Gentrification in Brooklyn: The Strategic Displacement of People of Color

A childhood memory stands out, prominently, in my mind. I’m 13 years old and my mom is telling me that we have to move. Not only out of my childhood home but also out of my home borough--my city--Brooklyn.

Crown Heights was all I knew.

My church, that I’ve been going to since I was born was a 5-minute walk from my house.

My grandparents have been living in the same house on Flatbush Avenue for the last 40 years.

My brother, sister-in-law, and baby niece now reside only a couple blocks away from my home church.

Everything was in Brooklyn!

For the first 13 years of my life, it was my home. Then, in the blink of an eye, it wasn’t. Simply because our apartment got sold and everyone had to go. This is when I learned that my neighborhood was becoming gentrified.

This is the process of upper- or middle-income families or individuals buying and renovating houses and stores and raising property values in deteriorated urban neighborhoods. While on the surface this may seem like a harmless improvement to areas in need, it is anything but harmless to minorities. Gentrification had already stormed through the surrounding areas of my neighborhood, meaning that there weren’t many places in Brooklyn with affordable housing for a single mother and her child. This forced us to move to Staten Island, a borough that I’d never even been to before, and from there (years later leading up to the present day) we had to move to Queens. Visiting my old neighborhood now it is nearly unrecognizable. There’s a “Natural Foods” market, a Starbucks, and white people walking up and down the block; things I never saw growing up. I experienced, quite literally, being driven out of the neighborhood I was rooted in and pushed past the brink. My experience is not an isolated one. It happens all too often, and therein lies the issue. Gentrification in Brooklyn, New York strategically displaces people of color because systemic racism is the origin of this process.

As with most, if not all, issues in America the origin of gentrification is in this country's history, specifically in the era succeeding World War II. During this time 90% of whites benefited monetarily, and this created the economic boom of the white middle class. The result of this today is that roughly 45% of Black people are homeowners while 75% of white people are homeowners (Slavery by Another Name). In fact, between 1934 and 1962 $120 billion

went to housing and less than 2% went to non-whites. Public housing projects were called "vertical ghettos" and 90% of housing destroyed in "urban renewal" was not replaced---2/3 of the people who were displaced were Black and Latino. Furthermore, the Federal Housing Administration explicitly stated that "If you allow one or two Black families the entire property value will go down." (Slavery by Another Name). This led to a process known as redlining, which was the systematic denial of various services by federal government agencies, local governments, and even the private sector to residents of specific, most notably black, neighborhoods or communities. This was done either directly or through the selective raising of prices. These “undesirable” neighborhoods were literally outlined as red, making it crystal clear to these services which areas they should ignore (Slavery by Another Name). Although racial language was removed from housing laws in 1968, all that did was make room for blockbusting. This was a process where real estate agents preyed on white people’s fear of their neighborhood becoming integrated. As a result, they were encouraged to sell their homes for less than market value. Agents then would resell them to people of color for an inflated price (Slavery by Another Name). These were the origins of housing discrimination, and it is clear to see the systemic racism at the root of it.

Sundown towns are a fitting example of this systemic racism at work. These towns were all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States that practiced a form of segregation by enforcing restrictions excluding non-whites via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence. “Across America, at least 50 towns, and probably many more than that, drove out their African American populations violently…Many other sundown towns and suburbs used violence to keep out blacks or, sometimes, other minorities” (Loewen, 5). It is in this way that residential segregation exacerbates all other forms of racial discrimination. “Segregated neighborhoods make it easier to discriminate against African Americans in schooling, housing, and city services… Residential segregation also causes employment inequalities, by isolating African Americans from the social networks where job openings are discussed.” (Loewen, 6). In other words, the poor pay more. When people are impoverished they encounter a plethora of problems stemming solely from the fact that they do not have money; they have to take out loans, they are charged higher interest rates because they are seen as "risky", their inability to pay things leads to higher fine amounts and possible jail time, health-wise they have little access to healthy foods or healthy environments, etc. Moreover, “poor” does not only have to be in reference to money. If you are “poor” in (as in lacking in) decent schooling, housing, or employment (like African Americans discriminated against in residential segregation or gentrification), the result is the same—issues are compounded and aggravated and you wind up more destitute than when you started.

What the history truly tells us is that “from the towns that passed sundown ordinances to the county sheriffs who escorted black would-be residents back across the county line, to the states that passed laws enabling municipalities to zone out ‘undesirables’, to the federal government …our governments openly favored white supremacy and helped to create and maintain all-white communities. So, did most of our banks, realtors, and police chiefs” (Loewen, 14).

Well into the 20th century, these spatial practices persisted. For example, racial zoning ordinances, a comprehensive set of policies that began in the South and spread throughout the country, controlled Black residential expansion and designated White and Black areas of cities. Although racial zoning could not withstand eventual legal challenges, “it continued to shadow public initiatives in community development as late as the 1960s” (Rodriguez, 316). Zoning established the spatial practice of separate communities based on race, and it must be stressed that the federal government was the principal agent of this discrimination.

In Brooklyn as a whole, there have been undeniable shifts in the composition of residents in several neighborhoods. “The five neighborhoods with the largest increase in White residents accompanied by a decrease in residents of another racial or ethnic group are all found in Brooklyn—Bedford-Stuyvesant, Williamsburg, Clinton Hill, Park Slope and Gowanus, and Crown Heights North” (Lewis and Sharps). Specifically, “between 2000 and 2010, these neighborhoods all saw an increase of between 6,700 and 15,600 White residents, paired with a simultaneous decrease in Black residents [Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights North], Latino residents [Williamsburg], or both [Clinton Hill, Park Slope and Gowanus]” (Lewis and Sharps). These statistics reveal that there was a direct correlation between the influx of White residents and the evacuation of Black ones.

Brooklyn serves as an example of how brutal gentrification is. It does irreversible damage. Families who have been in a neighborhood for generations are forcibly removed in the name of “urban renewal”, but that renewal is just to make the neighborhood "renewed" for white people. My experience, and that of a plethora of others, reveals that in the gentrification process, people of color just become collateral damage to be disposed of.

If you need any more proof of how deeply entrenched racism is in this country, this is it.

Sources

Lewis, Kristen, and Sarah Burd-Sharps. “The Pace, and Face, of Gentrification: Population

Change in Five Brooklyn Neighborhoods.” Center for New York City Affairs, 13 Mar. 2019, http://www.centernyc.org/the-pace-and-face-of-gentrification

Loewen, James W. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. The New Press, 2018.

Pollard, Sam, director. Slavery by Another Name. TPT National Productions in Association with

Two Dollars & A Dream, Inc. , 2012.

Rodriguez, Cheryl, and Beverly Ward. “Making Black Communities Matter: Race, Space, and

Resistance in the Urban South.” Human Organization, vol. 77, no. 4, 2018