NEW YORK CITY-Record high tourism and changing demographics in New York City are driving demand for retail to Brooklyn, a report from Marcus & Millichap shows. The recently released Retail Research Market Update highlights how record high tourism in Manhattan and the movement of more office workers to the boroughs have brought about this shift.

The phenomenon of more affluent workers moving to the boroughs has been covered by GlobeSt.com recently, for instance with Forest City Ratner signing over 570,000 square feet in leases in Downtown Brooklyn. Much of that space represents renewals, but some of those renewals include companies looking to expand their space.

J.D. Parker, a regional manager in the New York office of Marcus & Millichap sees it as a trend that will continue. “There’s a continued gentrification happening in many of the outer boroughs and certainly there’s been a mass migration of skilled laborers to the outer boroughs as they’ve been priced out of the Manhattan marketplace,” Parker says. “You’ve seen that in pockets of Brooklyn and in Queens and in areas of the Bronx, with all of the development that happened in specific neighborhoods.”

As Parker says, many people migrated to the boroughs because they were priced out of Manhattan. Now retailers are following them. He says the corridor along Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn is a particularly hot spot.

“Downtown Brooklyn is a great case study, where seven or eight years ago you really had a completely different market than what exists today,” Parker says, referencing retailers such as Urban Outfitters, Trader Joe’s and H&M that have sprouted up in the area. “None of those retailers would have touched Brooklyn before.”

In fact, the report shows that during the opening period of 2011, 224,000 square feet of retail space came online in New York City. Of that, Brooklyn received over 85%. Additionally, of the nearly 775,000 square feet of retail space that developers will deliver in the New York City market this year, 60% of it will be in the boroughs.

“Retailers,” Parker says, “are recognizing that those boroughs are under-retailed.”