February 10, 2007 / Fort Greene–Clinton Hill / Perspective / Greene Acres

Class struggles in Fort Greene

By Dana Rubinstein

The Brooklyn Paper

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Say goodbye to Fort Greene and Clinton Hill as you know them. The neighborhoods are fast transforming from middle-class enclaves to upper-class nabes.

Just look at the listings if you don’t believe me.

A quick Internet search reveals that Corcoran is hawking a townhouse on Washington Avenue for $3.4 million, and Aguayo and Huebener is selling a Washington Park brownstone for $3.8 million.

The average single-family home in Community Board 2, which encompasses Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Boerum Hill, and Brooklyn Heights, sold for $1.75 million in 2005, according to NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

No one is calling for the return of Murder Avenue and boarded-up brownstones, but come on! Must Fort Greene become the milieu of the super-rich? (Look at me, I’m even using the word milieu!)

This may sound provincial, or just plain naive — but I’ll just put it out there: economic integration is a good thing.

Where I grew up, in an old industrial town outside of New York City, our next-door neighbors ran a gas station. Down the street lived a Lays potato chip deliveryman, who gave out snack-sized bags of salty goodness every Halloween. We had our white-collar sorts, too — a couple of doctors, an engineer. And, of course, like any city, we had our millionaire’s row — Bray Farm Lane, a 10-minute drive away. (Rumor had it that if you trick-or-treated there, the homeowners gave out $1 bills).

As an adult, I’d take Fort Greene over the town of my youth any day, but for a child, economic diversity is especially crucial — it helped me understand that not everyone can afford tennis camp and trips to Spain.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. I’m backed up by academics, even!

“It’s beneficial for children to see and interact with many different types of people, to enrich their understanding of world,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, co-director of New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

Then there’s the issue of equity.

“If we’re skeptical that we’ll be able to achieve separate-but-equal communities, then that’s one reason to support integration,” said Ellen.

And we all know what a debacle “separate-but-equal” was. (See Brown v. the Board of Education or modern-day housing projects.)

Fortunately, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill real estate isn’t being left entirely to brokers.

Deborah Howard and the crew she heads up at the Pratt Area Community Council routinely sell affordable housing.

But in a true reflection of just how expensive the neighborhood has become, even some of PACC’s below-market-rate houses are, well, pricey.

PACC recently announced nine new “affordable homes” for sale in Clinton Hill and Bedford–Stuyvesant — ranging in price from $415,000 for a single-family home to $653,000 for a two-family home.

These are one- to three-family homes, and way below market rate.

Even so — hot damn!

“The [prices] are higher than other home ownership opportunities we have coming down the line,” Howard admitted. “All we can try to do is to create as many affordable housing opportunities as we can.”

And, to their credit, they are doing what they can.

Among the 72 new home ownership opportunities slated to go on the market in future months, at least four will sell for $25,000 each.

Now that’s affordable housing.

Let’s hope some of the middle- and working-class manage to stick around that long. The neighborhood won’t be the same without them.

The Kitchen Sink

If you graduated from Bishop McDonnell Memorial HS in 1930 (and want to impress your classmates with what you’ve done over the last 76 years), your moment has arrived: the long-defunct Prospect Heights parochial school will hold an alumni reunion at Fort Greene’s Bishop Loughlin Memorial High on Mar. 31 for classes from the 1930s, as well as every five years from 1942–1972. For information, call Janet Griffin at (718) 857-2700 x2251. …

Present-day high-schoolers from Benjamin Banneker Academy are raising money for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in New Orleans. To contribute, call Terry Samuel at (718) 797-3702 x412, or send tax-deductible checks to her attention at Benjamin Banneker Academy, 77 Clinton Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11205 …

The Myrtle Avenue BID revealed that a six-story, 52-unit building called “The Clermont” will rise on Myrtle and Clermont avenues. The jury’s still out on how much the units will cost.

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper