gentrification, now

Two years and a few months ago, I moved into Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for lower rent and more space. But quickly, the neighborhood felt more like a home to me than any other part of New York had. I felt a sense of community and authenticity. I felt a sense of connectedness to the people around me. 

Neighborhoods in New York gentrify regularly: generation after generation, new peoples move in and other peoples move out. And whether they are Italian, West Indian, Jewish, Russian or whatever, people don’t like being nudged from their homes by higher costs of rent and living. 

In the 1980’s, gentrification began happening rapidly in Crown Heights. Though it wasn’t the first time, it was particularly tense (or at least publicly tense). The people moving in were mostly Orthodox Jewish people, and the people being pushed aside were mostly first- and second-generation immigrants from the West Indies. The tension created division, which led to lack of understanding, which (as always) led to hatred flying in both directions. 

So in 1991, a Jewish man accidentally killed a Guyanese boy, and the tension from gentrification either pushed residents to perceive the situation as racially charged or caused it to actually be racially charged. Either way—an innocent boy was killed, riots erupted, an innocent man was murdered in retaliation, and, in the end, both the peoples who had been moving in and the peoples who were being moved out were deeply wounded. I don’t know much about the reality of living in Crown Heights during that time, but I know that it seems like a much different experience than the one I’ve had over the past two years. 

I’m a member of the group of people currently moving in—and I understand that my presence is a bittersweet site for many. Multiple times I’ve heard people from the neighborhood talk about how everything is changing and that it’s gotten a lot better—safer, cleaner, better smelling. But in a different mood or from a different prompt, the same native-Crown Heights residents will lament the change—the loss of character, the closing of old shops, the opening of too-expensive restaurants. Many have called it a general white-washing of the neighborhood. 

I understand that me coming to this new place willingly means that other people are going to a new place unwillingly. And with regards to policy, I’m not sure how I feel about that. But regardless of the effects that my presence and my apartment lease are having on the people who have lived on my street since before I was born, the people of Crown Heights have treated me with absolute openness. They have allowed me to take part in their community, to enjoy them and be enjoyed by them. They have allowed me to be a neighbor instead of a familiar-looking stranger. And if the old news reports from Crown Heights in the 80’s and 90’s are anything near the truth, this was not the common experience at that time. 

This Side of Franklin will seek to tell the stories of the people who make Crown Heights what it is right now, in 2015: those who have created the culture here, long before people like me arrived, and those who have been willing to share it with me since I unpacked my bags. 

For me, the blog will serve as a “thank you” to these incredible people who have given me a home. For them, hopefully it will be similarly received as thanks, but also as a much needed “I see you,” as the voices of the people being pushed aside are often similarly pushed aside. And for my readers, I hope it will serve as an illumination, into the lives of the oft-quieted people who live on the other side of gentrification—the side that isn’t included in the local newspaper’s new restaurant announcement.