Kai Wright: Previously on There Goes the Neighborhood.

[protesters chanting]

[music]

Unidentified Male 1: The fact that the real estate market is so profitable has provided additional incentives for every type of scammer to come in and try to take advantage of it.

Rebecca Carroll: Now, we're seeing some of the same predatory actors trying to get people who may not know the full value of their homes to sign over their property for either less than the value or unknowingly sign it over for nothing.

Unidentified Male 2: Somebody's getting a million-dollar property for nothing. It just raises so many red flags.

Unidentified Male 3: You sold granny's house. This is granny's house. Granny ain't dead.

Unidentified Male 4: I had one guy say, "Yes, we heard your house is in foreclosure. I'd be willing to take it. I can give you $50,000." The guys actually write checks.

Unidentified Female 1: They will invite themselves in your home and present themselves as your friend.

Unidentified Male 5: Sometimes it's very targeted when they see that there are homeowners who are facing foreclosure.

Unidentified Female 2: It seems that some people may have stolen it.

[background noise]

Unidentified Female 3: There goes the neighborhood.

Unidentified Male 6: There goes the neighborhood.

Unidentified Female 4: There goes the neighborhood.

Unidentified Male 7: There goes the neighborhood.

Kai Wright: I'm Kai Wright, and I'm an editor at The Nation magazine. This week, my WNYC colleagues and I take a look at a whole different aspect of this gentrification thing. Those of us for whom it's not such a bad thing.

Morgan Munsey: It's funny though, I was in a bodega recently. This woman was actually really giving a gentrification rant, how people are the devil, and all this kind of stuff, and they shouldn't be in this neighborhood. You could tell she was definitely a renter who's getting kicked out.

Kai Wright: That's Morgan Munsey, a long-time resident of Bed-Stuy who owns a few properties there and who sells a great many of them as a real estate broker.

Morgan Munsey: Her friend was saying, "I love it. The more the merrier." You could tell her friend was the owner of a house, so it's like, "My property value just went up."

Kai Wright: Morgan, who is Black, occupies a unique corner of the realtor game. Most of his clients are aging Black women who have owned in the neighborhood for decades and have decided to cash in and take off for warmer climes down south or back in the Caribbean. As Jim O'Grady and I walked around with Morgan one afternoon, he pointed out the homes of Bed-Stuy's Black gentry.

Morgan Munsey: I don't know them, but what I've heard, they're a new couple, very professional. Actually, I would call them Black gentrifiers. I think they're physicians. They're very cordial, but they're not in the gossip of the mix here at the block. Next door to that, it's a lady. She'll never let you in her house. I think she likes the gentrification, actually, secretly. She won't come out and say it, but I think she loves the change of the neighborhood.

The people who love it won't say anything about it. I shouldn't say they love it, but they love the change. They love the amenities that it's going to bring. They love that they're going to get-- the street won't be bumpy because, unfortunately, it's sad. In New York City, if the white woman calls and says, "I have a pothole in my street," it's going to get fixed quicker, I think, compared to if Ms. Betty calls.

Kai Wright: Morgan leads a popular tour of Bed-Stuy's historic homes. He's a bit of an encyclopedia on the topic.

Morgan Munsey: Everything else came in the 1880s and '90s. This was like the land that farmers, just old New York--

Kai Wright: Between the tour and his real estate sales and his own property, he's developed a complicated relationship to all this. For one, some people think he's a bit of a traitor.

Morgan Munsey: It comes at me more, actually, when I'm walking tours. It's so funny, especially when we see a person of color, we're like, "Thank God. Now, the neighborhood doesn't think we're showing white people how to take over the neighborhood," because that's what they see. They see me walking, and they see them looking around. It's pretty much all about architecture.

Kai Wright: Mostly white people.

Morgan Munsey: Most of the time. They say, "Oh, Morgan, you're showing the white people the neighborhood to take it over." I've gotten people who said that to me, "You're recruiting them." [laughs]

Kai Wright: Sometimes, he kind of agrees with them. It's hard. On one hand, he sees a parade of white buyers walking into his office and the prices shooting up, and thinks, "Wow, this historically Black neighborhood is going to be a whole different place pretty soon." On the other hand, he looks at these Black retirees who invested a long, long time ago and thinks, "Let me help you get yours."

