Brownsville is packed with projects, but will they be enough to push back the tide of gentrification?

"So many of the civic successes heralded by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg," Ginia Bellafonte wrote in The New York Times back in 2012, "might have happened in Lithuania for all the effect they have had (or could have) on the lives of people in Brownsville," which Ms. Bellafonte then goes on to helpfully identify as a neighborhood in northeastern Brooklyn.

We're not sure if gentrification counts as a "civic success," and we aren't aware of any pasty-faced, heritage flannel-wearing hipsters wandering around Pitkin Avenue, the neighborhood's main drag, yet. But if trends in nearby neighborhoods are any indication, it won't be long before Brownsville—a byword for blight, home to the largest concentration of public housing towers in the city and to this day a place that some mail carriers fear to tread—is selling something artisanal besides stamp bags.

Developers struck out as far as Halsey Street, only three L stops away from Broadway Junction, the gateway to Brownsville, during the height of the last boom, and "East Bushwick," which bumps up against Brownsville's northern border, is again heating up.

And now we have another datapoint in the closing-in-on-Brownsville thesis, this time on the neighborhood's western front: hipsters and yuppies have hit the "far eastern edge of Crown Heights," writes DNAinfo, that font of Brooklyn proto-trend pieces. DNAinfo chronicles the apartment hunt that led Sean and Pranjali Davidson to a gut-renovated $1,700-a-month two-bedroom rental at Montgomery Street and Utica Avenue, just half a dozen short blocks from Brownsville. The fact that the move warranted a DNAinfo write-up suggests that striking out that far east is still rare, but residential demand continues to far outstrip supply in the five boroughs and we expect that the gentrification bubble will continue growing at more or less the same pace it has been for the past few decades.

East New York's housing stock pales to that of brownstone Brooklyn, but it's nicer than Northside Williamsburg's vinyl.

And when bobos bearing yoga mats do hit Brownsville, there's at least one person who won't be surprised: Julia Vitullo-Martin of the Regional Plan Association. In January she penned an article for Untapped Cities asking, "Is Brownsville Brooklyn Ready for its Jane Jacobsian Comeback?"

"With multiple trains"—one of which is the L, Brooklyn's main vein of gentrification, with a history of raining money down on the neighborhoods it courses through—"and good bus service," she wrote, "Brownsville is a candidate for transit-oriented development."

Buffeted by racial tension during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike and stripped of its middle-class Jewish families in the 1960s—"neighbors firmly believe Pitkin Avenue compares with Fifth Avenue," one author wrote in 1951—the neighborhood lost its white middle class to the suburbs.

Now the worst of the decay is over. Fires no longer rage in vacant houses, a few new schools cropped up during the 2000s and Brownsville, along with its neighbors—East New York, Canarsie and Cypress Hills—have started to attract West Indian, Latino and even some South and East Asians immigrants. But so far, the neighborhoods have remained untouched by the skyrocketing real estate values and gentrification pressing in from all sides.

Not yet, at least—but in a real estate cycle or two, who knows?

Pearl's Social & Billy Club in Bushwick. (Facebook)

Those pesky hipsters are at it again, with their subversive non-weekday work schedules and socially destructive late night PBR-drinking, according to an article in the Daily News.

Bushwick’s Community Board 4 has taken a stand against Sunday sipping, according to the paper, by requesting that bar and restaurant owners stop selling alcohol by midnight on Sunday night.

“Sunday, that’s the day when people rest," district manager Nadine Whitted told the News. “We have to be fair to everybody. It’s not a hard thing to do.”

The State Liquor Authority can still approve a liquor license even if a bar refuses to comply with the suggested Sunday curfew. However, the agency plans to investigate each individual bar or restaurant applying for a license, according to SLA spokesman William Crowley.

“The hipsters are out of control,” said 38-year old perfect caricature of a Brooklyn resident, Monica Hall, to the Post.

“You go into a new land and think you own it," continued Ms. Hall. "Sleeping on a Sunday night, for people with children and who have nine-to-five jobs, is the difference between getting a good night’s sleep and starting your week off right, versus trying to sleep with noise coming from over grown children."

In response, a number of Bushwick bar owners are doing their best to appease the local residents. Betsy Maher, owner of Pearl's Social and Billy Club on St. Nicholas Ave, has installed a bouncer outsider her bar at night to try and keep noise levels now.

“There’s a lot of resistance between old and new,” Ms. Maher told the News. “It’s making the two sides butt heads even more.”

