In Greenpoint, a Polish bread shop my elementary school teacher frequented and treated my class to on birthdays has been replaced by an expensive health food store. I have seen what was a small, family-run hair salon in Chinatown turn into a food photography haven for matcha lattes and grass-fed butter coffee. They've become Streeteasy searches for those looking for “cheap rent” when initially moving to the city. In my eyes, areas such as Brooklyn, Harlem, and the LES had all that but have been attacked, transformed, gentrified, rebuilt. When unchartered, eats are cheap, small businesses intact, and ethnic culture alive.

I’m content with the commute from unchartered to chartered territories. I've been a consumer of hotspots in the Lower East Side and Williamsburg that I happily took the hour-long train ride from Queens to visit and enjoy. Afterward, I’d return to my personal serenity of bodega coffees and women in salwar kameez pushing laundry carts down the streets of Queens.

So, as a young, peripatetic native New Yorker, I’m exceptionally privy to the nuances of change in neighborhoods that I frequent: an Instagram-famous coffee shop on a corner in Greenpoint that wasn't there two years prior, the mammoth re-landscaping of industrial truck yards in Bushwick that now house DJ sets and art studios. I have also lived in Greenwich Village and in the East Village in college housing-an expensive phenomenon unto itself. I grew up in LeFrak’s larger community-Elmhurst, Queens-and a few years ago, my family moved near Astoria for various reasons, like outgrowing the two-bedroom apartment that saw consistent rent hikes. I attended Elmhurst’s elementary and middle schools, had a culture-shock stint of high school in a specialized downtown Manhattan high school (it had escalators, a pool, and students living in brownstones throughout the city), and then returned to Elmhurst after graduation to work with students in an under-performing local high school. (Editor's note: A reader alerted us to a Facebook post that Tahia wrote in response to our article, and we invited her to share her thoughts with other Brick readers on the changes that are happening in her Queens neighborhood.)

A few months ago, a link came across my Facebook newsfeed as a suggested article I might want to read: “Inside LeFrak City, a mega-rental community in Queens with affordable apartments.” The word 'affordable' jumped at me.

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