When residential is more lucrative, Williamsburg tech hub viability wanes

Williamsburg is such a desirable place to live that real estate developers are focusing on more lucrative residential construction than commercial or mixed use.

That’s a problem. One startup fashion incubator went looking for space in Williamsburg and ended up in Midtown. Taken to the extreme, if all the space becomes residential, the area becomes a bedroom community. Bedroom communities are, well, sleepy and then hurt their longterm viability.

The problem gets described in more detail, through the lenses of Secret Clubhouse and The Yard, coworking spaces in the neighborhood, in the New York Times:

Though there are plenty of start-ups that favor Williamsburg and Greenpoint, developers, local officials and real estate brokers say there is a dearth of office space. Most landlords, lured by the promise of building lucrative apartments in the increasingly popular residential area, are reluctant to devote space to commercial tenants who can pay little and might wither as quickly as they bloom.

For some longtime residents and younger champions of north Brooklyn, the shortage raises the specter of a creative, economically diverse neighborhood turning into just another bedroom community.

19 Kent Street is a project underway in Williamsburg, but that’s probably not enough.

Tucker Reed of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership wrote an op-ed about why Brooklyn’s live-work layout makes for such strong communities, in Business Insider.

There has to be place to both live and work, all over Brooklyn, to accrue those advantages. One of the problems we’ve seen in media accounts and also in talking to people around Brooklyn is this: a lot of the space that could be available needs to renovated and retrofitted for Internet access and other modern infrastructure.

Startups can’t afford to do that up front, but they probably could afford to cover amortized payments covering whatever amount of time they stay in a place.