[Photo from Mike Maguire / Flickr]
By John Kamaal Sunjata
Gentrification is a ubiquitous phenomenon of political economy across the United States. Residential displacement, socioeconomic exclusion, political instability, homelessness, spatial transformation, and racial segregation coincide with the marked rapidity of the gentrification (Filion 1991, Atkinson 2002, Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008, Brown-Saracino 2010, Thörn 2012, Novy and Colomb 2013, Kohn 2013, Marcuse 2015, Domaradzka 2018). Local governments have appeared too impotent to mitigate the worsening effects that gentrification has on marginalized communities as urban landscapes continue their dramatic shifts and political struggles intensify within urban centers. In the era of increased fiscal austerity and decreased fiscal activism, local governments are better equipped to expand gentrification processes than contract them. This presents a puzzle for residents, organizers, and urban decision-makers alike about how to approach gentrification, especially when there are competing socioeconomic objectives.
This paper addresses the following questions: how do we contextualize gentrification as a political phenomenon? What are some of the political challenges that gentrification could present to cities? How have urban decision-makers responded to gentrification? How does gentrification contribute to what is happening on the ground from an urban resistance standpoint? This paper argues from a Marxist framework that gentrification (a) presents racialized challenges of density, diversity, and inequality; (b) urban decision-makers have largely responded by expanding gentrification efforts; and (c) gentrification itself may antagonize urban resistance movements. This argument follows from conducting case studies of Detroit and Brooklyn, where gentrification efforts and anti-gentrification movements have been observed and documented.
Three key findings emerge from the analysis. First, the process of gentrification starts with the racialization of a city’s inhabitants (read: the justification of their displacement) through patently white supremacist framing (Zukin, 2010; Quizar, 2019). Second, gentrification produces patently racialized outcomes for non-white people (Fullilove, 2001). Third, the dilemma of gentrification as a political process and the lack of meaningful urban policy responses to gentrification from local governments has given rise to urban anti-gentrification resistance movements. This paper has four sections. This first section discusses gentrification as a political process. The second section discusses urban resistance to gentrification. The third section analyzes the cases of Detroit and New York as sites of gentrification and anti-gentrification resistance. The fourth section concludes.
Gentrification as a political process
Gentrification defined
As an aspect of political economy, gentrification has been described and empirically examined by various scholars. Neil Smith has described gentrification as “the process by which poor and working-class neighborhoods in the inner city are refurbished by an influx of private capital and middle-class home buyers and renters” (Smith, 1996). Smith identifies the “rent gap,” a cycle of disinvestment and devalorization that establishes poor neighborhoods as sites of profitability, as a key factor in gentrification (Smith, 1987). Ipsita Chatterjee succinctly describes gentrification as “the theft of space from labor and its conversion into spaces of profit” (Chatterjee, 2014).
Gina Pérez comprehensively describes gentrification thusly:
…[A]n economic and social process whereby private capital (real estate firms, developers) and individual homeowners and renters reinvest in fiscally neglected neighborhoods through housing rehabilitation, loft conversions, and the construction of new housing stock. Unlike urban renewal, gentrification is a gradual process, occurring one building or block at a time. It also gradually displaces by increasing rents and raising property taxes (Pérez, 2002).
The previous scholars present valuable insights for what is a manifold political process with racial, economic, cultural, and spatial implications. This paper will rely on Samuel Stein’s definition of gentrification: “…[T]he process by which capital is reinvested in urban neighborhoods, and poorer residents and their cultural products are displaced and replaced by richer people and their preferred aesthetics and amenities” (Stein, 2019). Some have described gentrification as a net positive: it increases the number of affluent and educated persons, leading to a wealthier tax base, increased consumption of goods and services, and broader support for democratic political processes (Byrne, 2002). Others have posited that gentrification (namely, “residential concentration”) can have a beneficial effect but primarily for more educated groups (Cutler, Glaeser, & Vigdor, 2007), and may create job opportunities for the lower income residents, raise property values, enhance tax revenues, which could lead to improved social services via the wealthier tax base (Vigdor, Massey, & Rivlin, 2002). However, most of the literature points to gentrification as a net negative (Filion, 1991; Atkinson, 2002; Newman & Ashton, 2004; Lees, Slater, & Wyly, 2008; Shaw, 2008; Zukin, 2010; Brown-Saracino, 2010; Goetz, 2011).
