There Goes the Neighborhood

There Goes the Neighborhood takes an in-depth look at gentrification in Brooklyn and the integral role that race plays in the process. Developers from all over the globe are hunting New York City, looking for deals that will allow them to “revitalize” neighborhoods, and make a few bucks in the process. But to many tenants and homeowners, it feels like a violent shove out of the way, especially for black and brown Brooklynites who have lived here for generations. Add to the drama the fact that the nation’s most progressive mayor has a plan to slow down gentrification, and encourage developers to create more affordable housing rather than luxury condos. Only, people are marching in the street stop it.   Beginning March 9, listen in to discover how the process is playing out. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.      

Gentrification is something everyone is talking about -- and the conversation is often heated. It's a complicated idea with a range of factors: race, class, history, policy. And of course there is the personal experience that we each bring to the table. Take a walk in Bedford-Stuyvesant with Monica Bailey, a resident of the neighborhood for more than 30 years. She'll show you the home she lost. Monica Bailey was forced to leave her apartment after the owners of the building sold it to a Brooklyn developer who wanted it cleared out. (Richard Yeh/WNYC) Sit in the office of a Brooklyn developer and listen to him work the phones. He'll talk tactics for going after foreclosures. These are the people affected by change -- and the people who are bringing it. Meet them up close and follow the wave of gentrification deeper into Brooklyn.  Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.    

East New York is the first neighborhood Mayor Bill de Blasio targeted for comprehensive rezoning -- and it's the neighborhood that saw real estate investments jump from $2.7 million in 2013 to $42 million in the first half of 2014 alone. But since the 1960s, outsiders have known East New York for its low median income and high crime rates. So what's it been like all those years for the people who call it home? 

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.

Mayor de Blasio's plan to rezone East New York and 14 other neighborhoods is his administration's way of controlling the fierce gentrification machine that is steamrolling across the city. So what does the zoning plan for East New York actually look like? This week we talk with WNYC's Jessica Gould and City Limits editor Jarrett Murphy to understand the nuts and bolts of the plan. And we go deep into the gentrification machine to see how it works. We meet Elizabeth Grefrath, a young gentrefier in Crown Heights who tells us what it was like to move to the neighborhood just a few years ago. We sit down with big time developers like Boaz Gilad of Brookland Capital and Kunal Chothani of Akelius -- a new player from Sweden -- to understand how they operate in the borough's various markets. And we walk the streets of Flatbush with real estate agent Namane Mohlabane who shows just how complicated -- and personal -- the machine can be.    Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

While politicians and developers strategize how to control the changes in New York, we want find out what gentrification feels like on the ground. How does a tidal wave of money and fast-shifting demographics affect the people who share a neighborhood? What role does race play when it comes to deciding who is included in a community — and who is excluded? We start on the west coast in San Francisco, where Alex Nieto was shot 14 times by police after new white residents reported him as a foreigner in his own neighborhood of Bernal Heights. Jamilah King of Mic.com talks about the gentrification dynamics that were central in Nieto's death.  Then we swing back to the epicenter of Brooklyn gentrification: Williamsburg. Writer and humorist Henry Alford talks about the inherently white aesthetic of the Brooklyn hipster, and YouTube personality Akilah Hughes tells her story about a racialized assault that spirals out of control at a well-known bar one Halloween night.   And we meet Tranquilina Alvillar from Puebla, Mexico, who's been living in her Williamsburg apartment for 25 years. Her landlord tried everything to get her out — paying her to leave, changing the lock, demolition — but she's still there.      Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

In the fast moving world of Brooklyn real estate, for some it feels more like the Wild West – developers and investors looking to cash in on the gold rush don't always play by the rules. Meet Tia Strother, she's a young mother whose family has been living in Bedford-Stuyvesant for five generations. Tia tells us how horrifying it was to learn that her 90-year-old great grandmother was convinced to sign away the family home to a speculator. She did so for no money and with no lawyer present. Now the family is fighting to hang on to the house.  And we visit Prospect Lefferts-Gardens to get the story of a vacant lot at 237 Maple Street. Neighbors – new and old – have spent the last five years transforming this one small piece of Brooklyn from a dumping ground to a thriving community garden. They put together a composting program and arranged visits for kids at a local pre-school; there were summer BBQs and weed picking parties. But all of that came to a halt one day in 2014 when Joseph and Michael Makhani showed up, claiming to own the lot. The only problem: their deed might be fraudulent. Now they are in court, battling it out with the gardeners, trying to establish their ownership of the property in order to build a five-story luxury apartment building. The gardeners and their lawyer have a plan to beat the Makhanis, but the cost of such a victory might be too high.  Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

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.

Gentrification has many New Yorkers asking the same question: Is there still a place for me in this city? We meet Dr. Ron Dailey who's been practicing medicine in Brooklyn for two decades, all the while watching long time patients leave the city, one after another. We meet New Yorkers fighting to stay and others who have made the decision to go. And we check in with East New York, the neighborhood where Mayor de Blasio's rezoning plan was passed by city council just last week. With the wheels of gentrification already in motion, we start thinking about solutions. There are some good ideas on the table that we don't always give enough space in the conversation. Take for instance, public housing. No, not that public housing. The public housing idea that never happened. It involves going all the way back to Fiorello La Guardia -- and looking beyond the de Blasio affordable housing plan.       Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

The team behind There Goes the Neighborhood talks about what they've learned throughout the process of making the podcast, and how to move forward in a post-gentrified Brooklyn. Where do we go from here? How do we reconcile with what now seems the inevitability of gentrification not just in Brooklyn, but nationwide? 

