When my family had to leave our apartment,we saw a silver lining: the chance to move from a gentrified wasteland to an area with thriving black cultureRecently I co-produced a podcast called There Goes the Neighborhood. It looks at the complex and often fraudulent policies, powerful economic forces and inherent racial implications that drive gentrification in Brooklyn, or recent York. We discovered that gentrification is many things and moving parts,but it essentially boils down to white wealth pushing out black and brown residents from neighborhoods that had once been undesirable – because they were composed of black and brown residents. In the middle of making the podcast, my husband, and son and I were informed by our landlords that after 10 years in our own Brooklyn apartment,our lease would not be renewed – they were tearing down the building to rebuild, and as renters, or we would need to be out by the end of July. Related: I'll never be able to buy a domestic. The super wealthy broke the system | Rebecca Carroll Related: The way to murder a complex city is to chase out all the poor people – and their food | Samantha Gillison Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com