Season 1 Episode 2 - Gentrification

Neighborhoods that see a rapid increase of wealthy tenants can become foreign to those who know its history. Displacement of long term residents and erasure of cultural landmarks can make these changes feel like a loss or even a theft. Just as violence in the first episode steals our feelings of familiarity, gentrification can do the same thing, making once familiar neighborhoods and our place in them seem strange to us.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio

Script

[INTRO]

Jess 0:08
From CoLab MIT, hello and welcome to Here There Be Dragons. I’m Jess Myers. For this show, I spoke to seven New York natives from all over the city about safety and identity. The episode that followed are their stories and experiences. This episode’s theme is gentrification. In this episode we’ll hear from:

“My name is Seena Jacobs.”

“My name is Karmen Cheng.”

“Hi, my name is Estephanie Castillo.”

“My name is Justin Steil.”

Each of the stories that followed talk about gentrification. For native New Yorkers, the rapid change of gentrification can be jarring. Neighborhoods that see rapid increase of wealthy tenants can become foreign to those who know its history. Displace of long-term residents and erasure of cultural landmarks can make these changes feel like a loss, or even a theft.

 Before talking about gentrification, it’s important to talk about the White flight, that preceded it during the turmoil of the 1960s. The next voice you’ll hear is Seena.

Seena 1:06
My name is Seena Jacobs. I was born in Brooklyn, New York I was raised from the time I was born to seven years in Crown Heights. And from Crown Heights, I moved to Jamaica, Queens. And I am 59 1/2 years old. And I currently work in an elementary school, P.S. 128 in Brooklyn as a school aide. Well, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was in junior high school. So what year was that? Was I in eighth grade or was I in seventh grade? But anyway, it was a very rough time, and a lot of my friends didn’t go to school. Because the parents were afraid see the school was very very diverse. We had a lot of people bust in that school. It was mixed. We had a lot of black children, a lot of white children, and it was very rough. Because back then, I was picked on a lot because I was white and I had a black boyfriend. But anyway, I went to school, because I wanted to go to school. I’m not gonna be afraid of anybody. I am going to the school. A lot of my friends stayed home. I went to school, and it was not a very pretty day. The white kids got beaten up because of what happened, because the situation. Just it wasn’t good. One of my friends walked me home that day. It was okay, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t good. Well, actually, a lot of my friends did move, my white friends anyway. They were all running. They were leaving. They moved to the Co-op City in the Bronx, who moved to Far Rockaway, who moved to Brooklyn, who moved to Long Island. All my white friends were leaving, but I had one girl friend, Gail, whose mother offered me to stay with them for that seven months until we graduated from Springfield. And my mother said, “No, I want her out of here.” Because she felt the neighborhood was changing. She did not feel safe there any longer. She didn’t like…she didn’t really care about my friends too much because I did have a lot of black friends. I had Ricky. Ricky was my boyfriend. He was… Well, his mother was white, and his father was black. And she wasn’t too crazy about the element, so it was just she wanted to move. My brother was no longer with us because he was married. So we got a smaller apartment in Bensonhurst. To tell you the truth, I would’ve rather stayed in Rochdale.

Jess 3:51
The return of wealthier tenants who once thought to fleet the city can lead to complete transformation of neighborhoods, often displacing long-term residents who created the cultures and communities their neighborhoods and New York itself became famous for it. Williamsburg is often held up as an extreme example of such transformation. For Seena and Karmen, who are resigned to these changes, Williamsburg is just another old memory while Estephanie is more critical of the change.

Seena 4:21
Williamsburg, Oh my God. My mother used to take me to Williamsburg when I was a little girl. And we used to go down, she used to go to some stores around there. And I remember Williamsburg being like very also a Jewish neighborhood, a lot of Hasidic, a lot of Orthodox. I think that there are certain spots in Williamsburg that are still like that. And then I think it was changing. And then it changed again to like more and more preppy area. A lot of young people, they want to live near the city and maybe the rents were more affordable in Williamsburg than the city. So that’s where all these yuppie preppy people started renting apartments. That’s what probably happened.

Karmen 5:09
My name is Karmen Cheng. I am 24 years old. And I grew up in the Lower East Side of New York, about five minutes outside of Chinatown. Currently, I am a first-year master’s student at MIT, studying urban planning.

 I mean New York is always going through a lot of changes. And I haven’t seen it firsthand. But I can kind of tell also by where all my friends hang out, and where my friends go now when I go back to New York. Williamsburg, which is in Brooklyn is now a really hip area where a lot of young people go to party. Whereas when I was in high school, that was kind of still dangerous area that was filled with mostly lofts, and empty abandoned warehouses. And now it’s a popular place to go visit.

Estephanie 6:08
Hi, my name is Estephanie Castillo. I am 23 years old. I grew up in the Huntspoint neighborhood of the South Bronx. But I currently live in Co-op City. And I’m a community organizer and also a writer. I don’t know, Williamsburg which is just weird. There, I just feel like so much social insecurity because there are just so many white people. And not just like normal white people. But like, white people who think that like, they can be like so carefree and like… it’s like they don’t care too much, but they care just enough about like, their appearances and their looks, and their whole like, vibe. But it just reminds me like… the super-privileged white kids at school who can afford enough to not care about shit. I’ve gone out to Brooklyn. I just don’t understand the streets out there. So…I also feel very vulnerable out there, too. And I think I still carry a lot of old-school Brooklyn talk. Like, my dad has… I have a family who grew up in Williamsburg before it was like trendy hippie Williamsburg. So like, being out of Brooklyn not knowing that area, still makes me feel like, a little fidgety.

