Gentrification in Brooklyn – Where The Borough Is Headed Exemplified Through A Close Reading of Paul Auster's Sunset Park (original) (raw)
Related papers
Race, Class, and Gentrification in Brooklyn: A View from the Street, Lexington Books. 2016
In this modest volume we are “revisiting” two more and less well known neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York: Crown Heights/Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, and Greenpoint/Williamsburg. These are complex urban communities in which we have been personally active for almost half a century and about which we have extensively published. On these pages we will describe, discuss and give examples “Then” (1970-80) and “Now” post 2000? of how these increasingly iconic neighborhoods developed over this occasionally tumultuous period, while paying close attention to the persistently contentious issues of race and social class. Since our perspective is taken essentially from the street level as opposed to looking down from the proverbial ivory tower, it will also be necessary to discuss the different approaches we employed in our urban neighborhood researches and analyses. At the time of our initial studies we both were, for want of better words, “community organizers” in reluctantly changing neighborhoods. Therefore we will give special attention as well to the formal and informal organizational strategies local actors used to both resist and promote changes in the composition of their residential communities, or perhaps better phrased controlling who might become their “neighbors.” The image of Brooklyn as a whole, as well as its well-known individual neighborhoods such as Flatbush and Coney Island, has always been a powerful independent force in creating and maintaining its concrete reality. Today, in 2015, Brooklyn by all accounts in the popular media is decidedly an “in” place. It occupies an elevated status as a gem in the crown of a Global City and is fast becoming a popular tourist destination in its own right. By almost every measure the “Borough of churches” has moved far beyond “renaissance” and “revival” to enjoy a hard earned, successfully promoted, chic and hip image that is presented to the rest of the world. As opposed to the “bad old days” in the 1960s and 1970s the major challenges likely to confront local community and political leaders in the Twenty-first Century arise from such “problems” as the rising cost of housing resulting from upscale gentrification by which investors compete for any available development space. A few decades ago the problems were exactly the opposite. No one at that time could have ever imagined a hip travel guide, Lonely Planet, would name Brooklyn as one of the top world destinations for 2007 (Kurtzman 2007).
The super-gentrification of Park Slope, Brooklyn
Studies of classical gentrification typically focus on the embourgeoisement of neighborhoods and displacement of marginalized people. According to Lees (2003), a new form of gentrification—super-gentrification—has emerged with the expansion of global finance capital. Super-gentrification entails the further upscaling of already gentrified neighborhoods with the in-migration of upper-income residents and displacement of middle class residents, many of whom were among the initial gentrifiers. Despite the attention policy makers, urban planners, and the media are paying to the “middle class squeeze,” few quantitative studies of super-gentrification exist. Using data from the United States Decennial Census, American Community Survey, public residential sales transaction records, and real estate listings, this article sheds light on the landscape of super-gentrification and how to identify it with a quantitative analysis of changes in income, demographics, and housing affordability in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York since 1970.
At the end of the 20 th century, nearly all of the major American cities were under the influence of gentrification -a social, cultural, and economic phenomenon that was reshaping their usually devastated and blighted inner-cores. Nowhere this trend was, and still is, more visible than in New York City, more specifically in Brooklyn, its most populous borough. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how gentrification influenced recent urban development of Brooklyn. In order to describe this process more accurately, I will concentrate myself on two specific neighborhoods that can serve as examples of a classic gentrification and something that can be called a cultural gentrification. These neighborhoods are Park Slope and
Brooklyn Revisited: An Illustrated View from the Street 1970 to the Present
2020
Urban ethnographers must understand that while we look at things using close-up lenses, most policy-makers, on the other hand, employ wide-angle lens to describe what is going on at that very same street level. In this chapter, the authors attempt to provide a contrast between those views in the context of the radically changed public perception of the New York City Borough of Brooklyn. When the authors began their sociological research (and social activism) in the late twentieth century, the neighborhoods in which they were active suffered from the spread of middle-class (white) flight and urban blight. Today, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the fortunes of these same areas have been reversed, but longer-term residents face new ‘problems’ in the form of gentrification and displacement. It is suggested here that a view from the street can provide a better sociological understanding of the bigger picture.
