https://www.polyarchives.hosting.nyu.edu/files/original/b63a8f1595b37fe31d39d4143a304928.pdf 58db5345ab1a4eed81dc2c2de4699191 PDF Text Text Urban Studies, Vol. 40, No. 12, 2487–2509, November 2003 Super-gentrification: The Case of Brooklyn Heights, New York City Loretta Lees [Paper first received, January 2003; in final form, May 2003] Summary. This paper is an empirical examination of the process of ‘super-gentrification’ in the Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood of New York City. This intensified regentrification is happening in a few select areas of global cities like London and New York that have become the focus of intense investment and conspicuous consumption by a new generation of super-rich ‘financifiers’ fed by fortunes from the global finance and corporate service industries. This latest resurgence of gentrification can be distinguished from previous rounds of revitalisation and poses important questions about the historical continuity of current manifestations of gentrification with previous generations of neighbourhood change. 1. Introduction Gentrification research has traditionally focused on the economic and cultural appreciation of formerly disinvested and devalued inner-city areas by an affluent middle class. In this paper, I want to examine a somewhat different phenomenon: ‘super-gentrification’. By super-gentrification, I mean the transformation of already gentrified, prosperous and solidly upper-middle-class neighbourhoods into much more exclusive and expensive enclaves. This intensified regentrification is happening in a few select areas of global cities like London and New York that have become the focus of intense investment and conspicuous consumption by a new generation of super-rich ‘financifiers’ fed by for- tunes from the global finance and corporate service industries. We can begin to understand some of what super-gentrification involves by considering the story of a fairly ordinary four-storey brownstone house in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, which I will tell by drawing on interviews with the householder (D) who first gentrified the house and his next-door-neighbour (S). I want to use the biography of this building to reflect critically on some familiar ways of explaining gentrification and the challenges posed to them by what I am calling super-gentrification. After a brief discussion of my data and methods, I then document the history and gentrification of Loretta Lees is in the Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK. Fax: 020 7848 2287. E-mail: loretta.lees@kcl.ac.uk. The author would like to thank David Demeritt and Bruce Malamud for their invaluable help with the statistical work to be found in this paper, Roma Beaumont for drawing the map and the interviewees and survey respondents in Brooklyn Heights for being so generous with their time. Versions of this paper were presented at the ‘Upward Neighbourhood Trajectories: Gentrification in a New Century’ conference, Glasgow, Scotland, and the ‘Urbanism 2003’ seminar, Oslo School of Architecture, Norway—the author thanks the participants for their useful comments. 0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/03/122487–23  2003 The Editors of Urban Studies DOI: 10.1080/0042098032000136174 �2488 LORETTA LEES Figure 1. D’s Brownstone House in Brooklyn Heights. Brooklyn Heights, and the extent and impact of super-gentrification on the pre-existing community. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of what is new and what is historically and geographically specific about this latest form of gentrification. 2. The Biography of a Brownstone In 1962, as gentrification began to take off in Brooklyn Heights, a young lawyer working in Lower Manhattan paid $28 000 for a small four-storey Brownstone (see Figure 1). He and his wife had rented an apartment in Brooklyn Heights for the previous four years and liked the neighbourhood. As D explained to me: At the time we had very limited resources so we had to find something that was reasonably inexpensive and at the time we felt we had to buy something north of Joralemon Street because of the nature of below Joralemon Street which was very heavily rental units to Hispanics, mostly Puerto Rican rooming houses. But because price was a big factor for us we ended up buying south of Joralemon Street anyway, and the property was quite small (interview with D, August 2002). At the time, the property was divided into three apartments: the basement level and parlour floor were the owners’ apartment, while the second and top floors contained small, rent-controlled apartments occupied by working-class Irish families. �SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS We owned the whole building subject to two rent control leases. It was a rather big speculation on our behalf. We didn’t know how, or whether, we’d get rid of them at all (interview with D, August 2002). The family living on the top floor left voluntarily after eight months when the husband of the family had a heart attack and was advised by his doctor that he should no longer climb the stairs to his top-floor, walk-up apartment. D took over their apartment. D and his wife now lived in a house in which they had use of the top and bottom floors but not the middle floor that still contained a rent-controlled apartment. Seven years after he moved in, D finally evicted this tenant: The other tenant left because we evicted them. We filed a petition to have them evicted on the grounds (permissible under the rent control law) which if a landlord had an immediate and compelling need for the space for his own use he can evict the tenant. I investigated the law. We already had one child and were about to have a second child and needed the space (interview with D, August 2002). D invested sweat equity in his brownstone. He estimates that he spent approximately $40 000 on improvements, mostly in the early years: It was electrical, heating, painting, etc … relatively minor. A lot of it was cosmetic. The goal was to retain period features. I even bought, for a nominal sum, two fireplaces that had been ripped out of other houses and put them in my children’s bedrooms (interview with D, August 2002). Thus far, the story is a fairly familiar one of middle-class upgrading and working-class displacement. Indeed, it is almost a textbook case of gentrification as first described by Ruth Glass (1964). What has happened to the house since 1995, however, illustrates in microcosm a new process I am calling supergentrification (compare with Dangschat’s (1991) typology of the ultra-gentrifier). 2489 When his family circumstances changed in the mid 1990s, D put the house in which he had raised his family on the market. His broker valued the house at $640 000—or nearly 23 times more than what he had paid for it some 30 years before. Within a week, an English woman employed on Wall Street as a broker specialising in Japanese bonds and securities, had agreed a purchase price of $595 000 and written a personal cheque for the full amount! Previous generations of gentrifiers needed mortgages and so were subject to banking loan officers’ ideas about who, what and where in the city was suitable for gentrification. By contrast, in New York, there is now a new generation flush with the exorbitant rewards of the global finance and corporate service industries (see Warf, 2000). They are able to marshal previously unheard of sums to finance their domestic reproduction. It is not only the volume and source of the assets they mobilise that mark out these ‘financifiers’ from previous generations of gentrifiers, but also, I would suggest, their lifestyles and values as well. The story of our house after its sale is taken up by the next door neighbour, S: She didn’t move in straight away because it took her nine months to renovate the house. Meanwhile she rented an apartment for an astronomical fee elsewhere in the Heights … She was English, he was Australian—he used to wear orange shell suits and gold chains … . The renovations cost her way more than the house: a minimum of three-quarters of a million. She gutted the place … took out weight-bearing walls, knocked out ceilings and floors, everything. They completely changed the floor plan. My house was covered in dust from the demolition for months … They installed central air conditioning, walk in closets, and wall to wall cables. In [one of D’s children] old room on the top floor they even put in a marblized bathroom with a jacuzzi. Then they didn’t like it, so they pulled it all out and redid it again! �2490 LORETTA LEES S. goes on to refer rather scathingly to the quite different lifestyles and values of the incomers: The garden said it all. When D lived there, there was a mature urban garden, with grape vine, ivy, clematis, crab apple tree, etc. They were control freaks … they couldn’t deal with stuff growing! They pulled it all up and turfed over the whole garden … They suburbanised it—green lawn and BBQ and nothing else! They brought Scottsdale, Arizona, to Brooklyn Heights … One day on my way home from work I noticed what looked like an outhouse in their front area … It was so big. It was a shed they got built for their garbage cans. I was going to say something but the historic preservation people got there first … She got pregnant 4–5 months after moving in and had twins. They had only lived there a year when they upped and moved to Scottsdale Arizona. Then a couple from Cobble Hill bought it for over $1.75 million!!