According to this New York Times story, young Asian American professionals are at the heart of a sublte demographic shift in rapidly gentrifying Long Island City and downtown Brooklyn: A New Generation Moves On, but Not Too Far. Asian Americans account for 15 to 50 percent of the initial sales in some of the new condominiums under construction in those neighborhoods.
The numbers are significant because Asians account for only 10 percent of the city's population. At first, the numbers seemed to grow organically, but some developers are now marketing heavily in the local Chinese and Korean media to better ride the trend.
Does this demographic shift mean we could be seeing satellite Chinatowns and Koreatowns eventually pop up in these neighborhoods? Not necessarily. But maybe it points to something else... going mainstream?
The article suggests that the trend may just be a sign that "like their counterparts who grew up in the early-20th-century Italian and Jewish enclaves on the Lower East Side," these young Asian Americans have more buying power than their parents' generation and they are using it to meld into mainstream New York.
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