Morgan Munsey: For African Americans who are ready to retire and live an easier, warmer life, but then you get to the open houses, and it's very rarely that you get people of African descent coming to an open house. I feel like I'm staring at the Black people when they come to my open house, like, "Oh, wow, haven't seen you in a long time." It's like living in Iowa or someplace. It's a little bizarre here.

Kai Wright: You're uneasy about that, right?

Morgan Munsey: It is a little bit, because you're like, "Wow, can I get one Black person even making an offer?" You do wonder, like, "Are the prices so expensive now that even Black people with money don't want to live here anymore?" It's strange. I don't know. [laughs]

Kai Wright: As a result of all this, whenever he gets hired to sell a house, a familiar little dance begins. He uses a recent example to describe the process. A 65-year-old woman who's lived since she was about two years old on Decatur Street, a comically gorgeous street of brownstones. She's ready to retire and head south, so she hires Morgan, but with a warning.

Morgan Munsey: She said, "My neighbors are going to be very upset with me." She said she's going to get cussed out and yelled at. Sure enough, everything she told me was going to happen happened.

Kai Wright: What did people say?

Morgan Munsey: "How dare you move? Why are you leaving us like this? You know who's going to buy the house."

Kai Wright: At first, the seller is a pain in the ass. She turns up at the showing despite him begging her not to do so. If she overhears something she doesn't like from a particular buyer, she shuts it down.

Morgan Munsey: She's like, "I don't care how much money they have. They're not buying my house."

Kai Wright: Then, ultimately, the inevitable moment arrives. Not just a sale, but a bidding war. In this case, the buyers were a young European couple, and she let them buy it.

Morgan Munsey: For her, it wasn't so much that it was a white thing. It was more like, "How well are you going to treat my home?"

Kai Wright: For the neighbors, it was a white thing.

Morgan Munsey: For the neighbors, I think for sure, even though it's funny because a lot of them who were yelling at her actually ended up putting their houses on the market, too. [laughs]

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Kai Wright: That's the final step in Morgan's Bed-Stuy sales dance: the neighbors pulling him aside to discreetly ask, "How much could he get for their old house?" That's what we're talking about first today: investments, new and old, that pay off financially, but maybe don't always feel right, or at least we don't know how to feel about them, and what those of us who find ourselves on the winning side of the gentrification ledger owe to our neighbors who don't. First, Rebecca Carroll introduces us to a young woman who's literally grown up alongside Bed-Stuy's rising fortunes.

Corinne Bobb-Semple: My mom owned a bookstore on Lewis between Decatur and McDonough, so I spent a lot of time on that block riding my bike up and down the street with friends and things. People were always just around.

Rebecca Carroll: Meet Corinne Bobb-Semple. She lives on one of the most beautiful streets in all of Brooklyn. Her parents own a Victorian frame house on McDonough Street in Bed-Stuy's historic Stuyvesant Heights. We sit on her stoop to talk, and I cannot lie, I am ridiculously envious. The block wins the Greenest Block Award from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden pretty much every year. It feels both welcoming and cloistered, like a secret kingdom of Black people and magnificent houses. It's a kingdom Corinne has not taken for granted, and one that, like so many other Brooklyn neighborhoods, is changing fast.

Corinne Bobb-Semple: I definitely felt like there was a very strong Black community of people just always around me and supporting me. I still feel that if I were to call on a lot of my old neighbors, they'd be there for me and my family, but I feel like there's not really a lot of spaces for that anymore. I think that's what the store was, and what Lewis Avenue was, at least for me and the people I hung out with.

Rebecca Carroll: Corinne is now 14. The store she's talking about is Brownstone Books, which her mother, Crystal Bobb-Semple, owned for 10 years. When she opened the store in 2000, it was the first bookstore in Bed-Stuy in over 30 years, and quickly became a beloved staple in the community, hosting monthly book clubs and hosting frequent neighborhood events. Crystal, who is a trained urban planner, studied gentrification and historic neighborhoods. She opened the bookstore with the specific goal of creating a gathering space to help sustain a cohesive community.

Corinne Bobb-Semple: I love my school, so I guess I'm pretty biased.

Rebecca Carroll: Corinne doesn't go to school in her neighborhood or in her district. She goes to Saint Ann's, the elite private school in the affluent neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. Known for its unique arts program and independent curriculum, it's been ranked the best school in the country. It's also where Lena Dunham went to school. She says her mom couldn't find the kind of school she wanted for her kids in the district, so both Corinne and her brother Colin attend Saint Ann's.

