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Brooklyn Has Not Yet Begun to Gentrify

Developers want to turn the dilapidated Domino Sugar Factory into a futuristic riverside development that looks like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel.

Williamsburg is a funny, fucked up place. As a years-long resident of the Brooklyn neighborhood, I say this affectionately. When I started hanging out in the hipster enclave back in the early aughts, it was a gritty, rundown district best suited to warehouse parties and art studios. It was a place where you could find crude oil if you dug deep enough and buy cocaine from the bartender if you knew the right bar. It was a place where creative types could find cheap rent but commute to Manhattan in less than ten minutes.

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All that's over now, and the sea change couldn't be more apparent than the latest designs for transforming the dilapidated Domino Sugar Factory into a futuristic riverside development that looks like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. The shift from gritty to glossy has been happening for about a decade now, and the $1.5 billion Domino Condoland is its natural culmination.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, broken windowed warehouses have turned into shiny glass towers. The warehouse parties and art studios have moved east to Bushwick, where there are still warehouses that haven't been converted into split-level two-bedroom yuppie palaces. The over-the-counter drug bar  has sadly, however, predictably gone out of business and is now just another dive with a dart board and a Big Buck Hunter machine.

Yet those changes seem trivial compared to the Domino Sugar Factory development. When a team of architects revealed plans for constructing four towers that dwarfed the hulking factory, everybody hated it. Five years later, Two Trees Management, which bought the property for $160 million last year, hired ShoP Archtitects, the same forward-thinking team that designed the Barclay's Center a few miles south of Williamsburg.

This week, ShoP revealed its master plan, an eye-melting row of funny-shaped structures surrounding a revamped Domino Sugar Factory that would give Williamsburg one of the most futuristic — yet historically informed — skylines in the country. Three of the four buildings have hollow centers, letting the sunlight stream into multi-million dollar condos and giving architecture enthusiasts something fun to photograph when they're walking around the new downtown-like pedestrian area on the ground. The new plan adds office buildings, a school, tons of space for shops and bars as well as a waterfront that would make even California towns jealous. It's really nice looking!

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It's also really expensive looking! The neighborhood fought hard to keep the historic Domino Sugar factory in its current state. If money-hungry developers swooped in and started building condos, they said, rent prices would drive out the neighborhood's regular residents, not only the folks who were part of the first artsy wave of gentrification in the late nineties, but also the immigrant population that has been there for decades–since the days of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which was set in the same area that the proposed development.

For a long time, city law prevented large condo towers from being built by enforcing zoning restrictions. All hope for maintaining that short building set up was more or less lost in 2005, when a sweeping rezoning effort invited new multi-unit building to Williamsburg. Immediately, Miami-style real estate developers rushed to start colonizing the waterfront with tacky towers. The transformation took longer than expected due to the financial crisis, and it left more than a few zombie buildings waiting to be finished. As of March 2013, Williamsburg is almost unrecognizable compared to its former self.

But that was clearly only the beginning of Williamsburg's process of gentrification. Assuming the new Domino Sugar Factory development is completed — if all goes well with the regulators, construction will begin in 2014 and last about ten years — thousands of new market rate apartments will become home to thousands of new tenants who can afford market rate. This is hardly the crowd of scruffy artists and tight-pantsed students that once gave Williamsburg its cachet. And it's hardly the scruffy but loveable little piece of land that is the Domino Sugar Factory in its current form.

Some diversity will survive. In order to comply with new zoning requirements, there will be as many as 660 rent controlled apartments built in the same buildings, but the waiting list for those is already years long. The new demographic will also attract more expensive bars and restaurants to attract people that can afford them, and landlords will inevitably hike up rent prices to keep squeezing as much money of their tenants as they can. Williamsburg is already more expensive than many neighborhoods in Manhattan.

If the glitzy new gentrified Williamsburg doesn't sound appealing, too bad. At this point, the developers who have the keys to the castle are quick to admit that they don't just want to build new buildings; they want to transform the entire borough. As ShoP principal Vishaan Chakrabarti put it, "This has the opportunity to be what new Brooklyn says to the world."