Gentrification, as a multidimensional process, develops through some combination of three forms of “upgrading,” or renovation: economic (up-pricing), physical (redevelopment), and social (upscaling) (Marcuse, 2015). Up-pricing is the increased economic value of a neighborhood, namely the land it sits on. Redevelopment, with respect to gentrification, is primarily a private undertaking (Marcuse, 2015). Upscaling refers to the pivot toward more affluent and educated people (Zukin, 2010). Within the United States context, “upgrades” take on a particularly racialized dynamic (Fullilove, 2001). These upgrades are led by capital employing racial segregation to secure private development (Stein, 2019).
Land is a key factor of gentrification
Land was a critical motivating factor for early American settlement (Campbell, 1959). Under a regime of racial capitalism,[1] land is a key factor in realizing both use and exchange values. Land is a both a “precondition for all commodities’ production and circulation, and a strange sort of commodity in and of itself” (Stein, 2019). Unlike other tradable or otherwise transportable commodities, land is a “fictitious form of capital that derives from expectations of future rents” (Harvey, 2013). Future rents are highly susceptible to demand- and supply-side pressures; therefore, the political economy cannot function without land prices and land markets for coordination. In treating land as a purely financial asset—an open field—for interest-bearing capital, it facilitates the circulation of anticipated surplus value production, bought, and sold according to the rent it yields (Harvey, 2018). The central contradiction of land under racial capitalism is its dual function as a collective good and commodity; a contradictory role as a site of social occupation and private ownership (Foglesong, 1986). It is on urban decision-makers to “reconcile” this contradiction for the capitalists [2] and workers. It is on the urban decision-maker to create the conditions wherein (1) capitalists can turn a profit; (2) labor power is reproduced; (3) infrastructure is maintained; and (4) basic welfare is ensured (Foglesong, 1986; Stein, 2019). The restructuring and redefinition of territorial foundations is central to the functioning private property regimes.
Private property generates dispossession
Private property [3] ownership exists at the nexus of racial capitalism. Robert Nichols argues that the “system of landed property” was fundamentally predicated on violent, legalized dispossession (particularly of Indigenous people) (Nichols, 2020). Racial capitalism reflects the “the social, cultural, political, and ideological complexes of European feudalisms” (Robinson, 2000) and institutionalizes a (colonial) regime of private property protection on that basis. Theft is generated as a recursive mechanism and “[r]ecursive dispossession is effectively a form of property-generating theft” (Burden-Stelly, 2020; Nichols, 2020). The institution of private property (especially and specifically in areas with Black people) manifests as a disjunction between the community’s use value and the exchange value of property (Pérez, 2004). Racial capitalism reproduces itself and a racist order through a series of supposedly race-neutral policies (Stein, 2019). In fact, race-neutral policies have been used to both “discredit and rationalize practices that perpetuate racial stratification” (Siegel, 2000). Modern American history has proven that racism can “coexist happily with formal commitments to objectivity, neutrality, and colorblindness” (Harris A. P., 1994).
Dispossession is justified by racialization
White supremacy is an underacknowledged political theory that articulates and structures the American polity. Even the origins of property rights within the United States are rooted in racial domination (Harris C. , 1993). It was the interaction of race and property that played a critical role in racially and economically subordinating Black and Indigenous people (Harris C. , 1993). Whiteness, as a historized social and legal construct, marks power and domination (Mumm, 2017), Blackness represents powerlessness, enslavement, and dispossession. Whiteness has, in various spaces, been “deployed as identity, status, and property, sometimes singularly, sometimes in tandem” (Harris C. , 1993). Whiteness is valorized and property ownership is an expression of whiteness; thus, property ownership is conflated with (white) personhood under racial capitalism (Safransky, 2014). Whiteness functions for racial exclusion (Harris C. , 1993) and capital advancement (Roediger, 2005). Racism is a feature of white supremacy and “its practitioners exploit and renew fatal power-difference couplings” (Gilmore, 2002). Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described racism as the “practice of abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories” (Bhandar & Toscano, 2015). It limits the life prospects of people it racializes, disproportionately burdens them with the costs of a “monetized and profit-driven world” while politically dislocating them from “the variable levers of power” that may well alleviate such burdens (Gilmore, 2002).