Corinne Bobb-Semple: It's a really great place to figure out what you love and how to find the learning that works for you.

Rebecca Carroll: Corinne says she has a broad racial mix of friends, but when it comes to the subject of gentrification, it can be a little awkward.

Corinne Bobb-Semple: It's funny because there are a lot of people from my school who are now moving into the neighborhood. There is definitely some resentment against them sometimes, I feel, like they almost shouldn't come here, but I'm trying to be more open in the way that I think about it.

Rebecca Carroll: Being open about it means being clear about what it is and what it isn't.

Corinne Bobb-Semple: Just the other day, I was walking with my friend. We were doing a walking tour of the neighborhood. We were just walking really far into Bed-Stuy and realized that things are very different in this part of Bed-Stuy, Stuyvesant Heights area, than others.

Rebecca Carroll: She says there's definitely a gap, and it makes her feel uncomfortable.

Corinne Bobb-Semple: Because I feel like I should be able to relate to people of my own race. I don't know why I feel like that's something that's really important to me.

Rebecca Carroll: A sense of community based on place. In Bed-Stuy, that community has, for a long time, been made up of mostly Black people. Now that money is becoming more visible and central to who gets to live where, it's affecting that community feeling.

Corinne Bobb-Semple: Not everyone can go to a café and buy something that's really expensive and sit there.

Rebecca Carroll: Do you think they want to?

Corinne Bobb-Semple: I'm not sure.

Rebecca Carroll: That's one of the things about gentrification that is so striking to me, is that it's so particular in its aesthetic. Does that appeal to you? Do you feel like you want to be there?

Corinne Bobb-Semple: I feel like I would, just because I'm really into aesthetics.

Rebecca Carroll: Like a lot of Black middle-class folks, both young and old, Corinne struggles with the constant influx and changes that gentrification brings to the neighborhood, while also staying grounded in the community and appreciating her own good fortune.

Corinne Bobb-Semple: It feels like a privilege, but it also feels a responsibility to talk about these things and find some way for this, for gentrification to not completely take over Bed-Stuy. Even if it ends up being I'm the last one here, we can find some way to stop that.

Rebecca Carroll: Around the corner from Corinne's house is the Brooklyn Movement Center, where she's working on her own story for our own WNYC's Radio Rookies program. She's interviewing a range of teenagers in the community about gentrification. Not surprisingly, the white kids have a pretty different take on the subject.

Corinne Bobb-Semple: They have very interesting ideas about what gentrification is. One person told me that it was white people coming into a neighborhood and basically making it more beautiful, just by their presence.

Rebecca Carroll: [laughs] Did you challenge that at all?

Corinne Bobb-Semple: In the moment, I just felt really uncomfortable. I didn't know what to say, so not really, and I wish I had.

Rebecca Carroll: What would she have said?

Corinne Bobb-Semple: "No." Period.

Rebecca Carroll: [laughs]

[music]

Rebecca Carroll: The Brooklyn Movement Center is run by Mark Winston Griffith, who knows a thing or two about gentrification, not just in Bed-Stuy, but in Crown Heights. He lives in the house formerly owned by his grandmother. He and his wife are currently raising their family in that house. His grandmother and her sisters came to New York as young women from Jamaica to work as seamstresses. They first settled in Harlem, and then in the early '50s, they moved to Crown Heights.

Mark Winston Griffith: From what I understand, the woman who owned the home prior to her moving there, a Jewish woman, actually was the one who held the mortgage for the house. The woman who owned the house was the bank.

Rebecca Carroll: Which is pretty amazing to think about, especially given the history of predatory lending and foreclosures and scams specifically targeting Black homeowners. We reported on it in the last episode. Mark's grandmother, her children, his parents, and now he and his family managed to avoid all of that, thanks in part to one woman's generosity. As Black people in this economy, they now have a legacy of wealth.

Mark Winston Griffith: My grandmother moved there at a time when banks were not making loans really to Black folks in the neighborhood, so that's why it was so important that the woman who owned the house was the one who essentially gave her the mortgage. My grandmother got sick, the house was left to my father, and I ended up buying the house from my father for no down payment. There's no way I would have been able to buy that home otherwise. I didn't have to jump through the hoops that a lot of people end up having to go through in order to acquire a home that can often times come with abusive and predatory terms.

