As Downtown Brooklyn welcomes its larger shopping complex and newest motto, locals feel as if the business boost is shoving them out.
Downtown Brooklyn has become one of the hottest areas in the borough. Visitors can enjoy quiet hangouts, sip artisanal coffees while looking at the Manhattan skyline, and are welcomed at the expansive plazas and parks -unless they are young students of color.
“When we left school, we would go down and walk towards Shake Shack,” said Yennifer Osorio, 19, who graduated from Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice last June. Osorio is an Argentinian immigrant, petite and fair with a long curtain of honey-brown hair. “Our deans and principals would come out and try to get us to move away. They told us that the [businesses] wanted us out the area or they would cause problems with our school.”
Local restaurants confronted and removed Osorio and her schoolmates on a daily basis from Willoughby Plaza, a block away from the high school. Normally, public school students would congregate there in the warmer months, as it is the nearest public area with seating on their way home. According to Osorio, the businesses told school security that the students would take up space reserved for customers.
However, Willoughby Plaza is a public plaza. According New York City’s DOT’s Plaza Program Rules, the students were permitted congregate peacefully there. In fact, the high school had to give consent for the area to exist. Businesses can demand the removal of loiterers directly in front of their entryways – the stores Osorio describes, Hill Country BBQ and Shake Shack, do not have entrances immediately in front of the plaza.
“I kind of understood why the owners of the property didn’t want us there. They had their clientele not based in high schoolers. It’s a business thing,” Osorio said.
The thing about business is that this treatment is not uncommon in areas that are steeped in gentrification. As Downtown Brooklyn underwent change to transform it into a local marketplace, locals reported that the change in business made them feel unwelcome in their own neighborhood. The treatment of students in businesses is what HVAC apprentice Drew Trotman deems as a sign of the new businesses and their policies seeking to nudge people of color and the less wealthy (such as public school students) out.
“I know that there are some smaller restaurants like pizza shops that ask students to order either up front or around at an additional window to keep the crowd down,” said Trotman, a 21-year-old African American who spends most of his time downtown inspecting restaurants. He described policies where some stores regulate student traffic by letting in a certain number of young people at one time.
The treatment of students in Downtown Brooklyn may be new, but the tension isn’t. The area went through a rezoning overhaul in 2004 under the Bloomberg administration that funneled $100 million dollars in the hopes that commercial businesses and trendy real estate would create more jobs in Brooklyn. The billion-dollar Barclays Center was introduced, alliances worked to make the area a “historic neighborhood”, and the industrial DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) waterfront was transformed to a massive seaside park. The goal was to sprout new businesses and scrub Brooklyn’s crime-ridden past clean as it had the potential to be popular with tourists.
New businesses took root, rent costs skyrocketed, and the demographic changed, as the census simultaneously reported a plummet in residents of color. The percentage of African Americans in Downtown Brooklyn has plunged since the start of the rezoning. For example, the neighborhood of Park Avenue to Nassau Street has gone from 80 percent African American/Black to 45 percent between 2000 and 2015.
New stores have sprouted in areas that are questionable – such as the Swarovski Crystal outlet wedged into Fulton Mall near $5 clothing shops and credit loan agencies. Often in the winter, homeless people huddle outside the store because it’s near open heat vents. This is what has locals questioning whether the stifling store policies and the unusual placement of new businesses are centered around managing race and class in the area.
“I’ve been asked by store security if I need help, six, seven, eight, times,” Trotman said. “Hyper -surveillance is targeted at me because of my [black] skin color and my sex.”
Some stores have visible and recorded policies that are legal but questionable – including collecting shoppers’ bags if they have several, seizing IDs at the counter, denying service to certain age groups, watching customers through “undercover shoppers” (nonuniform security walking around aisles), and enormous cameras in plain sight. Trotman admits even he has been subjected to a “watchful eye” as a shopper in certain businesses.
Higher costs and unfair treatment is what Trotman blames for the “mass exodus” of people of color. He was soon hired by an increasing amount of higher end stores owned by people who just moved to the neighborhood, and even the borough. If Bloomberg’s idea for the initiative was to keep businesses between Brooklyn locals, the opposite happened. There was a 21 percent boom of residents from out of the state within a year of the rezoning. This was referred to by locals as the first“wave” of gentrification.
Hunter College media studies professor and director of the 2013 documentary, My Brooklyn, Kelly Anderson, said that she was inspired to create the film after following the wave of gentrifiers and settling in the area.
“I guess to be part of that and say “No, I’m not a gentrifier” would seem to be very much in denial of the way that race and class were at work,” said Anderson.
She explains that her presence, as a white woman, gave cues to developers to install more expensive investments that most of the people of color in the area could not afford. Seeing her effects on the demographic was a factor in what caused her to move away.
In the same decade of the rezoning, DUMBO has been converted from a desolate industrial wasteland to a tourist-ridden “hidden gem”. The cobblestone entrance in Washington Street serves a perfect view of the Manhattan Bridge, which is reported to be the one of the most Instagram-ed spots in the city.
However, enormous glass high rises have sprouted and have severely altered the historic Brooklyn skyline. Those who live in the area have had their former view of the cerulean blue water and twinkling Manhattan lights replaced with the crystalline backsides of high rise condos. New buildings mean new stores, including the new CityPoint Mall that was added to Fulton in October 2016, making it the largest shopping complex in Downtown Brooklyn. However, it’s tagline “BKLYN BORN” and its playful renaming of Downtown Brooklyn to “DoBro” does not amuse Trotman.
“A phoenix born of the ashes of something else. A final step to recreating something after you changed it is to give it a new name so it’s no longer recognizable,” said Trotman.
Like Trotman, Jennifer Joseph, who works in the municipal buildings downtown, wasn’t very impressed with CityPoint. After working in the for over 20 years, she has never seen instances of stores regulating certain populations, but wonders about the aim of developers in the new changes in businesses.
“It could only be good because what it is doing also is giving people jobs. You have students who need supplement, you have retirees… In terms of that, I always look at that stuff as a bonus,” said Joseph, who isn’t much of a fan of the overpopulated area but loves how “streamlined” and modern it is becoming.
Last summer, Yennifer Osorio visited DUMBO with an ex-boyfriend. She said it was beautiful, and she would love to come again. However, Osorio recalls feeling uncomfortable with the ways people of color were looked at in the neighborhood, including her dark-skinned African American boyfriend. Even though she no longer wears the school uniform, she can’t help but remember how she was treated, and often thinks about how people who looked like her and her boyfriend were driven out of the area.
“It’s not for me anymore. I’m ambitious, I want to be a lawyer. So the goal is to be able to make enough money – but as of right now, I’d never be able to move into a place like Downtown Brooklyn anymore.”
See the My Brooklyn study guide for more information on the gentrification of Downtown Brooklyn.