What I Hear When You Say

How lovely I found some virgin territory in Brooklyn.

What I hear when I hear gentrification is there arent any people and we are discovering this place that has never been discovered before, completely ignoring everyone whos already lived there.

Talking about getting rid of the unwanted element and oftentimes those are minorities.

When you cant afford to pay the rent in your neighborhood anymore that is gentrification giving you the walking paper.

[MUSIC] What I hear when someone says gentrification is good for the hood is - I dont think so.

I mean it sort of depends, I think theres always a time in which gentrification means good things because it means in some ways better stores, better food, better access to education, sometimes it means those better things but theres always a tipping point and in a certain point it means no black people or Latino will be allowed.

Living in a changing Harlem I know gentrification is coming and has arrived when I can get natural cheese in the grocery store, when the bodegas are replaced by the gourmet snack food shop and all these things are not necessarily bad and in fact Im happy to have access to these things.

The problem is just that when those things appear, the price of living in those areas often goes up and the people who were there get systematically removed.

Certain things get lost when gentrification comes to town.

It could be something as simple as a family business that's been there for years, a butcher shop, a record store, a family jewelry business something that's been a bastion of the community for a long time.

Oftentimes, you know it goes away because another Starbucks needs to be put in or another frozen yogurt store.

There is always an internal struggle with gentrification because on one hand there has to be progress, you do want better food.

You do want better options.

Where do you lose the community?

Do I really need $4 coffee?

Probably not?

But, would I like to get fresh food in the store that's farm fresh and organic - Yeah!

Yeah!

And guess what?

Poor kids need that too.

They probably need that more than the yuppies that move in I think gentrification replaces culture with economy.

Thats an issue of corporations and conglomerates over here versus small businesses and individuals and families who need a place to live.

Unfortunately its quite common in New York City and across the world.

I think that a few people sitting in the room can actually change the fate of a neighborhood.

You know when I was making my film - the film was about the redevelopment of Fulton mall in downtown Brooklyn, which was a very black cultural space in Downtown Brooklyn.

There was a lot of culture on the streets; there was where Hip-Hop emerged in Brooklyn.

The city and people largely white people who lived in this surrounding community used to say this space is run down and it was dirty, it was a dump and all of these were codes really.

I think for the fact the space had a black cultural identity.

We found when we made the film is that there are precedents for the ways that corporations, mainly banks & real estate developers can use policies to reshape neighborhoods.

A lot people think that redlining was banks refusing to lend in neighborhoods that are majority black, but what it really was, was a way the banks segregated cities forcing whites to leave Brooklyn and segregating blacks in inner cities that they then withdrew resources from.

The 2010 census raised a lot of people's - piqued a lot of peoples interest because it turned out that for the first time since the Civil War, there was a net loss of blacks from cities in the United States.

The top 20 U.S. cities lost African American residents for the first time.

San Francisco, for example, has lost half of its black populations since 1970.

I don't think Im alone in wanting to live in a place where different neighborhoods have different cultural character and where people can't be displaced from their homes just because you know somebody with more money has the ability or wants to move there so I think we have the investment in equity and social justice and stable neighborhoods.

I mean who wants to live in a neighborhood where there's changeover every a couple of years of your neighbors, you want to live somewhere where you know people.

When I think of a group of wealthier people coming into a neighborhood and displacing the lower income people who lived there originally.

Just changing the neighborhood I guess could be a good thing or a bad thing.

It usually has a lot of racial undertones.

I used to laugh and say leave it to Detroit to be the only city thats being gentrified by people who have no money.

And I thought that was like the coolest thing.

Because the first wave that migrated back into Detroit were young people from all over the world actually, all stripes coming to help with the urban farming.

That really attracted people.

I kind of like the gentrifiers that came with no other resources except their hands.

When I moved here, it was called the cast corridor.

It was the very very eclectic and often desperate population that lived here.

Now it's been rebranded as midtown, you know trendy places and theyre sort of like just layered on top of what was already here, and it's not a compatible use.

Those tectonic plates are gonna to rub up against each other with the homeless, family services and mental health services that are here and they can't pick up the move.

Whatd be helpful is for people to understand that conflict is coming and lets have a talk about it.

Let's have a vehicle where businesses are together in really describing their vision for their neighborhood, everyone included.

We've had nonprofit communities get together to really to try to solve many of intractable problems we've seen around homelessness, and around crime, around healthcare so we need the business community to see how those models have worked.

Maybe more hybrid kinds of organizations that have both a business and community mindset.

It is my every faith that well get it together and that we will be able to get a happy medium where this town gets everything it deserves.

When we recognize the positive aspects of changing a community before gentrification has to happen then maybe we can get some of the positive aspects of changing a neighborhood but right now it's a double-edged sword.