As I type this from my living room/office in Long Island City, on the Southeastern tip of Queens, through the window I’ve got a prime view of the luxury real estate company setting up shop in the abandoned paper factory immediately across the street. Yesterday, they boarded up the upper windows and hung signs; today, they’ve parked three pedicabs with their logo on the sidewalk–because buyers who have been priced out of the Manhattan condo market are apparently so humbled by the experience that they couldn’t bear to walk a block and half from the sales office to the property.

Yes, the neighborhood’s changing, which is not altogether a bad thing–after almost a year and half in this apartment, the novelty of having to take the subway into another borough to get to the supermarket, the gym or a halfway decent bar has worn off completely. So I’m comfortable with the forward motion of gentrification. I just never thought Lloyd Kaufman would be one of the gentrifiers.

Yeah, THAT Lloyd Kaufman.

As Lou Lumenick reports in today’s New York Post (via The Reeler), Kaufman is selling Troma’s headquarters of 28 years, in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, to pay for the studio’s next, still-undetermined project. Troma will soon be “moving to cheaper quarters in Long Island City, Queens.” Says Kaufman of Troma’s exodus from Manhattan:

When we moved in, the neighborhood was so sleazy that women couldn’t work at night. Now Ninth Avenue has come up so much that they’re going to turn the building into fancy condos.

I’ll play one-woman welcome wagon for a sec: there is, admittedly, something fitting about the idea of the House the Toxic Avenger Built moving into this neighborhood. Long Island City is separated from Brooklyn by a wisp of a water body called Newtown Creek, which is still contaminated from an an oil spill in the 50s that was allegedly three times larger than the Exxon Valdez, and which is rumored to be the cause of a cancer epidemic in the area. Troma’s new home could completely revitalize the Toxie franchise!

But if Kaufman’s hoping to find a condo-free zone, he’s too late.