The Coming Real Estate Disaster for White-People Brooklyn

So the Brooklyn baby boom for the white hipster crowd is in full amazing swing. Saturday in Carroll Gardens is Dadurday! So many bearded tattooed dads in cool kicks. And this crowd (ages 26 to 35, essentially) is relentlessly nuclear. These couples live alone with their one-and-a-half kids. So many scooters with matching helmets. And they are split between renters and owners.

Now, what I can tell you about this amazingly traditional set is that, as they approach 40, about half of them will be getting divorced. I’m sorry! But yes.

The stages of urban young adult life are: marriage boom, baby boom, divorce boom, believe it. It happens really fast, and it happens in waves in your cohort, and it’s intense.

And their divorce boom is when the demand for Brooklyn real estate is going to double.

All these mega-involved dads, with their hyper-nostalgic 1950s parenting play-acting, are going to need their own apartments when they have to move out. And so while the family units are consolidated now, soon they’re all going to need two nearby Brooklyn apartments — both with enough room for the kids.

Because hipster adult visitation is going to be frequent. And these are not people who like to commute. There’ll be none of this “you can have the kids in summer” stuff that the previous generation did. It’s going to be like three days on, three days off — or-three day alternating weekends, or alternating weeks. And given the pressure for establishing residence for the “good” schools, it’s going to have a devastating impact on real estate and on vacancy rate.

(Sidebar: as usual, who’s going to suffer most for the people with children? The childless. But let’s not get started on that. Though the good news is that the divorced people with kids will also absorb some childless people into their households, in the form of new boyfriends and girlfriends and future spouses. The bad news is that none of these young radicals will embrace anything resembling communal living, unless the real estate situation gets so bad that it forces them into it. Which could happen!)

Fortunately, Prudential Douglas Elliman is just now opening an office on Court, just a couple blocks down from Carroll Gardens Park, so the straight people can have solid representation when they double down on their real estate holdings. It’s gonna be a hot mess.