Big Plans for Bed Stuy East Retail

While I find the idea of new businesses opening in vacant storefronts heartening, useful, and good, I really don’t like the speed of this flip, or the number of foreclosures I see listed on Trulia in Bed Stuy and Crown Heights. I am not one to believe in conspiracies–but it’s a little harsh, this mass clearing of families who have lived in these neighborhoods forever and how fast their replacement businesses are becoming organic juice bars, wine stores, and bookshops, all of which we know from brownstone booklyn are sure-fire moneymaking businesses that will never, ever close. To look at the scale you’d think it was infinite–that every few blocks we could have another wine store, another korean taco place, another branch of Greenlight or Word and that this kind of expansion–somehow–is “good” and meaningful and sustainable. I guess I know too many families who’ve lost their storefront daycares, their fish markets, their social clubs, their hardware stores, all in the name of improvement to think that a bunch of wine stores and juice bars make a neighborhood.

I know I’ve been one before pleading for decent coffee–and I know eastern Bed Stuy is underserved in pretty much everything–but, ugh. Another wine store. Where’s the yoga studio? Where’s the beer garden? Where’s the kombucha bar, I ask?