Author Archives: Kyle Williams

Reading Response, 5.12.15, On Rhetoric and Empathy (Again)

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I’ve been asking this question for most of the semester now, and I’m trying desperately to ask any other question but I can’t think of one as important: how do we shape and use responsible rhetoric in argumentation and law to prevent the inevitable situation we’ve found ourselves in, of an Orwellian “nobody-read-my-politics-of-English-essay” nature?

In both pieces, the authors make explicit reference to how political bodies use rhetoric that masks the reality of what they’re doing with nicety and tact to make it more acceptable. As Crenshaw points out, w/re/to the stills of the King tape, this actually changes the reality of a situation as we perceive it—rhetoric is not then bound to an argumentative structure, but a narrative one. This realization is immensely important—with doublespeak levels of word invention, the reality of a situation changes and our ability to assess and talk about it diminishes.

A natural response to this that I can think of is to then shape rhetoric in a way that can be better used by the disenfranchised, but this has been tried (see the Occupy piece from weeks prior) and met with little success. Is there, then, some ability of a “neutral” rhetoric? But, even if this were invented, would it actually solve the problem if the language we use to tell these stories isn’t used emphatically enough—or with enough empathy? The nature of the world is that it is based on agreed subjective perception—how do we shape this perception to be empathetic?

(Extra 5.5.15 Reading Response) Bushwick’s Frontier

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(This response is on this article, and, following, this website.)

When we read Smith’s piece on the urban frontier, I found myself in hilarity because of how much the pioneer aesthetic is in hipster culture. Arrows, vaguely indian motifs, sun-dried skulls—in the more insidious bits, straight-up-appropriated indian headdresses—it’s all there. But I thought of it as something that everyone was sort of ignorant about (Why arrows? I dunno, it looks cool.)—not so much intentional in its rhetoric as innocuous. But then—Colony 1209.

Colony 1209 is a luxury apartment building in Bushwick located on DeKalb avenue near Bushwick avenue. Residents are up in arms about it because of some pernicious tax practices the building is using to get more profit while gentrifying the area. It’s website is also washed in frontier rhetoric. The splash page reads “Welcome to Colony 1209: On Brooklyn’s New Frontier.” Their about page reads “Homesteading—Brooklyn Style.” Their amenities page talks of exploration; the location page says “We already surveyed the area for you.” The entire thing is sort of sickening, because it seems to refer to Bushwick as unrefined territory—its native naturally being cast as the sort of savage other us young adults are meant to displace. But the entire frontier myth works through this cowboy lens: see, conquer, this land was yours and now is mine, go somewhere else. It’s intentionally hostile to natives of Bushwick and I don’t understand how anyone could write this copy without feeling dirty. Is marketing always in favor of the gentry?

Architecture and Class Warfare

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I fear that most of my reading responses are very reactionary forms of “oh my god how could this be happening?” I do not think I’m cut out for sociology. But seriously, how far are we from the kind of ghettoization of arab communities during the Algerian war being applied to social classes? What struck me most in this article, for whatever reason, was the focus on Gehry’s neoconservative architecture. I’d never thought about architecture as a basis for division—it just never occurred to me. I’ve always seen architecture as more or less innocuous—utility over form and whatnot—but the amount of thought put into making these buildings as uninviting as possible for those of the lower-classes is sickening and mind-boggling. It’s classism being literally built into the foundation of a city—how much further from egalitarianism can we get? Even if these class divides were solved, these buildings would remain like grim reminders. But this has me thinking: what does egalitarian architecture look like? I can see why vertical facades and fortress-like premises are the domain of classist architecture, but does architecture exist for the cohabitation of classes? What does that look like? How does it function? My mind immediately brings up the image of large, very horizontal designs that might take up more room than anyone would benefit from, but surely this is a thing that’s been talked about, right? Please tell me there is architecture designed for class integration. Please.