—computer folk with two kids who loved the state of the art wiring (interview with S, August 2002). 3. Third-wave Gentrification The emergence of super-gentrification is just one example of how gentrification shifted into top gear during the long economic boom of the 1990s. This latest resurgence of gentrification, which Jason Hackworth and Neil Smith (2001) have dubbed ‘third-wave’ gentrification to distinguish it from previous rounds of revitalisation, poses important questions about the historical continuity of current manifestations of gentrification with previous generations of neighbourhood change.1 One important issue is about the location and scale—or the ‘distanciation’ (see Giddens, 1981, 1984)—of gentrification: the ways in which both the underlying processes of gentrification and the material changes they produce are stretched and sustained over time and space. According to Neil Smith (2002, p. 427) gentrification is now a global urban strategy that has displaced the liberal urban policy of old with a new revanchist urbanism, “densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation” and concerned with capitalist production rather than social reproduction. As Smith notes (p. 439) gentrification is now evident well beyond the familiar core of Anglo-American cities commonly studied by urban geographers. It is being documented across the globe from Mexico (Jones and Varley, 1999) to Israel (Gonen, 2002). Moreover, academics no longer restrict the term ‘gentrification’ to processes located in the city centre. Increasingly, they also use it to describe similar changes in the suburbs (see N. Smith, 2002, p. 442; Hackworth and Smith, 2001; Smith and Defilippis, 1999) and even rural areas (see Smith and Philips, 2001, on ‘greentrified rurality’ and D. Smith, 2002). Not only does ‘third-wave’ gentrification now occur in a variety of sites, but it also takes a myriad of forms. It can be of the traditional or classic form—that is, by individual gentrifiers renovating old housing through sweat equity or by hiring builders and interior designers and so leading to the embourgeoisement of a neighbourhood and the displacement of less wealthy residents. It is now also increasingly state-led with national and local governmental policy tied up in supporting gentrification initiatives (see Lees, 2003; Atkinson, 2002; N. Smith, 2002; Hackworth and Smith, 2001; Wyly and Hammel, 1999). In a departure from the traditional concern with renovating old housing stock, some now argue that gentrification can also be new build (see Morrison and McMurray, 1999). Nor is it always residential—it can also be commercial (see Kloosterman and van der Leun, 1999). This proliferation of gentrification at different scales, at different sites and in different forms suggests that gentrification has truly become the ‘plague of locusts’ that N. Smith (1984, p. 152) once described it as. Adding ‘super-gentrification’ to this long �SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS list of gentrification forms, I realise that I am running the considerable risk of making the meaning of the term so expansive as to lose any conceptual sharpness and specificity. A number of scholars have argued that gentrification is a ‘chaotic’ concept describing the contingent and geographically specific results of different processes operating in different ways in different contexts (see Rose, 1984; Beauregard, 1986). This is nowhere more true than with the process of super-gentrification. Indeed, I maintain that there are several reasons why we should consider the case of super-gentrification in more detail. First, it provides a concrete manifestation of sometimes rather abstract claims made about the relationships between global economic and urban-scale processes. For instance, Neil Smith (2002, p. 441) argues that the “hallmark of [this] latest phase of gentrification” is the “reach of global capital down to the local neighbourhood scale”. The relationships among global economic processes, local places and communities are nowhere more obvious than in the super-gentrification of Brooklyn Heights. Closely tied, through the labour market, to global financial markets, super-gentrifying neighbourhoods like Brooklyn Heights are peculiarly positioned global spaces/places. While it is important to recognise the specificity of its location within the global space economy, there is no reason to assume that the processes of super-gentrification at play in Brooklyn Heights are totally unique to it. Indeed, Butler and Robson (2001a, pp. 5 and 10–12) have suggested that Barnsbury in London is also “witnessing second generation (re)gentrification”, driven largely by finance and financial-sector workers employed in the City of London. And there is anecdotal evidence that Park Slope, located in Brooklyn not far from Brooklyn Heights, is experiencing super-gentrification too (see Lees, 2000; Slater, 2003). Secondly, by highlighting new processes intensifying the economic valorisation of— and consequent social and cultural changes in—already gentrified neighbourhoods, the 2491 concept of super-gentrification presents something of a challenge to traditional explanatory models of gentrification, which presume an end-point to the process. Stage models of gentrification were developed in the 1970s and 1980s both to explain the process and to predict the future course of gentrification (see Kerstein, 1990, for a review). For example, Clay (1979, pp. 57–60) outlined a schema from stage one (pioneer gentrification) through to stage four (maturing gentrification). Similarly Dangschat’s (1991) gentrification typology presumed that pioneer gentrifiers would be succeeded in a final phase of gentrification by ‘ultragentrifiers’, who were distinguished from pioneers on the basis of age and aggregate income. Like the now-discredited climax ecology models of vegetation invasion and succession on which they were predicated (see Hagen, 1992), such gentrification stage models assume that the process of gentrification will eventually reach a stable and self-perpetuating final climax stage of ‘mature gentrification’. The example of supergentrification demonstrates the folly of this assumption about the stability both of the underlying processes and of the resulting patterns of gentrification.2 As Chris Hamnett argued some time ago now: It should be clear that gentrification is merely another stage in a continuing historically contingent sequence of residential-area evolution. There are no universally and temporally stable residential patterns (Hamnett, 1984, p. 314). Drawing on neo-Marxist rent-gap models, Hackworth and Smith (2001) have recently produced a schematic history of gentrification in New York City, which they divide into three distinct waves separated by two transitional periods of recession-induced restructuring of the institutional context and mechanisms through which gentrification occurred. Their very useful heuristic model of gentrification was not designed with the predictive intention of early stage models and so does not commit the fallacy of constant conjunction (Sayer, 1992). But its emphasis on �2492 LORETTA LEES the dialectic of disinvestment and reinvestment and the attractions of “reinvesting in disinvested inner-urban areas so alluring for investors” leads Hackworth and Smith (2001, p. 468, 469) to discount the possibility of intensified investment in first wave neighbourhoods, like Brooklyn Heights, that “have already been fully invested”. That oversight seems somewhat surprising, given their emphasis on the dynamism of restless capital as a driving-force behind the new manifestations of the process they so helpfully document. 