For some New York City residents, new murals popping up are simply fresh new pieces of art to brighten a neighborhood, but to others, they represent a deeper, troubling trend, gentrification. High-income neighborhoods like Cobble Hill, Dumbo, and Williamsburg all have rent prices higher than median rent prices in Brooklyn, and New York City as a whole, according to 2023 data from the Furman Center. And The New York City Parks Department Public Art Map shows that these neighborhoods have higher concentrations of public art, including murals, statues, temporary and permanent installations,  than their more affordable counterparts, like East Brooklyn and Canarsie. 

Meres Ones, a graffiti artist born in the South Bronx and raised in Queens is no stranger to how the street art and graffiti scenes in New York have evolved. “ I started in ‘87 as a graffiti artist, which is pretty much all the lettering,” Meres shared. “There really wasn’t a street art movement back then.” 

Meres went on to found and curate 5 Pointz, a collection of graffiti projects created by different artists along the exterior walls of an abandoned factory on Jackson Avenue in Long Island City, Queens. Despite 5 Pointz’s notoriety in the art world, it was demolished In 2013 amidst the rapid gentrification and industrialization of Long Island City. Now, a high-rise luxury apartment building sits in its place. 

“There have been cases where real estate people, or people that have buildings, didn’t necessarily care and would give legal permission to have artists do lettering. It was easy to get walls at the time.” Meres continued, “In real estate now they’re realizing that you can hire artists to paint, and then those walls that were available to us are now taken away for ads.” 

But graffiti artists aren’t the only ones to notice the link between a rise in corporate street art and changing neighborhoods. In recent years, Bushwick has become prime real estate for artists, but their presence has had negative impacts on longtime residents. According to rental market trends, rent prices in Bushwick have increased by 5% in the last month. 

Among those noticing this trend is Wendy Martinez, a lifelong Bushwick resident, who can still recall a Bushwick before the murals, galleries, and cafes. “The walls that were once covered in graffiti, or were blank, are now covered by “acceptable” graffiti and artwork.”  She noted how Black and Latinx community members were persecuted for graffiti. “I remember police chases happening at night when I was younger because of teens and adults tagging on walls in the neighborhood or spray painting artwork on vacant walls.” 

Now, Martinez says the art that surrounds her neighborhood reflects, and draws, a different crowd, “it was mostly young, white, affluent people that were moving in.” According to Martinez, landlords in the area have taken advantage of these shifting demographics. Her own rent has increased by 58% in the last three years. 

“To see my own community being forced out of their homes while local organizations fight to keep generational families from leaving is really disheartening,” Martinez said. 

For Meres, preventing street art from becoming a force of gentrification is all about creating a balanced relationship between artists and the real estate industry. “You know you want to paint the murals, you want to try to get paid and balance it. But you also don’t want to overly gentrify a neighborhood where coffees are like 12 bucks.” 

Hundreds of South Slope and Windsor Terrace residents filled the Community Board 7 meeting Monday evening at the Holy Name of Jesus Church, lining the walls and bringing the town hall to full capacity. Echoes of booing, cheering, and heckling flew throughout the crowd as presenters and attendees spoke out about proposed housing developments. 

Arrow Linen Supply Company, a retail distributor based in Brooklyn since 1947, put forward a zoning application last year requesting rezoning of the area of its laundry structure in Windsor Terrace to allow for the construction of two high-rise buildings in the mostly three-story neighborhood. If the rezoning is approved, the company plans to sell the property to residential property managers Apex Development. The town hall meeting on Monday, September 9th addressed the rezoning application as part of the required Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. 

A spokesperson for Arrow Linen was not present at the meeting. Instead, representatives for Apex Development presented their plan for two 13-story high-rises in the form of a U-shaped lot that would add 244 apartments to the neighborhood. According to the current plan, 48 of the units will be affordable for renters between 40-60% of New York City’s Average Medium Income. 

The local community organization Housing Not Highrises (HNH)  presented an alternative plan to Shahana Hanif, the council member for District 39 in Brooklyn. Instead of the two 13-story high-rises, HNH has worked alongside the Catholic Charities Progress of Peoples Development Corporation (CCPOP) to propose two seven-story buildings of entirely affordable housing. This plan would bring in approximately 200 units of affordable housing as opposed to 48. However, Arrow Linen has not expressed interest in selling land to the charity, according to a statement by CCPOP read to the town hall, which also stated that the charity “has no further involvement in this property.”

Despite Arrow Linen’s lack of interest, many attendees held flyers stating “Housing Not Highrises” and argued that the size and affordability of the 7-story plan fits into the culture of the neighborhood. Others were eager to see the 13-story plan built. 