Listen to a preview of what's to come in The United States of Anxiety podcast from WNYC Studios and The Nation Magazine. Listen to the first episode on September 22nd. Subscribe today.  --- The United States of Anxiety is an in-depth look at the human stories underlying this year's presidential election. Too often, political reporting tells us how voters feel about the issues, but now why they feel that way. And in this election, just about everybody is feeling anxious about something. Poll after poll shows the vast majority of Americans feel the country is headed in the wrong direction. And for many of them, those frustrations are rooted in economic anxiety. They feel that they're losing their grip on what's left of the American Dream. Donald Trump has emerged as the vessel through which they believe the country can turn back the clock and that they and the country can regain its greatness. But another group of people are here specifically because they think that America remains the best chance they've got to build better lives for themselves and their families, and they're willing to break the law and risk everything to build new lives here. But immigrants aren't always welcome in their adopted communities, and with immigration front and center during the 2016 campaign, they're feeling anxious about their ability to remain in the country and continue to seize their destiny in a land of opportunity. This is the story of the people whom the Trump campaign targets: both through outreach and scapegoating. And it just so happens that on Eastern Long Island, they're living side by side. The United States of Anxiety is hosted by Kai Wright and produced by WNYC Studios & The Nation.  Listen to more shows from WNYC Studios: http://wny.cc/yzc4304odXpListen to more shows from The Nation: 

Mayor de Blasio is running for re-election and affordable housing remains one of his signature issues. If his plan for East New York is a measure of the merits of his approach, how's it working out? Kai Wright brings us back to East New York to check in on how the Mayor's plan to leverage the force of gentrification for good is working a year and a half later.   

Season 2 will dig into how Los Angeles has gone from being the place to chase your dreams to the least affordable city in the country. Housing prices are soaring, developers and landlords see opportunity, and many longtime Angelenos are getting squeezed out. In this episode, meet some of the characters you'll hear about in the upcoming series. Season 2 is produced by KCRW and WNYC Studios and is hosted by KCRW's Saul Gonzalez. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.   

Southern California was built on the sale of sunlit homes in affordable real estate developments. But the many building booms of the past century haven't been enough. In just the past 15 years, Los Angeles has added 230,000 new residents, but only 40,000 new homes. The median cost of a home in L.A. has doubled in the last five years. Rent climbs ever upward. So, who is L.A. for?

At one aging apartment building in Rampart Village, tenants are fighting hard to stay in their homes. Their new landlord wants to replace them with people who can pay a lot more to live there. Each side represents financial ruin to the other. See you in court.

In Inglewood, developers are building new luxury housing close to tech-job centers near the beach. Rents are rising and black residents watch nervously as white home-buyers move in. For Inglewood resident Erin Aubry Kaplan, the change would mean an increase in her home’s value but at the expense of a unique cultural space.

Once you know what to look for, they're everywhere. In mostly Latino and black neighborhoods, rows of aging houses with wrought-iron fences, their yards overgrown and concrete crumbling, are punctuated by homes with distinctive 2017 aesthetics. The fresh earth-toned paint job, burnished silver house numbers, horizontal fencing, drought-tolerant native grasses in the yard: it's a flipped house and it's probably selling for hundreds of thousands more than the others on the block. In some of L.A.'s poorest neighborhoods more than 20 percent of all home sales are flips -- houses bought by investors within the past year and then sold for a profit.

Are artists victims of gentrification? Or the perpetrators of it? Artists move into empty post-industrial spaces and poor neighborhoods, save on rent, create their work, build up studios and communities — and then find they're priced out.   Lisa Adams was evicted twice from L.A.'s downtown Arts District and is worried it's about to happen again. Thirty years ago the area was home to light manufacturing and warehouses. Now it's one of the city's most expensive places to live. "Artists are willing to put up with things that other populations won't," says Lisa, “You are a kind of forerunner to what is to come."

Gentrification isn’t just about who’s moving into the neighborhood. It’s about juice bars, yoga studios, fancy pizza and of course coffee shops. What’s it like to open a business that neighbors will clearly recognize as a symbol of change? In Echo Park, Israel Palacios had to move his pizza restaurant after his rent got too high. His family had run the restaurant for more than 20 years. He reopened his business at a cheaper site across the street, only to see a high-end, more expensive pizza place open in his old location. What really gets him angry? The new owner kept Palacios’ old sign. “I like the signs,” says Zach Pollack, the chef at the new restaurant. They’re “kind of like a symbol of the neighborhood.”

In the last decade, Los Angeles lost 250,000 people at or near the poverty line, and saw a net gain of 20,000 people with college degrees. Will Los Angeles become just a playground for the wealthy? Meet Lizzie Brumfield, who’s settling with her fiancé and baby in the desert ex-urb of Hemet after she was evicted from her gentrifying building in Highland Park. She’s now 90 miles away from the rest of her family. “It sucks because we’re not anywhere near home,” Brumfield says. Others who leave L.A. could afford to stay, but don’t see the point. Los Angeles native Mason Cooley says that he's left the city for the last time to move to Asheville, North Carolina.