4. Researching Super-gentrification In the remainder of this paper, I examine the process I am calling super-gentrification in more detail through a case study of the Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood of New York City. I am conscious that different research methods provide different accounts of gentrification. In this paper, I draw on data collected in 2002 as part of an on-going study of the history of gentrification and urban community in Brooklyn Heights.3 My interest in super-gentrification was initially sparked by the frequency with which older residents I interviewed tended both to celebrate their neighbourhood’s close-knit community feeling and to worry about the effects upon it of sky-rocketing real estate prices and the influx of Wall Street financifiers taking over the apartments and brownstones occupied by a previous generation of gentrifiers. When recalling the past, there is often a tendency to romanticise, and so in this paper I balance the qualitative reflections drawn from those semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Brooklyn Heights’ residents (and some ex-residents) undertaken during a first round of fieldwork in the summer of 2002 with two other sources of data. First, I make extensive use of the decennial US Census, as well as other official statistics from the New York City Department of Finance, for the four census tracts covering the neighbourhood, to set recent changes in the context both of the history of the area and of New York City as a whole. Comparison is facili- tated by the fact that the census-tract boundaries have not changed in more than 40 years, making time-series comparisons relatively easy. Secondly, I also draw on results of a questionnaire survey, which was hand delivered to 998 households covering all the streets in Brooklyn Heights. The survey was 10 pages long and contained 95 closed and open-ended questions, many of them quite intrusive in nature. Considering the length of the questionnaire and intrusive nature of the questions, the 101 questionnaires I received back by stamped self-addressed envelope was a good return rate (post-September 11 also meant that residents were less interested in responding).4 Although survey respondents were disproportionately owner-occupiers (68 per cent; see Table 1) and as a result tended to be older and wealthier than the population of the neighbourhood as a whole, I received responses from a broad range of neighbourhood residents. 5. The Case of Brooklyn Heights, New York City 5.1 The History of Gentrification in Brooklyn Heights Located on a 150-foot-high bluff overlooking the harbour and Lower Manhattan (see Figure 2), Brooklyn Heights was one of the first neighbourhoods in the US to gentrify. Hence it has long served as a model for gentrifiers’ own ‘how-to’ guides (see, for example, Stanforth and Stamm, 1972; Brownstone Revival Committee, 1969). The neighbourhood’s elegant tree-lined streets (see Figure 3) and brownstone or brick townhouses were first developed in the early 19th century by wealthy business, shipping and tradespeople drawn across the East River from Lower Manhattan by the availability of the Fulton Street steam ferry service. As well as being Manhattan’s first commuter suburb, Brooklyn Heights was also the legal and cultural centre for the City of Brooklyn (Jackson and Manbeck, 1998). The succession of historic homes and public buildings rendered in �SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS 2493 Figure 2. Brooklyn Heights and surrounds. Gothic revival, Queen Anne and other fashionable styles of the day reflected the neighbourhood’s position throughout the century as one of the wealthiest communities in the US (see Warf, 1990, on the social ecology of Brooklyn as a whole from the 1840s to the 1980s). However, its e´lite status began to fade in the early 20th century when the construction of the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) subway opened up the neighbourhood to a further wave of commuters. Many of the upper-middle-class residents of Brooklyn Heights fled for more distant suburbs, leaving their large brownstone houses to be divided into apartments and boarding houses for more modest occupants. By the Depression, Brooklyn Heights contained a substantial quantity of slum housing. As many as a third of its houses were boarded up due to bank foreclosures. These houses “were taken over as rooming houses by rapacious absentee landlords” (Stanforth and Stamm, 1972, p. 58). After World War II, “the area was rediscovered by upwardly mobile young adults who rejected the suburbs and regarded Brooklyn Heights as a desirable alternative to Manhattan’s scarce and expensive apartments” (NYC Department of City Planning, 1976, p. 11). In the 1940s, in a now-classic gentrification scenario, writers and artists such as Arthur Miller, Thomas Wolf and W. H. Auden started to move into the area. Then, in the 1950s, grassroots organisations and community groups, led by the Brooklyn �2494 LORETTA LEES Figure 3. Brooklyn Heights: an elegant tree-lined street. Heights Association (BHA), became active in initiating the renovation of Brooklyn Heights’ historic brownstones. Most famously, the BHA halted plans by Robert Moses, New York City Parks Commissioner and Head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, to drive the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway (BQE) through the middle of the neighbourhood and in the process destroy hundreds of historic buildings (see McCarthy, 2001). In what became Moses’ first defeat, the BQE was diverted along the edge of the bluff around the Heights to create, atop the two decks of the BQE below, the Promenade—a popular walk-way and park with benches and picture-postcard views over the harbour and the Manhattan skyline that has become a Heights landmark.5 The BHA was also instrumental in gaining historic preservation status for the neighbourhood. In 1965, Brooklyn Heights became the first New York City neighbourhood to be designated both a national landmark by the Department of the Interior and a New York City Historic District by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in recognition of its numerous pre-Civil War buildings (Stanforth and Stamm, 1972, p. 61; see Figure 4). Historic preservation helped to secure the area against both further devalorisation and slum clearance plans then being mooted. By the early 1960s, a wave of new investment by owner-occupiers like D was transforming the neighbourhood. The Brownstone Revival Committee (1969) reported that whereas in the mid 1950s homes could be purchased for as little as $20 000–30 000, by the early 1960s they were selling for $65 000– 120 000. By the 1970s, the neighbourhood had come full circle and was once again emerging as a fashionable and prosperous brownstone community that drew the Wall Street financial community. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, a more corporatised gentrification moved steadily throughout the already ‘tamed’ Brooklyn Heights. As Hackworth (2002, p. 820) notes, such corporate participation demonstrates the maturation of gentrification in neighbourhoods. This was closely tied to the redevelopment of Downtown Brooklyn nearby, subsidised by the City and the Federal government, and to other downtown redevelopment projects such �SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS Figure 4. Brooklyn Heights Historic District. 2495 �2496 LORETTA LEES as the Atlantic Terminal Project conceived and fostered by major city finance and real estate interests (see Steinberg, 1994, for an excellent discussion of redevelopment in Downtown Brooklyn at this time, the importance of its physical location minutes from Wall Street and the exacerbation of gentrification in adjacent neighbourhoods). The construction of Metrotech in Downtown Brooklyn, with its back-office facilities for large companies such as Morgan Stanley, brought a booming lunch-time trade to Brooklyn Heights’ main commercial street— Montague Street. Rents went up and large corporate chains such as The Gap, Banana Republic and Starbucks soon moved in. Many long-time residents view the increasing corporate commercial presence, and the added traffic and shoppers it draws to Brooklyn Heights, as an assault on the small town ethos and community feel of the neighbourhood: Corporations have come into the neighborhood changing the residential nature of B. H., too many chain stores and not enough catering to local residents (survey, no. 48). That feeling of loss was echoed by others: The high rents on Montague Street drove the small, family-owned businesses out of the neighborhood and only the large chains could afford the spaces, therefore the ‘look’ of Montague St is very much like the look of many streets in Manhattan. It was nicer when we had our own look (survey, no. 83). In the past few years, the adjacent Atlantic Avenue/Court Street commercial nexus has undergone an even more dramatic transformation. Long a no-man’s land with downmarket