Rebecca Carroll: He began working in financial justice to help Black communities avoid being targeted, and later co-founded the Central Brooklyn Credit Union. He continues to be active in social justice and fights against the displacement caused by gentrification. His good fortune is not lost on him.

Mark Winston Griffith: I'm very conscious of, I would almost say, the responsibility I have to hold onto it for future generations of Black people and people who are in my family.

Rebecca Carroll: It's a privilege for Mark that comes with a certain measure of anxiety.

Mark Winston Griffith: People who are living in Central Brooklyn are now-- if they're homeowners, they're millionaires. We are very lucky, and anything can happen to us. I could lose my job, or something could happen to me or my wife.

Rebecca Carroll: If the family were to face that kind of crisis, at least they have the house as a safety net, an asset that they can leverage or, at worst, cash in. It's not something they want to do, of course, but that wealth is precisely what allows them the relative security of middle-class life.

Mark Winston Griffith: I don't take this home for granted whatsoever. The people now who have been here for generations, they certainly deserve what they have, but they're not better people or they're not more worthy of these riches we have. We didn't necessarily work any harder. We just came in at a moment when it was possible, or we came in under conditions when it was possible. Those conditions are not there for middle-class Black folks.

Rebecca Carroll: Like Mark, Kierna Mayo lives in the Crown Heights family home she grew up in and took over the mortgage of her parents, who are now retired and live in the Virgin Islands. She's the editor-in-chief of Ebony magazine, the quintessential Black American publication. She says growing up in the neighborhood, the streets weren't safe enough for young kids to trick-or-treat. She'd gotten used to taking her own kids to neighboring Park Slope to celebrate.

Kierna Mayo: Maybe two or three Halloweens ago, I realized that the block association was now filled up with all of these white women and their white children, and I was like, "Who are these people? Where did they come from?" Well, of course, trick-or-treating has certainly picked up in the neighborhood. Now, it's become quite a thing.

Rebecca Carroll: Kierna says this observation is something to reckon with.

Kierna Mayo: When white folks are not there, there's an absence of so much that you end up going to another neighborhood just to trick-or-treat.

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Kai Wright: That reticence you hear when Kierna and Corinne talk about the white people moving into their neighborhoods, it's rooted in part in something they don't say, which is, "It's not like Black people have ever been able to just live anywhere we want and feel at home." That used to be a matter of law, but for many, it remains a matter of money and unspoken boundaries. One of the people we interviewed talks about this. Lance Freeman is the director of the Urban Planning Program at Columbia University and the author of the 2006 book, There Goes the 'Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up.

Lance Freeman: Historically, focusing on African Americans for now, there's been this feeling that we've been confined to certain neighborhoods and had to fight to acquire whatever space we did have. Then there's a sense that if that's lost, we're not necessarily welcome somewhere else. People, I think, feel somewhat defensive around their community.

Kai Wright: Feeling defensive around our communities. That's something humans all over the world can relate to, and something we need to find a way to talk about.

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Rebecca Carroll: Our story of Tranquilina Alvillar, the tenant who fought to keep her Williamsburg apartment despite developers' attempts to get her to leave, garnered a huge response. Hundreds of you left us comments on our Facebook page. Here's what one listener had to say.

Unidentified Female Listener: As a native Brooklynite, this is so disheartening. Ms. Alvillar's story is a sad reality for so many of us New Yorkers, and it seems like the city does nothing to protect us. It continues to cater to the likes of developers and urban sophisticates, pushing the rest of us to the outskirts of the outskirts, and continues to give huge tax breaks to developers for "affordable housing." You know, those developments with the 100 units that only contain 6 to 10 affordable units? I'm sure Jane Jacobs is turning over in her grave.

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Kai Wright: I'm Kai Wright, and this is There Goes the Neighborhood from The Nation magazine and WNYC Studios. We like to think about gentrification as something that involves monolithic blocks of people: renters, homeowners, infiltrating hipsters, praying real estate agents. So many of us are anchored to multiple, often conflicting identities. The lines we draw in the sand aren't always helpful.

If gentrification is complicated as a theory, it's nothing compared to how it plays out in our individual lives. A lot of the time when we talk about the changes in Brooklyn, there's a sense that there is a larger phenomenon outside of ourselves. No matter our race, our class, or politics, it can be hard to come to terms with the part we play in that system. DW Gibson introduces us to a couple of new arrivals in Bed-Stuy who share their own struggles with gentrification and their role in it.

