Is the “New” Brooklyn Economy For Real?
Neil Smith
CUNY Graduate Center, Anthropology and Geography
It is not clear to me that there is a “new Brooklyn economy,” if that is taken to mean some kind of economic renaissance specific to Brooklyn. At best, the news is marginally non-negative—for some. There are still lots of jobs in stores and offices and garages and restaurants and small manufactories, along this or that street or highway, but a lot of jobs have also vanished and a lot of people are out of work. Most renters in the borough have not seen any decline in rents, despite the economic depression—rather the opposite. Although the gentrification frenzy has chilled with the economic crisis since 2007, it has not ended: working and non-working people on the edge are still being evicted. For those who think the hipster moment of the 1990s and beyond will continue unabated, whether in old-hat Williamsburg or Bed-Stuy or Sunset Park, it’s fairly clear the cultural geography of hip will continue to follow the real-estate market outward. New restaurants will still open even as the number of homeless people begging outside their doors increases. Hipsters aren’t the cause—but all too often are the willing if sometimes unwitting tools—of gentrification, and they become its second or third phase victims along with Brooklyn’s working class. Brooklyn 2020 looks like the new inner city—global, gentrified, ghetto.