shops and a boarded-up porn theatre, it now boasts several high-rise apartment buildings and a large mini-mall with a multiplex cinema and national chains such as Barnes and Noble, CVS and Ben & Jerry’s. Whilst for some residents (mostly the newcomers), these developments are welcomed as positive—especially in terms of safety walking home from work late at night—others see it as part of what one resident dubbed the on-going ‘Manhattanization’ of Brooklyn Heights which “will crowd out the neighbors ⫹ upset the small town scale of B. H” (survey, no. 39). It is on the back of the corporatisation or Manhattanisation of Brooklyn Heights that a process of supergentrification has emerged. But before turning my attention to that, the US Census provides a more general indication of the changes that have ensued with the wholesale gentrification of Brooklyn Heights. With 93.4 per cent of housing units in the neighbourhood in 2000 built before 1969 (71.2 per cent before 1939), the total number of housing units has remained roughly constant between 1970 and 2000. However, the tenure of residents has shifted quite dramatically. The percentage of owner-occupied housing increased from 12.1 per cent of units in 1970, well below the city-wide average of 33.1 per cent, to 39.0 per cent in 2000—well above the city-wide average of 28.5 per cent (see Table 1). Although the city’s rent control and rent stabilisation programmes kept the rate of increase of mean gross rents in Brooklyn Heights in line with city-wide trends, the shrinking supply of rental property, combined with the spectacular, 1841 per cent increase in the average specified nominal value of owner-occupied property (more than double the rate of increase citywide), has made affordable housing in the neighbourhood increasingly hard to come by. The activity of first-wave gentrifiers like D. converting townhouses from multiple occupation back to single or dual-family owneroccupancy is reflected both in the dramatic decline in the number of rental units in Brooklyn Heights without a full bath (a useful proxy indicator of SROs and other housing for low income-groups)6 from 805 in 1970 to 195 in 1980 and in the corresponding 50.8 per cent increase in the number of threeor more bedroom, owner-occupied properties between 1970 and 1990. In returning historic homes to their former glory, gentrifiers were transforming not just the face of the built environment, but �2 917 429 33.1 66.0 148 28 194 11 244 12.1 87.4 148 54 268 2 941 850 22.2 76.6 262 57 299 11 492 16.0 83.0 321 202 775 1980 2 992 212 27.0 71.3 538 205 889 10 223 34.1 62.5 667 531 579 1990 Source: US Census, Neighborhood Change Database, GeoLytics, East Brunswick, NJ. New York City Number of housing units Percentage owner-occupied Percentage renter-occupied Average specified gross rent ($) Average specified value of owneroccupied property ($) Brooklyn Heights (census tracts 1, 3.01, 5, 7) Number of housing units Percentage owner-occupied Percentage renter-occupied Average specified gross rent ($) Average specified value of owneroccupied property ($) 1970 Table 1. Housing statistics for Brooklyn Heights and New York City, 1970–2000 3 200 912 28.5 69.8 766 250 307 11 057 39.0 59.8 946 999 213 2000 SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS 2497 �2498 LORETTA LEES Table 2. Demographic Statistics for Brooklyn Heights and New York City, 1970–2000 1970 Brooklyn Heights (census tracts 1, 3.01, 5, 7) Total population 20 524 Percentage ⬍ 18 years of age 14.1 Percentage ⬎ 64 years of age 14.6 Percentage White 94.9 Percentage African American 4.1 Percentage Hispanic 7.3 Percentage ⬎ 25 years completing ⬎ 15 38.0 years school Total employed in civilian labour force 11 901 Percentage in professional and technical 45.7 occupations Percentage employed as managers and 10.9 administrators Employed in FIRE (finance, insurance, N/A and real estate) New York City Total population 7 892 350 Percentage ⬍ 18 years of age 28.4 Percentage ⬎ 64 years of age 12.1 Percentage White 77.2 Percentage African American 21.1 Percentage Hispanic 16.2 Percentage ⬎ 25 years completing ⬎ 15 10.6 years school Total employed in civilian labour force 3 190 789 Percentage in professional and technical 15.7 occupations Percentage employed as managers and 7.8 administrators Employed in FIRE (finance, insurance, N/A and real estate) 1980 1990 2000 19 833 9.6 15.1 89.4 6.3 6.7 51.5 18 051 9.1 12.9 87.8 7.0 6.4 63.4 20 132 10.5 12.9 82.9 8.5 7.5 70.8 13 115 38.4 10 263 47.2 11 995 47.7 21.0 23.0 26.1 N/A 2 064 2 280 7 070 424 25.0 13.4 61.5 25.3 19.9 17.3 7 322 670 23.0 13.0 52.3 28.8 23.7 23.0 8 008 278 24.2 11.7 46.7 28.4 27.0 29.2 2 917 974 16.9 3 257 698 20.1 3 277 825 23.3 11.4 13.5 13.5 N/A 401 765 372 809 Source: US Census, Neighborhood Change Database, GeoLytics, East Brunswick, NJ. also the composition and qualitative feel of the neighbourhood (see Table 2). These changes must be understood in the context of wider demographic changes in the City of New York since its near-bankruptcy during the economic crisis of the 1970s (see Lees and Bondi, 1995; Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991). Although first-wave gentrifiers frequently commented to me that the neighbourhood is now older, with fewer children and more senior citizens, than when they first moved to Brooklyn Heights, these demographic shifts reflect wider national trends rather than changes specific to Brooklyn Heights. In contrast to the city as a whole, the neighbourhood has always been pre- dominantly White, with recent modest percentage declines in the White population largely reflecting the small but growing Asian population. While the racial make-up of Brooklyn Heights has not changed much over the past 30 years, neighbourhood residents have become increasingly wealthy, better educated and even more heavily involved in professional occupations and in the financial services industry, both in absolute terms and relative to the population of the city as a whole. Since the neighbourhood’s Hispanic population has remained almost constant, in contrast to city and nation-wide trends (Table 2), those displaced by firstwave gentrification in Brooklyn Heights �SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS 2499 Figure 5. Trends in family income in New York City and Brooklyn Heights, 1970–2000. Source: Author’s calculations, from US Census and Neighborhood Change Database, GeoLytics, East Brunswick, NJ. Figure 6. Distribution of families in Brooklyn Heights by annual income percentile categories for all New York City families. Source: Author’s calculations, from US Census and Neighborhood Change Database, GeoLytics, East Brunswick, NJ. were predominantly White, often Irish and Italian Americans. As first-wave gentrifiers were often Protestant or Jewish, who tended to send their children to private schools in the neighbourhood, rather than to the local public and Catholic schools, gentrification in the neighbourhood had an ethno-religious dimension as well as the class and, to a lesser extent racial, ones that have been the focus of most gentrification research (for example, Ley, 1996; Butler, 1997). The most dramatic changes in Brooklyn Heights have been the increases in income, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, and their divergence from city-wide trends (Figure 5). Further analysis of income data from the census shows the progressive displacement of low income families in Brooklyn Heights �2500 LORETTA LEES Figure 7. Mean specified value of owner-occupied property, 1970–2000. Source: Author’s calculations, from US Census and Neighborhood Change Database, GeoLytics, East Brunswick, NJ. by high-income ones.7 The census provides data on numbers of families with different annual incomes using nationally standard income categories, or bins, of various interval widths (for example, families in 1970 with incomes $9000–9999, $10 000–11 999, etc.). The resulting variation in the width, or bin size, of these income interval categories makes it particularly difficult to interpret the raw income frequency distribution data for neighbourhoods like Brooklyn Heights with a skewed income distribution. This is because the high-income categories containing the largest number of families also have the widest bin sizes (for example, $25 000– 49 999) and so would be expected to encompass a larger number of families than categories with a narrower bin size encompassing a narrower annual income interval (such as $9000–9999). To explore in more detail the changing distribution of families by income, I performed a four-step statistical analysis. First, I standardised the bin size of the annual income interval categories used by the Census Bureau to classify families in a