The worst thing about the New York Times Real Estate section article yesterday, Living In | Fort Greene, Brooklyn: Multiple Identities Can Be a Good Thing was not the reference to the neighborhood's location:
Snug in its corner between downtown Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Clinton Hill and the Atlantic Yards area...
NLG pointed to the folly of such a description.
Fort Greene's diversity
The worst thing was the failure of the article to mention the presence of high-rise buildings other than new luxury housing. Fort Greene is a mixed-income neighborhood; it includes public housing and subsidized Mitchell-Lama buildings.
Those buildings do not show up in the New York Times classifieds. They likely are not the desired locations of typical Times readers. But they are part of "Living In" Fort Greene.
Given that the Times just started a neighborhood blog about Fort Greene, you'd think that the newspaper would try to get it right. But the Real Estate section too often places marketing above journalism.
Snug in its corner between downtown Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Clinton Hill and the Atlantic Yards area...
NLG pointed to the folly of such a description.
Fort Greene's diversity
The worst thing was the failure of the article to mention the presence of high-rise buildings other than new luxury housing. Fort Greene is a mixed-income neighborhood; it includes public housing and subsidized Mitchell-Lama buildings.
Those buildings do not show up in the New York Times classifieds. They likely are not the desired locations of typical Times readers. But they are part of "Living In" Fort Greene.
Given that the Times just started a neighborhood blog about Fort Greene, you'd think that the newspaper would try to get it right. But the Real Estate section too often places marketing above journalism.
C'mon, Norman. This is an advertising section with "advertorial" to accompany, and especially regarding a neighborhood where the Times is in bed with a nearby developer, as you have pointed out and focused on for many years. With the economic downturn, it's ever harder to get those yuppies to move in and buy, so wasting time mentioning public housing, associated in their minds with the rising incidences of crime mentioned in the Times article, would hardly be proper. Hey, if it's about impartial, hard-hitting, balanced news reporting, when's the last real-estate section article you saw on Ocean Hill-Brownsville and its bargain housing stock?
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