District Eight

Brooklyn’s Community District 8 cuts a long, rectangular swath across south Brooklyn, making it a handy guide to gentrification in the borough. At the west end is Prospect Heights, where brownstones regularly sell for $3 million. The district ends in Weeksville, one of the country’s first free Black villages. To the east is Brownsville, the neighborhood with the most public housing in New York. And then there’s Crown Heights and Franklin Avenue.

In January the District Eight community board meets in a nursing home in Crown Heights, on a block with a vacant building, a craft beer bar, and a specialty shop for flowers and skateboards. The meeting draws a mixed crowd, age and race-wise, and for three hours they fill the room to capacity. Mr. Witherwax—a man who looks like his name—takes the roll. The stern chairwoman asks people to keep their announcements brief.

Construction projects are debated, liquor licenses are approved. Then the chairwoman asks a middle-aged white woman to come to the front. The woman, who lives in a specially zoned historic district, has apparently painted the archway above her door without permission from the landmarks committee. She says she didn’t know she needed approval for this kind of thing. We see photos, before and after. Most everyone agrees that the paint job looks good, but an older black woman warns about setting a precedent. Mr. Witherwax agrees. Other people don’t. For a minute, chaos breaks out. People stand. The gavel is banged. The woman stands silently at the front of the room with her hands clasped, looking down. By a slim margin, the board votes to approve the paint job. The woman mumbles thank you and sits down.

*

The first time I was on Franklin Avenue it was six years ago. I was on a date with a guy who lived in the old Jewish hospital, which was effectively a college dorm. We went to Chavella’s, a hole-in-the-wall with about five tables and mediocre tacos. “Another clue that Prospect Heights is coming to life,” wrote yelp.com user Mikah R. around that time. I left the city for three years; when I came back, Franklin Avenue was the pulsing aorta of Brooklyn-brand hip. The pop-ups were popping; the tattoos were artisanal; the hot dogs were cage-free. Chavela’s had lost an L and grown twice its size, but the food was still just okay.

Now I live a few blocks west of Franklin, in a unicorn apartment that’s still sort of affordable though the rent went up 20 percent this year. Every time I’m on Franklin it seems there’s a new storefront. And every new storefront means another opportunity for a Brooklyn-pun business name. In District Eight there’s Cooklyn, a seasonal restaurant, BYKlyn, a cycling studio, Breukelen Coffee House and Breukelen Brasserie. Elsewhere there’s Booklyn, Brewklyn, Barklyn Organics (in Manhattan), and Pork Slope. A fun game is coming up with other Brooklyn ventures: Rooklyn, a chess shop, Looklyn, for eyewear. Gnocchlyn, a restaurant specializing in artisanal pasta. Füklyn, a sex club in Bushwick. Shakshuklyn, an Israeli pop-up at the Brooklyn Flea. Last summer, on Franklin Avenue, a sign for “Nooklyn” appeared.

Nooklyn could be a boutique store for home goods or Limp Bizkit fan gear. “Please,” I think, “let it be an English muffin cafe.” But according to the internet, it is just a real estate office, the third in a chain owned by a guy named Harley, a Bushwick dude straight from central casting—down to the sleeve tattoos, the beard, and the hair long enough for when he is in the man-bun mood. From outside, Nooklyn looks like a start-up, which it is: rows of Macs on rows of white tables, the bleached cranium of some animal mounted to the wall. As I walk to the place to eat sushi from a cup, someone comes out of the office wearing a black beanie and offers me a koan: “The best time to look is between the first and sixth,” she says, before going off into the night.

*

The morning after the first night we spend together, my boyfriend and I walk from his house, across Franklin, to the west end of Community District Eight. We talk about vanishing points and cornices and the social value of front stoops. He loves New York as I do, at a physical, granular level. We fall in love, sifting the city through the sieve of our courtship—a Valentine’s Day tour of the wastewater treatment plant, an anniversary bike ride to the Verrazano Bridge.

He talks sometimes about buying a house, with help from his family, living on one floor and renting the rest. We start reading about real estate, casually, emailing each other listings (subject: dream home!). We go to a couple open houses, just to see. There isn’t much in Community District Eight, not that he could afford. Real estate agents push us north to Bed-Stuy. The mortgage crisis has hit harder there.

More people defaulted, more investors and house-flippers swooped in. We see dozens of brownstones at every stage of renovation. We learn what it meant to promise to deliver a place vacant. We learn tips and tricks for raising rent above market rate. We walk through people’s living rooms while they watch sports on TV. We see kitchens stripped to their piping and onion-skin wallpaper peeling away. We’re told to use our imaginations. We see places that smell like fresh paint and sanded wood and vanilla-scented candles. We like those places better. Renovation means erasure, we learn, and the more complete the erasure, the easier it is to forget who was there before.

*

If Tinder and the Craigslist real estate section had a kid and dressed it up like Airbnb, it would look a lot like Nooklyn.com. Its logo is similarly scrawled in the top left corner, except instead of suggestive anatomy, it’s a tipi—perhaps to indicate the size of many New York apartments, or that Nooklyn’s users are twenty-first-century nomads trekking from Brooklyn to Burning Man and back. There’s a roommate-search function that involves swiping left or right. The homepage is tiled with well-lit cityscapes and include Ridgewood, Queens; the Lower East Side; and the Mission, in San Francisco. Nooklyn, it seems, is for Brooklyns all over the world.