given year by income. Taking as standard the bin size of the narrowest income interval used in each census, I sub-divided wider income interval categories into a larger number of more nar- row, standard-sized ‘bins’. Secondly, assuming that families were normally distributed by income within the original census income intervals, I apportioned the number of families contained in the census’ original wider income interval category bins equally among the appropriate number of standard-sized bins. Then, I was able to calculate a cumulative frequency distribution of number of families by annual income. Finally, I used linear interpolation to estimate the percentage of families in a given population with a given annual income (see Figure 6).8 As Figure 6 demonstrates, the number of families in Brooklyn Heights with incomes below the median income for all New York City families has become steadily smaller over time, with the most rapid changes taking place during the 1970s. Over the past 10 years, the small number of lower-income families remaining in the neighbourhood has held steady, while the number of ‘upper-middle’ income families, with incomes between the 51st and 90th per centile of all New York City families, has fallen by nearly 9.7 per cent. At the same time, the number of families among the highest 10 per cent of all New York City families by income has increased by the same amount. As a result, now more �SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS 2501 Figure 8. Residential sales prices for selected property types in Brooklyn Heights and New York City, 1992–2001. Source: New York City Department of Finance Property Transaction File, Misland Report, NYC Department of Planning. than half of the families in the neighbourhood are among the wealthiest 10 per cent of all families in the City of New York. While these changes are suggestive of what I am calling ‘super-gentrification’, such cross-sectional analysis does not provide a basis for inferring whether they are the result of displacement of older residents by more wealthy incomers, of the relative enrichment of existing residents (either through ageing, increased salaries, the stock market or some other processes), or some combination of the two. Nor does such extensive quantitative analysis provide a basis for explaining the underlying causes of the process responsible for super-gentrification (Sayer, 1992). on here), building a number of luxury highrise apartment buildings and prompting concerns from residents about erosion of the historical character and low-rise feel of the neighbourhood. Globally linked corporate real estate brokerage firms like the Corcoran Group, whose Brooklyn Heights office is now located on Montague Street, are very active and visible in the area. But within the historic district, what is noteworthy is the prevalence of individuals and private finance in a new round of intensified investment and super-gentrification. The 1990s have seen a boom in Brooklyn Heights’ real estate prices that is the talk of the neighbourhood. For instance, D recently e-mailed me to tell me about a nearby 5.2 Super-gentrification in Brooklyn Heights house which is essentially four walls, no roof etc, with a tree growing up through the center and not lived in for over 50 years [that] has just been bought by somebody in the neighborhood for $995 000!!! All owners on the lane are smiling!!! In the survey and interviews, a great many Brooklyn Heights residents expressed the belief that a sea-change had come over the neighbourhood in recent years as a tidal wave of Wall Street money swept over the Heights. Large property companies and developers have been active around the edges of the historic preservation district (and outside of the four census tracts I have focused His bemused tone betrays both his incomprehension at the new scale of real estate transactions in the neighbourhood and the knowledge that, as the owner of a small, �2502 LORETTA LEES neighbouring apartment, he stands to profit from them personally. He continued the story in a subsequent e-mail: Yesterday I got a note from the new owner of the falling down house … His note was very positive and expressed concern that his work on the [property] would not be too disturbing to residents. Within a few hours of the arrival of the note there was a dumpster in front of his new property and it was being loaded with debris. The time between the contract of sale signing and the closing was about one week indicating that he paid the purchase price (nearly a $million) in cash! The first dumpster was filled yesterday and there is a new empty one there today with a few Mexicans filling it with rotten wood etc. This guy works fast. The whole property will be cleaned out in less than a week at this rate and he will have a roof on the place before December (if exterior walls will support it!). Former owner told me yesterday that new owner has already talked to real estate brokers on Montague St. He may just clean out the building, put on a new roof and try and sell it for a quick profit. Wonderful to have that kind of money to play with. All neighbors are watching with baited breath … by the next time you are in Brooklyn, we may have a show place down the street. Its size and design is best suited for a three lane bowling alley with a snack bar on the second floor!!!! Far from levelling-off throughout the 1990s, as might be predicted by stage theory and neo-Marxist rent-gap-type explanations on the dialectic of disinvestment and reinvestment, the value of housing in Brooklyn Heights continued the steady climb that began with the first wave of gentrification in the 1960s. The average specified value of owner-occupied property in Brooklyn Heights in 2000 was $999 213, up from $531 578 in 1990. These mean figures are depressed by the large number of relatively low-value condominiums. A better indication of the intense valorisation, particularly of one- and two-family homes, in Brooklyn Heights is provided by the fact that 65 per cent of the 254 owner-occupiers who reported a household value in the long form (SF-3) of the 2000 US Census reported that their home was worth more than $1 million. Converting the nominal values reported in the census to 1996 inflation-adjusted dollars using the implicit price deflator for GNP (US BEA, 2002), shows that the increases in Brooklyn Heights’ property are ‘real’ (see Figure 7). Results from my questionnaire survey provide further evidence for a dramatic increase in the value of property in the neighbourhood. The average value of owner-occupied property reported by the 44 respondents to this question was $1 406 094 and the median was $1.5 million. These high values are not surprising given the bias among my respondents towards owner-occupiers of single- and two-family properties, which have seen the largest increases in value. By contrast, the average reported purchase price—in most cases, many years previously—was $381 426. Several long-time residents reported in their questionnaire responses plans to cash in on this windfall, either through outright sale or through second mortgages, to finance retirement home purchases elsewhere, while 30 specifically mentioned making provision in their wills or through trusts to provide legacies for their children from their property and other assets. The property value data in the census and my questionnaire survey are self-reported. Actual price data are recorded by the New York City Department of Finance for tax purposes. Despite some gaps in the time-series because of data suppression due to insufficient sales volume, they provide a better indication of the scale and unevenness of residential sales price increases in Brooklyn Heights during the 1990s (see Figure 8). Most of the increases have accrued to singleand two-family houses, the same historic properties that attracted the first wave of gentrifiers in the 1960s and 1970s. As the real estate company Corcoran noted in its Brooklyn Report, during the 1990s Brooklyn Heights �SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS led the borough with some of the largest percentage price increases. The price average for single family townhouses on its quaint tree-lined streets topped $2 million (Corcoran, 2000, p. 1). Although there is now some mention of a slow-down in the local property market in the wake of September 11 and the recent poor performance of the stock market and the financial services industries, property values in Brooklyn Heights are now some of the highest in the city. The rapid appreciation of property values in Brooklyn Heights during the 1990s is in notable contrast to trends city-wide. As Daniels and Schill note from their extensive analysis of real estate price