What we learned about Brooklyn from the city’s new Business Atlas map

New York City’s Department of Information, Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) has announced a new interactive Business Atlas. It’s a map of the city that businesses (and people) can use to learn around business conditions in a given neighborhoods.

Find the interactive Atlas map here. According to the map:

• Fort Greene, East Bed-Stuy, Ocean Hill, Coney Island and Canarsie have had the strongest growth in new businesses.
• There’s no layer for existing businesses, however, which is a strange omission and makes it difficult to really assess the above (because, if a place went from one business to 10, that’s 1,000% growth).
• The strongest pedestrian activity is in Dumbo, Boerum Hill, downtown (on down to Atlantic Avenue) and West Williamsburg.
• The most new restaurants were established in a number of neighborhoods east of Prospect Park, from South Crown Heights (below Eastern Parkway) and in the band from East Flatbush up to Brownsville. Also, in Coney Island and parts of Brighton Beach as well.
• The most taxable sales revenue was earned in East Bed-Stuy, Brighton Beach and Ocean Parkway South.

The map doesn’t make it clear, but we assume this data was collected over the last year at some time. The fact that the map leaves out existing business numbers, business closures, estimated earnings per employee etc suggests that this is an effort whose layers were chosen to err on the side of positive spin. Still, some of the trends it suggests, if accurate, say that some of the borough’s economic activity is yielding growth beyond gentrification’s frontiers, which is encouraging.