A Condo Tower Grows in Brooklyn

Acosta migrated from the Young Lords -- a militant Puerto Rican nationalist group modeled after the Black Panthers -- to El Puente, a neighborhood nonprofit. He and his campaneros founded a school and a health clinic, which still sits on Driggs Avenue where, as it happens, a wine store next door now sells a fine $30 Malbec.

A young couple, in matching black-on-black jeans and T-shirts, sip coffee and discuss the joys of $749 Stokke Xplory strollers. "The telescoped handle is so cool," she coos.

Acosta wags his eyebrows. "We were formed out of rage at the decay around us," he says. "When I told my family I was going to live here in the 1970s, man, they thought I was nuts."

But now the cultural dislocation is considerable in Billyburg, as hyperventilating realtors and a few hipsters have dubbed it. You meet tenant organizer Debra Medina on a balmy weekday. Down Bedford Avenue, musicians play electronica on their guitars and a mime troupe reenacts the slaughter of innocents, and the line at the Verb Cafe goes out the door. It's like lunchtime at Oberlin College.

Medina, 42, strolls down to a new cafe, a blond-wood place with coffee from four continents, that sits within the shadow of the entrance ramp to the Williamsburg Bridge. A young white woman pours and chats with a friend. When this neighborhood changes more, the woman says, she wants to rent this cafe for parties. Medina pivots, leaving her steaming cup at the counter.

"All this veiled language about 'pioneers' and 'settlers' -- it's from the perspective that we're temporary." Medina's feet clip faster across the sidewalk. "We need to speak up or it's all over."

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City officials proposed two years ago to rezone Williamsburg's last industrial areas, hoping to seed a new forest of luxury condos. This was a step too far. Poles, Italians and Latinos shouted pols off stages and demanded affordable housing. And for the first time they joined forces with financially hard-pressed hipsters and performance artists who tossed up protest Web sites and trooped to City Hall to perorate against the plan.

City officials relented; they agreed last year that 20 percent of the apartments should be affordable to the working class. Celebrators pushed through the door at Teddy's Bar, a tin-ceilinged joint on North Eighth Street. Round after round of shots were tossed back.

Late that night, a young activist stood on not so steady feet and led a beery chant:

"No justice! No peace! No justice! No . . . " Then the sky bled red at sunrise and reality leaked back in. Hobbled by poor credit, many working-class tenants cannot qualify even for "affordable" apartments. (A city report estimates the new development will displace 2,500 residents -- very much a low-ball estimate, officials acknowledge.)

The housing bubble supposedly has deflated, but developers flip vacant lots at double the inflated prices of a year ago. When residents proposed landmark status for a massive warehouse in Greenpoint -- which would have slowed a luxury condo plan -- a mysterious fire sent thick clouds of smoke billowing miles into Brooklyn. So the neighborhood circles round, from the arson of disinvestment to the arson of the land rush.