I'm the blognigger; nigger of park slope, nigger of the blogosphere.
I'm a 32 year-old Software Engineer. I grew up in Manhattan, went to a ritzy private school with 95% white kids where I was the token
Now I make $106,000 a year, and I'm a pauper in Park Slope. No, literally - we have to leave. I have two kids and my rent has just been raised to $3500 a month. I couldn't afford that in a billion years - already got my wife doing online surveys and shit to supplement our income (hey don't knock it - these things bring us decent $$).
I've lived here since 1999 (when 5th avenue was still a total shithole), and now I'm going to have to uproot my family and move out of brooklyn.
Can I ask you a fucking question?
How can I be making $106,000 a year and not be able to afford to live in Brooklyn?
It works like this: "Cool" people such as my wife and I, with my interests in Almodovar and Jonathan Lethem and Apple's HUIG and and Interpol and Spinal Tap and KrsOne and boingboing and Fark and AphexTwin and Groovy on Grails and Bob Ross and Glengarry Glen Ross and Jorn... we move into a neighborhood just before it's safe and desireable. We take "sketchy" walks to the subway (yes, just because I'm black, it's still sketchy - maybe they can smell the whiteness within me) and we deal with not being able to buy tapas on ever corner until the rest of the neighborhood catches up.
But here's the thing - we rent.
After the neighborhood is built up with designer peruvian cuisine and gourmet garage franchises, it's deemed officially cool. So cool that it's a viable alternative to manhattan. Now wall street moves in - hundreds of people with quarter million dollar bonuses in '06 and '07 - so much fucking money that I don't stand a chance. They buy.
Now my 2 bedroom on Garfield st. is $3500 a month, and I'm a fuckin nigger.
30 comments:
Well, a lot of Park Slope that can't afford to stay there is moving to Sunset. It's driving our rents up, but it's cheap compared to PS. Here's the rub: Now we're starting to look farther south because soon we won't be able to afford to stay in Sunset! Check it out.
I hope you're happy. NOW you've got me asking my acquaintances and neighbors, parents of my kids' classmates, etc., "Hey, are you the blognigger?" You can imagine that people do not always interpret this as a friendly question. Thanks a lot. Can I help it if my curiosity overrides my good sense? (Don't answer that.)
You should keep this up, very interesting!
Hey, I feel ya. It's crazy.Hope it all works out for you and your family.
why didn't you buy an apt in the early 2000's if you love park slope so much?
oh well i cannot live where i want to live but i do not cry about it on a blog.
such is life my friend
I am always amused by stories like yours. I was living in Park Slope when you moved here in 1999 (I still live here) deep on a numbered street below 5th Avenue, when it was a so called 'shithole', and if you thought that the walk to the subway was sketchy 10 years ago then you need to get out and see a little bit more of the world. Gentrification started in this neighborhood long before you and your 'cool' wife wife showed up in 1999. If you had moved here in 1978 then maybe you could be talking a little bit about your pioneering spirit but otherwise it's just laughable. In my time here I've seen the area fill up with people from Manhattan, having gone to ritzy private schools, making $100,000+, ruining the neighborhood with their sense of entitlement. Oh wait, that's you! "But.. but... I'm black" you say... who gives a shit. The only thing that separates you from the people you're whining about is that you didn't buy when you first crossed the river with your ritzy private school education and your tech industry job. So now you're going to have to uproot your family and move out of Brooklyn? Good riddance...
@psj
yeah yeah yeah, and you stole the land from the Indians, white man- enjoy your soapbox.
1978 huh? get back to Woodstock, ya sad old queen
Block that metaphor, Amelia B!
Well, now I'm really flustered. First I decide that I am a black conservative trapped in the body of a white woman (that was years ago, my Thomas Sowell crush). Then it's help me, I think I'm falling for...Barack. (Ideology be damned!) And now you come along and you're all that plus so goddam funny that milk would've shot out my nose if I'd been drinking milk when I read this post. Oh, and I'm already married to a perfectly nice white boy for 25 years. Somebody help me! Is there a support group for girls like me, or at least a horribly rude nickname for us? (Buppie Bimboes?) I will just have to blogroll you and yearn from afar...and be very embarrassed if I have to meet you in person at a Brooklyn Blogade. (Come to one anyway!)
Doing my bit for that Conversation on Race...
I love it. I hate it. I'm glad a friend pointed me in this direction. This is some of the funniest shit I've read in a long time. And despite the fact I bristle each time I read the name of this blog, I have you bookmarked. Keep bringing the brilliance.
I am a white single female in BN's industry and salary-range. In 2000 when I decided to move to BK, I couldn't afford anything in Park Slope that I liked.
Also as much as I liked Park Slope initially, I began to sense an annoying sense of entitlement on the part of its residents that made me not want to live there.
So, I came to Prospect Heights! Of course, now I couldn't afford to buy here. However, maybe BN's family can afford to buy here in Prospect Heights or east toward Crown Heights. Prices are coming down a bit.
Good Luck BN and family!
Dear BN,
You rock. Your commentary on race and social class speaks volumes. Keep it up, man, keep it up. Me? I'm just a white trash girl from northern california. There might not be too many like you around here, but you can believe there are even fewer of those like me.
It's the same old story going back more than a few decades. My wife and I began renting on what turned out to be one of Park Slope's fanciest blocks, Montgomery Place. This was way, way back in 1983. In our mid-20s with (gulp) college degrees in *visual art*, we learned pretty damn quick that we'd never make enough money working in "visual art" to buy a rowhouse on our street, and probably never in our immediate neighborhood, either: annual bonus money from the financial services industry guaranteed it.
