The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  We sit on a park bench between events on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Daniel steers clear of the word gentrification. It is not a helpful word for a politician speaking on the record—and it’s risky: too many implications, too many donors who might not like what they hear. So Daniel does not talk about gentrification, opting instead for many murky references to “it.” He uses language that’s bright and optimistic, that verges on empty—equality, democracy, opportunity. This is the mark of the politician. Squadron, like Alan Fishman, is more comfortable with the macro, the big idea, the framework, while the micro—the intricacies of self, the apartment shared with rats and feral cats, etc.—is avoided altogether. At a certain point in the conversation, you hear The Vision—the kind of thing that’s better suited to a speech than a conversation. In Squadron’s case, The Vision is intelligent and generous and sounds like a magical place I’d like to visit, where democracy reasserts itself to share power equally with capitalism:

  We’ve seen some of the ways in which as much as things change the challenges stay the same. If you look at the Chinatown community you still have a lot of the same challenges you had before with folks who don’t have basic protections because they are undocumented. On the Lower East Side, sometimes one of the big fights is to have people realize just how much need continues to exist there. More than forty thousand public housing residents, a number of immigrant communities—and so when you talk about all the changes it’s always really important to remember there are many things that aren’t changing.

  Housing is, in many ways, the existential issue for the city’s future.

  Having housing and neighborhoods that allow a broad diversity of people to make a life in this city is the greatest challenge, in my view, of the next decade. This issue is the most important issue and we are not doing nearly enough. We have more people that want to live in the city than we have room for right now. And when this has happened in the past, the city and state have been extraordinarily aggressive in figuring out policies that make it work. That must happen. If we become a city where you need to be at the top of whatever profession you’re in, or an investor, or one of the very few who live in what’s left of subsidized housing—that doesn’t work. We need more affordable housing, we need more middle-class housing, we need to think about things like workforce housing. Once upon a time there were all kinds of programs to help labor unions build and help artists have dedicated housing. And we were expanding public housing instead of desperately trying to hold on to what we already have. Because of how many people want to live in the city today, we need to deal with that.

  Currently 247,262 families are on the waiting list for public housing in New York. And the Section 8 housing program, which provides rent subsidies to low-income earners in cities across the country, has closed its waiting list: it will take more time than anyone is willing to predict to respond to the 121,999 families awaiting word on their applications in New York for that program.

  The idea that it is inevitable, that the city is going to change completely and we’re not going to be a city that’s as diverse is absolutely unacceptable. And it will mean we lose the city. The greatest thing about this city is that we have the strongest collection of energy and expertise anywhere in the world. And that means people from around the world who are coming here to be part of the great engine of opportunity, it means people from around the country who want to be a part of what New York has to offer, it means people who are born here with fewer resources but still are able to get the opportunities offered—and it means people who can live anywhere in the world and chose to live here. If it’s not all of that, we’ve lost it. And there’s a real risk of that.

  My wife and I are raising our son in Brooklyn. We see all around us how hard it is to make a life here. And it’s much harder than it used to be. That’s true for sort of everyone, whatever their background. And I think the experience of having a growing family, desperately wanting to be part of this city that we love and the challenges we see around us, is meaningful.

  As a city we need to figure out how to grow and change but we need to do it in a way that is community driven. It is possible to grow and change in a way that brings the community in instead of taking it out.

  24.

  Interstate 278 is the de facto southern border of Daniel Squadron’s district in Brooklyn. The highway is also known as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, or the BQE. It is yet another Robert Moses project—a long, winding traffic jam that, for many stretches, is elevated above the street. The overhead drone sends the stink and heat of car exhaust onto the sidewalk below and separates the 26th District from the neighborhood of Red Hook, which, in many ways, is separated from the rest of the world. Gita Nandan has lived in Red Hook for eleven years and talks about it as though it were a sleepy seaside village.

  December, January, February are the bleakest months possible. And that’s when you only see your fellow Red Hookers on the street. And then there’s some huge snowstorm and you go to the bar and you know everybody because everybody needs to get out of their house. But there aren’t people coming to Red Hook in December. The tourist events happen in June, July, August, September, and then everybody forgets about Red Hook.

  It’s waterfront and disconnected so it’s not quite like Bushwick, which feels very connected.

  Bushwick is where Gita, an architect, works at the Thread Collective. The firm describes its work as “sustainable architecture [that] explores the seams between building, city, and the environment.” We sit in the backyard behind the collective’s studio on the ground floor of a four-story, LEED-rated4 building that they own, and which they designed and renovated. Gita’s business partner, the designer for the building, lives upstairs from the studio; her kitchen features reclaimed wood from the Coney Island boardwalk. The facaade of the building, all big windows and dark ipê wood, stands in stark contrast to the rest of the block, most of which is defined by vinyl siding and Fedders air conditioner wall sleeves. The collective’s building has a solar system with enough muscle to power the first two floors, a green roof, and a rainwater collection system. The garden where we sit is surrounded by young, wiry trees, just now tall enough to stretch over the fence that encases the hideaway.

