paying a lot more than what my house was worth. The neighborhood is still dangerous, and the house itself was a piece of shit.

In moving to bed stuy/clinton hill I have a nice house for 2/3 of what I was paying. The neighborhood and community is strong, but I don't think it is as strong of a community as the one in east williamsburg. Before I moved into East Williamsburg I thought a lot about gentrificaiton and what effects I was having on the neighborhood, but, in talking to my neighbors I mostly found that they felt really bad for me - having such a shitty landlord and paying such ridiculous rent. We're after all, not landlords and although our willingness to pay inordinant rents drives up the rent, we aren't the ones actually buying crapping buildings and then putting people in them and raising the rent to whatever they can.

A cafe just opened up across the street from me, (where I live is a predominantly african american / latino neighborhood) called, 'esparanza' cafe. I went to buy bread there the first day it opened and I was suprised to see a hasidic family running it. The woman at the counter didn't speak english or spanish. I would have bought the bread regardless of the nationality of the bakery - but I thought it was wierd. The family just moved in next door, they own their own home, and they also bought the house next door, and are currently renovating it. That's all fine - but if they target hipsters who have money to spend, and then hipsters move in, then they really shouldn't complain.

I agree with Dori about the neighborhood on the brink of gentrification. I ran into an aquaintances at my local G stop.

Bed Stuy.. I know 4 people that just moved out there last weekend. Queens? Nah.

I just got priced out of Ft. Greene after 2 years... the real estate situation in that area is quite depressing. The lovely multi-culti neighborhood feel (old, young, black, white, asian, hispanic) is quickly being replaced by an insurgence of rich, rude yuppies who are dropping $1+ million on one bedroom brownstones.

It's sad to say that the only area I could afford to move is... *gasp* Williamsburg (the South side, duh).

And I agree with the community leaders that say that the Hasidic community brought this upon themselves-- when I moved to NYC 6 years ago, I looked for apts in Williamsburg. It was well known then (and now) that Hasidic landlords were jacking up rent prices in order to grab renters with disposable income. So for the Gretsch building to come along and displace the Hasidic folks who started this whole trend is ironic justice to me.

IMO, if I had the epic amounts of $$ it took to get a place in that building, I'd be whooping it up in the penthouse in a hot second...

IMO, if I had the epic amounts of $$ it took to get a place in that building, I'd be whooping it up in the penthouse in a hot second...

Eh, I'm loath to purchase property in any area with radioactive waste dumps and power plants and the like. I worry about decreasing returns.

I don't know Dana. I think this neighborhood is firmly entrenched. It's a good purchase, if you can afford it. The rates are too high for an ugly neighborhood setting on top of toxic waste, but I just talked to a local W-Burg business owner who has been trying to get the MTA to NOT stop subway service for 12 weekends out of 23 in 2005. Anyway, the MTA told her that the numbers of people using the L on a weekday is growing faster than any place in the city. There are now 20,000 people using the Bedford stop on a weekday.

It seems to me like Williamsburg is past the critical mass of hipsters and artists and is fully within the domain of the 9 to 5 kids. And look at all the baby carriages that clog our sidewalks. There are a LOT of yuppies here which suggests to me that they're probably heavily invested in the neighborhood. I think Williamsburg is a good investment for the next 10 years, at least.

Hey ryeguy, I may be biased (because I'm from there), but I happen to think NC is great. Especially the Triangle. One of the most livable places in the country, I'd say.

If you are going to spend so much rent..move to San Diego,Ca.
Sure.. the rentals and housing in SD is expensive but the climate is the BEST in the US and the city is hip, beautiful and near the ocean and Mexico.
San Diego also has a trendy,happening downtown area and holds a Mardi Gras which is the best second to New Orleans!