Culture

The Trendification of Brooklyn and the Perils of a Successful Urban Brand

Now that USA Today has written about it, surely it's time to go back to being uncool again. I can hardly wait.
Sarah Goodyear

Depending on who you talk to, the borough of Brooklyn is a great urban success story, a painful hipster cliché, or a provincial backwater.

It’s actually all of those things, and many more. Brooklyn is a huge place, 71 square miles encompassing old-school blue-collar neighborhoods like Bay Ridge, trendy enclaves like Williamsburg, and decidedly ungentrified sections like East New York, which has some of the highest crime rates in all of New York City. Some 2.5 million people live in Brooklyn, and they are anything but homogenous.