WITH ROE OVERTURNED, AUSTIN’S LOSS COULD BE BROOKLYN’S GAIN

Imagine that you are a young woman setting out on your adult life in the United States of America in 2022. College is behind you; fulfilling personal and professional ambitions in a stimulating place is meant to come next. Ten or 20 years ago, depending on your interests, you might have moved, as if by reflex, to New York or Chicago, to Los Angeles or San Francisco. But those cities have become only more punishingly expensive. The average rental price of an apartment in Brooklyn is now $3,500, up 12 percent over last year, when we were still lingering in the misguided belief that the pandemic had perhaps changed the city irrevocably toward the softer and more accessible. (In Manhattan, the figure jumped 32 percent to $4,800.)…