Down at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a 300-acre industrial complex where warships were once made, a company called Capsys has been building prefab houses in a soaring skylit World War II–era foundry. House modules, modest 20-by-40-foot boxes, sit on the floor in various stages of completion, from raw steel frames with concrete floors to Tyvek-wrapped packages outfitted with kitchens, bathrooms, and heating systems. I’m wandering around with Alexander Gorlin, who’s best known for his high-end work, such as the apartment tower (named, actually, the “Gorlin”) at Aqua, the exclusive Miami Beach development. It’s unlikely that any of these Gorlin houses will be named for the architect. They’re destined for the Spring Creek development, a new community going up on the edge of East New York, a neighborhood once known for its high murder rate.
The architect was hired by the Nehemiah Housing Development Fund, a nonprofit developer established by the East Brooklyn Congregations, which has built several thousand low-cost mostly single-family homes in the neighborhood since the 1980s. He was brought in to give this new development’s row houses a more sophisticated look. Gorlin created a color palette from the available shades of Hardiplank, a cement-board siding popular in affordable housing: for example, deep Evening Blue and subdued Countrylane Red. “We just made them as bold as possible,” Gorlin says of the facades. He threw in some easy urbanistic tweaks—like moving the parking spaces from the front yard, where Nehemiah has been putting them for years, to a rear alley. “This is more like Siedlungen,” he says, referring to the German workers houses built in the first decades of the twentieth century. “Or Brooklyn brownstones. Or Queens, where I grew up.”
We’re touring the prefab house factory because I’m on the trail of the missing middle class. I first noticed that it was MIA at a May panel discussion called “Townhouses Old and New, The Future of the Brooklyn Block.” Jonathan Marvel, of Rogers Marvel Architects, presented his firm’s lovely Modernist single-family town houses designed for a new development on State Street, in historically unglamorous downtown Brooklyn. The 3,800- to 4,200-square-foot homes sell for more than $2 million. Otis Pratt Pearsall, founder of the Brooklyn Heights Landmark district, held forth on the pleasures of town-house living, showing pictures of the street on which he’s long resided, Willow in Brooklyn Heights, where the average home now sells for $2.7 million. Then Gorlin, who is also the author of The New American Townhouse, reviewed the history of the town house and presented renderings of his East New York houses.
During the question-and-answer period, I observed that while Marvel’s town houses were part of a full-block scheme that also includes Schermerhorn House, a 217-unit complex that will provide permanent housing for performing artists and low-income tenants, there was nothing—certainly no town houses—for the middle of the market. Developer Abby Hamlin, who was in the audience, made a case that given New York’s rarefied real estate market her State Street town houses actually represent the middle. Gorlin argued that given how much things had improved in East New York since the Nehemiah project began in the 1980s, his town houses could also claim the middle. In a way both Hamlin and Gorlin are correct. One represents the high end of the middle, the other the low. But the middle of the middle was still nowhere to be found.
In June the Brookings Institution released a study called “Where Did They Go? The Decline of Middle-Income Neighborhoods in Metropolitan America.” It found that middle-income neighborhoods constituted 58 percent of all urban neighborhoods in 1970, but that the figure has now dropped to 41 percent. Poor people are now more likely to live surrounded by poor people, and rich people by rich people.