Jess 7:31
As wonderful as it may be for New York to feel safer. There is often some consequence to such radical shifts. When more affluent tenants move into a neighborhood, the city takes notice. The garbage is collected. The potholes are paved. The 311 calls are attended to. But the communities that stay through the roughest time are rarely the ones that benefit from these improvements. As Justin remembers his childhood walks through Harlem. He weighs the changes he sees now against the possibility of losing the neighborhood he grew up with.

Justin 8:01
My name is Justin Steil. I’m 37 years old. I’m from the Upper West Side, W 89th Street. And I am a professor. Spending time in Harlem now, it feels increasingly different and so vulnerable that…, you know. It’s great in some sense that the church there’s this church steeple on Lenox Avenue south of 125th that always iconically was in my mind. Because it was missing the top of it and of course that’s been replaced which is wonderful. And what doesn’t feel wonderful is… you know, and there is all these buildings that were abandoned, that’ve been renovated and are lived in which is also wonderful. But what doesn’t feel wonderful is it seems that it’s losing its affordability for people who lived there for a long time. It’s losing the character that it is long had. Because so many long-term Harlem residents and so many working-class and poor people can’t afford to live there now.

Jess 9:04
Even as they lament the loss of neighborhood character, New York nips moving through the city, are not immune to the gentrification politics. A new job, a move, a slight increase in income can transform you from the gentrified to the gentrifier. While looking for an apartment in Harlem, the neighborhood where she went to high school, Estaphenie was concerned about being an unwelcome intruder in the place she once belonged.

Estephanie 9:31
My mom doesn’t understand gentrification. Like, I mean she does, but she just like why are people moving to this neighborhood? Because she still has that mentality like, that Harlem is Harlem. The Bronx is like… you know, so how can people be paying thousand-dollar rooms in these communities that where the sidewalks are messed up. And She still likes “Girl, No! save and then move to like, 20th Street and live good.” She is like why are you gonna struggle in Harlem for? And I’m like, like I can’t afford to live in the Harlem like, I can’t afford to live like…I don’t know, deeper into the city.

 The way gentrification works in Harlem is like weird, it comes from 110the up to maybe like 125th…no maybe 127th, but like when she got up to like 135th like, you can’t, like it’s Harlem. It’s like just Harlem. I was checking out an apartment in East Harlem, around like 105th Street but it was on First Avenue. And I was like… And she were like the sidewalks were like, not well kept. There was like a low and not a super tall projects, but it was like there was a park across from it. And then there was like a church and a kind of like abandoned lot. But that building just felt off because it was just like literally like all the signs of gentrification. Like there was just one nice building on this one block of like, nothing. Not only did it feel unsafe, I was thinking about walk back at night and this is like a pretty desperate street. Like…What’s up? what’s good? So like, those things came up for me. That was one of the reasons why I didn’t decide to move forward with it. But also, just kind of like what was I contributing? I wasn’t really contributing anything because I’m not around anything to have an impact. I’m just like in this siloed beautiful building. Well, the only thing that’s cute about it is the apartment itself, which so much gentrification going on that end of the area that like… I would be looked at as like you are a gentrifier. And as like, someone who understands what it is, how a gentrifier coming to your community. Like I didn’t wanna put myself in that position, you know. I saw like this group of three girls unloading the van, these three white girls unloading their van. And this like this black couple walks past them. And they are just like, “Oh my god, more of them.”, you know. And it’s like I feel that struggle, you know. And I didn’t want to be looked as, as that.

Jess 12:36
Gentrification is unsettling change. Little alterations, like a renovated church steeple, can seem like a positive change from the outside. While natives hold their breath, seeing it as the firsthand of the people, the landmarks, the neighborhoods that they once knew. May now slowly disappear. At the same time, as New Yorkers themselves change. An act as simple as hunting for an apartment can turn them from a concerned onlooker to an active participant in that erasure.

Just as violence in the first episode, steals our feelings of familiarity. Gentrification can do the same thing making once familiar neighborhoods and our place in them seem strange to us.

[OUTRO]

Thank you for listening. This is been Here There Be Dragons. I’m Jess Myers, a grad student at MIT’s Department of Urban Planning. Each person I interviewed for this podcast also drew a map of their childhood and adulthood in the city. You can find the link to those in the show notes. If you visited or lived in New York and want to share your experiences with me, download the base map use the map and gallery as your guide, and draw your own experiences of safety, and danger in the city. I’ll post them in the gallery. Send those to us at colabradio@mit.edu Or you can record a comment or question about the episode by calling into 1-888-821-7563 #58258. Some of those might be a part of the final episode in this series. Music for Here There Be Dragons is written by New York-based trio Octopus 2000, check out more of their music on Facebook.s And join us next episode to talk about the projects.