Is This the Destination for Affordable Real Estate?

Ditmas Park came up in the New York Times real estate section this week, in a piece about gentrification stretching further out into Brooklyn. Where Williamsburg and Carroll Gardens were once deemed out-of-the-way places for former Manhattanites to relocate to, now people who have been priced out of those Brooklyn neighborhoods are heading to places like Sunset Park, Crown Heights, Bushwick, and yes, here:

Ditmas Park’s increasing gentrification is helping attract and retain families who might previously have gone to the suburbs. “There’s more holding them here now,” said Jan Rosenberg, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 20 years and is a founder of Brooklyn Hearth Realty. “It’s more of a neighborhood.”

The piece notes that young families who bought apartments in the area are growing into larger spaces, though perhaps not our $1 million wood-frame houses:

Sometimes that might be a grand Victorian, but more often it’s a smaller home nearby in Kensington, a diverse neighborhood of Orthodox Jews and immigrants from Pakistan, the Darfur region of Sudan, and Poland, among many other places….

…The median real estate price there in 2012 was $260,630, versus $450,000 in Ditmas Park, according to Streeteasy.

Of course, there’s hardly a mention of the families, young and old, who have been living in these neighborhoods for decades, helping to make them the desirable real estate destinations they are today.

So, what do you think of it all? Is our neighborhood the alternative to the suburbs? Has it already been that, for many years? And can anyone afford to live here, or are the Ditmas Park gentrifiers gentrifying Kensington?