DW Gibson: Emily Wilson and Allie LaLonde share an apartment in Bed-Stuy. It's in a new building, and the place is in mint condition. Most importantly, it's a far cry from the apartment where they lived in Crown Heights.

Emily Wilson: We had a really, really terrible landlord situation. [chuckles]

DW Gibson: That's Emily. She came to New York 10 years ago from the suburbs of Baltimore.

Allie LaLonde: Also, there was no heat, and it was January.

DW Gibson: That's Allie, who proudly hails from Toronto. When the heat went out at the old place, she called the landlord. He didn't respond, so after 10 days, she bought a space heater and took the cost out of the rent. She says the refrigerator didn't always work; neither did the oven, and they frequently heard squirrels between the walls.

Emily Wilson: Then the last straw, I think, we got bed bugs.

DW Gibson: Emily says the landlord was unresponsive to calls about the bed bugs, so they hired an exterminator. When they deducted the costs for two exterminator visits because the bed bugs were still there after the first visit, the landlord finally called them, and he was furious. Allie remembers starting the conversation about finding a new place.

Allie LaLonde: We know that in the grand scheme of things, we weren't being harassed. People have had far worse troubles with their landlord, but it seemed like we didn't want to have to worry that much about something so fundamental as whether something was going to go drastically wrong in our home at any moment.

DW Gibson: After 10 months, they decided to move on from the crumbling building. They wound up a 10-minute walk north, shifting from Crown Heights to Bed-Stuy, from one gentrification hotbed to another. Emily and Allie met in college, and both work for non-profit organizations. Each room of their apartment is a clean, modern white box. It's all new construction from just a couple of years ago when a developer named Boaz Gilad bought the building.

Remember that name? Boaz is from Brookland Capital. We met him a few weeks ago. He has a big footprint in Bed-Stuy and proudly markets to hipsters. He tore down the dilapidated, tax-lien-burdened building and started over with something more contemporary, something better suited to new arrivals like Emily and Allie. They've been in the place for six months. Allie, who is white, likes to experience her new neighborhood on bike. She says it's the right pace to cover a lot of ground, but still take it all in.

Allie LaLonde: It's tricky because I feel very conscious because we are aware of the fact that by my very existence here, I provoke changes even if I am not intending to.

Emily Wilson: I'm Black. Walking around in the neighborhood, I feel like people don't really look twice at me.

DW Gibson: Emily thought about moving into a Bed-Stuy studio several years ago, but ultimately decided against it.

Emily Wilson: I definitely didn't know anybody who lived out here four or five years ago, and it was on my radar as a place that, like, "Oh, maybe if I was willing to go out a bit further, I could live this luxurious studio life." [laughs] Yes, I guess by the time I worked my way out here, that definitely wasn't the case anymore.

DW Gibson: It's the two of them sharing a place and one other person. There are three bedrooms, so an opportunity to combine three incomes to make the $3,200 rent each month. Emily and Allie both talk about seeing so many families in the neighborhood. It makes them keenly aware of the crunch for bigger apartments like theirs. Allie also talks about what she calls gentrification grocery stores, and how hard it can be to avoid them.

Allie LaLonde: At our old place, a new grocery store opened up two blocks away from us and was clearly targeted at young yuppies, I guess, and it sold single eggs. It was absurd, and called Broccoli Farm. I used to rail against this stupid gentrification grocery store, but it was on my way from the subway, and so if I needed apples-- and it was open 24 hours, so I ended up going there, way more than I intended.

DW Gibson: There is one thing that they miss about their old place: the stoop. This newer building doesn't have one, so they don't find themselves outside as much. They say it makes it harder to meet people. They're still trying to figure out how exactly they fit into the neighborhood.

Allie LaLonde: I live here because I feel like this is what I can afford. I work for a non-profit. At the same time, if I really wanted to be extremely rent-burdened, I could theoretically afford to live somewhere else. I am aware of the fact that a lot of people are very rent-burdened living here where I live, but the fact is I also like to go out to dinner occasionally and buy coffee on my way to work and things like that. In order to do those things, I cannot spend more on rent. At the same time, I know that things that are coming to the neighborhood that are targeted at people like me; we are susceptible to those things.

