The Two Brooklyn Neighborhoods That Got White Almost Overnight
The Fordham Institute analyzed the fastest-whitening neighborhoods in America between 2000 and 2010, according to census data. Brooklyn had four of the most-whitened zip codes of the top 25 most-whitened zip codes in all of America. We win!
And when you map it out, those four zip codes actually make up just two areas that are contiguous. I’ve combined them here on Google Maps.
• First: 11238 and 11205. That’s Prospect Heights, essentially, to the south, and then where Fort Greene and Clinton Hill meet. Lemme tell you, I was right living right there in the middle, on the Clinton Hill/Fort Greene border, last week, and glorious Clinton Avenue is basically a flood of white ladies reading their iPhones on their way home from the C train.
• The other connected duo are 11206 and 11237, which are, LOL, “East Williamsburg.” Williamswick. Bushwickburg. Whatever. Straight up Bushwick. Montrose L stop, so much to answer for. (via.)
Updates!
One person notes correctly that part of the top map includes a quadrant of Crown Heights in the bottom right. This is true! (Crown Heights goes to Washington and to Atlantic.) But Crown Heights proper is 11213 — that’s “south of Bed Stuy” Crown Heights — and we didn’t see anything like the same amount of gentrifying in that zip code. So we should acknowledge that zip includes Crown Heights, which is seeing change for sure; but I’m blaming the top two-thirds of that zip.
for everyone snarking about fastest whitening hoods in BK: you do realize that fastest-whitening reflects lack of white ppl before 2000? 1/2
— Ben Adler (@badler) June 12, 2012
I can’t speak for everyone “snarking” (ugh) about this, but, uh, yes? That seems pretty obvious. (Sidebar: in fact we remember quite well when the first black man moved to Fort Greene. So you know, 120 years ago, Fort Greene was entirely white. And then became… enblackened. LOL.)
And this is very whatever:
Writing “I saw a bunch of ppl in X demographic on Y block,” is lazy, no substitute for hard data. Who you see depends on time of day etc
— Ben Adler (@badler) June 12, 2012
These are the people in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood.