It's Complicated

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

🗓️ 20 April 2016

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Some Brooklynites are wrestling with their own role in gentrification. Changes may be welcomed, but they come with mixed emotions for many. This week we take a walk in Bed-Stuy with 14-year-old Corrine Bobb-Semple. She's grown up in the neighborhood and for the last few years she's been reconciling the changes in her neighborhood with her experiences at St. Ann's, the elite prep school in Brooklyn Heights where she is surrounded by students who are a part of the gentrification process. We'll meet a black homeowner and community organizer named Mark Winston Griffith who tells us how he landed in his home, and the conflicted security it affords him. We also meet Allie LaLonde and Emily Wilson, two 20-something new arrivals to Bed-Stuy who talk about how hard it can be to move outside the circle of gentrified coffee shops and bars. And we journey back to East New York where a community of artists that has lived there for years is bracing for change. We meet Catherine Green, who started Arts East New York because there were no arts organizations in the neighborhood. Now she's determined to let her organization, and the communities it serves, have a say in how their neighborhood is capitalized. She also introduced us to her friend, artist Rasu Jilani, who is turning the conversation away from developing economies and toward preserving ecosystems. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Previously, on There Goes the Neighborhood.
0:04.0	The fact that the real estate market is so profitable, has provided additional incentives for every type of scammer to come in and try and take advantage of it.
0:22.8	Now we're seeing some of the same predatory actors trying to get people who may not know
0:28.7	the full value of their homes to sign over their property for either less than the value or
0:34.0	unknowingly sign it over for nothing. Somebody's getting a million dollar property for nothing.
0:40.3	It just raises so many red flags.
0:43.3	You stole Granny House. This is Granny House.
0:45.3	Brandy ain't this?
0:47.3	I had one guy says, yeah, we heard your house is in foreclosure.
0:51.3	I'd be able to take it. I'll give you 50,000.
0:53.3	The guy's actually right checks. I'll be able to take it. I'll give you 50,000. These guys actually write checks.
0:56.0	They will invite themselves in your home and present themselves as your friend.
1:01.9	Sometimes it's very targeted when they see that there are homeowners who are facing foreclosure.
1:07.1	It seems that some people may have stolen it.
1:14.6	Thank you. It seems that some people may have stolen it. There goes to neighborhood.
1:15.6	There goes the neighborhood.
1:16.6	There goes the neighborhood.
1:22.6	I'm Kairite, and I'm an editor at the Nation magazine,
1:25.6	and this week my WNYC colleagues and I take a look at a whole different aspect of this gentrification thing.
1:32.5	Those of us for whom it's not such a bad thing.
1:36.2	It's funny though I was in a bodega recently and this woman was actually really given a gentrification rant and how, you know, people are the devil and all this kind of stuff and they shouldn't be in this neighborhood. And she could tell she was definitely a renter who's, you know, getting kicked out. That's Morgan Muncie, a longtime resident of Bed Stey, who owns a few properties there and who sells a great many of them as a real estate broker. Her friend was saying, I love it, you know, the more to marry her.
2:02.6	And she could tell her friend was the owner of a house, you know.
	...

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