DW Gibson: She and Emily say they both explore older shops and restaurants in the neighborhood, consciously trying to move outside the circle of new businesses targeted at gentrifiers, but it's not always easy. There's a Caribbean double shop up the block they've been eyeing for a while. They were both noticing the lines to get in.

Allie LaLonde: Then I Yelped it, what is a double shop? It's sort of a Caribbean food, breakfasty place, which we keep saying that we've been meaning to try, but we never get there. It's strange because it's just not part of our routine. It's an indicator that our routine and the things that we like to do are out of sync with some of the other people in the neighborhood, which means that we don't interact with this particular piece of the neighborhood that seems to be a pretty essential piece of the neighborhood considering the line that is there on weekends.

DW Gibson: Allie underscores that she's someone who generally finds it easy to meet others, and it's easy to see why. She's friendly and open-minded, but she feels that there are forces of change in the neighborhood beyond her own existence. She feels like she's part of a system that she cannot control.

Allie LaLonde: I feel like I judge myself sometimes, but ultimately, it's larger than me. It's a much larger system than me, and we're just trying to make it work with what we have.

DW Gibson: Emily sees a pattern in the system, a very certain sequence of new arrivals in every gentrifying neighborhood.

Emily Wilson: The way I think about the way that gentrification has happened in New York over the past 30 years, I think about the East Village, I think about Williamsburg, and I think about young people who don't have a lot of money, who are kind of cool, going to a place where they can afford, and making that place accessible and cool, and people following in with more and more money because it's cool now, until the cool people can't afford to live there anymore.

DW Gibson: We've heard this a lot, this appropriation of a neighborhood's coolness to lure in new residents. Joshua in East New York talked about it, and I hear it all the time from real estate agents who bring high-end home buyers into a neighborhood by seducing them with the new arrivals who are already in place, often young and artistic and white, and for the sake of increased capitalization, cool.

Emily Wilson: I don't think that we're those cool people. I do think that economic driver of people who are not from this neighborhood, who don't look like the people who come from this neighborhood, but are looking for affordable housing, who are squeezed down from neighborhoods in other parts of the city, they come looking for something affordable, for more space or just more accessible rents to not be as rent-burdened. That is how I see the first wave, and then the amenities start to come in.

I think that wave is the one that people often vilify. I guess you vilify the whole process because one leads to the other. When it becomes more obvious is when, like, "Okay, this is safe now because there are white people there, because there are people who look like me, and who are successfully living there." It's a proven experiment. Now, I can go and live a life that's more similar to what I'm used to in my old neighborhood.

[music]

Kai Wright: It is this sequence that awaits East New York. An influx of Emilys and Allies and others, as Joshua called them. What does it mean for the creative minds and artists who are already in East New York? Not outsiders looking for cheap studio space and a brush with authenticity, but the artists who have been working to give value to their shared space, to connect people with a sense of possibility and beauty. DW Gibson introduces us to one such maker.

DW Gibson: Catherine Green moved to East New York when she was 11 years old. With the exception of a few years at college, she's been in the neighborhood for most of the last 18 years. Like many people who live in East New York, Catherine is already bracing for the changes that are coming with the city's rezoning plan. She's determined to have a say in that development.

Catherine Green: It's really important to change our space and just take pride in where we're at, and think even on a larger scale, what is possible.

DW Gibson: This was the question on Catherine's mind several years ago when she realized that she was always going outside the neighborhood to take her kids to experience art of any kind. This fact bothered her deeply. In 2009, she started ARTs East New York. The organization does a range of activities, each strongly tied to a specific place.

Catherine Green: I walked from Pitkin Avenue, I think maybe it was a 10-block span, one day, and really noticed how many vacant lots were in that distance because I started to get a little depressed. Some of the blocks were dirty and just smelled bad. I realized halfway through the walk that I passed two schools. That means kids walk this route every day. What does that say to them about where they live? What does that say to them about their community? What does that say about themselves?

DW Gibson: Catherine's 10-block walk catalyzed ARTs East New York to start using vacant lots for large-scale art projects. Most of the sites are near intersections or areas with higher crime rates, like the lot at the corner of Pitkin and Berriman.

Catherine Green: We did a fence art project with portraits of seniors in the neighborhood, so the kids had dinner with the seniors. They learned about them, their stories, and whatnot over a five-month period, and then there's these large portraits or paintings of them on the fence. It's a little hard to knock somebody over the head when your grandma is looking at you. You know what I mean? [laughs] It's a little different feeling than just walking by a vacant, dirty lot.