Brooklyn Revisited: An Illustrated View from the Street 1970 to the Present 1
Urban ethnographers must understand that while we look at things using close-up lenses, most policy-makers, on the other hand, employ wide-angle lens to describe what is going on at that very same street level. In this essay the authors attempt to provide a contrast between those views in the context of the radically changed public perception of the New York City Borough of Brooklyn. When the authors began their sociological research (and social activism) in the late Twentieth Century, the neighborhoods in which they were active suffered from the spread of middle-class (white) flight and urban blight. Today, in the first two decades of the Twenty-first, the fortunes of these same areas have been reversed, but longer-term residents face new 'problems' in the form of gentrification and displacement. It is suggested here that a view from the street can provide a better sociological understanding of the bigger picture. Brooklyn's Image Then and Now The image of Brooklyn as a whole, as well as its most well-known individual neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush, and Coney Island, has always been a powerful independent force in creating and maintaining its concrete reality. Forty years ago these place names were stigmatized. Today, in 2015, Brooklyn and these areas are by all accounts in the popular media decidedly 'in' places. The Borough of Brooklyn currently occupies an elevated status as a gem in the crown of New York City as a Global City, and it is fast becoming a popular tourist destination in its own right. By almost every measure the 'Borough of churches' has moved far beyond 'renaissance' and 'revival' to enjoy a hard-earned, successfully promoted, chic and hip image that is presented to the rest of the world. As opposed to the 'bad old days' in the 1960s and 1970s the major challenges likely to confront local community and political leaders in the Twenty-first Century arise from such 'problems' as the rising cost of housing resulting from upscale gentrification by which investors compete for any available development space. A few decades ago the problems were exactly the opposite. No one at that time could have ever imagined a hip travel guide, Lonely Planet, would name Brooklyn as one of the top world destinations for 2007 (Kuntzman 2007). In 2015 the travel guide giant Fodor's advertised the first guidebook devoted only to the borough with this as its teaser: Brooklyn is the most talked about, trendsetting destination in the world. Fodor's Brooklyn, the first comprehensive guidebook to New York City's most exciting borough, is unlike any we've ever published. Written and illustrated by locals, it's infused with authentic Brooklyn flavor throughout—making it the go-to guide for locals and visitors alike.
Fit to Print: Hudson’s Gentrification in the New York Times, 1985-2016
2017
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………78 Article List……………………………………………………………………………………...84 4 the media are important because they often play a role in framing the image of disinvestment to an audience of potential gentrifiers. Many scholars have also cited the business interests of mass media corporations in pushing forward production-based models of gentrification. In their book Urban Fortunes, John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch point out that newspapers profit from increasing circulation and ".. . therefore have a direct interest in growth" of subscribers from a class of people able to boost the circulation of and/or advertise in newspapers. 4 Other theorists like David Croteau and William Hoynes argue that the media "tends to reflect the views and interests of those with wealth and power." 5 In her book Branding New York: How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World Miriam Greenberg points out that the media legitimizes dominant groups which in turn impose certain visions of a city onto the public., 6 Japonica Brown-Saracino, and Cesarea Rumpf contend that the media contributes to gentrification by "promoting a vision of a city that appeals to tourists and investors or by disparaging the poor and the spaces in which they live." 7 Gentrification can also be a result of policy shifts. Daniel J. Hammel and Elvin K. Wyly argue that gentrification is now synonymous with housing policy. In their 1999 study of gentrified US cities, the scholars note the importance of housing policies, like Section 8 or voucher programs in the process of gentrification. 8 They find that the construction of these policies can catalyze or stagnate gentrification in a certain area. The media is connected to this
African Americans, Gentrification, and Neoliberal Urbanization: the Case of Fort Greene, Brooklyn
This article examines the gentrification of Fort Greene, which is located in the western part of black Brooklyn, one of the largest contiguous black urban areas in the United States. Between the late 1960s and 2003, gentrification in Fort Greene followed the patterns discovered by scholars of black neighborhoods; the gentrifying agents were almost exclusively black and gentrification as a process was largely bottom-up because entities interested in the production of space were mostly not involved. Since 2003 this has changed. Whites have been moving to Fort Greene in large numbers and will soon represent the numerical majority. Public and private interventions in and around Fort Greene have created a new top-down version of gentrification, which is facilitating this white influx. Existing black residential and commercial tenants are replaced and displaced in the name of urban economic development.
Middle States Geographer, 53: 51-60, 2020
Since the 1960s, academic and journalistic literature on gentrification has proliferated as neighborhoods have experienced residential and commercial upgrading, along with higher property values, escalating rents, and social displacements. Through real-estate investment, renovation, and redevelopment of the building stock, assorted gentrifications have significantly altered the class, race, and ethnicity of such neighborhoods. Historically the phenomenon has waxed and waned along with economic cycles. Still, over time increasingly potent waves of gentrification have transformed cities of the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, including the global South. With the phenomenon's new worldwide reach and variability, some scholars now prefer to use "gentrifications" as plural. Given debates of comparative urbanism regarding gentrifications' diverse meanings and dynamics, this essay retains a national scale. We review seven books published between 2017 and 2019, including several written by geographers and others highly relevant to urban geography, to illustrate recent trends in the study of U.S. gentrifying cities. It is now an opportune juncture to assess the contributions of notable books over the last five years. The works under review raise questions about historical identity and authenticity, real-estate policy, racial displacement, gentrifier ethnography, gender and sexuality, generational conflict, and green gentrification. Such recent innovations suggest that the study of gentrification, nearly seven decades after the term first arose, remains an active research topic in urban geography.