Coffee, Pizza and Beer

There Goes the Neighborhood

WNYC Studios and KCRW

History, City, Nyc, The, Nation, Documentary, News, Brooklyn, Gentrification, York, Boroughs, Real, Race, New, Estate, Society & Culture, Business News, Wnyc

4.8 • 543 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Gentrification isn’t just about who’s moving into the neighborhood. It’s about juice bars, yoga studios, fancy pizza and of course coffee shops. What’s it like to open a business that neighbors will clearly recognize as a symbol of change? In Echo Park, Israel Palacios had to move his pizza restaurant after his rent got too high. His family had run the restaurant for more than 20 years. He reopened his business at a cheaper site across the street, only to see a high-end, more expensive pizza place open in his old location. What really gets him angry? The new owner kept Palacios’ old sign. “I like the signs,” says Zach Pollack, the chef at the new restaurant. They’re “kind of like a symbol of the neighborhood.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	We don't need more coffee shops because we've seen it already. There's a lot of shops opening up and they're raising up prices. A lot of these people, they come in and then they'll rike up the prices. And then when stuff like this comes out, it starts pushing out little businesses out of the way, which isn't fair for us. They're not there for the community. They're there for themselves to make money. Word travels fast nowadays with Instagram, but everyone loves their local community little
0:23.4	hangout and I feel like this provided that for our neighborhood.
0:26.6	I think there's always going to be people that, you know, they've lived in a neighborhood,
0:31.0	it's been a certain way their whole lives and they're going to be a little bit resistant
0:34.1	to that change.
0:35.1	So yeah, of course, but we do everything that we can to make
0:38.7	people in this community especially feel welcome here. Even other businesses that started out on the
0:44.2	weekends are now going into full-time year-round business because the traffic's there. Clearly this is
0:49.8	right in the middle of an area which has been traditionally Latino that is growing in its diversity.
0:56.1	And so I think they made a very brilliant move in moving here
1:00.0	because they're getting both an existing customer base as well as a new evolving customer base.
1:06.2	There goes the neighborhood.
1:09.6	There goes the neighborhood.
1:10.2	There goes the neighborhood. There goes the neighborhood. There goes the neighborhood.
1:11.8	There goes the neighborhood.
1:16.0	Hey, Anna.
1:17.0	Can we play a little guessing game?
1:18.7	Okay.
1:19.6	I'm going to name a couple of places.
1:21.0	You tell me the one that says gentrification to you.
1:24.0	Okay.
1:24.9	All right.
	...

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