Monday, May 05, 2014

Ironic Demographics: Brooklyn Is Dying

Gentrification is dying at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Geography of mesofacts.

Subject Article: "MORE ON THE LIMITS OF ANTI-GENTRIFICATION POLITICS: BROOKLYN IS GETTING POORER."

Other Links: 1. "Brooklyn Is Dying."
2. "Brooklyn And Park Slope Are Getting Less Alike, Not More."
3. "Pinsky: Middle class doesn’t need housing help."
4. "Voting With Your Feet."
5. "Rust Belt Resurgence: World Is Flat."

Postscript: "Brooklyn’s Chinese Pioneers: Hardworking Fujianese immigrants use the borough as a launching pad to the middle class"

While Brooklyn has gained international fame in recent years for its artisanal pickle-makers, hip-hop impresarios, and concierged condos, New York City’s largest borough has also undergone another—less media-friendly but (at least for longtime residents) equally unlikely—transformation. Over the past several decades, hundreds of thousands of mostly poor and sometimes undocumented immigrants from the Chinese province of Fujian have crammed themselves into dorm-like quarters, working brutally long hours waiting tables, washing dishes, and cleaning hotel rooms—and sending their Chinese-speaking children to the city’s elite public schools and on to various universities. The new Chinese immigrants are quietly having as great an effect on Brooklyn’s social, economic, and cultural landscape as are the borough’s hipsters and “trustafarians.” In turning a once-forgotten, now-overcrowded portion of Brooklyn into a launching ground into the middle class, they’re challenging new mayor Bill de Blasio’s portrait of New York as “a tale of two cities.”

This immigration probably explains Brooklyn's "dying" demographics.

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