  We are gentrifiers.

  Gita laughs, revealing dimples.

  This building has been a gentrifier. We always knew in the back of our minds that there was the potential but we never really took it seriously.

  You know you can be a designer and just build what I call the Fedders buildings—like what’s across the street—you can build something like that, which is a very innocuous building. I think they’re very unsuccessful and I don’t think they do any good for the city. But at the same time they’re not symbols of gentrification. Or you can build something like we did, which is special or unique or done with design in mind. So why does that become a sign of gentrification? We don’t make any more money than your average Bushwicker. We may be in a profession but we’re at the low end of the totem pole.

  She laughs.

  So to me it’s very interesting. Why is poor architecture welcomed and interesting architecture isn’t? It’s not that it isn’t—it’s just that it’s this thing. I wish it could be wow and interesting and cool without it being the gentrifier.

  We’ve met real estate agents that use our building to show to people interested in living in Bushwick. So that’s kind of disappointing. And I don’t know how you prevent that ’cause I wouldn’t be willing to build something like that—she points across the street, in the direction of the buildings defined by the Fedders units.

  I’m not interested in that at all. And we built this building for a heartbeat. We didn’t even have the money. We could have spent another $200,000 easily and we chose not to because we didn’t have the money. And I’ll bet you that building across the street cost almost as much as this building. We didn’t pay a huge amount more. So why shouldn’t everybody get good design? Every once in a while they’ll give an arc
hitect an award because they’ve done a really beautiful job on a low-income project. And I wonder, why doesn’t everybody design like that?

  For us, it’s too bad that the design is often the symbol of what gentrification is, or that gentrification’s coming. And so it often makes people not want to do design or not want design in their neighborhood because they think that it’s associated with the pushing out of the sort of native culture. I wish we could kind of invert that thinking. I don’t know how you go about doing that other than bringing better design to the people that can’t afford it. And showing that neighborhoods can still be well designed and beautiful and accessible and still used by native cultures. And when I say native cultures I mean the people that have been there, existing.

  Gita, forty-three, has blue eyes and dark curly hair that’s giving way to gray. She teaches design at the Pratt Institute and she advised Matt Krivich and Julian Padarath on the rooftop garden at the Bowery Mission, thanks to a grant from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. She and her colleagues are also working on a Red Hook project called Lowlands, trying to improve the safety and sustainability of public housing built on ecologically vulnerable former wetlands. Red Hook pokes out into New York Harbor across from the Statue of Liberty, and in a post-Hurricane Irene, post-Hurricane Sandy world with ever more hurricanes expected, Mother Nature has become a central player in the neighborhood’s development.

  Mostly she commutes back and forth between Red Hook and Bushwick by bicycle. It’s a substantial ride—nearly seven miles—but she is used to it. Red Hook has limited bus service and no subway lines within easy reach.

  Red Hook is isolated, and that isolation slows down the gentrification considerably. It’s not like an immediate five-year turnaround type of situation.

  When I first moved there eleven years ago, I was like whoa this place is crazy. The streets were pretty desolate. You couldn’t get a head of lettuce. It was a real desert, in a way. Between now and then, it’s not radically transformed but amenities are much more available.

  I don’t want to become too gentrified or too many amenities but as a neighborhood it has to function and it’s just beginning to have enough stuff that it is functioning. When your only choices to go out to eat are the local deli, and get a horrible sandwich, or get a meal that’s one hundred dollars, those are not viable options to eat on a daily basis.

  While I think gentrification is a problem, I like to think of it as the betterment of our city, so how do you put the betterment of our city into the hands of the community. What are those structures that we could make happen? To make things much more viable. It’s hard because people would look at this as so anticapitalist but it’s totally not at all. Its pro-development, it’s still pro-jobs, it’s still pro-money. I just don’t understand, why don’t you want these people to make more money? Pay more taxes, you know? I don’t understand it.

  My neighbors moved into Red Hook in 1939. They’ve seen it all. There are people like that, in their sixties or seventies and have lived there for forty years.

  It was originally settled by really poor artists. My husband was a super poor artist. The weirdest thing about Red Hook was that they were really struggling but the houses were so cheap. A lot of them had saved $15,000, or $10,000, and they could actually buy a falling-down house, get a mortgage, pay next to nothing, and slowly fix it up.

  So these artists were coming and they’re probably the same income level as the people in the projects, maybe slightly higher. Then the professionals started coming in. An editor at Lucky magazine lives there, an editor at Vibe magazine lives there. Now there are all these professionals that live there that really skews the income and the census numbers.

  Even the professionals that live in Red Hook, they’re weird and quirky, or else they wouldn’t choose to live in such an inaccessible space. They certainly don’t live in Manhattan. They’re not choosing to live in Tribeca, which is where you think they would be living. So even though there is this income gap, it’s a different type of person that comes there, and they come together. That’s the only saving grace for it.

