Led by a shopping renaissance along the Fulton Street Mall in downtown, where rents now top $200 per square foot, the price of shop space is soaring in the northern half of the borough.

Nine retail corridors in northern Brooklyn have doubled their average asking rents over the last five years. Meanwhile, a host of other streets are just starting their ascent, according to a comprehensive report released Tuesday by CPEX Real Estate Services, which linked the explosion of retail rents there with a corresponding economic and residential renaissance.

"The northern half of the borough saw some very dramatic increases," said Timothy King, Managing Partner at CPEX.

In fact, the highest asking rents out of the 88 retail corridors tracked in the report topped out at more than $200 per square foot. That level was hit along the Fulton Street Mall in the heart of downtown Brooklyn, a strip that has seen extensive renovations and repositioning of its storefronts, as well as the construction of a number of high-rise, luxury apartment buildings. Not far behind in terms of rents per square foot were Williamsburg's main drag Bedford Avenue, downtown Brooklyn's Court Street and Flatbush Avenue near the Barclays Center at the intersection of Atlantic Avenue.

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Those areas, along with several other streets nearby, all saw a doubling in their average per-square-foot asking rents in the last five years. In contrast, rents in the borough's southern half, including such neighborhoods as Bay Ridge and Coney Island, held steady over the same time period.

The report attributed the disparity in rents to one in economic performance. For example, zoning changes along the waterfront in Greenpoint and Williamsburg in 2005 helped unlock the development potential there and has spurred the construction of 4,500 units of housing—with even more than that in the pipeline, the report noted. These new units arguably created the demand for new and improved retail, and both have sprouted in old industrial properties. Now, a similar trend is taking shape in previously gritty areas of Gowanus and Sunset Park. In the former, trendy retailers like Whole Foods and Dinosaur BBQ have recently opened shop. In the latter there is growing retail interest in Industry City and nearby Liberty View Plaza.

"Sunset Park is clearly, in my opinion, the next big thing," Mr. King said. "This won't happen overnight, but in five years you won't recognize that area."

Another plus for northern Brooklyn is an increasing number of tech firms, which are concentrated in the Tech Triangle of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, downtown Brooklyn and Dumbo. These companies are not only set to generate double the amount of economic activity in 2015 as they did just three years earlier, but will be employing a large number of Brooklynites, the firms told CPEX.

And that means much of that economic activity will stay within the borough, pushed out to increasingly popular neighborhoods like Greenpoint or Crown Heights, for example, which is why the report identified the main drags there as two of several transforming retail corridors.

Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights has seen its asking rents skyrocket over the last five years, as a large proportion of storefronts are being snapped up by restaurants. While along Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, once largely occupied exclusively by shops catering to the Polish community, a number of restaurants and cafés have now opened up shop, which the report argues diversifies the area.

In total, CPEX has added 43 new retail corridors to watch in the last five years, which Mr. King

"If I was a retailer coming from Kansas to establish my first store, this is a kind of roadmap to where the real action is, and what I might expect to pay," he said.