The other day, Hallie and I met for lunch at the adorable sandwich and smoothie shop.

Once we’d found a table and placed our orders, I told her that Andy and I had bumped into my old college roommate Naomi at a restaurant and that, in the five years since I’d last seen her, she been married and divorced. And she was paying her same-aged, film school-graduate ex-husband alimony.

Naomi’s news had more than just surprised me. At one point in my life, I would have considered a woman paying a man alimony to be a sign of progress. But now that I was in a time of life when someone I knew was actually doing so, I was shocked and appalled.

“Sounds like an ass,” Hallie said with typical directness. Gender equality aside, this was the unanimous opinion. “I’m sorry, but what a weenie.” “I know. Would you even consider getting alimony from Mark?” Mark is Hallie’s fiancé. They’re getting married this spring.

She looked at me as if I was on drugs. “Mark’s a musician. A very broke one.” A casualty of the dot-com bubble, Hallie was finishing up her nursing degree. “Come to think of it, don’t tell him about this,” she added thoughtfully.

We both smiled, but the look in her eyes said she wasn’t all there. I asked her if something was the matter.

She took a deep breath and exhaled. “Mark’s parents have offered to give us a down payment as a wedding present.”

“That’s great,” I said, confused. I’m a big believer in the coming burst of the real estate bubble, but Down Payment Parents tip the whole equation. If someone were handing you tens – or, who knows, hundreds – of thousands of dollars, you’d be a fool not to take it. Plus, Hallie and Mark had an overly-familiar relationship with their sweet old Italian landlords, the upside of which was free homemade meatballs, the downside of which was a serious lack of privacy. You’d think they’d be happy to get their own place. “What’s the problem?” I asked.

“The problem is, we can’t afford to live in this neighborhood.”

She told me there was nothing available in their price range – unless the two of them were content to downsize to an even smaller one bedroom. “There’s just no way we can do it,” she said. “Especially if we want to have a kid soon.”

“That sucks,” I said, figuring they’d find someplace in the Park Slope fringe, formerly known as Gowanus. I was sure she’d still be somewhere nearby. “So where are you guys looking?”

She took another deep breath, then dropped the real bomb: “Jersey City.” “What?” I said, nearly dropping my curried egg salad sandwich. Hallie had been the “pioneer” who introduced me to this neighborhood. She’d been out here for almost 10 years; Mark had been here even longer. Not having Hallie in Brooklyn was unthinkable. “How can you not be in Brooklyn?” “I know,” she said, looking glum. “It’s just too expensive.”

What does it mean when people like Hallie and Mark can no longer afford to live here?

“You know who’s looking to buy a place in this neighborhood?” Hallie asked rhetorically. “One of Mark’s groomsmen and his wife. He’s a banker, and she’s a management consultant.”

The predicament was all too familiar. “The yuppies are coming!” was the new millennium version of “there goes the neighborhood.” This had been the old timers’ lament the last five years we were on the Upper West Side; it seemed it had now come to Brooklyn.

Why did this seem to happen to every neighborhood we lived in? This thought was followed by its obvious corollary, “Is it us?”The answer, I had to admit, was “kind of.”

I mean, Andy is a doctor – a researcher, but a doctor – and I work in public radio, which, strictly speaking, makes us yuppies. But we have much less money, and I would guess, a different life outlook, than a banker/consultant combo. These days, it seems the New York City-dweller needs as many words for yuppie as Eskimos do for snow.

Everyone wants their New York to up and come just to the point when they arrive. This works not just for neighborhoods, but for places to eat, drink, and shop as well. The goal is to be there before the wave crests and the great “them” discovers it and the place loses all of its character. It seemed that “they” had infiltrated most of Manhattan. Was the virus now spreading to Brooklyn?

I’m sure the old-timers here would say it already had – that the presence of couples like Andy and I, and Mark and Hallie, was a sign that the neighborhood had up and come and gone already.

But all of these questions were beyond the immediate problem. For me, it was that Hallie and Mark were considering leaving. For Hallie, it was that there was nowhere to go.

“I wish I could just get over myself,” Hallie was saying. “Why do I need to live in a city? Why the quest for the next cute neighborhood?”

I shrugged in the absence of a definitive answer.

And then she uttered the words it seemed anyone looking to buy in this market was saying: “I wish I could be happy in the suburbs like a normal person.”

The Brooklyn Chronicles, a work of fiction, appears each Friday. Previous installments are available at www.nysun.com/archive_chronicles.php. The author can be reached at kschwartz@nysun.com.