Afternoon Links: Red Hook Man's Trash Empire Fights Winds of Gentrification

In the News
“Bread Lab” Opening in Bushwick [DNA]
Franny’s Retracts Its Obamacare Surcharge [Eater]
“Let it Go” Writers Pick Up Park Slope Penthouse for $2.5 Million [TRD]
The Cat King of Columbia Street Won’t Bow to a Rapidly Gentrifying Brooklyn [Gothamist]
How a Tiny Brooklyn Creamery Landed “Star Wars” [Fast Company]
Visiting the Workspaces of Four Brooklyn Designers [BK Mag]
A Tree Is Guarded in Brooklyn [NYU Local]

Was it easy to buy a house in Brooklyn before recent price increases? Click through to see what one Crown Heights native has to say…

Comment of the Day

Which houses in Crown Heights were being “given away for nothing”? And in any case, “some” isn’t a lot..Please recall, banks weren’t giving mortgages for houses in Park Slope let alone Crown Heights as late as the 1970s — and for Crown Heights longer than that. (A member of my club recounts having a Wall Street bank calling the police when he insisted they give him a mortgage application for the house he wanted to buy in the Slope.) And as for today note that African Americans have median net wealth of about $7,000 as compared to about $110,000 for whites, largely a result of what Ira Katznelson, the Columbia University political scientist, calls “affirmative action for whites” during the 20th century, including social security benefits that excluded black housekeepers and farmers and FHA guaranteed home loans for exclusively white neighborhoods that accelerated the development of white wealth over black wealth. That wealth provides access to credit and family assets that black people as a rule don’t have and it affects not just access to housing but education and health care.

— NOP in ​Gentrifying Crown Heights Is Losing Its Black Community

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