If there’s one thing we can all agree on in Brooklyn, it’s that there’s so much housing everywhere. Just the kind of vacancy rates that apartment seekers dream of, knowing that they aren’t over a barrel whenever they start looking for a place to live. Given that we have so much space in which to live around here, obviously it’s totally cool that the candy company behind Sour Patch Kids is now using a Clinton Hill house as a kind of AirBnB for handpicked traveling musicians, who can stay there provided that they make some cool #viral #branded content about Sour Patch Kids. It’s not like anyone would want to live in that house or anything.
The totally cool house is being used a corporate crash pad called the Brooklyn Patch (no relation to the news website), instead of a house that could be lived in by people who need to live somewhere, so that Sour Patch Kids can have traveling musicians stay there for a day or two at a time in exchange for making content that Sour Patch kids can share on social media networks. Sure, you might think that taking housing off the market in a city where supply is so tight people will live in these places, in exchange for “fun” advertising is gross and bad, but think about this poor brand and their desperate need for viral content.
We mean, sure, a four-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment could house a family or even a cluster of twenty-somethings willing to share rooms, especially in a nice neighborhood like Clinton Hill. Isn’t it a better use of our very limited housing stock though, to instead let a corporation use it as what’s essentially an AirBnB that isn’t even open to the public, all so that Deer Tick and Tame Impala can stay there for a few days and write a rock opera about Sour Patch Kids? If you have a better idea for candy companies to make commercials that will reach teenagers that doesn’t involve choking New York’s tight housing supply, we’d like to hear it, smart guy.