TOW 26

The King Can No Longer Afford Queens is an article about the rapidly changing real estate market in queens.  This article comments on how Queens has gone from a working class, predominantly white area, to a pricey land of the rich, and the article uses pop culture references and numbers to help convince their readers of this idea.  This article uses references from such shows as The King of Queens to show the type of stature queens has previously carried.  The King of Queens is a show less than a decade from its finale about a working class American family who lives in queens.  This is synonymous with Queens’s public image and plays off of it for the story line.  This also reflects the fact that not only was this idea true but it was so commonly thought that it would be the perfect background for this story.  Not only did this show flow with the profile of Queens, but it also strengthened it.  With a viewership of about 9 million weekly viewers it likely changed opinions and people who knew nothing about Queens believed it was just like the show.  The author needed more to show the change so they started to pull out statistics.  The author, Ginia Bellafante started to pick out figures for real estate sold in Queens.  Massive numbers in the multimillion categories started to come out and the image of Queens started to change in the readers mind.  This addition of statistics did something that little telling could, it showed the reader that Queens real estate really was getting expensive.  Further, these numbers help to convince readers because they give specific facts and the readers can judge for themselves how high end they think Queens is.  With a little extra prodding, Bellafante pushes the reader in her direction by comparing Queens to other high-end areas.  All of these techniques help in the end to illustrate the change in the real estate market in Queens.