Drew Edwards lives with his family in Windsor Terrace and argued in support of the construction of the 13-story buildings. He expressed concern for the under-enrollment in District 15 schools following the Covid-19 pandemic. “In order to live here, we need to build homes for people to live in,” he said. 

Like Edwards, Ben Miller argued in support of the two high-rises. “Housing delayed is housing denied,” Miller said. “We need housing now because we are literally in a crisis. We have not built enough in decades and the city is suffering for it.” Miller’s statement drew scattered applause.

Melissa Olsen argued against the 13-story plan and expressed support for the affordable housing plan by HNH. Olsen said she lives with her family of four in Windsor Terrace and is looking to move into a larger unit in the neighborhood. She said that though there are many apartments for her to view, there are not many that are affordable at her family’s income level. “We don’t have a crisis of availability in Brooklyn, there are plenty of units we can see, what we have is a crisis of affordability,” said Olsen. “It is not the city’s job to make sure Arrow Linen can make their property sale, it is the city’s job to make sure all communities have affordable housing.” 

Assembly Member Robert Carroll, who has represented Windsor Terrace since 2017, expressed concern for the pending change in the zoning law, as the construction of two high-rise apartment buildings with limited affordable units can pave the way for similar projects to enter the neighborhood. “Gentrification and displacement are real and powerful, and that can be spurred by profit-driven rezoning purposes,” said Carroll. 

“Arrow Linen’s application is not what is best for this neighborhood,” continued Carroll, leading to an eruption of cheers from the crowd. “It has the potential to force out the remaining working-class residents of Windsor Terrace,” he said. 

Councilmember Shahana Hanif told the town hall that “at this early stage, my office does not have a formal statement on the proposed housing.” But Councilmember Hanif made clear that she “will not be accepting the bare minimum” from developers.

As Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first term comes to an end, housing experts have a mixed view of his 10-year plan to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing. They say that while they admire the ambition of the plan, they have criticisms regarding its current progress, its funding, its support among everyday New Yorkers and the actual affordability of its units.

The de Blasio administration says the plan is ahead of schedule, despite its cost, ambition and scope. For example, the mayor announced in July that his administration had secured 23,284 affordable apartments and homes during Fiscal Year 2016, which ended on June 30. It was said to be the second highest production in the city’s history and the most since Edward I. Koch was the mayor.

According to the press release, 52,936 affordable homes have been financed, 3,500 affordable units have been secured for New Yorkers earning under $24,000 per year and even “more than 4,000 affordable homes for low-income seniors are also underway.”

Even though the de Blasio administration has painted an optimistic picture of its affordable housing plan, experts have varying reservations about it.

Matthew Lasner, associate professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Hunter College, said that it was not going “as well as the mayor’s office would have us believe.” It’s ahead of schedule in terms of overall numbers, he said, but that’s because of the “preservation” of existing units through subsidies designed to keep buildings affordable.

“When you look at the, to my mind, the more critical number of new construction what we see is that so far the mayor is falling about 24 percent behind the plan,” Lasner said. While the mayor has called for 8,000 units to be constructed per year, the rate is actually about 6,000 units per year, he said.

“Under the Bloomberg plan, 5,500 units were built per year by comparison. So he’s only doing slightly better than Bloomberg did,” Lasner said. However, in general, he said that it is a good plan that the mayor needs to lobby for in Washington, D.C. to seek greater federal funding in the form of housing subsidies.

Other experts such as Alex Schwartz, professor of urban policy at The New School, also said that federal assistance is needed. “I think that’s in large part due to the fact that cities simply don’t have the resources to meet these kinds of needs which have historically been a federal responsibility,” Schwartz said of the plan’s inability to fully meet the city’s housing needs. “The federal government, previously because Congress was not willing to increase spending, has not been increasing money for federal housing assistance and it’s highly unlikely that’s going to change in [the Trump administration]. It’s probably going to get worse.”

Others said that while the plan’s goals were commendable there were other factors that needed to be taken into consideration such as the reactions of the neighborhood’s residents. “The question of neighborhood ambiance and also the impact of these projects on neighborhoods is becoming a bigger piece of the puzzle than just adding affordable housing units,” said Nicholas Bloom, associate professor of social science at the New York Institute of Technology. “There was this focus on adding these numbers but of course there’s a lot of ways in which people look at housing experiences beyond just numbers.”

Bloom said the administration should instead focus on preserving the existing 178,000 public housing units and attempting an “overhaul” of the entire public housing system. “I think that a pretty good argument for more affordable housing is taking care of all the stuff you’ve already built.”

Advocacy groups for low-income New Yorkers have protested affordable housing developments in the past.

