"THE NEW BROOKLYN What It Takes to Bring a City Back" By Kay S. Hymowitz
(Originally Published in the New York Times on )
Words
are always shifting in their meanings, but what has happened to the
word “gentrification” is something of a special case. Not too long ago,
it was pretty much a value-neutral term for the process by which
communities exchange one set of residents for another. Now it is a term
of opprobrium, a word that conjures up the cruel displacement of
defenseless poor people by a greedy and arrogant professional elite.
There
is a whiff of hypocrisy in all this, or at least a strong element of
disingenuousness. Ask mayors what they wish for in their city centers,
and they will give you similar answers — safe streets, bustling
sidewalks, busy stores and restaurants, and a healthy and growing
residential population with plenty of money in its pocket. Mayors and
city planners spend much of their time maneuvering to create these
things, but with one inevitable disclaimer: They don’t want it to lead
to gentrification. What they choose not to admit is that the change they
are seeking and the change they claim to fear are exactly the same
thing.
As
“gentrification” has become an increasingly dirty word, the volume of
disingenuous posturing on the subject has increased dramatically, and
the supply of balanced reporting has declined. One writer who has
managed to speak sensibly above the din is Kay S. Hymowitz, a
contributing editor at City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan
Institute. “The New Brooklyn” is her admirably clearheaded assessment
of the borough that sometimes seems the epicenter of American
gentrification.
Brooklyn’s
overall return to affluence in the 21st century has been a remarkable
event, and it is one that Hymowitz describes with an unmistakable
relish. “A left-for-dead city marinated in more than a century of
industrial soot,” she writes, “became just about the coolest place on
earth and the paragon of the postindustrial creative city.” But the core
of the book is the portrait that she draws of half a dozen individual
neighborhoods, and the subtleties that each of them reveals about the
gentrification process.
Writing
of now fashionable Park Slope, where Hymowitz herself lives, she makes
some provocative sociological points that tend to get lost in the larger
commotion. One is that class is now far more important than race: White
gentrifiers with elite-school credentials and well-paying jobs get on
famously with their well-educated black counterparts. The people they
fail to connect with are their white working-class neighbors, most of
whom were there before gentrification and have never been comfortable
with it.
In
a similar way, work and avocation are more important than geography.
The relationships that matter most in Park Slope are those that link
residents who share professional and leisure-time interests, not those
of people who happen to live next door to one another. The days when
neighbors bonded during long summer evenings on the front stoop are a
distant memory. Today’s Park Slope citizens are oriented toward their
backyard gardens and cedar decks; they may not know the family next door
at all.
Park
Slope is a neighborhood of elegant but formerly dilapidated brownstones
now restored to its 19th-century glory. Nearby Williamsburg is
something else entirely: an old working-class enclave whose industrial
grittiness became pretentiously chic in ways that no one thought
possible. In Williamsburg, the artists who arrived as pioneers in the
1980s resent the techies who showed up in the early 2000s, and both
resent the Wall Street traders who moved in after them. All three groups
are scornful of the huge condo towers that have sprung up on the
Williamsburg waterfront as a result of rezoning in the past decade and,
as Hymowitz puts it, erected a “massive wall between the community and
the waterfront park.” Those towers are a dark side of gentrification,
and Hymowitz candidly portrays them as such.
The way for any collection of neighborhood profiles to succeed is to
make fine distinctions between places that casual observers tend to
consider similar. Hymowitz does that effectively in the case of
Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville, two neighborhoods widely perceived
as outposts of African-American poverty and social dysfunction.
Bedford-Stuyvesant hit bottom in the 1960s and 1970s, but more recently
its architectural graces have made it attractive to middle-class
newcomers, many of them black professionals. Brownsville, on the other
hand, is an early-20th-century Jewish tenement slum that became an
isolated fortress of public housing, a “dumping ground for the most
welfare-dependent and least capable of Brooklyn’s black poor.”
Gentrification has not touched it — at least not yet.
It
is in discussing Brownsville that Hymowitz reveals her ultimate
conclusions about the subject of her book. She challenges the local
activists there who have voiced their opposition to the coming of the
white middle class. “They’re making a mistake,” Hymowitz writes. “The
difficult truth — and it is immensely difficult — is that gentrification
would be about the best thing that could ever happen to Brownsville.”
And
indeed, the thesis that emerges from the book, balanced as the author
tries to make it, is that gentrification has been, on the whole, a good
thing for Brooklyn. No fair-minded observer can deny, and Hymowitz does
not try to deny, that significant numbers of poor people have been
forced to leave Park Slope and Williamsburg, that this is happening in
Bedford-Stuyvesant and that it will happen in more remote parts of the
borough in the years to come.
And
yet when one considers Brooklyn as much of it stood 40 years ago —
once-vibrant communities whose residential blocks had become unsafe by
day and by night; elegant brownstone homes that had fallen into
dangerous disrepair; commercial districts with storefronts abandoned by
merchants who could no longer make a living from them; job losses
mounting in every corner of the borough — when one thinks back to those
depressing days, and compares them with the Brooklyn of 2017, the
ultimate logic of Hymowitz’s argument is compelling: Gentrification has
winners and losers. Urban decline makes losers out of everyone.
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