It’s easy to blame Nooklyn for capitalizing on transience, for its aesthetic appropriation of Native American dwellings and the way it makes you browse neighborhoods as if they’re vacation destinations or Etsy wares. But Nooklyn is just an aggregator, exposing and promoting what’s already happening in all of these neighborhoods. When you see an apartment on Nooklyn, it’s because the owner is already looking for tenants like you. The roommate-search function is no different. In Nooklyn’s YouTube ads, young people with Apple products look stressed, then meet similar-looking people on the Nooklyn app, ride bikes, and breathe sighs of relief.

*

One weekend in January we see a townhouse in District Eight, half a mile east of Franklin, at gentrification’s bleeding edge. It has a backyard and a bay window. There’s a big stone church across the street and a little park nearby. The broker is Orthodox, in his early thirties. He says the Orthodox don’t like to live above Eastern Parkway because of “the reputation,” but he thinks it’s nicer here. He and his wife and his four kids live around the corner, in a townhouse just like this one. He asks where we live and what we do for work. He’s choosing his future neighbors, we realize. We wonder if I should’ve worn a ring.

We go back a second time, and a third. The broker tells us to buy our fish and our produce south of District Eight in the Jewish neighborhood. “Buyers are a year ahead of renters,” he assures us. As in, don’t worry, your people will come.

We call it “the house we’re not going to live in”— we’re so afraid to jinx it. But as my boyfriend moves through the intractable, unpredictable process of home-buying, it starts to seem like we will. Around this time, I do two things: I convince my boyfriend to get a dog, and I start going to community board meetings in earnest. One week I go to four.

At the parks meeting, we sit around a scuffed table in what’s effectively a broom closet, and the only white people are visitors: two guys trying to save a community garden, a recruiter for a study on diabetes, and me. A wizened, bright-eyed woman walks in late. She’d been to six stores looking for window shades but all she could find were blinds. “No one cares about you when you’re old,” she says. Someone suggests she tell her grandchildren to Google it on the internet. “I gotta go to jail on Friday,” she announces. “You like going to jail,” a woman teases. “They cook better than you.” The committee votes to write a letter condemning the city’s plan to get rid of park gates. “The people making these decisions about our community, they live in their mansions up on the hill,” says the Committee Chair.

I sink further into the minutiae of landmark preservation applications and park dedications. At the housing meeting, an older white man wants to create a subcommittee on affordable housing, and it’s like opening a festering wound. An older woman says her taxes went up $400 this year. A black man in a baseball cap says his tenants are moving out because they can’t afford the rent increase, the first he’s made in fifteen years. “When I was in high school they said I lived in the ghetto. Now everyone wants to live in the ghetto,” he exclaims. The proposal passes unanimously.

Our new dog is a lab-pit mix who looks perpetually concerned. He changes our lives, suddenly and terrifyingly. My free time and my disposable income disappear. My days become bounded by walks. Three times a day we cross the avenues: Nostrand, New York, Brooklyn, through the park, Kingston, Albany, Troy. He greets the guy who calls him Spare Rib, or sometimes Gravy Train. He greets the old ladies in their lawn chairs, and the construction workers pulling the insides out of another beautiful home. For those hours, my screen-addled brain slows to a dog’s pace. I sift through the neighborhood at an even finer level than before: latticework and chicken bones and dog shit and faces looking out of windows and the worker who always says, “Ma’am, can I please pet your dog?”

We name him Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s favorite mayor. We call him Fio. I call him the Mayor of District Eight. At night, he snores in his dog bed while my boyfriend studies inspection reports and housing laws, makes spreadsheets, runs numbers, tweaks and runs them again. I use advanced search tools to track down the house’s past owners. A black couple with two kids had lived there for twenty years. They live in Maryland now. I see the couple in a Facebook photo, standing side by side on a patio, a kiddie pool draped over the fence. They look happy, I tell myself.

*

To be a city dweller is to be a hermit crab, skittering along in the dark, always feeling out for a better shell. But not all transience is the same. There’s Nooklyn’s urban nomad, broke but not poor, with an HBO GO password, good enough credit, and an iPhone on a family plan. Then there’s another kind. To qualify for the least expensive apartment in Community District 8—a studio with a shared bath—you have to make $43,600 a year. That’s $4,000 more than the median income for a family of four in this same neighborhood. In other words, most people living here can’t afford to stay.

I go inside the Nooklyn office on a particularly frigid day, after the dead Christmas trees are gone from the curbs but pine needles still littered the gutters. The sign on the door says, “Let us do the searching,” and a bell rings when I walk in. A lumberjack type says hello from behind a Mac. He’s friendly, and not in a salesperson way. It’s so white in there, and warm. I realize I don’t know what I’m looking for or why I’m there.

I tell him I’m moving to San Francisco for work. “How’s it looking in the Mission?” I stumble. “Real-estate-wise.”

They don’t have listings on the West Coast yet, he says, just the roommate-matching tool, although they hope to have listings up by next year. In the meantime, I can still use the app to swipe for roommates, and check out the businesses in my future neighborhood. “Good time to leave New York,” he jokes as I turn to go back outside.

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