New York Communities for Change opposed a project aimed at providing low-income senior residents with housing that was being built within Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene. The group said that the developer behind the project, BFC Partners, wasn’t able to create housing that was actually affordable for local low-income residents and was also constructing luxury towers that would end up increasing rents in the area.

Benjamin Dulchin, the executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, sees these sorts of situations as a “key detail” that the mayor and his administration have gotten wrong when implementing their plan.

“We would say that the way he really preserves affordability destabilizes neighborhoods and what we try to do [to prevent this] is not by building and preserving a lot of affordable units but by building and preserving them in the right way,” Dulchin said. For ANHD, in order for the plan to work, it is imperative “that what you’re building is not just affordable on any scale but is actually affordable for the people who need it in the neighborhood in which it’s built.”

Dulchin also said that the goal of building and preserving 200,000 affordable units was too large and too ambitious. “We would say that they should increase the impact of the housing they build and the way they do that is by making it is as deeply affordable and long-term affordable as neighborhoods want,” Dulchin said. “This is expensive to do. The city has resources and getting to [that level of] affordability requires subsidies. It takes money to do that and so I think we would say it would be pretty reasonable to back off the big number he’s put out.”

Despite such criticisms of the mayor’s housing plan, experts say that overall it is still a good one. The lower- and middle-income residents of the city are in dire need of affordable places to live, after all. According to a 2015 report from the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy on rent in major cities, an “overwhelming majority of low-income renters are rent-burdened–facing rent and utility costs equal to half their income or more.”

As a result, there is some lingering doubt about whether or not the plan will succeed in actually providing housing that is truly affordable. “The question is,” said Professor Bloom, “what is success? Is success meeting those numbers or is success making New York a more affordable place to live?”

Photos: Top, image from de Blasio administration’s plan to re-zone East New York. Below, cover of mayor’s affordable housing plan. (NYC.gov)

On a September afternoon in Washington Heights, shouts of protest could be heard in Spanish along Broadway. “Here we are! Here we stay! ¡Aquí estamos! Aquí nos quedamos!” elderly residents shouted . They were there to defend their senior center in Washington Heights near 174th Street and Broadway. In April, Fern Hertzberg, executive director of the ARC Senior Center, received a letter that the owners of the building would not be renewing their lease agreement and that their current lease would expire on Dec. 31.

Finally, Adriano Espaillat, New York state senator and congressional hopeful, showed up and surrounded himself with the elderly, encouraging their chants in Spanish. Espaillat, 62, was born in the Dominican Republic and is running against Republican Tony Evans for the 13th Congressional District in upper Manhattan and portions of the Bronx.

On Tuesday, he won an easy victory with 89 percent of the vote, becoming  the first Dominican elected to Congress. His message was “putting families first” and to support policies that stand up for those at a disadvantage.

“This center is important because it’s one of the best centers in New York City,” Espaillat said as he began to address the crowd and reporters. “Now, I have been in touch with the reverend,” he added, referring to pastor of Christ Church United Methodist, which houses the senior center. “He is saying that they are giving the center a month to month lease for six months. That’s unacceptable! The other tenants down [on the block] are empty; my hunch is that the church and the owners are trying to flip these two properties and make them luxury or market-rate housing. We will fight that tooth and nail!”

Espaillat finished and then repeated what he said in Spanish, with cheers from the elderly who still surround him.

Espaillat’s opponent, Tony Evans, also saw the problem with gentrification in the neighborhood. Evans lives in Harlem and has been witness to the rising rents, a trend confirmed in a New York University Furman Center report released in May that shows that Harlem has seen a 53 percent rent increase between 1990 and 2014.

“Rents rise faster than incomes – but our leaders do nothing to stop it!” according to Evans’s website. Rising rents are his top priority listed because “the housing sector in New York City is a broken system.”

Espaillat wants “federally designated anti-gentrification zones,” according to the Huffington Post. He would represent some of the most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in a district that includes Central Harlem, East Harlem, and Morningside Heights.

Fighting for the ARC Senior Center in Washington Heights is right up his ally.

Its struggle helps show the dangers that Espaillat sees in gentrification in Washington Heights. Espaillat told the crowd, “If this happens here, it could happen to any center across this neighborhood.” According to the website for Moriah Senior Center, Washington Heights and Inwood are the two neighborhoods in New York City that have the highest percentage of seniors, leading to fears that if one center closes, others could close too.

Shuli Gutmann, director of the Moriah Senior Center, stood next to Espaillat and later spoke about the challenge that seniors face. “We are a generation that fetishizes new and forgets our seniors. We must remember that we will be seniors one day and we need to take care of them,” she said.

