Real Estate Brokers Agree — Follow The Lesbians

Sure, blame it on the strollers:

As the Park Slope mommies, daddies and Bugaboos multiply, a fringe group that once dominated a piece of the neighborhood has taken itself back to the fringe.

. . .

The southward shift of the lesbian community is far from surprising.

One obvious reason is the skyrocketing cost of living in Park Slope. On average, men earn 21 percent more than women, an income discrepancy that becomes wider for women-only households. But finances are only part of the neighborhood’s waning desirability among lesbians.

In the end, the real turnoff may be simply too many people who look like one another.

“I went to the Tea Lounge the other day and it totally freaked me out,” said Gabrielle Belfiglio, a lesbian who once lived in Park Slope, but has since moved to Windsor Terrace. “Everyone looked like they were part of the same photo shoot, posing with a laptop or a baby.

“There used to be a sense of diversity that isn’t there anymore,” she added. “You can walk around Windsor Terrace and Kensington and see a Hassid next to a woman in hijab next to a Jamaican kid. You can be who you are in that mix of people.”

It’s great to feel comfortable in a “mix of people” . . . do the Hassids and women in hijab feel the same?

And although I like the idea of tying the decline of lesbian community in Park Slope to the male-female economic gap — interesting theory! — this story isn’t exactly new, is it? Even the Times was writing about the exodus from “Dyke Slope” back in January 2005:

When Emily Haddad moved to New York shortly after finishing college in 2001, she didn’t know much about the city, but being gay, she knew she wanted to live in a gay-friendly community.

Her neighborhood of choice? Park Slope.

“It seemed like lesbian central in New York,” said Ms. Haddad, 24, whose unaccented speech belies her North Carolina roots.

Park Slope was the neighborhood where she marched in the Brooklyn Pride Parade during her first summer in New York. She spent another afternoon at the Rising Cafe, a lesbian coffee shop on Fifth Avenue, and ended up in a spirited discussion with some women from Dyke TV, a weekly television show. It was also the neighborhood where she volunteered at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, on 14th Street near Prospect Park. The Archives, and by extension Park Slope, became her adopted home.

But she never did make Park Slope her actual home, nor did any of her lesbian friends. “Dyke Slope,” as it is affectionately called by many lesbians, was too expensive for them, as it has become for many other New Yorkers. Instead, Ms. Haddad found a cheap, newly renovated two-bedroom apartment in a rowhouse on 51st Street, deep amid the residential sleepiness of Sunset Park. She splits the $1,500 monthly rent with a female roommate, who is straight.

(In fact, it’s such old news that the Brooklyn Paper story even features a picture of someone who was interviewed in the Times piece. She’s still not living in Park Slope.)