That’s the subject of a NY Observer piece, which asks what effect Wall Street’s downturn will have on the portion of our population that works in the financial industry, and thus our high-end housing boom; those are the folks responsible for snatching up a lot of the inventory, apparently. “Brooklyn may not be where the top executives or VPs live,” worries one financial industry worker, “but a ton of back office employees live in the borough and will be out of jobs.” Still, the article assumes a relatively optimistic tone. Brooklyn is still a bigger bargain than Manhattan; contractors still maintain a backlog of work; big projects have a long enough time line that the economy could pop back up by the time they get to the offering phase. And apparently we’ve learned our lessons from the city’s last serious downward spiral. As one fellow put it, “I can’t see New York going into this huge kind of 1970s-city-going-to-shit type of thing.”
Wall Street Views From Another Bank [NY Observer]
Keap/Ainslie. Photo by kenyee.