  There are an incredible amount of local nonprofits, given the fact that it’s so remote and it’s not a very wealthy neighborhood. There are probably twenty local nonprofit organizations that exist to help the community. It’s really about trying to see how it can be more pro-mixed-income development that incorporates affordable living situations within it. Not just this is high end and this is low income but really to create mixed income projects. Or to create a community bank. Therefore there’s more investment put back into the neighborhood. I think that is the good thing: as places get made to be more functional, in a way it makes for a situation where the higher property values could be used in a hyper-local situation where you funnel money back into the neighborhood. Development can be done so it creates jobs and those jobs are hyper-localized.

  The small business association was doing a business survey: what do you need in Red Hook? We need a hardware store where you can buy nails, a measuring tape, a bucket. We just don’t have something like that. And we have to go all the way to Downtown Brooklyn to get a pair of socks, which is kind of annoying. I mean, where do you buy socks?

  She laughs.

  Red Hook is a destination spot so people will often come and they’ll have brunch or breakfast and then they’ll wander around and they want to go window shopping so that’s what they’ll do.

  They’ll say, “Oh, look at those cool bags.”

  “Oh, look they sell sunglasses. I’ll get some sunglasses.”

  So you know it’s like this weird little shopping thing that people do.

  There’s one row of shops that we call “unnecessary row,” and it’s right where I live. It’s Dikeman Street to Coffey Street. There’s a really fancy bag store, a really fancy jewelry store, there’s a tchotchke store. And I know all the owners, they’re nice people, and they’re all local Red Hookers, but, you know, we don’t need these things in order to make a neighborhood function. It’d be typical for those things to come later and the places you need would come first but it’s been the total inverse. These things that you don’t need are the typical symbol of gentrification. They’ve managed to subsist but I don’t know how.

  Definitely the amenities for the local residents aren’t being considered at all.

  It’s a food desert so there’s a really high rate of obesity and diabetes and asthma, and it has disproportionately affected the projects.

  Red Hook is really divided. Eleven thousand people live in Red Hook and seven thousand live in the projects—and it’s the largest projects in the city—and the other three thousand or so are on this sort of white side—or whatever—I would say it is primarily white. There’s a huge income disparity and everyone’s incredibly aware of it. And after Hurricane Sandy people are trying to address that but issues of gentrification on top of that just don’t help.

  On Lorraine Street by the projects there are shops, all owned by the same property owners, and they’re in really rickety shape and they didn’t survive the storm well and they’re haphazardly put together, not to code and all sorts of things. They’re pretty trashy. And there’s been a desire to upgrade them a little bit. There was a deli on the corner of Lorraine and Richards, and it was one of those places where in the evening you could only order through the window and there’s bulletproof glass and it was a real symbol of the old neighborhood. And after the storm they were able to rebuild and get funding and gut renovate the whole space and now it looks like a lovely, nice, typical deli. It’s lit up at night. You can walk in.

  That to me is like a symbol that we’re in a safer neighborhood now. We don’t need that bulletproof glass. Wealthier people will feel like they can live here now. It’s often a domino effect and it’s this vicious cycle. Right? You try to make something better, it raises the prices. Then in order to build there you have to raise the rents, and it’s just this vicious cycle, and I don’t know how you stop it.r />
  I teach at Pratt and we’ve been doing this green infrastructure class that is about storm water management and how to get the city to deal better with these increased storms and heavier rainfalls, and often green infrastructure and beautification of neighborhoods is looked at as gentrification. And it does often bring higher property values but at the same time, something necessary like storm water capture, which is being done in these beautiful ways with these planters and these streetscapes, is thought about as beautification of a neighborhood, which means higher property values, which means that a lot of people aren’t going to be able to afford to live there. So it has all these other domino effects that were never the intended consequences.

  There’s also this issue of transportation—transportation is lacking in Red Hook. Obviously if you’re a nurse living in the projects and you have to commute to Midtown the commute is hellacious. But the lack of transportation also creates this island, it’s a demarcation: Are you going to make this commitment or not? If we were to increase the transportation, which would be helpful and necessary for all the people that live there, does that open this floodgate to transform the neighborhood? Imagine if there was a subway. Wall Street to Red Hook is actually really fast. If you can afford to take the Battery Tunnel every day, and you have a car, you can be there in seven minutes. If that were to really open up more you can imagine how totally destructive that might be.

  So it’s solving the problems of the residents and trying to deal with that before trying to deal with all the problems of gentrification. And you’d try to stem that with other tools.

  One of my colleagues at Pratt, he was really upset that I’d even consider that maybe we don’t want any more transportation. Maybe the transportation we have is okay. He feels like you can’t say no because of the consequences that it could potentially bring. But I say you kind of have to control that situation.