trends in New York City, Despite all of the recent discussion of rapidly rising real estate prices in the city, the housing price indices demonstrate that as of the end of 1999, prices for the most part had not regained all of the ground they lost since the last peak in values in the late 1980s (at least in inflation-adjusted dollars) (Daniels and Schill, 2001, p. 56). Their analysis, conducted at the communitydistrict scale, based on repeat sales of the same property, indicates that only a few select areas of the city saw large percentage price increases. These were largely, but not exclusively, in peripheral areas of below-average real estate values. Similarly Hackworth (2001) found both a spatial expansion of gentrification into previously depreciated areas of the city, like Bedford Stuyvesant, and some evidence of intensification within reinvested core areas of the city like Brooklyn Heights. Whether the dramatic increases in house prices in Brooklyn Heights are fuelled directly by Wall Street bonuses or by the feeling of wealth created by burgeoning investment portfolios in a rising stock market, residents of Brooklyn Heights have been quick to attribute this latest wave of supergentrification to Wall Street and the influx of a new type of gentrifier in the neighbour- 2503 hood. Pondering the cause of sky-rocketing real estate prices in the neighbourhood, a journalist writing for the local Brooklyn Heights Press explained, There is a simple answer: a lot of people with a lot of money want to live in downtown Brooklyn … There is clearly new energy, and new money, fuelling the brownstone neighborhoods (Holt, 1999). As B., the adult son of pioneer gentrifiers in Brooklyn Heights explained to me, You know when the yuppies have moved in because you can hear the sandblasters (interview with B., August 2002). What is particularly telling about this remark is that he uses the 1980s stereotype of the young urban professional to distance himself and his family socially from more recent arrivals—whom, as a professional lawyer himself—he resembles, at least in occupational terms, if not, at least in this particular case, in terms of annual income. Several respondents to my survey—significantly both long-standing residents of Brooklyn Heights—used this same code word to describe recent changes to the neighbourhood. A teacher and owner of a four-bedroom townhouse complained, Preferred [it] in the old days … The Heights is too ‘yuppified’ (survey, no. 20) While another, a wealthy middle-aged doctor who grew up in neighbouring Cobble Hill noted, Community less close—more yuppies moved in. Was more connected 20 years ago (survey, no. 72). There is a widespread perception that the recent in-movers are predominantly wealthy financial types and hence different from the long-term residents and original gentrifiers. One long-time resident complains of ‘Wall Street Types’ who have bought coops here in the last 10 years are insular and relate to the needs of the upper middle class and they move to the suburbs once �2504 LORETTA LEES they have their second child. Us ‘oldtimers’ in the neighborhood are fewer in number now (survey, no. 64). Likewise, many of the new in-movers also see themselves as different from earlier gentrifiers: I’m part of the new wave claimed one (survey, no. 18). Some survey respondents were positive about the impact of these ‘financifiers’ on the neighbourhood: The level of income per household has risen—new upscale stores, restaurants have opened up. The whole neighbourhood has benefited by an influx of new tenants and homeowners from the financial businesses moving in (survey, no. 25). Most survey respondents, however, saw the impact in quite negative terms saying things like: It’s getting too expensive (real estate), pretty soon only the wealthy will be able to afford living here, then it will be a ghost town (survey, no. 9). Many expressed concerns about the effects of much higher real estate prices and rents on young families with children and thus on the diversity of the population and the character of the neighbourhood. The occupation of entire buildings by wealthy financial industry types has diminished the availability of rental properties (survey, no. 3). Another resident explained: In the 7 years I have lived here, the neighborhood has remained much the same. Physically (development-wise) there has been a trend to open more upscale shopping venues in the neighborhood. In terms of demographics things have remained much the same. Mostly very young families who move to the suburbs when children reach school age, but also a fair number of older couples with grown children, and singles in their 20–30s. Real estate values have increased significantly in the past two years which I believe will result in a shift in demographics to a more high income resident group, and will discourage young families from moving here, which would be a detriment (survey, no. 17). Similar concerns about the displacement of young families were also expressed by interview informants. For instance, a 39-year-old housewife married to a lawyer and renting explained, We feel that B. H. was ‘discovered’ by Manhattanites. Driving rent and properties higher, keeping ownership out of our reach, for now. Also the private schools are very expensive and lacking space. The price and competitiveness has driven young families out to the neighboring suburbs especially after a second child is born and the children become of school age (interview, August 2002). However, these specific concerns about the displacement of young families with children are not borne out by aggregate census data (Table 2). While there has been a slight decrease in the percentage of Brooklyn Heights’ residents in the same residence as of 5 years previously (from 56.3 per cent in 1990 to 51.8 per cent in 2000)—indicative, perhaps, of increasing displacement—the absolute number of children in Brooklyn Heights actually increased by 482, or nearly a third, between 1990 and 2000. It may be that the displacement of some moderate and upper-middle-income families from Brooklyn Heights is compensated for by an influx of much more wealthy residents drawn to the neighbourhood, its tree-lined streets, private schools and single-family homes, by the prospect of domestic reproduction. For instance, the need for ‘bigger living quarters to have children’ was cited by one 36-year-old lawyer as the reason he and his partner recently spent over $1 000 000 buying and renovating a five-bedroom townhouse in the neighbourhood (survey, no. 6). There is some independent statistical evidence to support the widespread belief in �SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS Brooklyn Heights that this latest wave of super-gentrification has been fuelled by large bonuses and salaries from Wall Street. Not surprisingly, given its proximity to Wall Street, substantial numbers of Brooklyn Heights’ residents are employed in the finance, insurance and real estate industry, with a further 12 per cent of the labour force in 2000—or more than a quarter of all those employed in professional occupations— working in legal occupations (Table 2; US Census, 2002). What is particularly noteworthy about this is that, whereas employment in the so-called FIRE industry has gone down in New York City as a whole since its peak in 1987 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2002; Warf, 2000), it actually increased in Brooklyn Heights during the 1990s (Table 2). This is important because, during a decade of stagnant or even falling real wages in other industries in the city, wages in finance 2505 have sky-rocketed (Figure 9). Even those not directly employed in finance relied on stock market assets to help finance new purchases in the neighbourhood. Of recent homebuyers I surveyed, four specifically mention stock sales as one of the ways they raised the capital to finance their purchases of townhouses in Brooklyn Heights. It is important to recognise, however, that whatever the statistical evidence to support residents’ concerns about their neighbourhood falling sway to super-rich ‘financifiers’, the very perception of such is a real social fact with the power to change the neighbourhood, irrespective of the ‘softness’ of the evidence for its ‘reality’. The interesting question, one which Butler and Robson (2001a, p. 11) are asking too, is how these recent arrivals map onto the narrative of middle-class life in the area. Residents of Brooklyn Heights are almost universal in the Figure 9. Average real wage rates by industry for New York City, 1992–2000. Source: New York City Rent Guidelines Board (2002). �2506 LORETTA LEES value they put on their neighbourhood’s strong sense of community. Describing her feelings for the area, one resident reflected a widely held sentiment Yes, I have lived in a few places in NYC ⫹ other cities. Brooklyn Heights embodies a sense of community, connectedness for me. I like knowing my neighbors. I love the accessibility to the city, yet the fact that we are a bit removed (survey, no. 13). And yet many also see those valued qualities under threat. Another grimly commented: The changes in the neighborhood continue to be compacted by groups only interested in protecting their personal financial investments in living here. Now people are moving on and leaving those groups behind. The changes to come are radical and critical, yet the real question to ask is why so few members of the community are involved, much less care to be, in the process. I find that to be indicative of the true nature of what is really going on here (survey, no. 29). 