In some quarters in Troy, it's repeated like a mantra. Troy is the new Brooklyn. Troy is the new Brooklyn. Troy is the ... well, you get the idea.

To some of you, the sentence may seem patently ridiculous. It is ridiculous if you take it literally. One city cannot become another. And Troy, a city with just under 50,000 people, can only have so much in common with a sprawling New York borough of 2.6 million — large enough to be the country's fourth-largest city, if it stood on its own.

Yet if you spend enough time in Troy, especially in any of the new restaurants, bars, bakeries and stores that are transforming the city's downtown, you'll hear it. Troy is the new Brooklyn.

"I hear it every day," says Vic Christopher, whose Charles L. Lucas Confectionary and Wine Bar is often cited as a leading example of how Troy is like that certain borough. Guess where Christopher was raised? Brooklyn, of course. Marine Park, more specifically, with the accent to prove it.

To understand what this Troy-is-the-new-Brooklyn thing is about, you have to know something about Brooklyn and how it changed. You have to go back 20 years or so, when Manhattanites, at least, viewed Brooklyn as a post-industrial backwater, while much of the rest of the country associated the borough with crime and the ills that bedeviled urban America. Crooklyn was dangerous, or so the perception went — not as bad as the Bronx, for sure, but not anywhere you'd want to be.

Then, everything changed. As Americans rediscovered cities, Brooklyn led the way. Families found Park Slope and its neglected brownstones. Hipsters found Williamsburg's bleak industrial landscape charming, or at least affordable. Neighborhood after downtrodden neighborhood went upscale. Gentrification was a blessing or an evil, depending, largely, on the size of your wallet. The old, sorry Brooklyn acquired a shine and became the New Brooklyn.

The borough was about potential and possibilities and reinvention. It was the place where neighborhoods were reborn, seemingly overnight. It was where a Manhattan family could find a cheap (by New York standards) brownstone, where struggling artists could find reasonable studio space. It was where it was possible to open that wine bar or yoga studio or vegan bakery — with an ever-growing influx of people willing to support it.

So when people say Troy is the new Brooklyn, they're suggesting the city has potential, just as Brooklyn had. They're saying Troy is rife with possibilities, a city where you don't need to a trust fund to open a business, buy a rowhouse, or just generally take a chance on a dream. They're saying you can almost sniff reinvention in the air.

Or maybe they're just saying that a lot of hipsters seem to be walking around.

No doubt, the transformation taking place in Troy is remarkable. Every day, it seems, brings an announcement of a store opening, a company relocating from Albany or Clifton Park, or a building that's set to be rehabbed. Downtown sidewalks hum, raising a question: Where are all these people coming from? Long-standing eyesores, such as the old Proctor's Theater building, vacant since 1979, are being remade. You can barely escape the pounding hammers, the screaming saws — the sounds of rebirth.

It's all this that gives rise to the comparison. Yet Troy is not the only new Brooklyn.

A few minutes on Google reveals that Oakland, Philadelphia, Camden, Cleveland, Yonkers, Detroit, Louisville, Baltimore, Buffalo, Austin, Harlem and the Bronx have all been described, at one time or another, as the new Brooklyn. The entire Hudson Valley has been compared to Brooklyn — and it isn't even a city. But Troy's grip on the claim is bolstered by so much of it looking like Brooklyn. Walk south on Second Street, in the elegant, brownstone-laden neighborhood immediately south of downtown, and you might swear you'd been transported to a quieter version of Cobble Hill.



Christopher noticed the similarities immediately when he first drove into the city a decade ago. It was obvious, he says now, that Troy was real — a diverse, sometimes gritty, but endlessly interesting city. A place with street life, where you didn't necessarily need a car. A place that felt like a piece of a much larger city. "In my mind, Troy is like a neighborhood in Brooklyn," Christopher says. "It has always felt like home to me."

Christopher's unconventional career path in many ways embodies the possibilities available in a city where real estate is cheap. He came north to work for the ValleyCats, Troy's minor league baseball team, before taking an economic development job with the city. Then, Christopher and his wife, Heather LaVine, bought a Second Street building for $155,000 and painstakingly renovated it — apartments on the upper floors, and they opened their wine bar down below.

Let's pause for a minute to consider what $155,000 would buy in New York. A closet, perhaps? With bedbugs.

Flabbergasted New Yorkers may have trouble absorbing this next fact: Christopher and LaVine paid just $80,000 for their second building, a three-story landmark on a downtown block. Sure, the building was a wreck. But still ... cheap is cheap. And within a year of the purchase, Christopher and LaVine had opened an upscale food market on the building's ground floor, next to an existing newsstand, and they plan to open a tavern/restaurant in an adjacent storefront later this year. "It's about real estate per square foot and buildings that are affordable for people," Christopher says. "That's what inspires creativity. People need space to do cool stuff."

The narrative — out-of-towner arrives, can't believe the prices and decides to stick around — is familiar in Troy. My first two landlords in the city did just that. They came north from New York City looking for the freedom that comes with a more affordable life.

There wouldn't be a need for a new Brooklyn if there weren't a problem with the existing Brooklyn. Truth is, the borough's success has made it prohibitively expensive for creativity, or any activity at all short of owning a hedge fund. Consider: When appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate began tracking Brooklyn rents in 2008, the borough's median rent was $1,100 cheaper than Manhattan's. Today, the spread is just $300 — and the median Brooklyn rent for a one-bedroom apartment is a staggering $2,747. Ouch.

"We could never, ever have accomplished in Brooklyn what we've done here," Christopher says. "There's no way."

Brownstoner, the website, has chronicled every step of the Brooklyn renaissance. It celebrated the new restaurants, the condo conversions, the rehabs — every troubled neighborhood that was ultimately remade. And for years, Suzanne Spellen was one of Brownstoner's most prominent authors. She still writes for the site — from her home in Troy.

Spellen was priced out of the borough after losing her Crown Heights home to foreclosure. Her experience is a reminder that sweeping gentrification has winners and losers, and that a city's newcomers sometimes arrive at the expense of existing residents. "The new Brooklyn is people with piles of money," Spellen says. "It changed so fast."

So will Troy become unaffordable, too? Not anytime soon. The city's fade was lengthy, and, so far, the revival is primarily a downtown phenomenon. Away from the wine bars and yoga studios, more than 40 percent of the city's children still live in poverty. Down in South Troy, beyond the renaissance belt, activist Sid Fleisher says he's seeing little evidence of change, not in a neighborhood still peppered by vacant buildings and overgrown lots.

At the very least, a city with a longstanding inferiority complex has acquired new status and confidence. "I have a cousin in Brooklyn," says downtown resident Duncan Crary. "For years he would ask me, 'When are you going to move to Brooklyn?' — as if I were wasting my life away in Troy. Now, I'm bugging him and asking, 'When are you going to move to Troy?'"

The changes in Troy have led to new comparison that, I swear, has actually been uttered by living human beings: Cohoes is the next Troy. This forward-looking culture of ours doesn't exactly embrace the moment. We need to know what's next, before the present has even been settled. But if Troy is the new Brooklyn and Cohoes is the new Troy, wouldn't that make Cohoes the new Brooklyn? Is Watervliet then the Bronx? But isn't the Bronx also the new Brooklyn?

Maybe these comparisons aren't such a good idea. "One Brooklyn's enough," Spellen says. "I think Troy can be the new Troy."