Feed

Gentrification Watch

By Stephen Jacob Smith 5/14 4:40pm

Gentrification Watch

Brownsville is packed with projects, but will they be enough to stem the tide of gentrification once it hits the neighborhood?

Closing in on Brownsville: Brooklyn Gentrification Nears the Final Frontier

“So many of the civic successes heralded by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg,” Ginia Bellafonte wrote in The New York Times back in 2012, “might have happened in Lithuania for all the effect they have had (or could have) on the lives of people in Brownsville,” which Ms. Bellafonte then goes on to helpfully identify as a neighborhood in northeastern Brooklyn.

We’re not sure if gentrification counts as a “civic success,” and we aren’t aware of any pasty-faced, heritage flannel-wearing hipsters wandering around Pitkin Avenue, the neighborhood’s main drag, yet. But if trends in nearby neighborhoods are any indication, it won’t be long before Brownsville—a byword for blight, home to the largest concentration of public housing towers in the city and to this day a place that some mail carriers fear to tread—is selling something artisanal besides stamp bags. Read More

By Kim Velsey 4/02 5:24pm

Gentrification Watch

The building in Williamsburg where Ms. Friedrich used to live.

Who ‘Ruined’ Williamsburg? Blaming Developers May Be Satisfying, But It Misses the Mark

The first, and perhaps most memorable scene of Gut Renovation—Su Friedrich’s 81-minute documentary screed about development in Williamsburg—comes a little over 10 minutes into the movie when Ms. Friedrich, filming from the window of her loft apartment at 118 North 11th Street calls down to a group of suited men (who are, presumably, developers) and screams, “you’re ruining the neighborhood.”

Is is that fury-filled charge that best encapsulates the entire film and indeed, Ms. Friedrich’s editorial/personal/professional perspective on what went wrong in Williamsburg and who is to blame.

It is, in many ways, a movie of interiors—a first-person film about one woman’s experience of loss in the wake of the real estate boom that transformed Williamsburg, and one that that completely glosses over Ms. Friedrich’s own role in that transformation. Ms. Friedrich paints herself, and other artists like her, as the victims—never the perpetrators—in the saga of Williamsburg’s gentrification and development. Though she does, at one point, credit artists with engaging in community activism that made the neighborhood a better place to live. Read More

By Kim Velsey 11/07/12 11:10am

Gentrification Watch

When trendy, chic restaurants can no longer afford to stay in Soho, who can?

A Celebrity Hot Spot Closes in Soho, and the West Village Gets a New Juice Bar

The say that New York is not the city it once was is a statement so obvious and oft-repeated that it is all but meaningless. And yet, even for the blasé, who view negative neighborhood change as a losing battle, there are occasionally startling changes, changes that suggest the city has reached an altogether different stage in its gentrification and development.

Like the impending closure of a hip Soho hot spot that has consistently studded its small, intimate tables with celebrities over its 20-year run. And, less than a mile away in the West Village, the opening of a juice bar. Read More

By Matt Coyne 3/01/11 10:23pm

Gentrification Watch

Is Affordable Housing Gentrifying Brooklyn?

Is the city’s public-private affordable housing model—the Community Preservation Corp., a group of 70 banks and insurance companies, in particular—expediting Brooklyn’s gentrification?

The Gotham Gazette seems to think so. The Gazette investigated the city’s publicly available property transaction records and found that since 2007, 65 percent of the $701 million invested in Brooklyn Read More