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This Utopian Co-Living Community in Brooklyn Will Tickle Your Gag Reflex

By Jen Maravegias | Think Pieces | February 10, 2023 |

By Jen Maravegias | Think Pieces | February 10, 2023 |


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There was an acting professor at the college I went to in New York who regularly encouraged her students to think about moving to Chicago to get started in their theater careers. Once in Chicago, I was surprised to see how many other people had actually taken that advice. There were a lot of us, and not all from the same generation. I remember being stopped by a woman in the supermarket one day because she recognized the bar whose teeshirt I was wearing and realized I was a fellow graduate. She was at least 30 years older than me.

The group of friends I moved there with eventually grew apart and are spread out all over the country now. Perhaps if we had staged a hostile takeover of an entire neighborhood, treating the city as though we were back in the dorms, our friendships could have lasted forever. That probably wouldn’t have worked for us, and it’s not going to work for these west coast weirdos who are trying to take over Bushwick. I’m sorry, East Williamsburg.

A group of San Francisco transplants and tech-adjacent friends are living near one another off the Morgan L stop in Brooklyn, and they’re calling it the Neighborhood NYC. The vision of this “project” (which is not a cult) is to “bring high-agency, emotionally intelligent New Yorkers within walking distance of one another,” or, as they call it, “clustering.” (Again, this is not a cult.) Priya Rose, one of the people heading the effort alongside her husband, Andrew Rose, wrote on Substack that they were trying to “combine the serendipity of a college campus, the co-creation of Burning Man, the agency of Silicon Valley, the vigor of a Midwestern high school track coach, and the culture of New York City.”

I checked out these colonizers’ substack, and it is a lot. To be fair, if a person put six months of research into determining what NYC neighborhood they wanted to live in, I would find this admirable. I wish I had done this much research before moving back. But the goal here was not to find a neighborhood where they would like to live, it was to find a neighborhood that they could transform into a personal utopia for themselves and their friends.

When I lived in Chicago, I moved in and out of many neighborhoods that raised the hairs on the back of my parents’ necks. Of course, that was before the gentrification steamroller really got going. Now it’s all about replacing locally owned businesses with Whole Foods and telling Black people to keep the noise down. So it’s really hard to see “The Neighborhood’s” attempts at beautification as anything but the first step in pricing working-class people and people of color out of living in Bushwick. Sorry, East Williamsburg.

It probably won’t matter. In the end, butting up against The Machine of city government and the ceaseless grind of actual life here in New York will crush their sunny optimism. It’s one thing to get 30 people together to pick up trash. It’s a different thing entirely to convince the city to “transform the area’s trash ecosystem.” My mom tried to “beautify” the tree planter on one corner of her Manhattan neighborhood and had to give up after a year because ain’t nobody in this city got time for flowers. Is “The Neighborhood” also going to transform the area’s retail ecosystem? Will they insist that the bodegas stock expensive organic groceries no one wants to buy except them and their five friends? What happens when they start having kids? Will those kids attend the neighborhood schools or will they bus them into Manhattan to join the ranks of the already overcrowded Charter and Private schools on that island? Are they going to make everyone start speaking French in “The Neighborhood?”

Besides, people with better business plans than this have already tried, and failed, to plant their flag in Bushwick. These folks should think about moving to one of those midwestern towns where no one WANTS to live. They’re paying people to move there. Take over Topeka, why don’t you?

The only part of this plan I like is the one where they all live in one building:

All of this hard work has been done in the hopes of eventually fulfilling their vision of a “co-owned multi-family building with a solarpunk school and coworking space (think Montessori x MIT Media Lab x Aristotle x Chobani).”

That will just make it easier to lock the doors and shoot the whole thing into space.