SF Techies looking for ‘diverse nerds’ to help them colonize Brooklyn

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Remember “Neighbourhood”? It’s that hilarious yet slightly sinister project that seeks to seed the one-square-mile area of ​​San Francisco with “builders, explorers, founders, artists, and more” in hopes of creating the kind of community of sticky techies that will last for generations. We don’t quite know what that means, but there are indications that it’s likely to be in the Hayes Valley – if it isn’t already.

Now it looks like another group of people are hoping to do something similar – this time in Brooklyn. In particular, future residents of Neighborhood NYC will head straight for the Morgan Avenue stop on the L subway line in Bushwick, which turned out to be my last address before moving to San Francisco in 2008.

Earlier this week, a reined-in sniffed out Neighborhood NYC, noting that the co-founders are clearly looking to “bring powerful, emotionally intelligent New Yorkers within walking distance of each other” as a kind of Burning Man-slash-startup combo that likens it to “Montessori x MIT Media Lab x Aristotle x Chobani.” They need 1,000 different nerds in their live work holdings, and they make sales pitches at dinner parties in hopes of winning converts or at least a short-term sublease or two.

Despite everything that has gone awry for us, the spirit of San Francisco lives on. With all the grumbling from East Coasters moving here, making tons of money, complaining about eucalyptus trees, and leaving a mess, it’s nice to see that energy channeled to the other coast for a change. The New York City neighborhood has a refreshing utopian vibe, akin to the 19th century socialist communities who built beautiful home furnishings before fizzling out, or that group of libertarians who once tried to conquer a city in New Hampshire but were driven out by bears.

But why Bushwick? Well, it’s cool and cheap, relatively speaking. It’s like Mission in 1994. When I moved there 17 years ago, people went out of their way to highlight its proximity to Williamsburg. I basically lived above the entrance to Morgan L Station, in a rat-infested railroad-style ground-floor apartment that was across the street from one cement plant and next door to another. A look at Google Street View shows that the restaurant has opened next to my bedroom window, but the neighborhood remains industrial and rather deserted.

Although Bushwick is nowhere near as gentrified as ultra-expensive Williamsburg, its large Puerto Rican and Dominican communities struggle to stay. Treating a neighborhood like a blank slate can be a risky proposition, even to the point of tempting entrepreneurs with comparisons to a school for rich kids, a think tank closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein, an ancient Greek philosopher who believed that eels don’t reproduce, and high-end yogurt. But at least Neighborhood NYC isn’t renaming it “Cerebral Valley.”

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