Downtown Brooklyn -- Where It's All Happening, Eventually, Baby!

The New York Post has the surprising story: that the newest Hot Nabe is -- Downtown Brooklyn! Yes, the zone of borough offices, courts, the Transit Museum, and crappy delis is "Brooklyn's fastest-growing residential neighborhood" -- its population has tripled in just 10 years.

That still leaves it with only about 9,000 residents, but some of them are living in condos built during the last good real estate years, which means they're sort of people that make a neighborhood swing, baby.

And the Post says the neighborhood will be further swollen with swells once luxury apartment complexes like Brooklyn Gold take off. (Brooklyn Gold, Curbed reports, has pushed back its move-in dates several times, but that just makes it even more a part of Downtown Brooklyn's glorious future, rather than the present its leaseholders were expecting.)

Real Estate Bisnow agrees: The hotels are expected to boom, and "look for vacant retail space to become short-term, pop-up art galleries, increasing visibility of both NYC artists and available storefronts." The future, baby! Plus, it's cheap, so cheap that some newspapers have moved there, and you know they don't have any money.

There's a lot to draw thrill-seekers to the neighborhood. The Metrotech Business Improvement District just opened a Downtown Brooklyn Information Center, "created by renovating an MTA-owned booth that had been a coffee and donut stand."

Not hot enough for you? Then there's NYC Resistor, which holds geek-centric hacker parties ("we do two things really well -- hack and party"). Local realtors know what you like, kids -- The Brooklyner rental building on Lawrence Street has a laundry room that texts you when your laundry is done, and a Skee-ball machine. Though one resident thinks they're " trying waaaaay too hard to recreate Camp + [insert name of random W'burg hipster bar]," we're sure this is sort of treatment trust-fund young'uns will appreciate, indeed expect.

Plus there are lots of colleges down there (Polytechnic, LIU, CityTech, etc). And the big draw, which the Post saves for near the end -- Atlantic Yards. They've gone bullish in the wake of recent legal victories, and Forest City Ratner has sent their EVP MaryAnne Gilmartin to inform Observer readers, "The wait is over. We are building Atlantic Yards." And if you have the clams and the stones to join the Downtown Brooklyn gold rush, 46 nights a year you may expect drunken and (no doubt) disappointed Nets fans to stream into your neighborhood, patronize your local drinking establishments, and vomit on your local streets. Downtown Brooklyn, baby! It's what's happening, shortly after now! Photo (cc) See-Ming Lee.