This issue is emblematic of an ever-growing divide between long-time Bushwick residents and the colonizing hipster crowd, who are more likely to shun traditional work patterns in favor of, you know, not having any work patterns (if you believe Girls is an accurate representation of real life, which, duh, it is).

Clearly those old fogeys with their 9-5 jobs and their mindless subjugation to the corporate hegemony don’t appreciate that when you’ve been slaving away all weekend perfecting your newest round of splatter paintings and hawking reclaimed furniture at the Brooklyn Flea, Sunday night is actually the perfect time to kick back with a few brewskis. Can't we all just get along, bro?

Bushwick's urban fabric hasn't changed much since the early 20th century, and Community Board 4 would like to keep it that way. (Photo courtesy Holly Dutton, Real Estate Weekly.)

The Williamsburg and Greenpoint rezonings in the 2000s allowed for tens of millions of square feet of new residential development—between 30 million and 32 million square feet, Vicki Been at NYU's Furman Center told The Observer—but for developers looking to meet the torrent of demand flooding into northern Brooklyn, it hasn't been anywhere near enough. Builders have been pushing into Bushwick for years—the last market cycle saw new development as far down the L train as the Halsey stop. Now, builders are starting to return to the frontier and the neighborhood, it seems, is ready to push back.

Councilwoman Diana Reyna said in October that she was ready to see the neighborhood rezoned to prevent the sort of luxury development that has washed up on the shores of Williamsburg, and now Brooklyn Community Board 4, representing Bushwick, has weighed in in favor of a rezoning as well.

"To help manage the growth and rebirth of the neighborhood," the members of CB4 wrote to Councilwoman Reyna, "we feel the time is right to begin rezoning," as reported by DNAinfo. The specifics of what they are asking for are unclear, though they did mention "down-zoning" and referenced the recent Bed-Stuy rezonings, which have for the most part restricted development in the neighborhood. Community Board 4 did not respond to The Observer's request for comment.

If the downzoning happens, it would continue the Bloomberg administration's strategy of focusing northern Brooklyn's growth on the waterfront, while limiting development in the built-up neighborhoods farther inland, leaving these vast tracts of land more or less as they were a century ago.

While anti-growth sentiment is strong in northern Brooklyn, those in the real estate industry remain skeptical that restricting growth would keep rents from rising or produce more affordable housing—the goal of Bushwick resident Rolando Guzman of Greenpoint- and Williamsburg-centric St. Nick's Alliance, who told DNAinfo, "The last thing Bushwick needs is high-rises. It needs affordable housing."

"I'm a big proponent of affordable housing," David Behin of MNS brokerage told The Observer. "But there's already a mechanism for affordable housing to come into the neighborhood." Mr. Behin, who runs MNS's investment sales and advisory division, was referring to the city's 80/20 program, which gives developers tax advantages and density bonuses in exchange for renting 20 percent of a building's units at below-market rates.

"Almost every developer I speak to, whether it's 10 to 15 units up to 500 units," said Mr. Behin, "they are all strongly considering doing 80/20s, and many, if not most, are "going forward with the program."

Matthew Cosentino, who works in investment sales at TerraCRG, was not ready to take a position on whether the neighborhood should be rezoned, but he was skeptical that clamping down on development would stop the upward march of prices. A rezoning, he said, "would affect how the area develops, but not what's happening in terms of the gentrification."

"We're kind of at a nice point right now where although prices have gone up," Mr. Cosentino continued, "it's still working okay for a large group [of longtime residents]. But I don't think it'll last forever, and I don't think the downzoning will change that."

A Velodrome. (YouTube)

Finally, however, Bushwick has found a solution: a Velodrome, which is an indoor racing track that, according to Brokelyn writer David Colon, is pretty hardcore:

Unlike the uh, thrill (?) of standing on the side of the road during a marathon cycle race, you don’t have to wait to have the race pass you by to see anything exciting in velodrome racing. It’s more like watching NASCAR, but without the potential for being maimed by a gigantic piece of a car. And yes, there are crashes too.

Which is pretty much like saying that driving on the L.A. Freeway is too dangerous, so we should all register for the Daytona 500. Ooh, maybe James Franco will be the Velodrome Grand Marshall too! Especially if we get a little version like this one from London:

Contextualism may be an opiate, but it feels so good.

As Vishaan Chakrabarti, a principal at SHoP Architects, was unveiling the Southside Williamsburg master plan they designed for Two Trees, he evoked the image of Manhattan's skyline. "Just like in the dead center of New York," he told the assembled group of reporters, "we have this parabolic moment—there's this moment of exuberance that happens" as the towers rise on the waterfront, culminating in the towers at the Domino site. The tallest will reach 598 feet, or about 60 stories, making it taller than any other building in the borough.

