3. The beggar outside the Key Food on 7th Avenue who asks for money is impeccably dressed and sits on a stool, not the ground. And his sign is printed, not hand written.
4. You have to stand in a line that goes out the door just to enter Park Slope Food Coop on Union Street.
5. You find that you just paid almost $10 for a half gallon of organic milk at the Union Market that suspiciously doesn’t go bad for weeks.
6. You find that, aside from the occasional man in an untucked button front shirt carrying a briefcase, you’re almost always the only one walking home from the train after 11:00 pm on a school night.
7. You actually pay someone to come and hang out with your cat for an hour while you’re traveling abroad.
8. A studio apartment with a mini refrigerator goes for $1,700 a month. And someone rents it.
9. A new coffee and dessert shop opens every few weeks and people flock to them as though they have never seen one of these stores before in their life.
10. You go to the GreenMarket at Grand Army Plaza to buy organic vegetables and milk in glass bottles because it makes you feel you are getting ‘back to the land’.
11. You see Steve Buscemi on the street in his baseball cap and casually say ‘hello’.
12. You run into people who don’t think it’s completely asinine that a seven-bedroom limestone-and-brick townhouse on Montgomery Place just sold for $10,775,000.
13. You buy $80 t-shirts at Habit or Bird.
14. The buyers, who look to be about 12, at the Beacon’s Closet reject most of your gently used clothing to sell in their store.
15. You own a car but there’s a waiting list for all the neighborhood parking garages so you have to park it on the street. You then never drive your car anywhere because you don’t want to lose your parking spot.
16. You are annoyed with the influx of cars trolling for a place to park whenever there is an event at Barclay’s Center, the house that Jay-Z built.
17. You can’t ever give up your basic rent-controlled apartment, because you could never afford anything else in the neighborhood now — and yet despite the fact that babies seem to greatly outnumber adults and you can’t find a decently-priced loaf of plain old enriched bread to save your life, you can’t imagine not living anywhere but this neighborhood. 