
It’s Complicated
Some Brooklynites are wrestling with their own role in gentrification. Changes may be welcomed, but they come with mixed emotions for many. This week we take a walk in Bed-Stuy with 14-year-old Corrine Bobb-Semple. She’s grown up in the neighborhood and for the last few years she’s been reconciling the changes in her neighborhood with her experiences at St. Ann’s, the elite prep school in Brooklyn Heights where she is surrounded by students who are a part of the gentrification process.
We’ll meet a black homeowner and community organizer named Mark Winston Griffith who tells us how he landed in his home, and the conflicted security it affords him. We also meet Allie LaLonde and Emily Wilson, two 20-something new arrivals to Bed-Stuy who talk about how hard it can be to move outside the circle of gentrified coffee shops and bars.
And we journey back to East New York where a community of artists that has lived there for years is bracing for change. We meet Catherine Green, who started Arts East New York because there were no arts organizations in the neighborhood. Now she’s determined to let her organization, and the communities it serves, have a say in how their neighborhood is capitalized. She also introduced us to her friend, artist Rasu Jilani, who is turning the conversation away from developing economies and toward preserving ecosystems.
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Kai Wright is the Features Editor of The Nation and a reporting fellow of the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.
Rebecca Carroll is the Producer of Special Projects on Race for WNYC.
Karen Frillmann is the Enterprise Editor at WNYC News.
Co-published with WNYC Studios and The Nation. This new podcast takes an in-depth look at the gentrification of Brooklyn, and the role race plays in the process.