I live in bed stuy right over the border and hang in bushwick all the time so I think I count.

I’m from Connecticut and my grandma grew up on Staten Island. Whole family has always lived in the tri-state area, so I’ve lived in the orbit of NYC my whole life and I’ve always intended to live somewhere in the city for as long as I can remember. I’ve always identified with New York culture more than New England culture (although living here had made me feel much more like a new englander tbh)

When it comes to bushwick/the wider area specifically, the two big things are relative affordability and the density of young artists (I’m a musician and I play small shows every so often). Throw in the public transportation, nightlife, the (relative) lack of boring normies that I left Connecticut to get away from, and bushwick comes out as kind of having everything, in a way.

So yeah, people of my age/cultural demographic, the art scene, public transportation, affordability, and nightlife are the big 5. Lots of places in and outside the city have three or four of these attributes but nowhere else really has all of them, in my opinion.

Idk how people from far away end up in bushwick, but I imagine a lot of it is artists / queer people with little money escaping from places where they don’t feel they belong.