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This paper is an empirical examination of the process of 'super-gentrification' in the Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood of New York City. This intensified regentrification is happening in a few select areas of global cities like London and New York that have become the focus of intense investment and conspicuous consumption by a new generation of super-rich 'financifiers' fed by fortunes from the global finance and corporate service industries. This latest resurgence of gentrification can be distinguished from previous rounds of revitalisation and poses important questions about the historical continuity of current manifestations of gentrification with previous generations of neighbourhood change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 10–15 years, many cities in the US have experienced a form of development unknown since World War II—middle-income housing in their downtown cores. Such downtown housing initiatives assume that functional interdependence among different property sectors—office, residential, retail, entertainment—will ensue and that the resultant, co-ordinated investments will produce a lively and attractive downtown environment. This article explores the impediments to this synergism using a perspective that emphasises the ‘thicknesses’ of property markets; that is, the social, institutional and place-specific qualities of real estate investment. New York City's lower Manhattan revitalisation plan, designed to subsidise office conversions, is used as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]