Ken Fisher, a member of Cozen O’Connor’s Business Law Department, discusses why New York City infrastructure can not keep up with gentrification in Brick Underground. Many of New York's so-called "emerging" neighborhoods are food deserts, where residents have limited to no access to quality groceries or fresh produce. When it comes to larger chains such as drug stores and certain grocery stores, the people making the decisions care much less about a neighborhood's growing cultural cache than they do about numbers on a spreadsheet. "If you're a real estate manager for a major retail operation, you're not necessarily driving around Brooklyn looking for signs of change," says Ken. "Any neighborhood is just one more place on a list of places where somebody is giving you demographic information." Ken also discusses how community boards and elected officials can result in improved infrastructure in communities, however, that there is often a lag time.
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