6. Towards a Historical Geography of Gentrification In this paper I have examined the case of super-gentrification in a particular location. To date, most gentrification scholarship has focused on the cultural and economic changes resulting from the influx of new money and people into relatively disinvested and often depopulated areas. By contrast, super-gentrification takes place in alreadymature, gentrified neighbourhoods. Thus the phenomenon of super-gentrification presents something of a challenge both to stage model explanations of gentrification, which presume a final end-point to the processes of gentrification, and to those neo-Marxist rentgap-type explanations, which in their focus on the dialectic of disinvestment and reinvestment in the city tend to ignore changes in “neighborhoods [that] have already been fully gentrified” (Hackworth and Smith, 2001, p. 469). It is important to recognise the geographical and historical specificity of this case. Brooklyn Heights is located close to Wall Street which, over the period of my study, has emerged as the largest of the three major financial centres of the global economy (Warf, 2000). Apart, perhaps, from London and some parts of Silicon Valley, where the boom in high-technology stocks has had some similar effects on local housing costs, few places have been so closely tied into the flows of global capital. An unprecedented volume of capital, both the personal assets of a new generation of exorbitantly paid Wall Street ‘financifiers’ and the commercial capital of developers seeking to cater to their tastes, has poured into Brooklyn Heights and begun to reshape the neighbourhood. Although not entirely unique to Brooklyn Heights—Butler and Robson (2001a) have also found evidence of the regentrification of Barnsbury in inner-London—the resulting processes of super-gentrification are relatively circumscribed. In response to a number of calls for a ‘geography of gentrification’ (Ley, 1996, p. 81; Lees, 1994, 2000; Carpenter and Lees, 1995), a growing body of comparative research, conducted at a variety of scales, is seeking to contextualise the geographically specific manifestation of gentrification processes in different places. For instance, the research of Tim Butler and Gary Robson (for example, Butler and Robson, 2001b, 2003; Robson and Butler, 2001) is comparing a number of different gentrifying innerLondon neighbourhoods to draw out both the commonalities and the diversity of middleclass resettlement in inner-London. At the international scale, researchers have sought to contextualise the gentrification of New York City by comparing it with processes at work in Toronto (see Slater, 2003) and London (see Eade and Mele, 1998). Such comparative work is important because it counters the tendency in gentrification studies to what James Clifford (1997) has called ‘travelling theory’: the universalising application of explanations drawn from one specific country/city/neighbourhood to other �SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS situations without attention to the specific contexts of both their original conceptualisation and their operation in other contexts. Indeed, if anything, Neil Smith’s (2002) provocative thesis that gentrification is now a global urban strategy re-emphasises the need for a more careful examination of the geographies of gentrification—the contextuality, spatiality and scale of gentrification. In my discussion of super-gentrification, I have tried to identify the geographically specific and contingent relations between local and global at work in gentrification. I also consider the temporality of gentrification and the historical continuities and changes in gentrification processes over time within this particular mature gentrified neighbourhood. As the example of super-gentrification demonstrates, the material manifestation of gentrification, like the underlying processes responsible for it, has grown and mutated since it was first noticed in cities such as London and New York back in the 1950s and 1960s. Gentrification has different histories in different cities and countries (see, for example, Lees, 1994; Carpenter and Lees, 1995). This history matters to the place and its residents. On the one hand, super-gentrification is evidence of the power of capital to drive successive waves of redevelopment (although this author is not sure that super-gentrifiers are ‘investing’ in their homes as vehicles for profit—rather, it’s about status). On the other hand, however, super-gentrifiers do not seem to share the historic values of first-wave gentrifiers and their presence is perceived as something of a disruption to the established gentrified community. There are tensions between first-wave and third-wave gentrifiers or the ‘old guard’ and the ‘new wave’, as one survey respondent put it. This historical geography is also important for how we theorise gentrification. Many of the features ‘old guard’ residents associate with super-gentrification, such as increasing disparities of wealth and poverty, and with financifiers, such as women working in full-time professional jobs and nannies replacing stay-athome mothers, stem from wider economic 2507 transformations (see Jarvis, 2002; Hanson and Pratt, 1995). To put all of this in proportion, the arrival of new-wave gentrifiers has not impacted the Heights anywhere near as much as the decline in ‘stay-at-home moms’. Describing recent changes in the neighbourhood in which she had lived for more than 30 years, one 63-year-old housewife explained: changes—mostly because life has changed—more women working, less around to volunteer—more nannies, no babysitters, pools. More paid services rather than groups getting together to roll up their sleeves and work (survey, no. 34). In interviews, it was stressed over and over again that it was the wives of pioneer gentrifiers that had created the sense of community in Brooklyn Heights. With more women at work they are not doing neighbourhood things. With long working hours and often having to travel away from home in association with work, they have no time to be involved in, or join, neighbourhood associations. Their social life is work- rather than neighbourhood-orientated. This has important implications for the reproduction of ‘community’ in Brooklyn Heights. This, though, is the subject of another paper. Notes 1. Hackworth and Smith (2001, p. 467) date the onset of post-recession or third-wave gentrification to approximately 1993–94. 2. I do not want to discredit stage models of gentrification per se, for they are very useful explanatory tools, rather I want to discredit the specific assumption of an end-stage in these models. 3. Super-gentrification: a case study of Brooklyn Heights, New York City—British Academy grant no. SG 301–70. 4. A number of residents actually sent back the survey and stated that they were not interested in filling it out due to September 11. 5. For views of the Promenade and other images of Brooklyn Heights, see www. viewsof.com/newyorkcity/brooklynhts.html 6. The last of Brooklyn Heights’ many rooming houses were picked off by developers in 1995, after a city-wide moratorium on SRO conversions was lifted. �2508 LORETTA LEES 7. The family was the primary unit of analysis for the 1970 Census, rather than the more comprehensive household, which includes all people sharing a housing unit. As a result, I have focused here on family income to make consistent comparisons through time. Analysis of both the per capita data and of the 1990 and 2000 censuses, in which income is reported both for families and for households, suggests that trends in family income hold more broadly for other units of analysis. 