I attended my community board meeting on February 12th, in a really insanely beautiful building in Crown Heights. The atmosphere was welcoming: at the back was a table full of handbills for future community-related activities and opportunities, and another table with water, fruit, and red-velvet cupcakes. The meeting started with a member of the board going to the podium and announcing that 28 days is not enough, met with jocular agreement by seemingly everyone in the room—which was a very full room, by the way:

The meeting’s first “action item” had to do, broadly, with “housing.” Mostly there was a company interested in turning one of the derelict buildings in the neighborhood into an extension for the hospital facility, adding 280 for the nursing home. This is more or less all that was talked about for the next hour: every member of the community board was concerned about the possible jobs that the facility would bring. When the company in question (whose name I really should have written down) let it be known that they would not be accepting labor contracts from people in the community, there was a veritable outrage. Three of four people stood up and shouted over how that was the problem, that work that could be offered to the community was being sold away to outside labor contractors. The company tried to defend their decision in three parts: first, they bolded that the facility would be provided 150 jobs to the community after construction—150 jobs that would be held for community member—which the head “hoped [they] would be satisfied with”; second, they underscored that, because it was a hospital facility being built, that it was a very specialized and highly regulated form of labor that only certain contracting firms were actually qualified for. The community, not letting up, demanded more, and the company tried to cede on the point of apprenticeship programs: only after the head of the company guaranteed 15 possible apprenticeships would the community let the build pass.

What shocked me about all of this was just how demanding the community board was. Just before the motion was voted on, a man stood up demanding answers about some explosion of sewage at the construction site, which the head of the board refused to take. “We have to finish this up so we can get out of here by nine.” “Can I ask the question or not?” “No. Sit down.” This sort of energy, though, is exactly what I think Crown Heights needs. As someone told me after the meeting, “A lot of people are interested in investing in this community and the old people don’t want to get shafted.” So much so, that when the brief topic of renewing food and liquor licenses was brought up, 2 or 3 people questioned why the renewal was taking place, to which the meeting head responded “because these restaurants have been here for a while.”

The feverish defense the community presents gives me some hope for their work against gentrification, though.