Lesbians Sniff Out Values in Kensington
We’ve all heard that if a real estate investor wants to find the next hot nabe, he only needs to find where the artists and gay people are moving. According to The Observer, though, it pays to watch a particular subset of the gay community: Lesbians. “Practical, and always in search of domesticity, lesbians are…

We’ve all heard that if a real estate investor wants to find the next hot nabe, he only needs to find where the artists and gay people are moving. According to The Observer, though, it pays to watch a particular subset of the gay community: Lesbians. “Practical, and always in search of domesticity, lesbians are handy urban pioneers, dragging organic groceries and prenatal yoga to the ‘frontier’ neighborhoods they make hospitable for the rest of us,” writes The Observer. “In three to five years.” Sharon Zukin, a Brooklyn College professor and author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, identifies an even further subset to keep an eye on: “Lesbians may be canaries in the urban coal mine. And lesbian moms may be an even more acute canary, maybe because they are especially concerned about the character of the school district.” And which neighborhood have the lesbians annointed now? Kensington, where one lesbian rejoiced over the “crazy amount of space” while admitting that the trade-off is that “there is nothing to do within walking distance except grocery shopping.” The article has already been met by criticism from one blog. In a post titled Bad Gentrification Writing, Ditmas Park Blog says, “This Observer story really reads like a parody of the genre, and manages to get all the details wrong in passing…We remember the days when they had editors, and a clue, at the Observer.”
Lesbians as ‘Canaries in the Urban Coal Mine’ [Observer]
Photo by bonnevilleyacht76
By daveinbedstuy on April 26, 2010 9:35 AM
Refilling coffee, sitting back to watch this unfold.
By chuck on April 26, 2010 10:06 AM
Nobody’s mentioned the awesomest headline ever? Or complained!?
ROFL AGAIN. This is great!!!! Mr. B. is on a roll today, Chief Provocateur… Title guaranteed for a slugfest of somekind.
Hmmmm…the 40-something (40 y.o. +) lesbians I know moved out of Park Slope 3-5 years ago to…you guessed it–Kensington. Cheaper, more space and safe. Lends some credence to this article, at least, for me.
dibs, i don’t know you, but… *win*
I think the article is spot-on. I have several multi-families in West Philadelphia/University City (between S 45th and S 52nd St), which has a strong lesbian presence and also has the above-mentioned businesses AND is exhibiting the same evolutionary trends.
Apparently I’m a bad lesbo. No one mailed me the memo about domesticating myself and moving to Kensington. I’ll have to ask all my friends what they are doing in places like Crown Heights when the lesbian movement has so clearly made its way to Kensington.
No, Dyker Hts.
Kensington has been a perfectly lovely place to live for decades. In fact, its one of the most unchanged ares in all of Brooklyn. Whoever is writing this article clearly doesn’t know anything about the nabe or its history.
Wouldn’t lesbians be inherently more interested in Flatbush anyway????
I thought Kensington was the other side of Coney Island Avenue. This is Flatbush, plain and simple. I can’t imagine the writer didn’t call it that just for all the double entendre thrills possible (much better than Box Pop!).