"And that," he continued, "that's the stuff of postcards all around the world."

But despite the best efforts of SHoP and Two Trees, the plan does not succeed in aping the natural parabolic shape of an organic thicket of towers found in midtown, downtown or even downtown Brooklyn. Nor could it—Williamsburg's new planning regime, instituted in the 2005 rezoning and reinforced in 2009, makes sure of that.

Traditional downtowns grow around transit hubs, and are built by myriad different developers and architects, all working in competition. Through thoughtful zoning and market forces, the tallest towers sprout at the center of the transit network, with heights tapering off as you travel farther away.

But the new Williamsburg and Greenpoint skylines are more Bal Harbour than Brooklyn.

The towers form a narrow stockade on the shores of northern Brooklyn, a sort of Potemkin village of development to be admired from Manhattan. But behind them—nothing.

Dramatic density differentials are par for the course on the waterfront.

A block or two away from the old Domino refinery, the skyline plummets to near zero—most sites across the street are zoned exclusively for industrial use, and cannot be developed beyond one and two stories. There is no gradual downward gradient. "There's no way to hide that," admitted Mr. Chakrabarti of the disparity in heights.

It's not hard to see how it ended up this way. The rezonings took the path of least resistance between the pro-development wishes of the Bloomberg administration on the one hand, and the anti-growth attitudes of vast inland neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint on the other.

Manufacturing districts, where there weren't existing residents to bother, were upzoned. Development in established residential neighborhoods, on the other hand, was restricted.

The result is an awkward hybrid that pleases nobody. There isn't enough supply allowed to meet demand and temper the wave of gentrification shooting over northern Brooklyn, but what supply is allowed comes in the form of towers so out of place that they spark resentment throughout the community.

When the existing neighborhoods of New York were built before World War II, it was during a time when increases in demand were met by gradual but widespread redevelopment. Two- and three-story townhouses were replaced by six-story tenements, and when demand reached a fever pitch, as in Manhattan and a number of neighborhoods in brownstone Brooklyn, these were in turn redeveloped into grand apartment houses and skyscrapers. The redevelopment thinned as you got farther from the city center and subway stations, the result being the "parabolic moment" that Mr. Chakrabarti spoke of at the Domino unveiling—the true "stuff of postcards."

But today, the zoning code does not afford the opportunity for such organic development in the neighborhoods of northern Brooklyn.

Away from the glassy waterfront towers, much of northern Williamsburg is frozen in its vinyl-sided past.

With high-rises on the waterfront and row homes farther inland, the planning lacks provision for mid-rise buildings. Six stories or more, the traditional New York mid-rise smooths out the transitions between towers and townhouses, marrying the density needed to meet demand with a human scale that doesn't cast shadows for blocks.

But the standard new law tenement, a design that developers were eagerly building in the early 20th century in Southside Williamsburg, is now twice as dense as what's allowed in vast swaths of Northside, Greenpoint, East Williamsburg and Bushwick.

The word that leaps to mind is "capricious." Why are Manhattan-style high-rises acceptable west of Kent Avenue, while landowners across the street are not allowed to build so much as a single-family home, their land instead reserved for low-value industrial use?

And from a transit point of view, the planning makes little more sense. High-density building is allowed more than half a mile from the Bedford Avenue L, on the waterfront, but no housing is allowed at all on the blocks immediately adjacent to the Morgan Avenue stop. And it's the pre-war neighborhoods, which sprouted naturally closest to the L, where residential development was most restricted in the rezonings.

The development on the Brooklyn waterfront may look nice from Manhattan, but it's hard to see what it's given its home borough.

From a pro-development perspective, the amount of supply allowed is clearly insufficient to meet demand, evidenced by a near-tripling of housing costs in Williamsburg since 2004 and the wave of gentrification racing across Bushwick. Rents there recently jumped a stunning 17 percent in just 30 days, according to real estate brokerage MNS.

And far from allowing enough supply to bring down prices, the towers on the waterfront may have backfired. Despite being insufficient to bring down prices, the outsized heights on the river have helped foster the widespread impression of an overdeveloped Williamsburg. Anti-development sentiment has flared across northern Brooklyn, out of proportion to the relatively paltry number of new units.

Far from being a model for the rest of northern Brooklyn, the Williamsburg rezonings are seen as a cautionary tale.

Bushwick—soon served with the high prices of Williamsburg, but none of the new housing.

