One of New York City’s largest central business districts, Downtown Brooklyn, is on the rise, literally and figuratively. Known mainly as a commercial region, this area has been going through some major transformations over the past ten years. Some of the most noticeable changes include the addition of many residential high-rises. According to the Brooklyn Daily, director of real estate and planning in Downtown Brooklyn, Alan Washington states, “The fabric of a great urban environment is when people get to live, work, and play in the same area.” The goal of these transformations is to build more residential developments, along with creating some of the tallest and largest buildings Brooklyn has yet to see.

It goes without saying that if you’re a tourist in New York City, chances are your visit will be confined to Manhattan and you won’t think to visit any of the other boroughs. This may soon change, for Brooklyn at least, as the borough is stepping up to challenge the Manhattan-centric tendencies of tourism through an upcoming tourism website named ExploreBK. While Brooklyn already has a tourism website run by the office of the borough president, VisitBrooklyn, the new ExploreBK website is the brainchild of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and Hybrid Media, a private Brooklyn-based company. ExploreBK will target visitors to New York unfamiliar with the entertainment and culture that Brooklyn offers through advertising events and activities throughout the borough.

Brownstones are an indelible feature of New York City’s distinct architectural landscape. New York City has the largest compilation of brownstones in the United States—by far. They are the primary residential units in Bedford Stuyvesant and the Upper West Side. Harlem, Queens, and the Bronx also host a swath of the iconic homes. Brooklyn, in particular, is defined by its brownstones. They line the streets of Fort Greene, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and Cobble Hill, and are scattered in bundles from Greenpoint to Red Hook. Many of these brownstones are now the most desirable (and expensive) properties in the borough.

Brooklyn, long seen as the less expensive New York borough when compared to Manhattan, could soon be losing that reputation as prices for apartments in the borough shoot through the roof thanks to a market that’s running short of inventory. Although there’s a lot of demand for homes in Brooklyn, home hunters in the borough are finding that there just aren’t enough vacant apartments for them to move into, thereby giving sellers the upper hand in an increasingly tight real estate market.