Brooklyn rent: it’s so damn high! It’s so high that businesses are fleeing our borough for the relative cheapness of Manhattan. It’s such a sad story, the way Brooklyn’s success has strangled the dreamers and entrepreneurs that are flourishing in Downtown Brooklyn. If that assertion makes no sense, don’t worry, it’s not supposed to. That’s because in the space of a day we’ve had one story claiming Brooklyn is the “new mecca” for tech startups and a day later one that highlights another Brooklyn-based startup finding cheaper rent in Manhattan. Trend stories be colliding!
First up, we had Tucker Reed of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, taking to Business Insider yesterday to tell the world how great Brooklyn is for startups, pointing to the successes of Tech Triangle residents MakerBot, Amplify and Etsy, along with 500 other tech companies in the Triangle. And this on the heels of classical commie group The Brecht Forum moved to Downtown Brooklyn from Manhattan.
But then today, we’ve got a story from DNA Info about how Brooklyn startup Manufacture NY couldn’t find a space for their fashion incubator along Atlantic Avenue from Boerum Hill to Prospect Heights. So instead of setting up shop in Brooklyn, the fashion networking company went to the Garment District in Manhattan. And this on the heels of Mandate of Heaven leaving Bushwick for the Lower East Side.
None of this means much, except that sometimes people can find deals in Brooklyn and other times people can find deals in Manhattan. The only question these days is where you’re going to find the eccentric non-Australian landlord who’s going to help make your dreams come true. If you want to try to divine a trend from these individual data points, we guess you can put on some gloves and start sorting through those entrails. But you should probably wait a little bit.