"We don't need the speculation that Bushwick is the next Williamsburg," Councilwoman Diana Reyna told The Wall Street Journal in October, angling for a rezoning that would limit development in Bushwick to low-rise structures. (Though given the pace of things, it might be more realistic to talk about preventing Broadway Junction and East New York from becoming the next Williamsburg.) Even Mayor Bloomberg doesn't dare rezone the manufacturing districts of East Williamsburg.

The location of the new development also raises concern. Newly built market-rate apartments in Brooklyn these days are almost never affordable, but some are less unaffordable than others. There is new construction in Bushwick, for example, that was overbuilt during the boom and is now within reach of upper-middle-class strivers. The waterfront, on the other hand, where most of the new housing is allowed, is reserved for the unabashedly wealthy.

None of this is the fault of SHoP or Two Trees, who, unlike some waterfront developers, had no role in the rezoning. But it's hard to see their piece of the waterfront as emerging any more organically. Even if Jed Walentas' waterfront towers are built to a higher quality than the Northside Piers—and there's every indication they will be—they are unlikely to be resented any less by the community.

This plan is so fetch. (Wikimedia Commons)

The joke about hipsters (well, one of many, many jokes about hipsters) is that they are pioneers, non-conformists. But out in Bushwick, they are following in the footsteps of more than a hundred of the city's neighborhoods: they want a rezoning.

A stones throw (not the hip hop record label) from the the McKibben Lofts and Roberta's, just across Flushing Avenue, a developer wants to transform the old Rheingold Brewery into a 10-building housing complex, a plan that has been kicking around since at least 2008. But according to The Wall Street Journal, this is Bushwick, so the rezoning has to be different, it has to be cool, with it, or at least that's what Councilwoman Diana Reyna wants.

She wants the rezoning of Bushwick to happen on different terms from a rezoning of Williamsburg and Greenpoint seven years ago. There, just a couple of stops west of Bushwick on the L train, a growing number of industrial buildings have given way to luxury condos and rental buildings.

"We don't necessarily need high rises. We don't need the speculation that Bushwick is the next Williamsburg," Ms. Reyna said. Instead, Ms. Reyna would like to see low-rise developments, a strong "affordable housing" component and the preservation of local jobs.

According to The Journal, the Rheingold redevelopment could pave the way for a larger rezoning of entire Bushwick neighborhood, which has seen spot development over the past decade but remains primarily comprised of low-rise apartment buildings and rowhouses. Encouraging development while protecting the neighborhood character, and more importantly its long-time residents, could prove a challenge. Because everybody knows gentrification is not cool.

There goes the neighborhood. (Aaron Edwards, Flickr)

Williamsburg residents are pissed, enraged, and furious—and not just because the Foster the People Summerstage show is sold out. No, this is a problem with a park on this side of the river, namely one the city has refused to build.

“I feel like the city has let us down,” Laura Treciokas, co-chairwoman of the Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park told DNAonfo. She likes to take her one-year-old child to the park, she said, adding that they are “avid users of park space.” But, because the city has still not rezoned a 30 acre open waterfront space, which they pledged to turn it into a park in 2005, Ms. Treciokas complains that “what exists is very crowded” and going to the park is now “tough.”

We wish we could say Ms. Treciokas is joking, that taking care of a newborn has so dominated her time that she has forgotten how to tell jokes and has now developed a warped sense of humor. But this is real. Ms. Treciokas is pissed. And hell hath no fury like a mother scorned.

On June 14, Ms. Treciokas and her equally ticked-off cronies—state Senator Daniel Squadron and Councilman Stephen Levin have joined her ranks—plan to rally on the steps of City Hall where a hearing on the status of the open-space project is scheduled to take place.

“The rezoning brought new residents, which we welcome,” Ms. Treciokas said, “but we also need things like parks and open spaces to help cope with that.”

And she has a point: It’s hard to stay zen when you can’t find a spot to unfurl your yoga mat.

It is a restaurant that does not take reservations for most parties, which on a busy night, will lead to a wait of anywhere from half an hour to 90 minutes (if you arrive in the middle of a dinner rush). Compared to the other restaurants in the neighborhood, it is slightly pricey.

It has a radio station, and their own garden (with its own blog), and they make their own honey, too. It is also fairly well-regarded, and was undoubtedly instrumental in putting the neighborhood on the map for many people who'd otherwise never venture past the Bedford Stop.

Today, erstwhile New York Times food critic Sam Sifton took a break from his gig as the paper's national editor to report on the existence of Blanca.

Blanca is a restaurant that sits behind Roberta's.

