Abstract
Viewers are invited to explore the intersection of race, class, power, and urban change in this poignant and visually striking documentary about the gentrification of downtown Brooklyn. The film weaves the personal narrative of director and Brooklyn resident Kelly Anderson, grappling with her own role as a gentrifier, with that of local residents, business owners, developers, and urban scholars. In doing so, My Brooklyn explicates the roles of key players and stakeholders in the gentrification process while also giving voice to the experiences of community members confronting urban change at the ground level.
Refuting the folk interpretation of gentrification as an always positive, benign, and inevitable process—an argument evoked throughout the film by the spokespeople of developers and government agencies—the film outlines the gentrification of downtown Brooklyn as a series of deliberate decisions made by powerful actors. Viewers are made privy to the immense profit garnered by a handful of investors at the expense of local residents and business owners, a profit heavily subsidized by the city government under Mayor Bloomberg. Thus, students are challenged to think of gentrification not as a laissez-faire exchange of new residents for old but as a process with significant implications for individuals and communities drawn carefully along lines of race and class. The flow of the film first highlights the personal experiences of residents, allowing students to relate to those affected most by gentrification, and then elevates the discussion to examine the political economy and neoliberal ideology that generated and legitimized that change.
My Brooklyn opens with photographs of bustling 1970s Brooklyn: children playing amid open fire hydrants, young women braiding hair on neighborhood stoops, and the fashion and art of the burgeoning hip-hop scene. Brooklyn photographer Jamel Shabazz reflects upon this vibrant time in his neighborhood and laments the replacement of his African American, Latino/a, and Caribbean neighbors with wealthier residents during the rebranding of downtown Brooklyn as a hip (and highly expensive) place to live. A 2002 clip of Mayor Bloomberg announcing plans for the redevelopment of downtown Brooklyn, framing Brooklyn as a product that must be sold forcefully, sets the stage for the central questions put forth by the narrator: “What was Brooklyn becoming? Who was it for? Who was calling the shots?”
The film then delivers succinct answers to these questions by focusing on the Fulton Street shopping district and the Albee Square Mall as cultural centers of downtown Brooklyn slated for redevelopment. These centers were important to early hip-hop and breakdance culture, and served as third spaces where local residents could meet, converse, and share their lives. The film chronicles multiple meetings between Joe Chan of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership (the organization responsible for the redevelopment plan) and community organizations and members. Residents express their grievances with the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s plan of redeveloping the area to make room for high-rise office buildings, and organize to protest the plan and propose an alternative redevelopment that would retain the existing small businesses and character of the neighborhood. In the end, the alternative plan was never considered, and the original plan was altered after the Brooklyn City Council approved it, resulting in the construction of several skyscrapers housing luxury, high-cost condos and upscale shopping as the nationwide housing bubble grew.
What is the social significance of such redevelopment? An additional strength of the film lies in the input of urban experts who offer thoughtful critiques and commentary, at times interwoven with personal experience, which helps to frame the discussion of gentrification in downtown Brooklyn to broader urban concerns and historical contexts. Among these are Brooklyn photographer Jamel Shabazz, historian Craig Wilder, professor of urban planning Tom Angotti, and community development experts Alyssa Katz and Michelle De La Luz.
Dr. Wilder frames the discussion in the historical context, recalling that the racially mixed Brooklyn of the past became highly segregated through real estate practices following the Great Depression. Real estate agencies divided the city into 60 neighborhoods and graded them according to their safety and desirability, with grades including C for “caution” and D for “dangerous.” Dr. Wilder remarks that though there was little consistency in the grading of neighborhoods, all areas with a black population of more than just 5 percent received a mark of D. This signaled the beginning of many other detrimental urban processes, including white flight to the suburbs, practices of redlining, and the spatial concentration of blacks and Latinos/as in deteriorating neighborhoods where public services were withdrawn.
Putting these changes into perspective, Dr. Wilder notes that at this point in American history, those with the economic clout to shape the city had declared Brooklyn undesirable and left black and Latino/a residents abandoned. Decades later, after these same residents had worked to preserve these communities—fixing up brownstones, creating community associations, and so on—the economic elite once again decided these areas were desirable, appropriating the space to meet the needs of the lifestyles of wealthier residents under the guise of positive and inevitable urban change.