Comments from Hertzberg help show just how many people the closing of the ARC Senior Center would affect. “We have been in the heart of this community since 1970. We have almost 4,000 members coming to us on a regular basis, over 200 a day. This is their second home, they want us to be here, they want us to stay,” she said. “This is where we started and this is where we need to be.”

The “second home” for the seniors provides wellness workshops, dancing, arts and culture, and other social services, along with a kitchen that can provide healthy meals for those who aren’t able to cook. Its location is pivotal as it is one block away from J. Hood Wright Park, allowing easy and quick access for the seniors to spend time outside. The seniors range from 65 to 104 years old.

Efforts to reach the Senior Center and contact Hertzberg for updates on the lease renewal were not successful. There was no comment from the church when it was contacted for input concerning the ARC Senior Center lease and its landlord.

Espaillat wrapped up his speech with a promise that the fight was far from over. “We are going to fight because this is an important center, we are going to continue to picket here. We are going to continue to fight. I will go and contact the pastor’s bosses, everybody’s got a boss even if it’s God. I thank you for being here, because this fight is your fight too. This is our fight.”

Photo: Top, Adriano Espaillat became the first Dominican elected to Congress.  (Lisa Flaugh)

Swimming through the sewage-infested waters of the Gowanus Canal, Christopher Swain had to paddle through a thick layer of dirty yellow foam that floated on top of the water, trying not to let it touch his face. He felt like a senior citizen at her local pool, trying not to get her hair wet. Swain said he wore cream on his face to protect from the water in case it did touch his skin.

Swain started at the top of the canal, just north of Douglass Street between Bond Street and Nevins Street in Brooklyn, and swam the 1.8-mile length of the canal into New York Harbor, where he let the fresh harbor water wash away the filth of the Gowanus Canal.

“It was like swimming in a dirty diaper,” Swain said. “I tried not to get a ton of water in my mouth, but I could taste metal and hydraulic fluid, it was so potent.” Chunks of coal tar also floated by, he said.

But now the first steps toward a cleanup of the notoriously polluted canal are underway in the form of two retention tanks being installed to store the sewage that overflows and usually ends up in the canal during heavy rain. This begins a major Environnmental Protection Agency cleaning process that will cost roughly $506 million, and aims to make the canal clean enough for recreational use.

In a rapidly changing Gowanus neighborhood, this is a pressing issue for the neighborhood population, new and old. No one is a fan of toxic water, but the prospect that a clean canal will make the local real estate more attractive – driving up rents too high for many current residents and prompting development of luxury housing – has become the talk of Gowanus.

Gowanus Creek was dug out and turned into the Gowanus Canal in the 1860s to be used for industrial transport in local waters. Future recreational use of the canal could bring a new boating industry to fruition.

“The Gowanus is ideal for boating,” said environmental planner Eymund Diegel,a local expert on the canal and a member of Swain’s team for the swim. “There’s very little current, and it’s actually quite nice at sunset.”

Moms, dads and children of the new family-oriented Brooklyn neighborhood often spend afternoons on the Whole Foods patio by the side of the canal on 3rd Street, with massive wood burners next to the Whole Foods, an attempt to mask the smell of the putrid water. There is even a Twitter account dedicated to updating Brooklynites daily about the canal’s odor in case these families want to check its status before getting the strollers out.

“Everyone that approached me was up for a swimmable canal,” Swain said of the local people who came out to watch him swim in the deep green water. “People were shaking my hand and I think everyone respects what we’re trying to do here.”

Click for slideshow of Gowanus Canal. (Sean Egan)

“Quality of life would be better for the community if the Gowanus was clean,” said Haley Block, who works at a hair salon next to the canal of 3rd Street and frequents the Whole Foods patio. “There’s not many other nature spots around here, and it’d be good for people to have a clean canal in their neighborhood. It says something about us as a community.”

“It’d be nice if it didn’t smell so bad,” said Alexia Gautier, a nanny who goes to the Whole Foods patio with the baby she watches. “But then again if it was clean, this spot would get very crowded.”

Gautier is among the many people who already live in fear of the changing culture and economic tides in popular Brooklyn neighborhoods.

“If the canal was cleaned, I don’t think we could afford to be here,” said Welland Scripps, co-founder of the Letter of Marque Theater Company, which has a studio down the road from the canal.

“The neighborhood has been changing and will keep changing,” Scarlet M. Rivera, another co-founder of Letter of Marque, said. “As the community gets cleaned up, it gets less affordable to be here.”

Still, said Nolan Kennedy, another founder of the theater, “I think it would be nice to have the canal be cleaned. It would be like a small New England boat town, or Red Hook.”

