The concept of gentrification may date back to ancient Rome, but the term came into modern use in the 1960s. While not everyone agrees on exactly what gentrification means, it generally includes concerns about how a neighborhood is changing and the displacement of people with less economic power by those with more.
Ian Phillips’ documentary There Goes the Neighborhood focuses on several communities in New York City which are threatened by gentrification, including Astoria (Queens), the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and Prospect Heights (Brooklyn). The issues at stake are complicated because city real estate is valuable (if it isn’t, you have a much worse problem), cities are places where people from different cultures and backgrounds live in close proximity, and the one constant of city life is change. Also: unless you are a member of the Lenape tribe, you aren’t “from” New York in any way that gives you the right to dictate who can or can’t move in after you.
Phillips, a native New Yorker, is on the side of the people fighting projects like a massive tower condo cluster in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattan and the proposed Amazon HQ 2 move to Queens. Fair enough—big money always gets heard in high places, while community members frequently don’t, and bringing in advocates for such developments would take time away from what this film does best. That is giving each of the central figures enough time to tell their story and express their views, while illustrating the context in which those views were formed. Phillips chose interview subjects who are reasonable and articulate, and their calmly expressed views come as a relief considering how quickly people can start screaming at each other when real estate is the subject under discussion.
Even those most against gentrification may have mixed feelings about specific projects, as demonstrated by Dannelly Rodriguez, a lawyer and activist from Astoria. Strolling through Rainey Park in Astoria, he looks across the East River to some glass towers being erected in Manhattan, which he admires as beautiful works of architecture. At the same time, he realizes that such buildings aren’t being constructed for any “us” that he is a part of, as the child of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Above all, he’s concerned that new housing construction for the wealthy, who may well come to New York from somewhere else, seems to be taking precedence over meeting the needs of people already resident in the city.
Historian Kenneth Jackson offers a different perspective, seeing gentrification as a sign that the city is successful. First, he notes that New York City has always been a magnet for the young and the ambitious, and that if housing prices are high, so are wages. Second, he sees the current wave of gentrification as a vast improvement over the dirty, crime-ridden 1970s and 1980s (which he experienced first-hand, having taught at Columbia University since 1970).
Jackson points out that people can vote with their feet, and in the 1970s they did so by leaving (the city experienced a net population loss of 800,000 in that decade). Today, people want to move into New York City (the population today is pushing 9 million, up from 7 million in 1980), meaning more people are competing for limited space. For owners, that’s a good thing (the value of their property increases), but for renters it’s a bad thing (their rent goes up, and their building may be demolished in favor of a more profitable use of the land).
Jerry Walsh, a Brooklynite born and bred, is an old-school shopkeeper who has worked at Mayday Hardware (established 1960) since he was 12, and today owns the joint. He’s proud his store has survived over half a century, through robberies, riots, fires and a precinct crime rate that was once the city’s highest. At the same time, he is at peace with the reality that when he sells the store it will most likely be torn down and something different built in its place.
Arnette Scott describes herself as a third-generation lower East Sider, her grandparents having moved to the city from South Carolina. Today she’s worried about being displaced by a proposed luxury condo development, and also fears that the nearby neighborhood of Chinatown will be the victim of the same type of “urban renewal” that destroyed so many African American neighborhoods. Calvin Clark, from the South Bronx, opened Club Langston on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in 2001. He sees it as more than a nightclub—it’s also a safe space for queer black men—but is worried he will have to close due to increasing rents and taxes as well as changes in the neighborhood’s demographic makeup.
There Goes the Neighborhood is most eloquent it lets these advocates speak about themselves and their neighborhoods. When it becomes more issue-specific, it also becomes more scattered, trying to cover too many topics (from lawsuits to the pandemic to response to the death of George Floyd) and departing from the measured pace characteristic of the early sections of the film. Still, it does very well in giving a human face to issues that can seem abstract and impersonal, and that’s enough for one film to do. | Sarah Boslaugh
There Goes the Neighborhood is available on SVOD and Virtual Cinema from IndiePix Films beginning Oct. 6.
