What's in a Name?
Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries is a man on a mission, a mission to stem the tide of broker-named neighborhoods like “ProCro” and “Greenwood Heights”! According to City Room, Jeffries is going to introduce a bill next week that would require new names for neighborhoods get approved by community boards, the City Council and the mayor. The…
Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries is a man on a mission, a mission to stem the tide of broker-named neighborhoods like “ProCro” and “Greenwood Heights”! According to City Room, Jeffries is going to introduce a bill next week that would require new names for neighborhoods get approved by community boards, the City Council and the mayor. The bill calls for fining brokers who use unofficial names in their listings and, perhaps, suspending their licenses. City Room quotes Jeffries as saying that real estate agents “are allowed to essentially pull names out of thin air in order to rebrand a neighborhood and have the effect of raising rents or home prices.” A senior vice president for the Real Estate Bard of New York, meanwhile, says it would be “difficult to legislate the use of an official name when these neighborhood names are not legally defined.” Still: BoCoCa, we hardly knew ye.
‘SoBro’ and ‘ProCro’ No Joke to Assemblyman [City Room]
Assemblyman Wants To Prevent Realtors From Renaming Neighborhoods [NY1]
He does have a point. Brokers misrepresent where their properties are- take that jerk last week who was marketing places squarely in Bed-Stuy as being Clinton Hill. It’s not a life mission and Jeffries is no fool- he wouldn’t have taken it on had he not been getting complaints from constituents about sleazy brokers.
I’m pretty clear on the borders of CH! Atlantic/Degraw, Court/Hicks. it’s really not all that confusing!!
He’s right, but at the same time, I am sure there are much more important issues he could be dealing with.
These “new” neighborhoods don’t bother me as much as when brokers outwardly lie about where a property is located.
Park Slope now extends down into the 30’s
If you want to find an apartment in Clinton Hill – you have to search for Ft Greene. Bed Stuy around Nostrand? Clinton Hill.
East Williamsburg now includes all of Bushwick, Ridgewood, Maspeth and Glendale Queens.
If Bo Co and Ca would get their borders straight, it would be easier to refer to the individual neighborhood.
Sure, some names are dumb (can anyone actually say BoCoCa without sayining instead BoCACa?). Is there even any need for an aggregate name for those three distinct neighborhoods? I hope the dumb ones like that don’t become common. But apparently this guy has never heard of the 1st amendment.
Some that stuck likely shouldn’t have, but did. Remember how silly TriBeCa sounded at first? Now we don’t cringe at the awkwardness of the name. And remember how long it took forDumbo not to make one think of an elephant? (Though it still sounds dumb.) I prefer historical names…the buildings in Dumbo are much older than the Manhattan Bridge, and likely some historical association could have been resurrected.
“BoCoCa, on the other hand, is totally bogus, and tries to re-brand three neighborhoods that are already established, with their own separate identities and histories. And it’s a stupid name that sounds like one of my cats horking. Blechh!”
Thank you, MM! Amen to that!
DUMBO makes sense, and was actually chosen by the people in the neighborhood, back when no one but artists were actually living there. They figured (wrongly) that no one upscale would want to live in a place with that name.
BoCoCa, on the other hand, is totally bogus, and tries to re-brand three neighborhoods that are already established, with their own separate identities and histories. And it’s a stupid name that sounds like one of my cats horking. Blechh!
“This is more important than drug dealers at clinton-washington, crackheads asleep on stoopsâ€
Considering that his motivation for the nabe naming proposal is to stop rising rents, it wouldn’t make much sense to address these problems…