After the 125 th Street Rezoning: The Gentrification of Harlem's Main Street in the Bloomberg Years (original) (raw)
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Annals of The Association of American Geographers, 1986
The process of gentrification has begun to affect the majority of large and moderately sized urban areas in the advanced capitalist world, and impressionistic reports suggest that Harlem may be undergoing gentrification. After reviewing some of the debates and arguments in the gentrification literature, we identify a number of indicators from 1980 census data and examine other housing and mortgage data through 1984. The results suggest that indeed gentrification has begun but that there are *several potential limitations to the process. The number of wealthy black households in Harlem is relatively small, and if gentrification proceeds it will lead eventually to white immigration and to the displacement of blacks.
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).
Revitalizing inner‐city neighborhoods: New York city's Ten‐Year Plan
Housing Policy Debate, 2002
This article examines the impact of New York City's Ten‐Year Plan on the sale prices of homes in surrounding neighborhoods. Beginning in the mid‐1980s, New York City invested $5.1 billion in constructing or rehabilitating over 180,000 units of housing in many of the city's most distressed neighborhoods. One of the main purposes was to spur neighborhood revitalization.In this article, we
2007
The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. ABSTRACT Bronx buildings appear to face a split possibility for their future: gentrification, as the city housing market continues to tighten; or abandonment, as inflated prices come down and leave owners in the red. This thesis takes stock of the buildings, the players and regulation, and looks at what could happen and what should be happening in order for Bronx communities to build the capacity to plan for the future of the housing stock. In light of the new Bronx environment, the means of preserving and regulating housing stock necessarily look different than before. They demand a more comprehensive approach to regulation that reaches investors as well as physical buildings. They demand a physical monitoring system that doesn't bank on tenants to report or landlords to self-cert...
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
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.
Gentrification and Displacement New York City in the 1990s
Journal of the American Planning Association, 2004
Gentrification has been viewed by some as a solution to many of the problems facing older central cities. At che same time, many are wary of the potential for gentrification to displace disadvantaged rcsidcms. To date, however, surprisingly little reliable evidence has been produced about the magnitude of this problem that could guide planners, policymakers, or community-based organizations. The study described in this article attempts to fill this void by examining residential mobility among disadvantaged households in New York City during the l99os. We found that rather than rapid displacement, gentrification was associated with slower residential turnover among these households. In New York City, during the l99os at least, normal succession appears to be responsible for changes in gentrifying neighborhoods. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for planning.
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.