Either That Or Expand The Definition Of “City” To Include Wakefield, Tottenville, Bayside And East New York So No One Feels Left Out

Better to decamp to Jackson, Prospect or even Morris Heights than whoring every detail of your life for clicks, according to the person who started it all (by portraying someone who started it all):

Budding Carrie Bradshaws better think about moving to Queens, says “Sex and the City” icon Sarah Jessica Parker.

Manhattan is bracing for another influx of Blahnik-wearing career girls after the film is released May 30. But New York is “a really hard city, and it’s very expensive and it’s not what it used to be,” Parker told me at the Cinema Society and Linda Wells’ screening of her new film, “Smart People.”

“That’s why the outer boroughs are so desirable,” she said. “The outer boroughs are pretty sexy. It’s just a matter of time before they have their own shows.”

Kelo, Sweet Vacant Lot, Coming For My Prospect Heights Home

Atlantic Yards opponents are aiming high with their latest, and possibly last strategy:

The proposed Atlantic Yards development near downtown Brooklyn could prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider when government may use eminent domain to seize private property.

About a dozen holdout residents within the project’s planned boundaries are petitioning the high court to forbid their eviction. If the residents win, the development, which entails 16 towers of residential and office space and a basketball arena, would be halted. One resident, Daniel Goldstein, said his two-bedroom apartment is near center court of the proposed arena.

If four justices agree to hear the appeal, it would be the court’s first to test the power of government to seize property through eminent domain since a landmark decision in 2005 in the case of Kelo v. the City of New London. In that decision, which produced a groundswell of public opposition across the country, the court ruled 5–4 that the government can seize property and transfer it to a private developer to foster economic development.

“If they had the stomach for it, they could accept this case to overrule Kelo,” the lead attorney for the residents, Matthew Brinkerhoff, said of the justices.

Mr. Brinkerhoff’s petition to the Supreme Court focuses on a more modest aim than convincing the court to scrap its opinion in Kelo just three years after issuing it. The residents are asking the court to give them a chance to prove their allegation that the primary motivation behind the Atlantic Yards project isn’t a desire to benefit the public. Instead, the plaintiffs claim the project is mainly a conspiracy to benefit the interests of the project’s developer, Bruce Ratner, and his company, Forest City Ratner.

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

Stuff That Makes You Want To Relocate To Duluth Includes . . .

. . . the word “bicoastal”:

Eve Levine, a 34-year-old real estate broker, recalls fondly the five years when she was, as she calls it, “low-cost bicoastal.” Her primary residence was in Brooklyn — first Williamsburg, then Bushwick and now Greenpoint — but she also had an apartment in the Fruitvale section of Oakland, Calif., that she visited for long stretches.

The apartment, actually a warehouse, was really big and inexpensive, she said. Friends paid the rent, but Ms. Levine said she could come back whenever she wanted, because they were friends.

In the fall of 2005, she severed ties to her West Coast warehouse.

“If you are trying to build something, whether a career or a bank account, you need to make a choice,” she said.

These days, she is a host of a gathering in Williamsburg called Home Buying for Hipsters, at which she explains the idea of Tenancy in Common, a form of ownership that enables people to combine their resources to buy a house jointly instead of just renting together. It is popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, she said, and she hopes to bring it to Brooklyn, where there is a similar pool of young people who have a history of sharing apartments through their 20’s.

. . .

Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.

Other communities across the country also fit this bill, but what Brooklyn and the East Bay share is proximity to more cosmopolitan centers — Manhattan and San Francisco — where the “creative class,” many of whom are freelancers, can earn a living.

“You can make money in both cities,” Ms. Levine said. “Can you make money in Portland, Ore.? It’s a cool city, it’s got lots of hipsters, but can you make money?”

. . .

If there is an aesthetic credo to Brooklyn and the Bay Area, it is Do It Yourself, which connotes more than using an Allen wrench from Ikea. D.I.Y. can mean everything from wearing locally designed T-shirts to attending concerts staged in someone’s warehouse apartment, to riding a bike to work.

Several businesses that have opened in both Brooklyn and the Bay Area exemplify the aesthetic. One of them, Rare Device, a home furnishings and fashion store in Park Slope, sells felted throw pillows and “wildcrafted soap.”

It’s Also Good To Be The Secretary Of The King

Many of the spaces in the downtown Brooklyn “park”-ing lot supposedly occupied by judges for supposed security reasons are actually being used by their secretaries:

It’s not just judges who are parking in the controversial judicial parking lot in a downtown Brooklyn park, the Daily News has learned.

Secretaries, court staffers and judicial hearing officers also are parked inside Columbus Park, a recent Daily News survey found.

Law clerks who chauffeur their judgebosses to work also have nabbed the coveted spots, the News found.

“It certainly shoots a hole in the argument that they need this parking lot for judges’ security,” said Transportation Alternatives spokesman Wiley Norvell of the Civil Court judges’ stance they need to park near the old courthouse next to Borough Hall where they preside over volatile cases. “It’s a job perk.”

The News’ findings came as judges threatened to sue the city over its plans to oust some of the cars from the lot and turn it back into a pedestrian plaza. Work is slated to begin as early as next month.

. . .

In 1999, judges allegedly promised to move their cars to a garage at the new courthouse at 330 Jay St. when it opened in 2005.

But they have more recently argued it is unsafe and inconvenient for judges who preside over divorce and foreclosure cases to park in the new Criminal Court garage and make the six-minute, two-block trek to Civil Court.

“They can’t walk two blocks to a garage, but they all walk to Queen for lunch,” quipped one insider, referring to a well-known Court St. Italian restaurant.

Among The News’ findings from its March 7 review are:

Nearly 40% of the 44 cars — 17 — did not belong to judges.

Three cars belonged to judges’ secretaries.

Another five cars were law clerks’; while two more were driven by high-level courthouse administrators.

Four cars were listed to retired judges now working as judicial hearing officers or court attorney referees.

Two cars belonged to court officers assigned to watch over the lot. One car’s owner could not be identified.

Location Scout: Columbus Park.

Time Is Running Out . . .

. . . to burnish your legacy somehow, somewhere:

With time running out on Mayor Bloomberg’s dream of rebuilding Coney Island, the city is now looking to bring a controversial developer back into the plan to build America’s largest amusement park, sources told The Post.

Only six months ago, when the term-limited mayor announced his grand 47-acre rezoning plan for Coney Island, city officials said developer Joe Sitt and other boardwalk property owners weren’t qualified to build the new 15-acre park the mayor envisions there.

But with the economy dwindling and deals to buy the 15 acres — including 11 Sitt controls — far from being reached, city officials said they are suddenly open to them playing a yet-to-be defined role in the park, even through the goal remains finding a world-class operator to run it.