Gowanus is home to a myriad of art studios, and produces a prolific Brooklyn art culture amid the industrial space. Brooklyn needs the industry and arts and much as they need Brooklyn, but the problem is that the canal lies partly with the industrial sites and art studios around it, adding to the impurities of the water.

Swain’s swim in the Gowanus on Oct. 17 was his second attempt at the feat. In April he tried to swim the canal but the water was so thick with feces that he wasn’t able to complete the task. It was particularly thick that day because there was heavy rain the previous night, which led the outdated sewage system to overflow into the canal as it very often does.

“It was so thick, I would have been too exhausted to continue not even half way down it,” Swain said.

The coal tar level in the water and the soil at the bottom and around the canal is the real issue with the canal and one of the main reasons the EPA is involved, according to Diegel.

With a long history of industrial dumping of toxic pollutants, and sewage overflows, the Gowanus Canal remains one of the nation’s most heavily polluted bodies of water, according to the EPA. Among the impurities in the canal are polychlorinated biphenyl waste, coal tar, heavy metals, volatile organics, and dangerous diseases that get into the water through the human waste, such as gonorrhea, according to the EPA and Diegel.

“Whatever your roommate has, or the guy down the hall has,” Diegel said, “it gets into the canal at some point, even if it’s just for a little while.”

An example of how this water can pose health risks can be found in the case of a dolphin that found its way through New York Harbor into the Gowanus Canal in 2013. The dolphin lasted a day before dying in the canal. The autopsy of the animal afterwards showed a damaged kidney, stomach ulcers, liver parasites, and an empty gastrointestinal tract, according to the Riverhead Foundation, an animal rescue organization in New York. It is unclear if those ailments were brought on by the canal, but officials said it couldn’t have helped.

All of this renders the canal unable unusable as a recreational site in the up-and-coming neighborhoods it runs through: Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, and Park Slope. Under the Clean Water Act of 1972, all American bodies of water must be able to be used for recreational purposes, such as swimming, fishing, and boating.

Fish weren’t always able to survive in the water of the canal, but in May 2014, the Flushing tunnel, which connects the Gowanus to Buttermilk Channel in the East River, was activated. The tunnel pumps around 250 million gallons of fresh water into the canal daily. This gives oxygen to the stagnant waters of the canal, allowing fish to breathe. Also, the lack of a predatory presence in the canal allows small minnows to survive in vast numbers, according to Diegel.

While the fish can survive, they are still living in human waste, accumulated oil, sludge, and heavy metals, thus making them harmful to eat. Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA is bound to the mission of making the canal clean enough to fish in.

The environmental agency’s plan is a fairly simple but expensive one. It starts with dredging, or scraping, the 10 to 20 feet of oil and grease sludge from the bottom. Getting all of it would be nearly impossible; there will be more oil and grease coming in through abandoned factory tanks left behind, and from nearby restaurants dumping grease down a drain instead of properly disposing of it.

“Restaurants have sky rocketed in this area, and they have a substantial amount of grease to get rid of,” Diegel said. “And there’s a protocol for that. But as is the case with any percentage, there are people just dumping it down the drain, which gets flushed into the canal along with your roommate’s feces.”

Next step is to stabilize, or sanitize, the canal floor. A thick layer of this cleaned sediment will be laid on top of the coal tar-contaminated sediment, followed by a multi-layered “cap,” consisting of a material that will remove contamination that wells up through the sediment, then a layer of sand and gravel, a thicker layer of gravel and stone to protect from erosion, and then a layer of sand that will fill the cracks between the stones, and create a livable habitat, according to EPA documents.

In dealing with the sewage, the EPA is requiring that two retention tanks be installed in key parts of the sewage system where it is most vulnerable. They are being installed currently; one at the head of the canal, and one underneath the pools of Thomas Greene Park. These 8 million gallon tanks will catch the overflow from sewage system during storms, before it is discharged into the canal. According to the EPA, this will reduce the waste in the canal anywhere from 50 percent to 74 percent.

While this plan will, when executed, clean the canal drastically, there will still be work to be done. Diegel has been mapping the canal’s history to the 17th century, and with the maps he can see the changes in the canal’s size throughout its history. For example, according to one of his maps, the Gowanus Whole Foods is sitting on top of a very large pond that is still there, underground, today. Using this method of cartography, Diegel can pinpoint underground freshwater streams. These streams can be tapped and connected to the canal again to give it a flow of more fresh water, keeping it oxidized and moving.

Beyond that, it is up to the community. Policy must keep restaurants from improperly dumping their grease, and the same for art studios and their paint. According to Diegel, most of the heavy metals in the canal come from paint, yellow specifically, being poured down drains instead of being properly disposed.

