Dave Sanders for The New York Times  Those priced out of Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg and Park Slope have begun house hunting deeper in Brooklyn, including, clockwise from upper left, Bushwick, Crown Heights, Sunset Park and Ditmas Park.  Many Brooklynites, priced out of Williamsburg, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, are heading farther in. They are turning to neighborhoods like Sunset Park, Crown Heights, Bushwick and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, bringing a willingness and an ability to pay more for housing than the waves of residents who came before them.  “What many clients have told me is that they like the old Brooklyn vibe of these up-and-coming areas,” said Kristen Larkin, an agent with TOWN Residential. “They like the sense of community, friendliness of the neighbors, and the mom-and-pop shops that come along with it.”  Brokers and developers say the cross-Brooklyn migration has picked up in recent years, as recent college graduates, artists and families, mostly white, seek new affordable neighborhoods. The median real estate price for Boerum Hill ($675,000), Carroll Gardens ($677,500) and Cobble Hill ($750,000), once viewed as out-of-the-way destinations for renters and homeowners unable to afford Manhattan, now rivals those in the northern reaches of the Upper East and West Sides and parts of Lower Manhattan, according to Streeteasy.com.  Park Slope reached a new median high of $670,500 last year. The median price in 2012 in prime sections of Williamsburg, including its waterfront, was $765,000, which outpaced even Manhattan destinations like the Gramercy Park area, where the median was $725,000 for the same period.  Housing prices in neighborhoods deeper inside Brooklyn are even competing with or surpassing real estate in solidly middle-class areas of Westchester County, Long Island and northern New Jersey, according to Trulia.com.  Stretching along New York Harbor between Greenwood Heights to the north and Bay Ridge to the south, Sunset Park has long been a magnet for working-class immigrants. Once almost exclusively Scandinavian, the area is now home to large Chinese and Hispanic communities.  Its lovely hillside park offers striking Manhattan views and has a recreation complex with a gym and an Olympic-size outdoor pool. The local Chinatown is larger than Manhattan’s, and express D subway line trains make the eastern area a bit more accessible than neighborhoods reliant on the F and other sluggish trains. Last year the median sale price was $280,000, according to Streeteasy.  A new green space, Bush Terminal Piers Park, is scheduled to open this summer along the waterfront between 43rd and 51st Streets, offering softball and soccer fields, tidal ponds, walking paths and a wooded area. Other stretches of the industrial waterfront are being refashioned to attract artists and artisanal food manufacturers. Last month the chocolatier Jacques Torres announced that he was opening a factory, designed with tourist viewing in mind, in a 40,000-square-foot space in the Brooklyn Army Terminal. In 2000, the opening of Jacques Torres Chocolate in Dumbo was among the clearest signals of the gentrification that was to come.  Erika Storella, a literary agent, and her husband, Daniel Heidkamp, a painter, were living in Greenpoint when they began hanging out at a friend’s art studio on the industrial waterfront in Sunset Park a couple of years ago. “We were drawn in by the sense of fresh creative energy in this neighborhood, as well as the beautiful park, the city views, and the historical details of the Finnish Co-ops,” she said, referring to some of the first co-ops in the city, on 43rd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.  In January of last year, the couple, who now have a 6-month-old son, bought a two-bedroom co-op a half a block from Sunset Park for less than $300,000. The listing agent was Peter Bracichowicz, a Corcoran broker who specializes in the area. Mr. Heidkamp also moved his painting studio to Sunset Park from Greenpoint.  Ms. Storella’s commute to Midtown has doubled, to about an hour each way, and she pines for a good wine store. But there are benefits: “We appreciate the natural beauty of the neighborhood,” she said. “We walk through the park almost every day with our son. We eat a lot of dumplings and burritos, and there is a new organic/local restaurant that we frequent called Café Zona Sur.”  A decade ago, buyers drawn to Ditmas Park’s Victorians, complete with front porches, backyards and driveways, would have found 99-cent shops and vacant storefronts lining Cortelyou Road, the main business strip. Today Cortelyou has a number of popular restaurants, bars, cafes and shops catering to an evolving clientele. A recent addition, Brooklyn Industries, the hipster outfitter, opened its 16th clothing store at the corner of Cortelyou and Marlborough in December. That’s a good distance from Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, where the first shop opened in 2001.  Ditmas Park’s increasing gentrification is helping attract and retain families who might previously have gone to the suburbs. “There’s more holding them here now,” said Jan Rosenberg, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 20 years and is a founder of Brooklyn Hearth Realty. “It’s more of a neighborhood.”  Younger families who bought one- or two-bedrooms and had another child are now selling those apartments and buying the next step up, she said. Sometimes that might be a grand Victorian, but more often it’s a smaller home nearby in Kensington, a diverse neighborhood of Orthodox Jews and immigrants from Pakistan, the Darfur region of Sudan, and Poland, among many other places.
Buyers and renters in search of affordability and ambience are moving into parts of Brooklyn that were once considered out of the way.