We’re cool, too! Marketers target Williamsburg residents ahead of L train shutdown

Targeted ads suggest Downtown Brooklyn, Jersey City as alternatives

Downtown Brooklyn
Downtown Brooklyn

With the looming L train shutdown, landlords are trying to lure Williamsburg residents to other parts of Brooklyn and even New Jersey.

The hashtag #Williamsburg (perhaps sneakily) on Instagram brings up pictures of TF Cornerstone’s 33 Bond Street, a new apartment building in Downtown Brooklyn. Paid links show prospective tenants searching for Williamsburg rentals listings of apartments at the Offerman House, another apartment building in Downtown Brooklyn, or the apartment building Journal Squared in Jersey City, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The L train is slated to temporarily shut down in the spring of 2019 and is expected to last 15 months. Marketers are targeting neighborhoods along the train’s line ahead of the service shutdown in hopes that residents will ditch Williamsburg for another transit-friendly area.

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“As articles of the impending shutdown appeared, we started advertising and targeting people in the neighborhood along the L line in buildings similar to ours,” Matthew Berenson, a vice president at the Gotham Organization, which is renting out the Ashland in Fort Greene, told the Journal.

Industry experts told The Real Deal in March 2016 that the train line’s shutdown shouldn’t have a long-term impact on rents or sales. [WSJ] — Kathryn Brenzel