By Emily Badger

Zip code 11216 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn has a spectacular stock of stately brownstones. The buildings — long ago sliced into apartments, but easily restored as grand townhomes again — composed the last major collection of brownstones in the borough that hadn’t yet been gentrified going into this housing cycle, beginning in the early part of the last decade.

“So there was a huge feeding frenzy for them,” Stephen Smith, a New York writer behind the Market Urbanism blog, told me. The housing looks just like in popular Park Slope, but the neighborhood is a little further out.

Since 2004, single-family home values in the Zip code have risen by 194 percent — they’ve tripled in barely a decade. That’s the single biggest gain of any Zip code among the 300 largest metro areas in the country, according to our new Washington Post analysis of how home values have changed across the U.S. over the bubble, bust and recovery. (The analysis lets you explore what happened in your Zip code, and how the country’s housing market has been increasingly divided along lines of race, income and geography.)

Zip code 11216 looks a bit odd in our data: It now has a median single-family home value over $1 million. But the median income according to the most recent five-year American Community Survey data is only about $44,000 — certainly not what you’d need to buy such a place.

This is a hallmark of rapidly changing neighborhoods: steep price gains, relatively lower incomes. This Bed-Stuy neighborhood is also still home to lower-middle-class retired homeowners and renters in rent-stabilized apartments, many of them West Indian and African American. What’s happening in the housing market benefits the longtime homeowners (at least as far as their property …read more

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