That was way, way back before the 1987 stock market crash, back when Paul Simon held his nose just long enough to re-unite with Art Garfunkle and welcome the boomers and yuppies to New York City with their 1981 "Concert In Central Park."
New Millennium, Same Old Problem
Come on now BN - you can afford a pretty nice place in PS with your salary (and whats with the wife - no income for her???)
The problem is that like many Blacks you are used to paying much less for your housing b/c your not scared of (most) Black People - so you move to neighborhoods that are nice but white people wouldnt live in (b/c all the faces are black and brown) and then you have mad cash to pimp out your BMW and buy some fine threads.....
Its not that you can't afford PS - its that you can only afford PS like a white man (which aint great) - and of course if YOU start wearing crappy clothes and driving a shitbox around PS - your going to get tossed more than a salad.
I say move to some of the nicer areas of the Bronx - there you'll be RICH and you'll have enough disposable income to look like a Hedge Fund Manager (as a result of affirmative action of course).
One word, BN. BUSHWICK.
And say what you like, but I can groove with just about anyone for a neighbor...black, white, striped, rich, working class, eccentric, etc as long as they are N-E-W Y-O-R-K-E-R-S. God save us from the perpetual and nauseating influx of Mid West and Bible Belt hipsters. Serious.
So you're the black guy in Park Slope. I love Park Slope but it looks like I'm leaving, too. It's just too expensive and I don't feel like I fit in anymore, if I ever did. It's too bad, though, because it's such a beautiful part of Brooklyn. Too many doublewide strollers and post-hip parents still trying to grasp onto that final thread of youth. I saw a 30-something dad recently, perfectly cool seeming guy, wearing socks and Crocs. Yeah, guess it's time to leave. Looks like I'm moving to Chicago. New York has killed its middle class.
wow. i feel your pain.
Hilarious shit! I won't even begin to complain about the newly rezoned gentrification burgeoning in my own neighborhood after reading this! lmao
My husband and I felt your pain and moved to Kensington.
This just what I've been talking about! I've been coming to Brooklyn for the last 25 years, back when a nigger couldn't walk down the street. Now whitey moves in and my brothas and sistas are admonished for not buying. What the fuck? Why would I buy a shit hole apartment? Who thought to sell a shit hole apartment? White people are clueless, shit eating jerks who take over a neighbor only after hard working niggers cleaned it up for them. I have to live in the Bronx because I can't even afford BedStuy. Fuck you crackers!
You're a joke. I'm a brother who grew up in East New York, went to a 95% white boarding school for high school, and like you now make a six-figure income, but (again like you) am not in the monetary class of prime Park Slopers. However, I haven't created an insultingly named blog to sing the blues about my misfortune. My wife and I were renting in Park Slope (1997-2002), found it was becoming too expensive, took our savings and bought a Crown Heights brownstone. A lot of people can't afford to live in Park Slope anymore, and they aren't whining about it like you. If you have such a problem with the way things are, DO something about your situation rather than insulting a whole group of people by creating this poorly named and unfortunate blog. The jackass, deluded white folks who read this may think it's funny, but the whole thing pisses me off. You've even managed to attract bitter and moronic black losers like the 9:26 AM post. I do hope I get to meet you one day so we can discuss this man to man.
Haha. You Americans crack me up. With your blacks and your whites. In London, we all hate and don't trust the shit out of each other equally, thus rendering us all worthless shits. An equal playing field. And if the kids don't like it, they just stab each other to death. It's glorious. And this Park Slope (which in mind is a big slope with swings at the top) sounds like every borough in here. There are more young professional white people than pigeons. Keep up the blogging it's a hoot.
Dan!
I hear you on the too expensive part. I was forced out of Park Slope too after renting there for 15 years. I ended up in Staten Island where I own a beautiful house on half an acre with A DRIVEWAY for the same price as a 1 bedroom co-op. My sister just bought a 5 bedroom Victorian near the ferry for 420,000 and its the best deal in NYC. The ferry is free, its close to Brooklyn and the blogosphere is WIDE OPEN out here.
please, you think it was unsafe in 1999! i moved here to park slope in 1984 when it was still cool and we complained about the software engineers moving in in 1999!!!!
move on over to bed-stuy with all of us white people
Shit, move to Bed Stuy and buy a brownstone and have all the white people paying rent TO YOU, which is both what is and what has been happening in 70% of Do or Die during this so called "revitalization", and I pray it STAYS that way..........
wow, "blognigger". So, when exactly does the brilliant entertainment begin?
@brooklynborn
Well "Brooklyn born," as you well know, for us, the "brilliant entertainment" starts as soon as your wife gets back from the herpes clinic.
Dude, I'm white, live in the sticks.... and my wife and I made almost a quarter-mil last year... but I'm still broke. No shit. Why you ask? Because, as entrepreneurs, half of what we make goes to pay fucking income taxes. I've got two kids in college, an empty rental house, and a bunch of other shit you don't care about... but anyway, don't whine about being broke. We're all fucking broke, living week to week , and we're gonna stay that way until somebody does something about the US government consuming half of middle-amerika's income. I had more take-home income when I was making $50K, because I could cheat like hell on my taxes. Now I can't even do that because clients send us 1099s and shit. DAMN. Your boy Barack Obama thinks people like me are "Rich" and should tax us even more. Word UP my Nigga.
I feel your pain. I make a little less than you do but, my wife and I were able to buy in Woodside! Our neighborhood has a great public school, great neighborhood eaterys, a nice park, low crime and even cool dogs--like mine. Queens is a bit more working class than Brooklyn which I've been all my life--so I'm pretty comfortable here.
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