Action Mall Cop

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In the first reading, a great point is made when the author says, “Whether crime has actually decreased is subject to debate considering that misdemeanor arrests have increased by fifty percent” (23). Bringing this to the national scale, isn’t this essentially the problem with our justice system? I know Lydia works very closely with research on the prison system in this country, so I want to try very hard not to sound stupid here, but isn’t the increase in arrests for minor charges, along with overly harsh punishments for said crimes, one of the biggest problems facing the “justice” system? Because of it, there are more people in jails and prisons, which have shown not to be correctional facilities but rather criminal-career-making facilities, which breed a kid that may have been locked up for having weed on him into a drug peddler for a gang establishment. And, because of these minor offenses, a person is then branded as second-class citizens, often making it much harder to maintain a legal job and pushing them further into criminal territory. My question, then, is how this is justified to be a sustainable practice? I feel as though, up to this point, these policies have been shown very blatantly to not work—so what is the justification for continuing them?

Occupy Boylan 4129

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I hesitate to put it this way, but as a first reaction, did anyone else see that first reading as a kind of cruel joke? A sad depiction of the Occupy movement drowned in satirically punk-ish language that no one can take seriously unless they never grew out of their Crass patches? But at the same time, this article is a kind of window to the past—probably not as good of an aesthetic as windows like Mad Men or something, but true to form. There’s so much hope in that article, and there’s an intelligence there that almost can’t be taken seriously because of the rhetoric. And though now Occupy has fizzled out from a collective shrugging of what they were trying to accomplish—among other reasons, I’m sure—the problems it outlined are still prevalent and, well, terrible. If a giant movement like Occupy couldn’t address those issues, what hope is left? And is my framing of this an example of a post-Occupy world jaded about meaningful political change?

Gentrification in Crown Heights

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Rya Mishra, Maria Osorio, Isobela Suster, Courtney Takats, and Kyle Williams
Owen Toews
Seminar in the Future of New York City
March 29, 2015

Gentrification in Crown Heights

INTRODUCTION: ETYMOLOGIES AND ECONOMICS

Gentrification is a process of displacement in which “working class quarters” become “invaded by the middle class,” or gentry; the term was first coined by British sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe conditions in London at the time (Lees et al). Since its coinage, urban sociologists have been particularly interested in gentrification as cases of it crop up again and again.

Though it could perhaps be understood as a rather marginal process in the time of Glass, gentrification has become “the cutting edge of urban change” (Smith), the displacement of the original, inevitably lower-class occupants from the neighborhood causes much tension between the urban pioneers coming in and the native populus being forced out, without care as to where they might end up; as Engels says: “The bourgeoisie has only one method of settling the housing question…The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere” (Smith).

Economists view gentrification as a sign of economic growth in an area (Biro), but from a socioeconomic standpoint, this displacement occurs in waves of disinvestment and reinvestment: as a neighborhood is understood by landlords and developers to be lacking, the safety and health of those living in it are put to the wayside and buildings allowed to deteriorate, eventually forcing people out; once undesirable tenants are gone reinvestment takes hold to attract tenants of a higher economic status—rents are then increased, forcing out the remainder of the original occupants and preventing their return. Data presented by tax arrears, or “nonpayment of property taxes,” is a sound indication of disinvestment in a neighborhood, becoming “an investment strategy,” providing property owners “guaranteed access to capital that would otherwise have been ‘lost’ to tax payments” (Smith). As disinvestment takes its hold, urban pioneers (in New York City, typically young artists, as presented by the cases in the Lower East Side and Williamsburg) take root in the neighborhood and “revitalize,” offering landlords and developers an indication for reinvestment. The line of gentrifications will sweep through a neighborhood, forcing people to uproot at its front like a pilot plow, and leaving an economic turn in its wake which its pioneers cannot usually afford—keeping the train moving.

