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- Celebrate Brooklyn returns!
Matthew Katz, an intern at Celebrate Brooklyn (do they pay well?) writes in about upcoming events this summer. The setup looks wonderful, Lila Downs on August 8th!
Flickered Prospect Park picture from FlySi
- Fort Greene real estate is invincible!
Nothing could possiblie go wrong!
The average Brooklyn home price inched up 3 percent to $627,324 in the first quarter of 2008, despite a 15 percent decline in sales volume, according to a study by Brooklyn-based real estate consulting and appraisal firm HMS Associates.
[snip]
Fort Greene saw a 170 percent increase in sales volume, the largest of all the neighborhoods, with 62 homes sold in the first quarter of 2008 compared to 23 for the same period last year. Overall prices also rose from $675,870 to $760,484, a 13 percent increase.
Holy mackerel! 170%! That’s like 169% more than Bush’s current approval rating. But how, you may ask, is Brooklyn real estate continuing to weather the withering subprime mortgage crisis? Easily, says HMS associates. We just snipped it out of the equation. Snip-snip. Problem solved. What better way to get a comprehensive look at a nationwide problem then by doctoring the numbers.
The report does not include neighborhoods where high turnover and a large volume of subprime mortgages are suspected — including Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick and Brownsville — because the data are likely to skew results dramatically, Heskel said. Last month HMS produced a study focusing on those neighborhoods in particular, reporting that home prices in Bedford Stuyvesant, East New York, Brownsville and Ocean Hill came down 4 percent and sales volume dropped a staggering 64 percent.
Not to worry. Real estate companies in New York have little to no influence, I’ve heard.
Back on South Elliot Place, the first causality of Fort Greene’s bullish housing market is local cinematic provocateur Spike Lee, who is packing up his 40 Acres and a Mule production company HQ, currently stationed in a converted firehouse on Dekalb, and moving to property he already owns on S. Elliot Place between Lafayette and Dekalb. Alright, so he’s not moving out of the neighborhood, but he is downsizing. What would Radio Raheem say to that?
- Fort Greene in the 1970s
Check out ClintonHillChill’s pictures of Fort Greene Park around 1976. Beautiful!
- VANDERBILT BIKE LANES
Reader Julia chimes in with a tip about bike lanes for those interested:
Today was the first day of construction for the new BIKE LANE they are building on Vanderbilt ave. This did not excite me that much until a skinny, curly haired white dude chased me down this morning to tell me how great it was and that I should attend a community board meeting tonight. After convincing me to go he ran up and down Vanderbilt giving thumbs-up to the construction workers and telling them how great they are. He almost got knocked over by the tar truck while taking a picture with his cell phone.
Anyone have info on where and when this meeting is taking place? Soon we’ll have a post up looking at bike lanes in Fort Greene and comparing their perceived accessibility vs their real usage. Stay tuned as we iron the kinks out of what we hope to be a fantastic part of the online community!
- BOMBERY
This is sort of funny, in a “we’re material girls livin’ in a ultra-paranoid-world kind of a way”:
In a hillside bunker in a New Mexico desert two weeks ago, a New York architect peered through a periscope as, about 1,300 feet away, a simulacrum of the Freedom Tower’s exterior was blown up.
“The specimen performed beautifully, far exceeding our expectations,” Mr. Galioto said.
- a kid grows in brooklyn
People living in Fort Greene love lamenting the loss of their neighborhood to gentrification while celebrating the arrival of screen-printed baby yoga mats. As the grups taught us several years ago, the conflation of youth hip culture and parental culture is not a new thing, but it is an interesting phenomenon to slowly observe in what has been a more resistant, or at least more critical, neighborhood.
While local whipping-boy Park Slope gracefully accepts its status as the stroller capital of Brooklyn (I mean, they have the co-op, why should they care?) other neighborhoods in between the violent Park Slope - Williamsburg nexus quietly succumb to the child boom even as housing markets dramatically swoop.
So what does the child boom really mean? What does it mean when ironic hipsters (i’m not linking to THAT website) make fun of having children and slowly channel their guilt about it while not addressing — as all class-empty critiques do — the downward boom of child-rearing in “developed” countries?
Anyway, Fort Greene remains wonderful and vibrant, and its nice to see the kids almost killing themselves on scooters in the park every Saturday. Still, this blog hopes to explore the dynamics and tensions of the area that, playing themselves out without addressing class issues even as they celebrate diversity, will inevitably provoke topics of discussion.
- IN WHICH WE LAUNCH FORTGREENERY
This weekend saw the kick-off of the soon-to-be-famous Fort Greene flea market. It was, measured by olive-colored jackets, a resounding success, though Marty Markowitz’s highly ignored “take my wife, please!” speech aside, the market was an interesting indicator of Fort Greene’s continuing slide into a studied affluence and continuing expansion of gorgeous people.
Think Soho-with-composting; think organic vintage; think whatever you want, but with new venue Masonic Temple right across the street and a movie filming on that same block of Lafayette the night before, it was an incredible weekend that was only a foretaste of the neighborhood before Habana Outpost reopens on April 20th.
We at FGCOM are excited about this blog and want to be a sustained, interesting conversation about Fort Greene’s amenities without a papering-over of the real economic effects brought on by gentrification and affluence.
We began this blog based on a few conversations, but most importantly this week’s flea market highlighted the changes we’ve seen over the years here (including the closing of our favorite Cambodian restaurant!) that has changed the area for the better and worse - we wanted to resist easy and neat explanations and really explore why it is that authors love the place… And so do coffee shops. You see, we used to other families set up food stands outside Bishop Loughlin highschool on weekends and also sell true flea/junk, the kind we missed at the flea market.
So where to next? We’re excited to part of the dialogue here, just as excited as we are that prices are coming down in Brooklyn; maybe one day we can actually afford where we live. Until then, we welcome all comments, but please be constructive and, please don’t rickroll us.
