This is a couple weeks old already, but I just keep being reminded of it: the people on Brownstoner were shitting their pants over someone’s jaw-dropping audacity in painting part of their brownstone white. I read the post, laughing to myself at expressions of outrage more fitting with genocide, and the snarky comments making fun of the brownstone fascists. In the end it turned out that the home’s owner was simply repainting an approved color, and the white was just primer. Whew!

Last week, Petra from the Bed-Stuy Blog came to our hood and had some iced tea with me at the Wyckoff-Starr. She brought up the white paint fiasco almost first thing, at first probing me to see if I, too, shared the outrage. When I laughed in response, we started poking fun at the kinds of cushy lives these hyperventilators must lead — if this is what gets their blood boiling, life must be pretty cushy indeed. To prove the point, she posted a photo of a lovely, tall, well-cared-for brownstone — painted shocking white! The horror!

Fortunately for Bushwickers, we won’t ever have to worry about overzealous preservationistas calling the history police on us for such infractions — most of our buildings are brick or woodframe, and were built to be painted. (Though I can envision an as-yet-hard-to-imagine future where neighbors call 311 on each other for other minor crap on the more intact blocks of South Bushwick.)

Don’t get me wrong; I like historic buildings, and agree that many of the new buildings going up are just plain nasty. But it’s not always practical to keep every single old house around forever under the pressure of huge housing demand. In light of this, flipping out over a mere paint job on a block full of multimillionaires and their flawless houses comes across a bit hysterical. No?

And talk about pricing out the lower-income among us — historic districts are an old tool in the art of gentri-fu. Only the wealthy can afford to buy 1- or 2-family homes on land so close to the center of a megacity. The fact that anyone even knows about this minor infraction is testament to that.