Racialized persons, especially Black people, confront the dual designations of superhumanity and subhumanity through their livelihoods. It is white supremacy that supports the synthesis of white domination through racial capitalism, across political, economic, and cultural geography. Black people are “fungible” in that they are commodifiable, their “captive [bodies]…vessel[s] for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others” (Hartman, 1997). Black lives do not matter, the ways in which Black people’s bodies can serve white interests; however, matter a great deal. The settler-colonial logic of elimination and the white supremacist logic of Black fungibility converge around the question of gentrification (Quizar, 2019). The spatialization of race and the racialization of space is critical to the settler-colonial logic embedded in racial capitalism and the processes of gentrification (Safransky, 2014). Gentrification comes from a refusal of the would-be settlers to allow inconvenient, often racialized, inhabitants to prevent them from occupying a desired region. Therefore, much gentrification can be thought of as a “contestation of blacks and whites for urban space” (Vigdor, Massey, & Rivlin, 2002).
Urban Resistance to Gentrification
Gentrification has led to the demoralization of the people most directly affected (Chernoff, 2010). The consolidation of racialized class inequalities via accumulation through dispossession often emerges from the processes of gentrification (Harvey, 2008; Casgrain & Janoschka, 2013). It has also inspired anti-gentrification activism in response to the uncomfortable political economic pressures (Castells, 1983; Harvey, 2008; Kirkland, 2008; Zukin, 2009; Creasap, 2012). This activism often includes broad coalitions, across various heterogeneous groups and networks, united under common objectives that may apply to a variety of concrete challenges such as density, diversity, and inequality (Novy & Colomb, 2013; Domaradzka, 2018).
Urban resistance to gentrification has manifested as residents demanding a “right to the city,” wherein they attempt to assert their self-determination and autonomy by controlling their urban environment (Portalious, 2007; Pruijt, 2007). At various times and spaces, movements, organizers, and community-based groups may employ confrontation–resistance (insurrectionary/revolutionary) strategies against the state or participation–cooperation (reformist/counterrevolutionary) strategies with the state (Hackworth, 2002; Novy & Colomb, 2013). Tactics of urban resistance may include but are not limited to “the occupation of empty houses, demonstrations in favor of urban infrastructure, spontaneous celebrations, the rejection of zoning, demands concerning leisure, issues related to participation, self-management and alternative ways of everyday life” (Portalious, 2007). Any expression of urban resistance may provoke a response (or non-response) from the presiding local governing body .
There is a creative tension that exists between confrontation and cooperation strategies; some of the contradictions are antagonistic and some are non-antagonistic. The confrontation–resistance actors tend to be radical or anti-capitalist and favor insurrectionary/revolutionary postures with the local governing body, whereas the participation–cooperation actors favor a “reformed” capitalist system and dialogue with the local governing body (Novy & Colomb, 2013). Under the regime of racial capitalism, local governments prioritize and support the displacer class. This may intensify local struggles and heighten the socioeconomic contradictions. The power imbalance engenders conflict between the classes of displacers and the displacees. The city becomes a contested object “both for powerful groups and the grassroots” (Portalious, 2007). This contestation creates sociopolitical spaces for movements to confront gentrification as a force that operates for the benefit of the elites. For racialized subjects, resistance to gentrification may take on decolonial dimensions.
The Cases of Detroit and Brooklyn
The United States has a long legacy of dispossessing poorer people of adequate housing stock through racist urban planning and housing policy (Moskowitz, 2017; Stein, 2019). Gentrification relies upon legal, logistical, infrastructural, and technological capacities developed, maintained, and reproduced by the repressive and ideological state apparatuses of racial capitalism (Althusser, 2014; Stein, 2019). Local governments are structurally ordered to establish the spatial order (Stein, 2019); therefore, if the state is ordered under racial capitalism, the governing body must maintain and expand that system. Gentrification relies on severe urban divestment, which over time, creates “gentrifiable” building stock, or dirt-cheap real estate. This creates the incentive for urban reinvestment (Moskowitz, 2017; Stein, 2019). The history of American urban planning, operating under the logics of white supremacy and racial capitalism, is the purposeful spatial concentration of Black people and their subsequent divestment (Moskowitz, 2017). Few places exemplify the cycles of urban disinvestment–reinvestment like Detroit and Brooklyn. In both places, urban decision-makers have responded to the challenges of gentrification by gentrifying further.
