No thanks, I moved to Astoria instead.

A second point that people forget that alot of outer borough housing stock, pretty much anything built after World War II, is just ugly. The earlier gentrified neighborhoods were run down but had some beautiful buildings. Neighborhoods developed more recently also may not be pedestrian friendly. The key is really when the neighborhood grew up, not whether it is technically within the city limits.

If you look on a subway map, you wil notice that New York City actually has something of a Green Belt consisting of Greenwood Cemetary, Prospect Park, the St. John’s Area, Flushing Park, and Van Cortland Park. Once you can’t afford to live inside this area, you might as well make the jump to Westchester or Bergen Counties, you won’t be gaining much in terms of urban atmosphere and probably actually losing on commute times.

Also, the main push for gentrification, easy credit and high asset (housing) prices for the middle class, is coming to an end. Don’t expect more neighborhoods where middle class people push out poor people in the near future since we are going to run out of middle class people to move in. You still might see middle class neighborhoods that become super-wealthy, however.

No? Oh, just wait for the rebuilding of the tracks, embankments, signals & stations on the far Brooklyn end of the Brighton Line, delayed only by the laborious task of obtainng construction easements for the work in all the backyards of the many residential properties that flank the line thereabouts.

The Brighton Line was also subject of a years-ago Newsday piece by Jim Dwyer, extolling it as a splendid ride for observing Urban Autumnal foilage. Dwyer, now with the NYT, singlehandedly created the Subway Beat in NYC journalism, and won a Pulitzer in doing it. Nobody else has written even nearly as well about it.