March–April, 2008: Vol. 1, No. 1

Welcome to the Brooklyn boom. The rest of the nation may be going through a real-estate meltdown, but Brooklyn’s housing market remains strong and surprisingly resilient.

From the brownstone-filled neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope, to the new skyscraper parks in DUMBO and Downtown, to Bay Ridge and Bedford-Stuyvesant (which are becoming increasingly attractive — again! — to young professionals), housing prices indicate that more people want to make Brooklyn their home, more builders want to make their reputations here and more neighborhoods will get on the map in the next few years.

So to feed the maw of our collective real-estate obsession, we created Brooklyn Boom, the borough’s only magazine and Web site devoted to sales, deals, neighborhoods and trends. In every issue, you’ll find tidbits about real estate that you won’t find anywhere else, plus detailed coverage of the newsmakers, trends and big developments that everyone will be talking about.

Like our sister publication, The Brooklyn Paper, every issue of Brooklyn Boom will take a serious look at the stories behind the press releases, the truth behind the hard sells and the reality behind all those sexy renderings.

This debut issue, for example, looks at whether the Richard Meier–designed, glass-walled building “On Prospect Park” deserves all the hype (it does!), whether Bedford-Stuyvesant is “back” (or whether it ever “left” in the first place) and what penthouse buyers will see from the tops of all those skyscrapers going up in Downtown. (They don’t call them “million-dollar views” for nothing.) We’ll also check in with the ultimate insider, Downtown Brooklyn Partnership President Joe Chan.

Thanks for reading — and sharing our obsessions.

Gersh Kuntzman, Editor

©2008 The Brooklyn Paper