GENTRIFICATION IN NEW YORK CITY: LOISAIDA TO EAST VILLAGE

Gentrification in New York City may have its roots in its exact opposite: white flight, a massive migration in the mid-twentieth century of people of white european backgrounds from the mix of races in the city to the racially homogenous suburbs, can be seen as one grand and intense period of disinvestment. Reinvestment, then, would be provided by a subsequent “back to the city” movement, after the severe levels of urban decay caused by the socioeconomic forces which white flight can be seen to have caused; the back to the city movement, or “brownstoning,” was initiated in 1968 with a pro-gentrification committee organized by Everett Ortner, and the committee’s magazine, The Brownstoner; The committee facilitated and recommended gentry who had moved from the city to come back, to reinvest, and bring forth a period of urban wealth by then forgotten (Lees). The efforts worked, with brownstones now worth well over a million dollars.

Later, in the 1970’s, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, or Loisaida, would undergo the same sort of process. Disinvestment was aided by banks redlining the district—refusing any requests for loans, which could have been used to prevent its urban decay—and the general upkeep—or lack thereof—pushed many of its inhabitants out, leaving an opening for the line of gentrification coming from the neighborhoods in proximity. With gentry, this time in the form of artists attracted to the low prices of the neighborhood and its location. These artists signalled developers to reinvest in Loisaida, pushing it away from its roots as a latino neighborhood and rechristening the area as the East Village “by real estate agents and art world gentrifiers who, anxious to distance themselves from the historical association with the poor immigrants who dominated this community at the turn of the century” (Smith); banks green-lined the neighborhood and rent prices shot up, even beyond what the artists could afford.

Though pockets of former residents remained in the neighborhood in the shape of “loosely organized antigentrification and squatters’ movements,” connected with “local housing groups,” the city’s organization itself was their enemy: by the time of the Tompkins Square protests, the city had organized police forces to abet gentrification and shrouded it in political rhetoric which ensured gentrification’s victory in the area: numerous police crackdowns, in which “The policemen were radiating hysteria” with abuses of power and concealed badge-numbers, made residents’ know where they were not wanted, as politicians decried them as “communists” and twisted the rhetoric so pushing people out of the area was seen as a samaritan act, as “It would be ‘irresponsible to allow the homeless to sleep outdoors’ in such cold weather, explained a disingenuous parks commissioner, Henry J.Stern, who did not mention that the city shelter system had beds for only a quarter of the city’s homeless people” (Smith).

The line of gentrification, originating in Greenwich village in the 1950’s, moving into SoHo by the late 1970’s, then into Chinatown and then East Village, was a historical force which may well be seen as parallel to the situation in Crown Heights, the line currently sweeping over the area having origins in Cobble Hill and Williamsburg, aided by the L train.

INTO CROWN HEIGHTS

Acting as a parallel to the gentrification of the lower east side, along the L-line in Brooklyn there has been continuing gentrification. Developers began buying up land in all parts of brooklyn and when they were through with neighborhoods like Bushwick, Bedford Stuyvesant, and Park Slope, there was a natural pull to come to Crown Heights (Gregor). Crown heights basically consisted of abandoned warehouses, beaten up warehouses, and old mechanic shops. The main goal of developers was to create apartment buildings, such as the Hello Living apartment complexes at 834 Sterling Place. These apartments (depending on the size and the real estate company that owns them) could go from $2,000 all the way up to around $4,000 per month (Gregor). though this may be profitable to developers and building owners, lower income families and individuals are having a really tough time adjusting to any type of rent increase and thus, owners are trying to push these people out. Sandoval, an immigrant living in Crown Heights, is fighting to stay in his apartment because his landlord will not accept the fact that his apartment is rent-stabilized (which protects him from being evicted) (Gopal).

As a mirror to the problems inherent in the 1970’s gentrification, there are governmental issues impeding the fight against higher prices. For instance, there was a distinct reluctance in Crown Heights of the community board in the community meetings we attended to implement policies keeping the residents safe from high rent. Stresses have been high in the neighborhood because of this, often manifesting through racial tension, as evidenced by the decrease in 11% of the black population from 2000-2010. Whether the gentrification can be halted or alleviated remains to be seen, but it appears there are going to continue to be issues in the neighborhood until something happens.