8. Without this procedure (or requesting a custom retabulation by the Census Bureau), it is impossible to statistically represent supergentrification in Brooklyn Heights, as I have done in Figure 6. References ATKINSON, R. (2002) Does gentrification help or harm urban neighbourhoods? An assessment of the evidence-base in the context of the New Urban Agenda. CNR Paper 5 (www.neighbourhoodcentre.org.uk). BEAUREGARD, R. (1986) The chaos and complexity of gentrification, in: N. SMITH and P. WILLIAMS (Eds) Gentrification of the City, pp. 35–55. Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin. BROWNSTONE REVIVAL COMMITTEE (1969) Homebuyers Guide to New York City Brownstone Neighborhoods. 230 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017 (prepared by Lucy Durand Sikes). BUTLER, T. (1997) Gentrification and the Middle Classes. Aldershot: Ashgate. BUTLER, T. and ROBSON, G. (2001a) Negotiating the new urban economy: work, home and school: negotiating middle class life in London. Paper presented at the Annual RGS-IBG Conference, Plymouth. BUTLER, T. and ROBSON, G. (2001b) Social capital, gentrification and neighbourhood change in London: a comparison of three south London neighbourhoods, Urban Studies, 38, pp. 2145– 2162. BUTLER, T. and ROBSON, G. (2003) London Calling: The Middle Classes and the Remaking of Inner London. Oxford: Berg. CARPENTER, J. and LEES, L. (1995) Gentrification in New York, London and Paris: an international comparison, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 19, pp. 286– 303. (Reprinted in M. Pacione (Ed.) (2002) The City: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, Vol. 2: Land-use Structure and Change in the Western City, pp. 544–566. London: Routledge.) CLAY, P. (1979) Neighborhood Renewal: Middleclass Resettlement and Incumbent Upgrading in American Neighborhoods. Massachusetts and Toronto: Lexington Books. CLIFFORD, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. CORCORAN (2000) The Corcoran Brooklyn Report: Year End 2000 Summary. Corcoran. DANGSCHAT, J. (1991) Gentrification in Hamburg, in: J. VAN WEESEP and S. MUSTERD (Eds) Urban Housing for the Better-Off: Gentrification in Europe, pp. 63–88. Utrecht: Stedelijke Netwerken. DANIELS, G. and SCHILL, M. (2001) State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods 2001, rev. edn. New York: Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, School of Law, New York University. EADE, J. and MELE, C. (1998) Global processes and customized landscapes: the ‘eastern promise’ of New York and London, Rising East: The Journal of East London Studies, 1, pp. 52–73. GIDDENS, A. (1981) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism: Volume 1: Power, Property and the State. London: Macmillan. GIDDENS, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. GLASS, R. (1964) Aspects of change, in: CENTRE FOR URBAN STUDIES (Ed.) London: Aspects of Change, pp. xiii–xlii. London: McGibbon and Kee. GONEN, A. (2002) Widespread and diverse neighborhood gentrification in Jerusalem, Political Geography, 21, pp. 727–737. HACKWORTH, J. (2001) Inner city real estate reinvestment, gentrification and economic recession in New York City, Environment and Planning A, 33, pp. 863–880. HACKWORTH, J. (2002) Postrecession gentrification in New York City, Urban Affairs Review, 37, pp. 815–843. HACKWORTH, J. and SMITH, N. (2001) The changing state of gentrification, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 92, pp. 464–477. HAGEN, J. (1992) An Entangled Bank: The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. HAMNETT, C. (1984) Gentrification and residential location theory: a review and assessment, in: D. T. HERBERT and R. J. JOHNSTON (Eds) Geography and the Urban Environment: Progress in Research and Application, Vol. 6, pp. 283–319. London: John Wiley. HANSON, S. and PRATT, G. (1995) Gender, Work and Space. London: Routledge. HOLT, D. (1999) Economy spurred boom here in 1999, Brooklyn Heights Press and Cobble Hill News, 23 December, p. 12. JACKSON, K. and MANBECK, J. (1998) (Eds) The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn. New Haven: Yale University Press. �SUPER-GENTRIFICATION IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS JARVIS, H. (2002) ‘Lunch is for wimps’: what drives parents to work long hours in ‘successful’ British and US cities, Area, 34(4), pp. 340– 352. JONES, G. and VARLEY, A. (1999) The reconquest of the historic centre: urban conservation and gentrification in Puebla, Mexico, Environment and Planning A, 31, pp. 1547–1566. KERSTEIN, R. (1990) Stage models for gentrification: an examination, Urban Affairs Quarterly, 25, pp. 620–639. KLOOSTERMAN, R. and LEUN, J. VAN DER (1999) Just for starters: commercial gentrification by immigrant entrepreneurs in Amsterdam and Rotterdam neighborhoods, Housing Studies, 14, pp. 659–677. LEES, L. (1994) Gentrification in London and New York: an Atlantic gap?, Housing Studies, 9, pp. 199–217. LEES, L. (2000) A re-appraisal of gentrification: towards a ‘geography of gentrification’, Progress in Human Geography, 24, pp. 389–408. LEES, L. (2003) Visions of ‘Urban Renaissance’: the Urban Task Force Report and the Urban White Paper, in: R. IMRIE and M. RACO (Eds) Urban Renaissance? New Labour, Community and Urban Policy, pp. 61–82. Bristol: The Policy Press. LEES, L. and BONDI, L. (1995) De-gentrification and economic recession: the case of New York City, Urban Geography, 16, pp. 234–253. LEY, D. (1996) The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MCCARTHY, J. (2001) Moses vs. Brooklyn Heights: where the mad builder met his match, in: M. ROBBINS and W. PALITZ (Eds) Brooklyn: A State of Mind, pp. 260–263. New York City: Workman Publishing. MOLLENKOPF, J. and CASTELLS, M. (1991) (Eds) Dual City: Restructuring New York. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. MORRISON, P. and MCMURRAY, S. (1999) The inner city apartment versus the suburb: housing sub-markets in a New Zealand city, Urban Studies, 35, pp. 377–397. NYC (NEW YORK CITY) DEPARTMENT OF CITY PLANNING (1976) Montague Street—Revitalization. New York City. ROBSON, G. and BUTLER, T. (2001) Coming to terms with London: middle-class communities in a global city, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25, pp. 70–86. ROSE, D. (1984) Rethinking gentrification: beyond the uneven development of Marxist urban 2509 theory, Environment and Planning D, 1, pp. 47–74. SAYER, A. (1992) Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. SLATER, T. (2003) The geography of the gentrifying ‘North American’ neighbourhood: a comparison of South Parkdale, Toronto, Canada, and Lower Park Slope, New York City, USA. Unpublished PhD thesis, King’s College London. SMITH, D. (2002) Extending the temporal and spatial limits of gentrification: a research agenda for population geographers, International Journal of Population Geography, 8, pp. 385–394. SMITH, D. and PHILIPS, D. (2001) Socio-cultural representations of greentrified Pennine rurality, Journal of Rural Studies, 17, pp. 457–469. SMITH, N. (1984) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. SMITH, N. (2002) New globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as global urban strategy, Antipode, 34, pp. 427–450. SMITH, N. and DEFILIPPIS, J. (1999) The reassertion of economics: 1990s gentrification in the Lower East Side, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 23, pp. 638–653. STANFORTH, D. and STAMM, M. (1972) Buying and Renovating a House in the City: A Practical Guide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. STEINBERG, P. (1994) Territorial formation on the margin: urban anti-planning in Brooklyn, Political Geography, 13(5), pp. 461–476. US BEA (2002) Table 7.3. Quantity and Price Indexes for Gross National Product and Command-basis Gross National Product (http:// www.bea.doc.gov/bea/dn/nipaweb/TableViewFi xed.asp#Mid; last accessed 10 November 2002). US BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS (2002) Current Employment Statistics Survey. Series Id: SAU3656117000011 (n) (http://www.bls.gov/ ces/home.htm; last accessed 9 November 2002). WARF, B. (1990) The reconstruction of social ecology and neighbourhood change in Brooklyn, Environment and Planning D, 8, pp. 73– 96. WARF, B. (2000) New York: the Big Apple in the 1990s, Geoforum, 31, pp. 487–499. WYLY, E. and HAMMEL, D. (1999) Islands of decay in seas of renewal: housing policy and the resurgence of gentrification, Housing Policy Debate, 10, pp. 711–798. ��� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Super-gentrification: The Case of Brooklyn Heights, New York City Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Loretta Lees Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Urban Studies Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Carfax Publishing Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 2003 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF