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 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]
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