The effects of the redevelopment of downtown Brooklyn for small-business owners and residents alike are vividly presented in a walk through the “new” downtown. The look and feel of the neighborhood had been completely transformed. The restaurants and apparel and electronics stores that line the streets across from towering high-rise condos, with studios starting at $400,000, stand vacant. Sidewalks that used to buzz with afternoon activity are silent and empty. Small businesses feeling the pressure of redevelopment share their plight: as landlords learn of coming redevelopment, long-time tenants are evicted with little notice and no compensation or are asked to pay higher rent, in one case increasing from $15,000 to $45,000 overnight. Affordable housing is demolished without promise of replacement to make way for high-end housing with 10-year tax abatements (at a value of $9,000 per year per unit, in one case). At this point in the film, viewers arrive at answers to the questions posed at the start: Brooklyn was becoming a hip, fashionable brand made for wealthy residents, and the shots were being called by a network of private developers and government agencies.
Throughout the film, scenes cut to diagrams illustrating these networks of key actors in the redevelopment of Brooklyn. These illustrate the political economy and flow of public funds that allowed for such wholesale change of a city neighborhood. Though the slides are helpful, viewers are given only piecemeal glimpses of the connections between stockholders without seeing the whole, complex picture, which a single visual summary may have achieved. One task of instructors showing this film will be to expand on this portion, or elicit student discussion as to the social forces that brought about such change. Fortunately, this diagram is included in full as part of the free study guide on the film’s website (www.mybrooklynmovie.com). The film also fails to convey the extent of this sort of gentrification in the United States. Though the narrator at one point acknowledges that 100 similar projects were under way in New York City around the same time as the downtown Brooklyn redevelopment, instructors should address this with discussions, lectures, or supplemental readings. The Gentrification Reader (Lees, Slater, and Wyly 2010), the Center for Urban Pedagogy (www.welcometocup.org), and the Urban Institute (www.urban.org) serve as excellent resources to guide instructors in this effort.
My Brooklyn is sure to contribute to lively class discussions in a wide range of courses. The narratives of residents and business owners may make it easier for students to connect their own personal experiences with urban change to broader issues of race, class, and gentrification. As such, I think My Brooklyn could serve instructors and students well in lower-level undergraduate survey courses in sociology as well as those in upper-level undergraduate and graduate urban sociology, race, or stratification courses. For more advanced students, the topics brought to life in the film relate well to much of the writing of scholars such as Neil Smith (2008), Sharon Zukin (2009), and David Harvey (2012) and may make tangible some of the more abstract concepts covered in such texts.
The website for the film, www.mybrooklynmovie.com, offers a free comprehensive study guide. The guide outlines key issues discussed and persons interviewed; provides updates of gentrification in New York City and Brooklyn; and offers class questions, activities, and other resources, including a glossary of important concepts. The activities provided are mostly geared toward more advanced students and include mapping networks of the institutions and players responsible for decisions in their communities, creating development strategies for their cities and deciding where to allocate subsidies, building an oral history of change in their community, and analyzing media coverage of local redevelopment projects. Though these may be better suited for upper-level undergraduates, these activities can be easily augmented or adjusted to serve undergraduates in lower-level courses.
The discussion questions provided in the study guide can also be used across settings. They include general questions about the film to more specific questions regarding relevant policy issues, planning alternatives, organizing and resistance, and issues of the intersection of race and space. This resource can be customized to serve as an outline for discussion or as a more in-depth assignment. Perhaps one way instructors can initiate class discussion is by expanding the central questions of the study to gentrification in the United States—What are American cities and neighborhoods becoming? Who are they for? Who is calling the shots?
My Brooklyn offers students a glimpse into the often unseen social forces responsible for instigating gentrification processes, and further insight into the role of community organizations in fighting such change. The film should aid sociology instructors in achieving one of the key aims of many sociology courses: empowering students to interrogate the taken-for-granted aspects of their social world, elucidating the networks of power that shape the everyday lives of individuals and communities. Applicable to a wide range of audiences across course offerings, the film facilitates the discussion of gentrification on a number of levels: the affective responses of long-time residents, the historical context of urban change, and the political economy of the city. My Brooklyn thus serves as a powerful pedagogical tool for instructors seeking to engage students with these important topics.