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After confronting problems with bad landlords and tenant harassment, at a pair of hearings earlier this month, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, in an article in City & State, tries to take on gentrification.

For well over a decade people in Brooklyn have been complaining about it, hoping for it, praising it and condemning it — and moving in and out of Brooklyn because of it. Just about everyone has a different definition of what it is, what causes it, how it changes neighborhoods and whether it is good, bad, inevitable or some combination of all of the above.

That’s Adams above, flanked by tenant advocates, announcing the hearings last month. One more is scheduled for July 26 (you can read all about it here).

Adams singles out four issues he says amplify problems associated with gentrification:

Tenant Harassment
The first is criminal harassment of tenants in an effort to empty units so the landlord can take advantage of rising rents. After an outpouring of horror stories from tenants whose landlords had denied them heat, hot water, or sanitary living conditions at the hearings he hosted earlier in the month, Adams is referring cases to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office and to the state attorney general’s office for prosecution.

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The Times isn’t the only publication that can spot a trend. We’ve noticed that The Gray Lady’s Real Estate section has lately featured an unofficial series on leaving Brooklyn (see this and this and this).

The ex-Brooklyn theme evolved in this weekend’s edition with a story about young families returning to Brooklyn after moving away.

We know that a few Brownstoner readers have become Brooklyn expats in the past couple of years. What would you miss most if you left Brooklyn? And would you ever boomerang back?

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As any Brooklyn homeowner set on a major renovation knows, the City’s Department of Buildings permitting process is expensive, time consuming, and opaque. And it has only gotten worse in the last year or so, as we experience a building boom and the City has increased requirements for such things as sprinklers, according to what we hear from readers on the Forum and elsewhere.

Last month the City’s Department of Buildings announced a major reform initiative. This followed 50 arrests in a massive bribery scandal that erupted earlier this year.

Reform strategies include spending $120 million, eliminating in-person visits with an entirely virtual process, hiring an additional 320 employees over four years, a new fee structure, and creating one building code to speed up the permitting process.

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In New York City, the more trees there are on the street, the wealthier the neighborhood. That’s according to a recent study published in online journal PLOS One and quoted in an article in the Wall Street Journal about trees in Brooklyn.

Trees are all over Cobble Hill and Park Slope, but rare in Gowanus and East New York, according to the story. That’s because requests for the city to plant trees “mainly came from higher-income residents, who tend to be more aware of such opportunities,” according to a U.S. Forest Service scientist quoted in the article.

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Friday’s story about the Passive House remake for the quaint (and landmarked) wood frame house in Clinton Hill, followed by the Times story on Passive Houses in Brooklyn over the weekend, got us wondering if Passive House construction is more attainable than we had previously thought. We’re curious: Could a new buyer of a Brooklyn town house who is planning a typical $300,000 renovation anyway include Passive House on the to-do list?

The Times story didn’t give many details about cost.

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What do you call someone from Queens?

There are Staten Islanders, Brooklynites, Manhattanites. There are those who from “da Bronx.” More often than not, when referring to the residents of Queens, the media and or government use “residents of Queens.” Can it possibly be Queensite? To me, Queensite sounds like something that requires an antibiotic.

Queenser just sounds odd.

This may sound dumb at first, but I’m asking it out loud: What do you call a resident of the Borough of Queens?