Detroit as a site of gentrification and urban resistance
The post-World War II economic boom brought tens of thousands of Black people to Detroit where they sought economic opportunities in the industrial sphere (Moskowitz, 2017; Mallach, 2018). Detroit’s black population was 6,000 in 1910, 41,000 in 1920, 120,000 by the eve of the Great Depression, 149,000 in 1940, and 660,000 by 1970 (Mallach, 2018). The growth in the Black population coincided with white flight (Mallach, 2018): the city’s white population declined from 84 percent in 1950 to 54 percent in 1970 (Doucet, 2020). From the 1960s through the 1980s, Black families moved into the parts of Detroit vacated by former white residents (Mallach, 2018). As deindustrialization took hold, a (further) segregated landscape developed with the economic burdens falling disproportionately on Black people (Safransky, 2014). The Detroit debt crisis, along with the subprime lending crisis through “reverse redlining,” the Global Financial crisis, and fiscal austerity devastated Detroit’s inner urban core (Safransky, 2014; Mallach, 2018). Property prices rose steadily and home sales rose dramatically before culminating into a real-estate crash (Mallach, 2018). Sarah Safransky writes the following (Safransky, 2014):
In March 2014, the city began an unprecedented process of declaring bankruptcy. This decision followed Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s order that Detroit be placed under emergency management. Detroit is one of six cities in the state (all with predominantly black populations) that Snyder has deemed to be in financial crisis. Emergency managers – who are unelected – are tasked with balancing cities’ revenue and expenditure and are granted sweeping powers to do so. They nullify the power of elected officials and assume control of not just city finances but all city affairs, meaning they can break union contracts, privatize public land and resources, and outsource the management of public services (Peck, 2012, 2013).
By 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau reported the Black population at about 526,644 (79 percent) and the white population at about 97,825 (15 percent) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). When Detroit cratered, a space for gentrification opened. Detroit was described as a “New American Frontier” (Renn, 2011) and the incoming, usually white, residents were described as “urban pioneers” settling into “urban homesteads” (Quizar, 2019). For decades, the imagery around Detroit—the Blackest large city in the United States—centered around decaying abandoned architecture—the implication being “emptiness” and “vacancy” (Doucet, 2020).
Whiteness, in the Detroit context, acts as a tool to invisibilize Black residents, delegitimize their rights to spatially occupy political, economic, and cultural geography, and advance capital. Now that white people are resettling the city they had once abandoned, Detroit is making a “comeback” and it is the “New Brooklyn” (Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). White people’s presence—along with their advanced buying power and aesthetic choices—confers “legitimacy.” It is white people who are “saving” Detroit from the failures of Black leadership and Black underproductivity (Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). The majority Black population is devalorized (or dehumanized) in favor of the “empty” urban landscape in the “empty” city they occupy (Safransky, 2014; Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). L. Brooks Patterson, the county executive of Oakland County, was asked by The New Yorker what should be done about Detroit’s financial woes. He answered, saying, “What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn” (Quizar, 2019). The logic of elimination and Black fungibility are present even in the words and actions of one of the premier urban decision-makers. The racialization of Black Detroiters and the genocidal framing facilitates the processes of gentrification: accumulation through dispossession.
There is a long history of Black Detroiters engaging in political struggle, including ground-level mobilizations that connect America’s history of settler-colonialism with anti-Black racism, as manifested in Detroit’s patterns of gentrification (Quizar, 2019). Detroit’s Black neighborhoods have been described by anti-gentrification activists as “colonized Indigenous land and sites of Black containment, displacement, and resistance” (Quizar, 2019). The urban resistance movements in Detroit have used a blend of confrontational and participatory strategies. Urban resistance in Detroit has looked like residents, activists, and academics mobilizing research to counter positive narratives about gentrification (Safransky, 2014; Doucet, 2020). Many Detroiters have engaged in mutual aid projects and extended their communities of care (Safransky, 2014). Some have held anti- foreclosure and -eviction protests and demanded that negligent landlords “take care of land and buildings.” (Safransky, 2014). Some activists even engaged in more radical tactics such as squatting empty houses wherein families had been recently evicted (Safransky, 2014).