DW Gibson: Another empty lot that ARTs East New York reimagined became reNewlots, an art and craft market with food, an outdoor seating area, and a stage for music and open-mic nights. Shops and artists' studios are set up in shipping containers. There are about 11 containers. People drift in and out, shopping or just talking to artists about their work. Catherine's background is in clothing design, and she brings a strong business sense to her artistic endeavors. You can feel that at reNewlots. It's both cultivating creativity and jump-starting a hyper-local economy. I met her friend, Rasu Jilani, inside a shipping container at reNewlots.

Rasu Jilani: Being in a capitalist society, it has its benefits and it has its curses.

DW Gibson: He's an artist who's done a range of projects, including an oral history and portrait series in Bed-Stuy. He says Catherine's hit on something special by creating a space for people to experiment with creative business ideas on a manageable scale.

Rasu Jilani: Part of the thing that has awakened me as a businessman is this idea of social entrepreneurship. How do you enroll people, community? Empathy is part of your business model. You just don't make money because you can capitalize over every situation to make money. That's cool. We see how that's affecting the world. The world is dying because of that. I make money, personally, but how am I investing my time, energy, and money back into the place I'm making money from?

DW Gibson: Rasu takes me outside to walk around the rest of reNewlots. As we do, he echoes Emily and Allie in Bed-Stuy, predicting that the change will play out in waves.

Rasu Jilani: Artists come to an area for cheaper rents, for inspiration, to create work, and then not too far behind is that aggressive, colonial, imperialistic gentrification movement.

DW Gibson: Rasu talks about a sense of frontierism that newcomers often bring. Whatever the diagnosis, there's always a false sense of discovery. The idea that a neighborhood is up-and-coming is inherently outsider. While Rasu says it is mostly white gentrifiers that are guilty of this, it isn't always that simple. He heard as much over and over again while interviewing people in Bed-Stuy for his oral history, newcomers and old-timers alike.

Rasu Jilani: They have white people in the community who I've interviewed that said, "I didn't come here to Bed-Stuy to get a whitewashed, gentrified Bed-Stuy. I came to Bed-Stuy for what was already here, the culture, the community-driven, the family-driven, the block parties, the know-thy-neighbor aspect of Bed-Stuy."

You have this assumption that, even if you believe it or not in your heart, but mentally, intellectually, you may say, "Well, all white people that come to Bed-Stuy just want to co-opt it, and all Black people in Bed-Stuy are not really trying to capitalize off of gentrification because they're natives," and blah, blah, blah. Both assumptions are not true at all. You do have people who are of my same complexion who are totally benefiting from gentrification and are exploiting people in the community, and there's people from the other race that are doing the same thing.

DW Gibson: Reflecting on Bed-Stuy and the stories he collected there, Rasu suddenly takes a look around him and is transported back to East New York. He tells me that the city has already informed Catherine that they'll be developing the empty lot where we are standing. That means reNewlots has got to go. ARTs East New York will have to relocate the project to another site. The complications seen by neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy are already rolling into East New York.

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Kai Wright: Next week, we go back to East New York as well. It's the first neighborhood that will be rezoned and reimagined under the mayor's affordable housing plan. Already, the tension between his goals and the profits developers are seeking is showing up. We'll look at how things stand now, but we'll also take a look at some out-of-the-box solutions for all of this. How do we all manage it as we look for homes and communities as New Yorkers? Actually, how do I handle it? That's next week.

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Anakwa Dwamena: There Goes the Neighborhood is a production of WNYC Studios and The Nation magazine. It's recorded and mixed by Cayce Means. Sean Carlson is our researcher, with additional foreclosure research from Anakwa Dwamena. That's me. Our associate producer is Amy Eason. Janet Babin contributed a recording to this episode. Aaron Cohen is the studio manager. Terence Blanchard composed our theme music. Thanks to our digital team, including Lee Hill, Delaney Simmons, Kevin France, Frank Reynolds, and Annie Shields. DW Gibson, Rebecca Carroll, Kai Wright, and Jim O'Grady all contributed to the reporting and producing of this episode. Our editor and executive producer is Karen Frillmann.

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Rebecca Carroll: Call us at 646-783-9692, or write to us at wnyc.tumblr.com.

Anakwa Dwamena: Support for There Goes the Neighborhood has been provided by the Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The New York Community Trust, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

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