Post-college graduation, many young white adults pack away their dormitory reminence and start their new lives in New York City; for a fresh start, a new internship...and then maybe to gentrify historic districts and experience a bout of “culture shock.” Young adults who were able pay three figures for their college education are now actively populating and claiming neighborhoods that have been home to predominantly people of color for longer than most of us can remember. In this system of urban colonization, the cost of living rises, historic neighborhoods become whiter, and people are forced to move out of their homes.
Bed-Stuy is not your experiment. East Harlem is not your yuppie daydream. These neighborhoods are colorful with long-lasting cultural history, superior to your aspirations of starting your adulthood in an apartment evocative of the Greenpoint/Bushwick/Williamsburg residential interiors on HBO’s "Girls."
What gentrification is, in the context of the complexities of New York City (post-Mayor Bloomberg administration, which rezoned every inch of the boroughs and shoved in monstrous luxury condominiums), is the ruthless attempt to wipe out cultural history by “remaking” the trendy city, taking it back from people of color, from the homeless, from the working class and immigrants. It is a system of racism and classism, colonizing streets belonging to black families since the early twentieth century and demolishing small businesses known to various neighborhoods in the effort to allow the construction of upscale bars and restaurants, and a flux of liberal arts college grads to make the outer boroughs their new homes.
During filmmaker Spike Lee’s lecture on the issue of gentrification at the Pratt Institute in 2014, the long-time Brooklyn resident asked his audience an important question: “Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the South Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed-Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?”
Lee’s frustrations are justified. People native to these neighborhoods have been dealing with infrastructural deterioration, with a lack of decent local public schools, with crime; so why does it take bulldozing the streets, soaring rental costs, and racial cleansing to solve these urban dilemmas? Lee, in his important, passionate rampage, attributes some of this injustice to what he has coined as the ever-so-real “Christopher Columbus Syndrome.” Eager white newcomers come upon, or discover neighborhoods that have the potential to be beautified and foster unaffordable boutiques and upscale concert venues, pouncing upon the new space as if there had never before been significant lives and stories and homes wherever they choose to settle.
I’ve lived in a small, Brooklyn neighborhood my entire life, and have watched the changes take place from behind my small apartment windows, reminding myself how lucky I am to at least have had stability in my family’s home thus far in my life. On the outside, the various affordable mom-and-pop shops, which are very much part of my memories of my neighborhood as a child, have disappeared in the effort to make room for boutiques that belong on the Upper East Side and the construction of million-dollar high rises. In other neighborhoods, gentrification, this hyper-colonization, has done much worse damage.
College grads migrate to the city in means of attaining their new, trendy urban dreams, seeking shelter in Crown Heights, the South Bronx, etc., wreaking havoc in their paths as they push toward their Instagram-worthy abodes. Old family bakeries close. The community used bookstore owners attempts to quickly rid their space with “Everything Must Go” signs. Displaced and lingering, the gentrified are forced out of their homes.
To white settlers: Please re-evaluate your dreams.
Here is the audio of Spike Lee's 2014 lecture at the Pratt Institute.
Scene from Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing." (1989)
