Portland: The Observer Warns Brooklyn Not to Go There

Any Brooklynite who’s watched an episode of Portlandia, the newish IFC sitcom, can’t have failed to see numerous parallels and to notice that most of the barbs applied to Brooklynites as much as Portland residents. The Observer has a piece out today that takes the comparison of the two places a step further and recasts it as a cautionary tale for Brooklynites: “I lived in Portland for two years after college. It’s a delightful place with plenty of drunken, druggy Bohemianism. But, dear Brooklyn, you do not want to go there.” Here’s how this young writer spent her two years out west:

We wound up sharing a house with a yoga instructor and an underemployed deejay. Our rent was $195 each; we spent about four times that on food and beer. I bought a bike immediately and talked about it a lot; I developed a highly discerning palate for gourmet coffee and I.P.A.’s. We bought local and composted impeccably. I carried around a Kleen Kanteen to which I’d affixed a map-of-Oregon decal with a green heart over Portland. We were irreproachable environmental stewards with one guilty exception: the gallons and gallons of water we used to fill and refresh a 12-foot inflatable pool in the front yard, a gift from the Israeli backpackers we were hosting during the summer heat wave of 2009. We had a video projector in the living room for movies and Nintendo. Pot was $30 an eighth and very potent. We indulged frequently on the front porch, splayed on the full-size couch we got for $25 on Craigslist.

Brooklyn may not yet have a (fully) naked bike ride or a vegan strip joint, but it’s only a matter of time, reasons the Observer author, citing a recent game of human Scrabble that was played out on Bedford Avenue.

And a sociology professor’s summary of Portland’s gentrification sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it?

You get a concentration of people who are visibly different in some way that’s not repulsive but kind of attractive for other people to consume. That becomes a kind of brand for a neighborhood, or for the city as a whole, in the case of Portland. Then real estate developers start jumping on the bandwagon and marketing the brand, so that what starts out as alternative culture, alternative lifestyle, laid-back, D.I.Y. or whatever you want to call it, that becomes a product and the brand of a place, and then it becomes part of a business cycle where the media pick it up…and then it becomes very expensive to live there because more affluent people beg to move in, because they want to be different too.

Gothamist co-founder Jake Dobkin put it this way: “It’s all just becoming so precious and Brooklyn is not supposed to be a precious place.”

Agree or disagree?

A Twee Grows in Brooklyn [NY Observer]
Drawing by C. Whetzel