Brooklyn as a site of gentrification and urban resistance
New York’s Black population grew rapidly in the 20th century. It was not until the 1950s, the majority stopped living in Manhattan and shifted to Harlem (Chronopoulos, 2020). The legacy of redlining played a tremendous role in developing what would become Black Brooklyn (Chronopoulos, 2020). Between 1940 and 2000, the white population of Brooklyn declined by 67 percent; the Black population increased by 682.9 percent (Chronopoulos, 2020). White residents, “anxious” about the changing racial composition, fled for Staten Island, New Jersey, or Long Island (Osman, 2011). White Brooklynites tried everything they could to force non-white residents out, particularly neighborhood defense (Chronopoulos, 2020). According to Themis Chronopoulos:
Neighborhood defense included real estate agents and landlords who resorted to unofficial discrimination and refused to rent or sell housing to minority populations; financial institutions that denied mortgages and other loans to minority populations trying to relocate or open a business in a white neighborhood; white neighborhood residents who verbally and physically harassed minority residents who managed to rent or buy a property or youths who attacked minorities attending schools or using the public spaces of white neighborhoods; and the police that hassled minorities because they were frequenting white neighborhoods. In a general sense, neighborhood defense was an effort to maintain the racial exclusivity of white neighborhoods during a period of political mobilizations by African Americans demanding equality.
The legacy of neighborhood defense has ensured that racial segregation still defines Brooklyn today. White supremacy as structured through housing, financial, and employment discrimination—de jure and de facto, as well as the maldistribution of resources, public goods, white terrorism, police brutality, racially-biased sentencing, and a dearth of socioeconomic mobility, has had a lasting adverse effect on the livelihoods of Black Brooklynites directly and indirectly affected even to the present day. By the late 1940s, Black people were the majority of downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, Bedford Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights (Woodsworth, 2016). As a result of persistent real-estate blockbusting, East New York’s population flipped from overwhelmingly white in 1960 to overwhelmingly Black in 1966 (Chronopoulos, 2020). White Brooklynites engaged in neighborhood defense and spatial separation projects to prevent Black Brooklynites from “spreading” to other areas, but by 1980 most whites had abandoned Black Brooklyn (Chronopoulos, 2020).
Today, Brooklyn has 2.6 million residents (if it were a city, it would be the fourth largest in the United States) and 788,00 Black people—more Black residents than any city in the United States except for New York and Chicago (Chronopoulos, 2020). Despite this, the movement of middle- to upper-middle class white people has contributed to patterns of racial segregation and gentrification (Wyly, Newman, Schafran, & Lee, 2010; Shepard, 2013; Hyra, 2017). White Brooklynites have disproportionately benefited at the expense of Black Brooklyn. [4] Black fungibility is exemplified; the contagion of Blackness was historically spatially limited to protect white Brooklynites’ capital investment before white flight but meticulously expelled to expand white Brooklynites’ capital investment via gentrification.
Brooklyn, beset by the political challenges of deindustrialization, gentrification, globalization, has been a site of smaller scale contestations (Shepard, 2013). Residents have resisted rezoning efforts by drafting alternative “community plans” (Shepard, 2013). Brooklyn has been the site of urban resistance from wide coalitions of actors, from organizers, artists, global justice activists, and anti-war demonstrators (Shepard, 2013). Brooklynites have resisted evictions by engaging in eviction defense at the local level, protesting the development of big box stores, and developed community gardens, and fought police brutality (Shepard, 2013). Overall, the erosion of militancy has undermined effective anti-gentrification resistance within Brooklyn (Chronopoulos, 2020).
