Turf Wars

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

🗓️ 23 March 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

With his first rezoning plan, Mayor de Blasio has declared East New York the place where the city's future begins. But what does East New York's past look like? This week we go back to the founding of East New York in order to understand how it became the place it is today. We meet the people who have been organizing since the 1960s when the neighborhood underwent radical changes. And we'll revisit the blistering summer of 1966, when an 11-year-old black boy named Eric Dean was shot and killed amid the neighborhood's simmering racial tensions. We hear reactions to Dean's death from the street and from city hall. Ron Shiffman talks about the dynamics in the street at the time of Dean's death, as East New York rapidly transformed from a mostly white, working class neighborhood to an under-served community of mostly black and brown New Yorkers neglected by both society and policy. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I remember where I lived and it was mostly all white kids.
0:06.6	Anybody crossed the Euclid Avenue, black kid would cross there.
0:11.0	They were chasing back there.
0:14.1	Previously, on There Goes the Neighborhood.
0:16.0	Israel, war, Islam, Islam, Islam. This is some phenomenon that everybody sees, everybody feels, but somehow isn't in the center of the discussion where it needs to be.
0:31.9	I am, of course, talking about gentrification.
0:34.6	When everybody gave up on the neighborhood, we didn't. We stood in the neighborhood. We worked it out and we made it the better place that everybody wants to invest into now. We live on Bobby as family. We all there for each other.
0:52.3	They have also the political power to modify things. they can go and sit with commissioners and with high-ranked people and say, I need an extra block. I had a guy walking around my back yard, yeah, I'm looking to buy this property. I said, we're looking to buy the property for my own. He says, oh, dude, it's this in foreclose. I said, listen, dude, you're confused.
1:14.7	All I see is overpopulating the city with others.
1:18.1	The only ones that could afford this rent is people that's not from New York.
1:21.9	K.A., my income doesn't even give enough for a room in East New York.
1:23.9	So how the hell is going to give me a apartment? There goes the neighborhood. There goes the neighborhood. Okay. apartment.
1:29.3	There goes the neighborhood. There goes the neighborhood.
1:31.5	There goes the neighborhood.
1:35.6	I'm Kai Wright, and I'm an editor at The Nation Magazine, and my WNYC colleagues and I have been
1:40.7	looking at this major demographic change that's happening all over Brooklyn now.
1:45.0	Gentrification is one term that's applied to it. And a lot of people who are sick of hearing that term feel like, hey, this is just the law of supply and demand.
1:55.0	There's relatively cheap property available and all things being equal, the people who can afford it, grab it. And the people
2:01.2	who had it earlier, they reap the rewards. But all things are not equal. They never have been.
2:07.6	For decades, public policies stacked the deck of economic opportunity against black people.
2:12.9	Writer Tanahasi Coates has spoken a lot about this fact lately in making his case for economic reparations.
2:19.0	He made the link to gentrification succinctly during a recent talk in Brooklyn.
	...

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