Stuff That Makes You Want To Relocate To Duluth Includes . . .

. . . the word “bicoastal”:

Eve Levine, a 34-year-old real estate broker, recalls fondly the five years when she was, as she calls it, “low-cost bicoastal.” Her primary residence was in Brooklyn — first Williamsburg, then Bushwick and now Greenpoint — but she also had an apartment in the Fruitvale section of Oakland, Calif., that she visited for long stretches.

The apartment, actually a warehouse, was really big and inexpensive, she said. Friends paid the rent, but Ms. Levine said she could come back whenever she wanted, because they were friends.

In the fall of 2005, she severed ties to her West Coast warehouse.

“If you are trying to build something, whether a career or a bank account, you need to make a choice,” she said.

These days, she is a host of a gathering in Williamsburg called Home Buying for Hipsters, at which she explains the idea of Tenancy in Common, a form of ownership that enables people to combine their resources to buy a house jointly instead of just renting together. It is popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, she said, and she hopes to bring it to Brooklyn, where there is a similar pool of young people who have a history of sharing apartments through their 20’s.

. . .

Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.

Other communities across the country also fit this bill, but what Brooklyn and the East Bay share is proximity to more cosmopolitan centers — Manhattan and San Francisco — where the “creative class,” many of whom are freelancers, can earn a living.

“You can make money in both cities,” Ms. Levine said. “Can you make money in Portland, Ore.? It’s a cool city, it’s got lots of hipsters, but can you make money?”

. . .

If there is an aesthetic credo to Brooklyn and the Bay Area, it is Do It Yourself, which connotes more than using an Allen wrench from Ikea. D.I.Y. can mean everything from wearing locally designed T-shirts to attending concerts staged in someone’s warehouse apartment, to riding a bike to work.

Several businesses that have opened in both Brooklyn and the Bay Area exemplify the aesthetic. One of them, Rare Device, a home furnishings and fashion store in Park Slope, sells felted throw pillows and “wildcrafted soap.”