The economy has tanked, and Bloomberg and the City Council’s rezoned Greenpoint and Williamsburg is now strewn with stalled construction sites. According to Gothamist, it looks like northern Brooklyn has taken a time machine back to 1979, when the streets were mean.

A team of building inspectors have found 143 stalled construction sites around the city, with the highest concentration in Brooklyn, which boasts a total 63 vacant lots and rusting steel building frames—18 in Williamsburg alone. Residents are increasingly outraged about the degentrication, which is attracting squatters and creating a fin de siècle atmosphere of urban blight. Philip DePaolo, who moved from The Bronx to Williamsburg in 1979, tells the Post his adopted neighborhood now reminds him of his old neighborhood: “It looks like I never left.”

Source: Gothamist