Blanca is a restaurant with twelve seats.

Blanca is a restaurant in Bushwick with a $180 per person entry fee. 

Sifton writes:

Dinner at Blanca costs $180 a person, excluding wine.

Blanca is a restaurant with a 22-course menu. At $180 per person, that comes out to around $8.10 a course, which doesn't sound too crippling. Even with tax and tip estimates, it only comes out to about $10.63 per course. And the people who own it are no doubt savvy, and have been working towards this moment for a while, that when they could charge $180 per person and expect people to venture out and pay it, enabled by an investment and bet on the neighborhood made long ago, or moreover, a bet that quality would trump the tension of opening a very serious restaurant in a neighborhood otherwise barren of options like it and with residents whose willingness to pay for it was as unproven as the willingness of Manhattanites who would travel to taste it.

No doubt, the development of Roberta's and the birth of Blanca have ushered in a new era of Bushwick. We have no idea what it means. Or how Bushwick's denizens will react to it, short of beginning to anticipate the next palpable, less-expensive place to live. All of which is to say:

Ridgewood, be prepared. The food looks pretty great.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Subways and artists have had a long, long relationship.

Everybody knows the old saw about how artist migrations and subway access help drive gentrification in the city, but we never realized the two were quite so intertwined.

Capital New York has an interesting story about how a major gallery, Luhring Augustine, moving to Bushwick might reshape the neighborhood, as has happened so many times before. There is some doubt this is the case, given the neighborhood's remoteness from Manhattan. We shall see, maybe sooner than we know.

Still, that is not what really caught The Observer's pink eye—which is not to say the story isn't great, it is, and you should go read it. Allow us to link to it once more so that you do.

What was so striking to us, then, was an editor's note written by Tom McGeveran (an Observer alum, as you may know) included in an email newsletter, which you can only find if you already subscribe to Capital emails. In his note, Mr. McGeveran gives one of the most interesting explanations for not just why but how gentrification happens:

There's a theory that the development of a neighborhood of artists in New York City is directly related to the locations of the big commercial galleries. The galleries need to be in expensive neighborhoods, near rich collectors; the artists want to be able to get to the gallieries easily, but they also need cheap rent.

So when the 57th Street gallerists first started becoming cool-hunters among young and emerging artists decades ago, what followed was a boomlet in Long Island City (take the train from 57th Street the shortest distance across the East River to where inexpensive studio space can be found, and there it is!) and Soho.

And then when lots of gallerists followed their artists down to Soho, Long Island City became a haul. That's about when the East Village and Lower East Side art scenes took off, and when new concentrations of artists formed along the F line in neighborhoods like Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook and Gowanus.

Then came West Chelsea, the area around the High Line that boomed in the 1990s, pretty far from any good subway stop except the L train at 14th Street and Eighth Avenue. And before long, artists began to flood the first Brooklyn stop on the L line, Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg.

It's a new and interesting theory we had never heard before, which is why we're republishing it here, and Mr. McGeveran goes on to openly question whether or not Bushwick will break these rules, as it already seems to be violating them. In an email, Mr. McGeveran told The Observer that he believes the idea comes from Fate of a Gesture, Carter Ratcliff's book about Jackson Pollock and the development of postwar American art, much of which took place in the Village.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

So yes, it's a little unnerving to see not one, but two IHOP opening up in the Brooklyn/Manhattan area: it's like finding out you can now order Moon Over My Hammy at The Spotted Pig. Well, not quite that bad, but...

Bucky Turco and the gang at NY diligently visited Bushwick opening of the pancake house yesterday, taking pictures of their meal for the inevitable Grub Street Report. They found the coffee "expensive...(but) infinite." The Bushwick location is opening from 7 to midnight, which makes sense seeing that they've put that thing right on Flushing Ave and Broadway (conveniently located next to the Taco Bell, we hope.)

The East Village location is going to be a little more high-end than it's Brooklyn counter-part: as part of its 24-hour convenience (think of it as the after-after party), it will have a security guard in place in the form of an off-duty cop.

“When people have a few drinks, they can get rowdy," explained IHOP manager Michael Carlos. So while the Bowery and Electric Lights might just have a bouncer checking your IDs, it's really IHOP that's going to have the tightest security in all of the East Village...meaning of course that it's definitely the spot you want to be at on a Friday night at 3 a.m. Just don't even think about opening a Waffle House next door: the neighborhood has gone to crap enough as is.

IHOP East Village is located at 235 E. 14th St., at 3rd Ave. Please don't go there "ironically."