This is a snatched image of a street corner in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
In a recent edition of New York magazine, Adam Sternbergh contributed an article with a tantalising opening line: What the hell is happening in Red Hook?
Just a year ago, the neighbourhood was a text book model of gentrification.
As reported by The Brooklyn Paper,
Last summer, anything seemed possible on Van Brunt Street. Big-time
broker Barbara Corcoran had recently paid $1-million for one of the
drag’s narrow, 19th-century buildings. Fairway foodies were stopping at
the Old Pioneer for post-grocery beers, and every balmy evening brought
another fancy-people caravan to eat small plates of costly, farm-raised
food at 360 and the Good Fork.
But Red Hook's prospects have since changed. The Posh 360 store is closed. The Old Pioneer is closed. And a Time Out New York cover story entitled Red Hook Has Arrived: 27 Reasons to Go Now is just a distant dream.
In his article, Sternbergh reached for an answer as to what's going wrong in Red Hook. He blamed poor transportation, a short supply of housing stock and regular flooding of basements.
Geography professor Winifred Curran drew attention to a wider failure.
A lot of developers in Red Hook have gotten ahead of themselves by charging gentrified prices without providing any of the services the gentrifiers expect....People who can afford to spend a million dollars on an apartment want to be able to get to work in less than an hour and a half. They want a supermarket. They want a bank. And in my opinion, a lot of the redevelopment in Red Hook is not actually very nice.
In his piece, Sternbergh made a useful distinction between gentrifiers who sow the seeds of development of a place and harvesters who reap the rewards. And he suggested three ways in which gentrification can burn itself out.
One, an economic downturn douses people's ability or willingness to relocate. Two, the seeders, in search of cheap new space, get driven out of the city entirely. Three, the gap between what the seeders seek out and what the harvesters will accept becomes too wide for the cycle to continue.
Over the last decade, countless towns and cities in the U.K. have fought to differentiate their 'offer'. Often what has followed is a hike in property values and glut of investments geared to 'value uplift'.
But how many of these places have put in the software of renewal without the essential hardware? The regeneration of public space, without improved train services? New town squares without a local skills revolution? Public art without new flood defences?
Sternbergh's article on Red Hook was entitled Embers of Gentrification.
How many other dying embers are there in the U.K. and United States, places that are supposed to have gentrified and are dying - but whose fate is ignored by the wish-fulfillment of social, political and financial investors?
Photo courtesy of ...neene... on Flickr.