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Another factor leading to gentrification of Crown Heights is the dramatic rise of apartment and home prices from a few years back. Houses that were once worth nothing, have been renovated and remade and are now solds for over a million dollars each. This is truly apparent in many buyers, who could not afford a fancy home in Park Slope or Forte Greene. As Julian Katz stated in an interview, “We loved Fort Greene but we could only afford a modest apartment there. We could get a whole house in Crown Heights” (Gopal). Since Crown Heights is new to the gentrification chapter, it is slightly cheaper than other high class neighborhoods. With this new class of people moving in, the older residents are being forced out, along with their well established businesses. Many nail salons, West Indian bakeries, 99 cents stores have signs informing people that they are “Moving to Flatbush” (Gregor). The benefits of this gentrification are apparent to one Crown Heights resident, Ms. Jacobs. She notices that crime rates have dropped tremendously, and thats due to the increased presence of police. She loves this statistic so she can raise her family in a safer neighborhood, but the environment and atmosphere is completely different from when she was a child. Ms. Jacobs states that “But all my friends are gone. Everybody that I grew up with that lived in the neighborhood, the folks that I’ve known for years, are gone” (Gregor). Another woman who was asked to describe how her neighborhood has changed said its “like a little Manhattan over here” (Ewing and Rotondaro). Franklin Avenue is actually defined as the most gentrified, because it has been described as a shopping street, lined with pizzerias, bakeries, small boutiques, versus, when back in the 2000s, the avenue only had dollar stores, braiding salons, bodegas, and a few small restaurants as its primary shops (Ewing and Rotondaro).

While there’s a common consensus that gentrification has begun to affect Crown Heights, residents have addressed it to varying degrees of frankness. At a community meeting, one woman said in a private interview with us: “With gentrification, the neighborhood changed for the better. I’ve been here for four years; I was told by my neighbors that ten years ago two women would not have been able to own a bar and restaurant together,” as she does. When pressed for how this tied in with gentrification of the area, the woman said: “Just three years ago there was a murder; I was told it was drug-related. But there’s more police presence as the neighborhood improves: the sad fact is that with gentrification, services improve. There are the drawbacks: people get pushed out and can’t afford it—the apartments in prospect heights are overpriced. But there are trade-offs with everything—that’s the reality. A good customer of mine is rallying against the high rises being proposed.” Unfortunately, this conversation highlights the major drawback of gentrification: the economic strain and displacement of previous residents.

In a more blunt conversation with two men on their stoop, one of the men commented on the futility of trying to fight the rising prices of property in Crown Heights. When asked to elaborate, he went on to describe how his cousin had been pushed out of his own neighborhood of Park Slope not too many years ago. On the subject of community meetings and getting his voice out into the neighborhood, this gentleman was less than enthusiastic. “It doesn’t matter what we say,” He said, “You need money to have power and power to have a voice and I don’t have the money and I don’t have the power and I don’t have the voice.” There’s so much at stake with gentrification that for those whom it affects, there seem to be no positive aspects. The displacement is more of an issue than the increased safety is a benefit.

CONCLUSIONS

While the situation in Crown Heights is presenting itself as rapid and somewhat dire, it’s important to keep in mind that its situation as a place undergoing gentrification is not isolated: it is the product of historical socioeconomic forces and must be seen as such to be understood. It is undergoing dis- and reinvestment, politics and police are involved, the community is fighting against it—Crown Heights is not a special case, it’s just a current one. Like one resident interviewed at a community meeting said: “There are a lot of people interested in investing in this community and the people who’ve been here don’t want to get shafted”—in effect, the very same situation presented along every line of gentrification.

