There were so many things I had planned to tell you in this update, like how I got a haircut. Also, the irony of New York City spending the better part of a decade designing and fighting to implement a plan to rezone the Coney Island beachfront to allow high-rise apartment towers — helping launch a land war that ended up creating huge rifts in the community, leading to the destruction of several historic buildings, and utterly changing the face of Brooklyn’s world-renowned amusement district — and now the very first new 40-story luxury apartment tower is finally planned for Coney Island and it’s nowhere near the rezoned area. And people hate it anyway.

But I’m not going to tell you about any of that, because we are apparently about to be buried under a mountain of snow, and not the good kind. So for now I will stick to only the timeliest of matters: This Wednesday from 7 to 9 pm, I’m going to be on a panel with some of the brightest minds in New York development politics — author and professor Sharon Zukin, urban planning legend Ron Shiffman, Bed-Stuy city councilmember Robert Cornegy, Flatbush Tenant Coalition organizer Jherelle Benn, and Broadway Triangle development activist Juan Ramos — for a discussion titled “Brooklyn for Sale: The Price of Gentrification,” organized by the fine folks at BRIC. If you’re local, you can come watch in person at 647 Fulton Street (near BAM), with seating first-come, first-served; otherwise you can watch live on Brooklyn Independent Media (Cablevision channel 70, Time Warner 756, Verizon Fios 46) or streaming online at the BRIC website.

You can also watch the promo video below if you want a quick sneak peek at some of what we’ll be discussing:

And if I survive that, and the snow, I promise to be back soon with a longer update. We have much to talk about.