Conclusion
Gentrification has restructured and reconstituted urban space, reproducing new zones of privatization, exclusion, and homogenization (Kohn, 2013) via the racialized logics of elimination and Black fungibility. It induces urban instability and crises at the global urban scale, as real estate developers search for creative ways to maximize profit through and above antagonistic forces at the local level. The limited geographic investments that are tied to geospatial localities creates local dependence for firms, local governments, and residents (Cox and Mair 1988). Urban instability and crises are inherent to racial capitalist political economy; however, local governments may navigate by ensuring that the most politically disempowered, typically racialized, persons absorb the brunt of the economic burdens (Smith, 1996; Stein, 2019; Burden-Stelly, 2020). Black people are disproportionately displaced and dispossessed by gentrification in urban spaces as they occupy an identity of accumulation and deaccumulation (Burden-Stelly, 2020). This feat of racial capitalist political economy is accomplished through Black people’s structural location as simultaneously indispensable and disposable racialized subjects (Harris C. , 1993; Quizar, 2019; Burden-Stelly, 2020). The disposability, exchangeability, and expendability of Black people via purposive campaigns of dehumanization and devalorization accelerates the gentrification process, especially in the cases of Detroit and Brooklyn.
The devalorization of Black people for urban private property has been a constant feature of American racial capitalism since Black people ceased being legal chattel (Harris A. P., 1994). Thus, cities are “saved” when white people presumably “rescue” the urban centers and the decaying architecture from “Black underdevelopment, mismanagement, and underproductivity” (Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). So, gentrification within the American context, functions as a more benign form of ethnic cleansing wherein racialized people are evacuated from urban centers; it may be presented as the result of non-violent market forces despite evidence to the contrary. Gentrification exacts “spatialized revenge” against the inconvenient racialized inhabitants of urban centers (Smith, 1996).
Racialized people may develop class consciousness because of the disruptions created by gentrification (Cox & Mair, 1988). Class consciousness among the racialized may be an altogether natural affair as “[r]ace is the modality in which class is lived.” (Hall et al., 2013). This class consciousness may develop into urban resistance against the political forces that allow gentrification to continue. The mobilization of resistance occurs as cleavages develop among the urban political establishment and opportunity for successful urban resistance manifests (Pruijt, 2007). As gentrification continues, contradictions emerge; gentrification as a phenomenon possesses both the conditions for its expansion and its contraction. The success of urban resistance movements against what is effectively urban colonization; however, is not guaranteed.
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Notes
[1] Racial capitalism does not describe a distinct permutation of capitalism or imply there exists a non-racial capitalism, but rather emphasizes that, in the words of Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines.” As a system of political economy, it depends on racist practices and racial hierarchies because it is a direct descendent of settler-colonialism. It is a translation of the “racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional” antagonisms of European feudal society, reconstituted for the American context. It profits off the differentiated derivations of human values, non-white people are especially devalued and their exploitation is a justifiable and profitable enterprise (see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
[2] Although the capitalist class makes up what Marxists refer to as the ruling-class, there still exists contradictions within the ruling-class about certain objectives and interests, especially with respect to gentrification. Neil Smith once noted this, saying, “to explain gentrification according to the gentrifier’s actions alone, while ignoring the role of builders, developers, landlords, mortgage lenders, government agencies, real estate agencies is excessively narrow.” A business owner may want their workers (who are also tenants) to have affordable housing because it reduces the likelihood that workers would demand raises. Real estate developers would dislike “affordable housing” as that puts a constraint on their ability to maximize profits on rental properties. There are a lot of competing interests to consider and an uncareful conflation of capitalist interests could lead to unanalytical analysis.
[3] Private property is not the same as personal property, which is almost exclusively wielded for its use value, it is not a personal possession, it is social relation of excludability. It is the ownership of capital as mediated by private power ownership that removes legal obstacles for one’s existence and provides an unalloyed right to violence. It is “the legally-sanctioned power to dispose” of the factors of production and “thus dispose of [labor-power]: property as synonymous with capital.” Toscano, Alberto, and Brenna Bhandar. “Race, real estate and real abstraction.” Radical Philosophy 194 (2015): 8–17.
[iv] [4] This paper, drawing upon Chronopoulos’ article, What’s Happened to the People?” Gentrification. Journal of African American Studies, 549-572., defines Black Brooklyn as “Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Brownsville, Ocean Hill, East New York, Canarsie, Flatlands, East Flatbush, Flatbush, parts of Bushwick, and parts of downtown Brooklyn.