 

WORKS CITED

  • Biro, Jessica. “Gentrification: Deliberate Displacement or Natural Social Movement?” The Park Place Economist 15.1 (2007): 42-46. Web. <http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=parkplace>.
  • Ewing, Maura, and Vinnie Rotondaro. “The Ins and The Outs.” The Ins and The Outs. Marquee, 15 Jan. 2013. Web. 30 Mar. 2015.
  • Gopal, Prashant. “Brooklyn Boom Squeezes Buyers Pushing Into Crown Heights.” Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, 28 Aug. 2014. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
  • Gregor, Alison. “Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Gets Its Turn.” n.d.: n. pag. The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 July 2014. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
  • Lees, Lorretta, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly. 2008. Gentrification. Chapter 1, “The Birth of Gentrification”. p.3-36
  • Smith, Neil. 1996. “Mapping the Gentrification Frontier”, “Class Struggle on Avenue B: The Lower East Side as Wild Wild West.”  The New Urban Frontier.

Reading Response, Climate Round 2

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I don’t even really know where to go with these readings this week. Between governmental incompetence ranging from passively dangerous (underfunding) to actively harmful (policing), in response to states of emergency, I wonder what the point of government is at all. I think I’m thinking like Marx, but our government’s neoliberal leanings seem not to care very much for its people and only about what is most beneficial to the capitalist market system—handing out food and blankets does not help the invisible hand, so its uncared for. It would explain why the semi-anarchic Occupy movement would have gotten involved so readily. But how do you even go about fixing these problems? Can that be done on a community level? If the problem is funding, how do you get more besides just, well, asking, then being denied? If the problem is policing, how do you deal with those police from a community-level, if the people who could take actions against them are the very people responsible for giving their actions the green light? How are any of these problems solved without some grand governmental overhaul, which we can’t enact from our position as citizens anyway?

Crises of Rhetoric

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Since last class’ discussion, I couldn’t get the thought of rhetoric out of my head throughout these readings. In all but the first of our readings, I’d say that all of them employ some sort of rhetorical trickery—whether it be the sort of ad hominem stuff going on in the article of Bush’s policies post-Katrina (which I still agree with, all-in-all, but attacking Bush for being Bush was played out and useless as a strategy of talking about the damage done long before he was out of office), or the incendiary methods of extreme pathos throughout Land of Opportunity. Especially in LoO, there is no attempt made to veil their rhetorical strategy: the man talking about gentrification in Brooklyn uses some classic power-dynamic strategies to place himself in a position of authority; the urban planners in Katrina specifically say they’re to stop using terms like “footprint” or what-have-you in favor of “solidifying communities;” and Acorn was just as drowned in rhetoric. I come away from all of this really only being able to say for sure that climate change is happening, from scientific evidence that shows it, but once politicians and group-interest gets involved, the nuances of data are lost. So, is there a way to “depoliticize” issues like climate change, to strip away rhetorical terminology and present facts and studies that will still have people taking action with passion?

“But WHY are we renewing their liquor license?”

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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:

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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.

The S/Z of Gentrification

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The moment Roland Barthes came up in our reading, I knew I was in for a good time. I truly appreciated every paragraph of the “Building the Frontier Myth” section of the Smith reading. And later, when he says, “Whereas the myth of the frontier is an invention that rationalizes the violence of gentrification and displacement, the everyday frontier on which the myth is hung is the stark product of entrepreneurial exploitation” (22)—is sobering, and an entirely necessary way to look at the stark reality of the way gentrification is a manipulative process. The stories of tenant abuse in this new wave of gentrification—mirroring the violence predicted by Smith—presented in the City Limits article was equally sobering; I’m tempted to make my question this week something like “why are all New York landlords terrible people?” but I feel my question this week is the same as last’s: where is the solution here? How do we stop gentrification? The way Alec said his relative handled it seems like a good idea that allows both the new people coming in to come in and the old people who want to stay to stay. The suggestion of co-ops in the latter article, while possibly very idealistic, also seems good. How can we make places like Crown Heights not become Williamsburg?