According to an EPA responsiveness summary, there was pushback in the community against the cleaning. Fifteen businesses and 700 residents were in support of the construction of a facility that would be used to dispose of contaminated sediment from the canal, while 900 other residents locally and in other parts of the city opposed the construction of this facility, according to EPA documents.

The city Department of Environmental Protection, in documents sent to the EPA, claimed that the sewage overflow are not contributing to the contamination of the canal. City officials also state in these documents that more study needs to be done before construction of anything begins, according to the EPA responsiveness summary.

“It will all happen with time,” Diegel said assuredly. “Sustainable development is really in over here now.” According to Diegel, 90 percent of the new buildings being made in the area are working towards LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certification. This will contribute to the clean up of not only the canal but the land as a whole.

Said Diegel: “You won’t recognize this place in 20 years.”

Photo: Top, Alexa Gautier enjoys the view at Gowanus Canal.(Sean Egan)

By JHERELLE BENN

The president of Brooklyn began the morning in a pair of swim trunks.

Eric Adams was in the pool at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights to advocate safe swimming. His schedule for Sunday, Oct. 18 led him into a pair of sneakers as he joined hundreds of young athletes in a march across the Brooklyn Bridge calling for greater access to safe spaces for youth sports. He went to a community cookout where he wore a polo shirt and his signature smile. There was another change of clothing for an emergency hospital visit to encourage a dear friend fighting for his life and then a funeral to give a proclamation, honoring someone who had lost hers.

It is for this reason, he said, that he keeps a suit and tie with casual pants in the car just in case he needs to speak on a last-minute panel or give a keynote speech at one of the many events happening in the busy borough of Brooklyn.

Adams, the first African-American to become Brooklyn borough president, is a man of many outfits. “My day is really defined in the attire. The constant switching of attire to fit where I’m going and what I’m going to do,” he said. “And that diverse attire is reflective of the diverse information I need to know and how I need to be present in the moment to speak to the people that I’m speaking with.”

Adams has become a genial and popular spokesman for Brooklyn, but no change of clothing can help him he walk the difficult line between encouraging the development that is reshaping Brooklyn – as his talkative predecessor Marty Markowitz did – and addressing the fear of gentrification that resounds among the black constituents whose support launched him to higher office.

Earlier this month the Brooklyn Borough Board joined boards in Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan in voting against Mayor Bill de Blasio’s rezoning plans, which would allow higher-density development in many neighborhoods to encourage construction of affordable housing. Opponents say the housing envisioned under the plan say it isn’t really affordable and that it would contribute to the displacement that gentrification causes. Comptroller Scott Stringer issued a report asserting that the rezoning plan could displace as many as 50,000 residents of East New York.

“By voting with our recommendations today, we’re saying ‘No’ to the city plan,” Adams said at the Brooklyn Borough Board meeting on Dec. 1.

Adams sounded more pro-development in an interview with the Commercial Observer in March.

“I think that East New York and Brownsville really offer some gems, if we just go and develop there. If we [met] infrastructure needs, we would see a great deal of development,” he said.

Last year he released a report that targeted East New York, Broadway Junction, and Coney Island for development of affordable housing. The report recommended that 600 affordable housing units be built in the Broadway Junction area alone.

A First for African Americans

Ron Howell, a journalism professor at Brooklyn College who has written extensively on African Americans in Brooklyn politics, said that Adamsput his name in the history book of Brooklyn when he was elected borough president.”

Howell is the grandson of Brooklyn’s first black elected official, Bertram L. Baker, who won a seat in the Assembly in 1948 and was recognized as the borough’s black political boss.

“For 30 years, black activists had been trying to get a black person elected to that office,” said Howell.

Last year Howell organized a panel at Brooklyn College to discuss gentrification in Bedford-Stuyvesant. At this panel Alicia Boyd, founder of The Movement to Protect the People, spoke out against black elected officials, including the borough president. She said the black politicians weren’t protecting black residents from being driven out of their neighborhoods by the rising rents that gentrification is causing.

“We got a black borough president. They put him there so he can sell out the black community all throughout Brooklyn,” Boyd said. “We need to start demanding better for ourselves.”

As is the case for many of the city’s elected officials, Adams’ campaign fund relies heavily on real estate donors. The Commercial Observer reported that, “Those associated with the real estate industry made up more of Mr. Adams’ campaign donations of any other industry.” Shortly after becoming borough president Adams hired Anthony Lolli, a real estate executive, to be his adviser.

Responding to questions raised about his loyalty to his black constituents, Adams says his diverse experience is what qualifies and prepares him to serve as president of such a diverse borough.

