Brownsville Rents Up 20% Since 1990: Study

Photo by Salem Eames

BROWNSVILLE, BROOKLYN — Brownsville and Ocean Hill saw average rental prices rise about 20 percent between 1990 and 2014, according to a new study from NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

This dramatic rise in rents was enough to rank Brownsville among the city's 15 neighborhoods designated as "gentrifying" by NYU researchers.

To be considered "gentrifying," NYU required neighborhoods to meet two criteria:

a) The neighborhood had to be considered "low income" in 1990, meaning its average household income was in the bottom 40 percent of the city’s neighborhoods.

b) In the time since 1990, the neighborhood’s rents had to have increased faster than the median rate of increase for the city.

(Neighborhoods which were already considered "higher income" in 1990 were excluded from the "gentrifying" column, although many of them have also experienced rapid changes and rising rents.)

With all that in mind, here are some of the specific changes Brownsville and Ocean Hill (considered part of the same neighborhood area in the NYU study) have undergone in recent years.

• Between 2000 and 2014, the median rent in the area increased from $714 to $951. (A quick math note: Here’s a refresher on what median means. Furman's study used both average and median rent rates for different calculations.)

• The median household in the area went from paying 30 percent of its total income for rent in 2000 to paying about 40 percent of its income in 2014.

• From 2000 to 2014, the median household income in the area decreased from $31,355 to $25,291.

• During the same period, the racial makeup of the area didn't change much. The area was, and still is, about 75 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic.

(You can check out Page 39 of this Furman Center document for more detailed information on the above figures.)

What trends do gentrifying neighborhoods share?

The NYU study also came to a number of conclusions on the characteristics gentrifying neighborhoods share, compared to non-gentrifying parts of the city. Among them:

• Between 2000 and 2010, the number of housing units in gentrifying areas increased by 7.2 percent, compared to 5.5 percent in non-gentrifying neighborhoods. This happened even though gentrifying neighborhoods have grown more slowly in population than the city overall.

• The percentage of residents in gentrifying neighborhoods holding college degrees has risen 121 percent since 1990 — compared to a growth of only 56 percent in the city overall.

• Citywide, the percent of residents between the ages of 20 and 34 has dropped slightly since 1990; in gentrifying areas, however, it has increased nearly 2 percent.

What about race?

The white percentage of NYC's gentrifying neighborhoods has increased since 1990, even as the white percentage of the city's population has fallen significantly.

At the same time, the black populations in gentrifying neighborhoods have been shrinking faster than they have citywide. And Asian and Hispanic populations have increased, percentage-wise, in both gentrifying neighborhoods and in the city overall.

The cost of living

When it comes to affordability, since 1990, gentrifying areas have seen a small drop in the percentage of their populations living below the poverty line, even as that number has ticked up slightly citywide.

And, the study shows, today's low-income residents are finding it increasingly difficult to pay their rent in gentrifying neighborhoods.

In such areas, around half of all households making between 50 and 80 percent of their neighborhood's median income are "rent burdened" — meaning they dedicate 30 percent or more of their pre-tax income to rent. In 2000, only 29 percent of those households were rent burdened.