Kevin Powell Discusses Brooklyn Gentrification In Powerful Essay
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by It’s nothing new. Brooklyn is the hub for million dollar condos, over-priced coffee shops and hipster yoga facilities. Long time residents are getting pushed out with rising rent cost and unaffordable housing and many believe the borough is losing its charm, its authenticity and its realness.
Political activist, writer and entrepreneur, Kevin Powell, who appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show back in 2009 and previously held the title of senior writer for VIBE magazine, took to Facebook today to express his heavy thoughts on Brooklyn gentrification and the recent killings of three men in Downtown Brooklyn. Powell subsequently voices his concerns on “greedy developers” and the new residents’ perspective on the “poor in Brooklyn.” Powell, having just spent the weekend at the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington D.C., where President Obama addressed his fight to close the economic gap in the black community and push for criminal justice reform, found it extremely ironic that having settled back in his home in Fort Greene was subject to witnessing the gun violence that is still very prominent in that neighborhood — though real estate buffs will have you convinced otherwise.
“It was just minutes after I had arrived home from Washington, DC, and settled into bed. Then the loud and long cry of a woman in the aftermath of the bullets ripping into someone’s body. What I did not know until this morning was that three men were killed, ages 36, 43, and 76, and that a 21-year-old was brought in as a suspect,” Powell profoundly expresses on Facebook. “The two younger men were shot in the head. All this happening while communities like Brooklyn across America continue to build high-rise condos and apartment buildings with non-stop greed, pushing people to the side, or literally building around them, as is the case in Downtown Brooklyn where Fort Greene Projects is situated. I have listened to some real estate folks actually lie to people looking to buy in places like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, so greedy that they are milking folks for $500,000 and up properties while there is no improvement for the lives of the people long there, especially poor and working-class folks just struggling to survive, literally, day-to-day.”
While Powell’s essay is needed to build on the conversation that has been on-going since the rapid rise of gentrification in Brooklyn in the early 2000s, he doesn’t quite have a solution on slowing down the process but does offer many suggestions on what could possibly cut down on inner-city neighborhood crime.
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“People always ask me what are the solutions to violence. There are no easy answers. We know resources need to be there around jobs and job training, better schools that actually empower young people, [and] after school programs. We know that far too many men in our communities who could be mentors are woefully missing in action, including all those fancy Black churches with “men’s ministry” who do not come into ‘hoods like ever, except to walk right by the boyz and girls in the ‘hood’.”
There is no perfect answer for slowing down gentrification either. The fact is the neighborhood doesn’t get better as a group of hipsters move in; it just simply changes. As Scott C. McDonald details in his study of how gentrification affects neighborhood crime, “Relief from long-term trends of urban decline may be only temporary in gentrified neighborhoods. Crime may act as a feedback mechanism to deter neighborhood stability resulting from gentrification.” Powell stated it perfectly, “they keep building buildings around us like we do not even exist, while we put up flowers and spill some liquor on the concrete for the brothers and the sisters who ain’t here no more.”
Click HERE to read Kevin Powell’s full essay on Facebook.