Bold and Outspoken

Adams was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn on September 1, 1960. He was one of six children and as a boy, death and poverty were a part of everyday life. “It’s amazing how you could become so accustom to violence and conditions,” Adams said. He remembers making a game out of guessing who was shot the night before. The rodents were their “little pets and toys and projects.” He was in the third grade when his family moved to Jamaica, Queens, where he had a life-changing run-in with the police.

As Adams recounted in an article he wrote for The New York Times last year, he was beaten by police officers when he was 15. He was arrested for minor crimes that night and taken to the basement of the 103rd Precinct where he endured repeated kicks to the groin. “Out of every part of my body, that’s what they targeted,” Adams wrote. He urinated blood for seven days after that.

It was an attack on his manhood, his pride and, he said, the color of his skin. Adams kept the secret with him, staying silent about the incident until adulthood but the experience had started a fire in him. “I didn’t want any more children to go through what I endured, so I sought to make change from the inside by joining the Police Department.”

Before becoming a politician Adams served in the Police Department for 22 years. As an officer, he noticed that the people he arrested were getting younger and younger. He could see that city agencies were failing urban youth. The stop-and-frisk policy was particularly upsetting to Adams. “It was that policy that millions of young people were being stopped and searched and frisked, degraded, demoralized, and negatively impacted,” Adams said. “It’s horrific to be stopped by this symbol of authority when you did nothing wrong at all. It makes you feel as though you are illegal just based on your existence.”

In 1995 Adams co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care along with other African-American law enforcement officers. They sought to make sure fair policing was being practiced. According to Adams, “We wanted to be the conscience of policing.”

The group’s outspokenness encouraged the Vulcan Society, an association made up of African-American firefighters, to push harder for blacks to be hired in the Fire Department, according to Paul Washington, former president of the society.

Washington said he mimicked Adams’ example with 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. “They were just like us,” he said. He was inspired by the way Adams used the media and followed with a similar strategy to bring attention to discriminatory hiring practices within the Fire Department.

The Vulcan Society won a lawsuit against the Fire Department, with a federal judge naming a monitor to oversee a new entrance exam and other hiring practices in the agency.

Adams continued working his way up the ranks, becoming a police captain. He was elected to the State Senate in 2006. His district includes Brownsville, Crown Heights, East Flatbush, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, South Slope, and Sunset Park. As a New York state senator Adams tackled issues such as the stop-and-frisk policy, illegal guns, and marriage equality (which he voted in favor of).

As a legislator Adams was bold and outspoken. Back in 2012 he joined a group of senators and Assembly members who wore hoodies to the legislative chambers to protest of the death of Travyon Martin, a black teen shot to death by a neighborhood watchman in Florida.

“I have a son; he looks like Trayvon,” Adams said during the demonstration.

Professor Moses Davies, who teaches a black political identity course at Brooklyn College, said of Adams that “in terms of being vocal about black issues, not many black politicians are that vocal.”

He added, “Because they are politicians, most of them try to play it safe. They don’t want anything to have to do with creating controversy and most of them are looking to advance.”

But Adams took his spot on a new stage when he was elected borough president a year later in 2013; his constituency was borough-wide, not from a heavily minority section of the borough.

As a result, he has faced much criticism for his positions on development. His answer is that the diversity of this borough is what’s important.

According to Adams, “Each change of attire also comes with a change of approach and knowledge of the people I’m communicating with.

“Diverse clothing for a diverse borough with diverse issues.”

By REZA MALEK

For 20-year-old James Dillard, a business major at Columbia University, Harlem is the place to be. Looking for a place to move into after he graduates, Dillard is considering Harlem as one his primary locations.

“It’s the place to be right now. Harlem is a growing area of New York City and everyone is moving there,” said Dillard, who is from Boston and lives in Morningside Heights. “Everything is changing, and there’s just so much culture and history in Harlem, there’s no where else like it in the city.”

Harlem has long been known as the capital of black urban America. But a walk down Malcolm X Boulevard – where signs on longtime stores say “FOR RENT,” “STORE CLOSED,” and “OUT OF BUSINESS” – shows that a shift is accelerating.

Many expect that Columbia University’s plan to expand its campus will speed the process and transform the historic neighborhood. While that is forcing out many longtime black residents, newcomers see the changes as a great benefit.

“It’s the happening place in New York City,” said Mehdi Bozorgmehr, a sociology professor at City College of New York. “There’s been a huge injection of wealth into Harlem and it’ll attract the upper class or upper-middle class from all over the city to want to live there.”

The planned Columbia campus “will hopefully do great things for that neighborhood,” Bozogmehr said. “Yes, some will have to leave, but this is what happens when neighborhoods change.”

