Metro

New hipsters fight old hipsters in Bushwick

It’s the Battle of Bushwick.

The hipsters who settled the Brooklyn neighborhood 10 years ago have declared war on rich kids flocking to new luxury digs on their parents’ dime.

CastleBraid, an upscale rental complex marketed for artists, was adorned last month with crime-scene tape reading “Occupy.”

The “perps’’ were first-generation hipsters calling themselves “Occupy Bushwick.” They say they are “in solidarity” with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

CastleBraid is stacked with amenities designed to appeal to the aspiring hipsters.Paul Martinka

“It’s like Neverland over there,” fumed Angelina Dreem, 27, a yoga teacher who’s lived in Bushwick for four years and owns Body Actualized yoga studio across the street from the complex.

“It’s an adult children playground,” Dreem said. “They’re all, like, subsidized.”

CastleBraid is stacked with amenities designed to appeal to the aspiring hipsters — including a recording studio, a wood shop, a screening room, a gym, a game room and even a digital-media lab.

Locals complain that the rent is so steep — $2,200 for a one-bedroom and up to $3,400 for a three-bedroom — that the complex is actually causing rates to go up throughout the neighborhood.

An online opposition group, on Twitter as @AntiCastleBraid, describes the haven as “Where you would live if the only thing you knew about Bushwick you saw on the TV show ‘Girls.’ ”

But the same hipsters who are waging war against their privileged neighbors actually want to live in the luxury high-rise building — and are demanding that management set aside 20 percent of the units in return for a tax abatement it received.

CastleBraid partner Mayer Schwartz confirmed that the building got the abatement, but says owners are not required to offer low-income housing because ground was broken on the building before the rules were changed.

Gregory Tyler Hill, 27, a chef who lives in the building, suggested that his neighbors are just jealous of his sweet digs.

“The resentment is just haters,” Hill said. “Hate what you don’t know, hate what you don’t see.”

He and his three friends cram into a three-bedroom unit to make the luxury pad work for them.

Meanwhile, “true” Bushwick natives are laughing at both sides.

“It’s funny that the people who complain about it made this area gentrified in the first place,” said Carlos Juarez, 22, a waiter who remembers when his cousins were forced out of Bushwick by the first wave of hipsters in 2000.

“There was no name for them then — now it’s ‘hipster.’

“It was all working-class minorities like me. And then people like those people came in from other parts of the country and then people with more money came. The money washed the people away.”

But when asked if he would move into CastleBraid if there were lower-income options, he didn’t hesitate:

“Absolutely!” he said.