New restaurants and businesses have started to move into Harlem neighborhoods in anticipation of a new wave of residents. Ristorante Settepani, an upscale restaurant known for its Italian and Mediterranean cuisine and stylish atmosphere, opened recently right in the heart of Harlem on 120th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard.

Thomas Ortiz, a waiter at Ristorante Settepani, said the restaurant added a lot to the neighborhood. “It shows with the kind of people walking in,” Ortiz said. “Harlem is definitely going through a sort of gentrification. A lot of money is coming in and it’s showing with the rent prices, people moving in, and the whole vibe of Harlem.”

Central and West Harlem, more specifically 110th to 125th streets from Morningside Drive to Malcolm X Boulevard, and Columbia University’s upcoming Manhattanville Campus from 125th to 134th streets from Broadway to 12th Avenue, have already seen a great deal of gentrification.

According to the American Community Survey, in 2008, for the first time since the 1930s, fewer than half of residents were black – 40 percent at the time.

In 2000, the population of central Harlem was no more than 7 percent white in any census tract. By 2013, the lowest percentage of white population in an area of central Harlem was 13 percent, and the highest was 31 percent, according to census data from the American Community Survey.

“Everyone knows the neighborhood is changing,” said Emmanuel Torres, a junior at Columbia who is roommates with Dillard.

Over time, the increasing investment in Harlem has led to rising rent, and that increase is what inevitably forces out people.

“It’s when these changes happen that people from the outside start to move into these new developed neighborhoods in Harlem,” said William Gibbons, chief of reference at the City College of New York library.

In 2009, 25 percent of owner-occupied housing units in central Harlem were valued more than $1 million. Four years later, that increased to 32.5 percent.

From 2009 to 2013, median house values for all owner occupied housing units increased from $612,625 to $735,757.

One building in particular, 303 W. 118 St. at Frederick Douglass Boulevard, was listed last year at $4.3 million, becoming the most expensive residential homes in the neighborhood. It is a sign of what could be in store for the neighborhood.

These developments are the reason so many small businesses in the local community are being forced to either move away from the neighborhood, or close down.

One restaurant in particular, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, was forced to move from its West 131st Street location to its new home on 125th Street and 12th Avenue. Its relocation was part of Columbia University’s effort to help businesses in the Manhattanville area to find new spaces within the same community as its own developments continued on the 17 acres that will soon become Columbia’s new campus.

Michelle Gonzalez, a waitress at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, said that the new location has brought many positives, as well as some negatives, to the restaurant. “We lost a good amount of regular customers when we moved down here,” she said. “A lot of them moved completely. But we’re seeing a lot of new fresh faces, both in the restaurant and in the neighborhood, which is nice to see.” When asked on her thoughts about Columbia’s new campus, Gonzalez said, “it’s definitely going to do great things for the area.”

The real estate advisory firm MNS noted in its Manhattan Rental Market Report for September that Harlem saw the largest annual rental growth in the borough, with rents increasing by 19.9 percent, largely led by the continuing surge of new construction in the area.

Average studio rent with a doorman in Harlem currently stands at $2,658, whereas on the Upper West Side, the rent is just above that at $2,850, according to the MNS September 2015 report. In September 2014, a Harlem two-bedroom apartment rent was averaging at $3,465; a year later it was $4,491, an increase of 29 percent.

One store that has been able to keep up with the increase in rent prices is Lilac Nail & Spa on 111th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. “Rent has gone up in the last year or so dramatically, but it’s been a two-way street and we have more people coming in our store, so we’re lucky and it’s worked out quite well,” said store manager Sara Cordova. “I know a lot of stores around us have closed, but new businesses are coming in and it’s giving this part of Harlem a fresh new look.”

Along with the increase in rent across central Harlem, there is an increase in median household income. In 2009, the median income was $38,078, compared to the $48,909 in 2013, according to American Community Survey. However, this spike in median income also signals a change in the population, as people with higher incomes are moving in.

Columbia University’s upcoming Manhattanville Campus will gentrify and create a new kind of Harlem in the coming years. The 17-acre project, which has an estimated cost of $6 billion to $10 billion, will span from 125th to 134th streets, from Broadway to 12th Avenue, and will take nearly three decades to complete. The first building, The Jerome L. Greene Science Center, home to the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind, Brain, Behavior Institute, is to open in 2016.

However, in the eyes of many of the current residents, the university will end up tearing down everything that is currently in that 17-acre area. About 1,600 people are currently employed in this part of Manhattanville, and some 400 live there.

“Yes, I’ve seen and heard all about the new campus. I probably won’t be around to see the finished product, but it’s great for Columbia to get that space,” said Dillard. “Yeah it’s tough for those that lived and worked there, but sometimes these things happen and they’re for the best.”