Taking Over and Talking Back: Theater as a Forum on Gentrification

I think that we've criminalized poverty in the United States and I think we need to have criminalized greed. I think if we were successful in doing that, it would change the entire dynamic in the conversation.
—Michelle de la Uz

The All City Tour

E-flyer for "Taking Over: The All City Tour" by Danny Hoch Click here to enlarge

In the fall of 2008, Brooklyn theater artist Danny Hoch performed “Taking Over,” free of charge, in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, prior to its run at the Public Theater in Manhattan. The one-man show chronicles the state of gentrification and displacement in New York City, “how people take over neighborhoods and how absurdly funny and absurdly heartbreaking it is at the same time.” Says Hoch:

I find that if I put conflicting opinions within one character, the character becomes richer. So it’s not just one character has an opinion but one character maybe contradicts him or herself, and it makes it more complex.… It starts to make the audience question themselves, and ultimately, at the end of the day, that's what you want people to do in the theater, is question themselves and not just point the finger.

Hoch wanted the people on the front lines of gentrification, including those in his own neighborhood of Williamsburg, to be the first to see the show in New York and talk back to it. His nine characters sparked a lively call and response with audiences — during the show and after. At the Williamsburg performance, sponsored by el Puente cultural center at a local high school, close to 1,000 people laughed, cried and actively engaged in Hoch’s stories. After the show, el Puente Founder/President and CEO Luis Garden Acosta told the story of activism in the community.

We led a boycott in this very building, to shut this school down and create the wonderful school we have today. I know that we changed this system. I know that where there were no trees, we reforested. I know we created parks in impossible places.…What I know is that our people have been courageous, and have struggled, and have maintained their dignity, have changed the school system, have created parks, have made it livable. And now we’re being chased out.

Evelyn Cruz, a longtime resident of the Southside of Williamsburg and community liaison for an elected official, reflected on both the history of the community and the present challenges:

We fought poverty, violence and blight, and we made the Southside a better place to live. We are now strangers in our own neighborhood, and it’s painful.… Gentrification doesn’t make us enemies. We need to share our commonalities. We need to work together, and unite.

Throughout the “All City Tour” people enthusiastically participated in post-show discussions, telling their own stories and talking about how they could stay in their neighborhoods and make a difference. These were no ordinary theater audiences: They were multigenerational and diverse in race and class, reflecting the demographics of the city.

And these were no ordinary times: The tour took place during a period of economic crisis and heightened politics and activism in the city and the country: one month before the 2008 presidential election and just as the New York City Mayor and City Council extended their own term limits without a public vote. Local organizing, such as an affordable-housing campaign in Long Island City Queens, brought additional context and urgency to the dialogues.

Housing is a big problem in Queens, I realize from my life here.… People are not money. We spend more than 50 percent on our rent, so how can we live? People cannot afford their medicine, their food and their housing.… When I first came here, I didn’t speak English very well. I couldn’t get a good job. So that’s why we lived in a basement and there was no heat … at that time, I also didn’t know how I could find a home. My husband’s income was very low. I was two months pregnant, and I lost my baby because I was so sick. So this is not only my story, as long as people are living in basements and shared apartments. Affordable housing in Queens has become a fight in my life, and I must win this” (Queens resident).

The Hip-Hop Theater Festival (HHTF), founded by Hoch in 2000, produced the All City Tour in partnership with the Public Theater. The Festival invigorates the fields of theater and Hip-Hop by nurturing the creation of innovative work within the Hip-Hop aesthetic, by presenting and touring American and international artists whose work addresses the issues relevant to the Hip-Hop generation, and by serving young, urban communities through outreach and education that celebrates contemporary language and culture. Clyde Valentin, executive director of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, explained the Festival’s motivation for the tour:

It is clear that both destructive and beneficial consequences of gentrification do exist, but without a forum to resolve and negotiate them, New Yorkers can only play out their convictions in the political arena (where they are unlikely to be heard) or in the streets (where the outcome can be damaging, public and made loud and clear, but ultimately ineffective). Perhaps in an era long-gone, such issues would be discussed in churches, town hall meetings and community centers attended by our lawmakers and politicians. Since this is not the case, we aim to examine gentrification in the theater.

HHTF partnered with the Pratt Center for Community Development to develop and organize the community dialogues, working with local venues and sponsors: Laguardia Performing Arts Center (part of Laguardia Community College) in Queens, Hostos Community College and Bronx Council on the Arts in the Bronx, and el Puente in Brooklyn.

Each dialogue began with opening remarks by artists, activists and community residents. In Brooklyn, the performance and discussion literally hit close to home. Luis Garden-Acosta, Evelyn Diaz, Clyde Valentin (who moderated the dialogue in both Brooklyn and the Bronx) and artist Deborah Masters, 475 Kent Ave Tenants Association, catalyzed a powerful sharing of neighborhood stories about displacement, activism and the human impacts of policy.

In the Bronx, the discussion began with Charles Rice Gonzalez, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD); Siddhartha Sanchez, Office of Congressman José E. Serrano; Deirdre Scott, Studio Museum of Harlem; and Bill Aguado, Bronx Council on the Arts. Said Aguado:

It’s not about the real-estate developer making a profit, it’s about creating livable and sustainable communities that are inclusive, that allow young people to grow up, go to school and come back.… We have people moving back, young professionals, Latinos, African-American young folks and white people moving back. We want them all. But we don’t want to exclude those of us who have been here for a number of years … those of us who fought the fight when no one else was fighting the fight.

Two audience members had an exchange about who was “reaping the benefits of gentrification.”

We bought the house in '77 and we lived there throughout the bad times, and we lived there through the gentrification.… We sold that house for $850,000, a house that we paid $2,500 for. We moved out at the height of the market.… So I'm living the benefits of that gentrification.… It’s a strange irony.

My mother’s on welfare still, and I’m trying to help her out.… I’m not angry at you, sir, for reaping the benefits, but some of us are still struggling.

In Queens, the discussion addressed affordable housing, the survival of small businesses, and immigration. Steven Hitt, LaGuardia Community College; Sheila Lewandowski, The Chocolate Factory, a member of the community board; Richard Lee, Asian Americans for Equality; Jon Furlong, Habitat for Humanity-NYC, and organizer, Farzana Morshed got it started with examples of civic engagement and community organizing. Lee, Furlong and Morshed were members of Queens for Affordable Housing, a coalition of community-based groups coordinated by the Pratt Center.

The Pratt Center works for a more just, equitable and sustainable city for all New Yorkers, by empowering communities to plan for and realize their futures. As part of Pratt Institute, it leverages professional skills — especially planning, architecture and public policy — to support community-based organizations in their efforts to improve neighborhood quality of life, attack the causes of poverty and inequality, and advance sustainable development. For Elena Conte, organizer of Public Policy Campaigns at the Pratt Center, the performances provided a new opportunity to engage people in strategies to increase affordable housing. Speaking about the Queens performance and dialogue, Conte remarked:

This is an opportunity to say: Here’s this piece of art talking about gentrification, and here’s a development project that is going to accelerate gentrification, in this exact neighborhood.… What can we do? How can we use these performances as a chance to come together as a community and say that everyone should have a place here?

The Pratt Center’s Arts & Community Change Initiative works locally and nationally to connect arts, culture and equitable development in order to strengthen low-income neighborhoods and make systemic change. At the time of the All City Tour, the Initiative was also organizing a series of nationally focused roundtables around such issues as community recovery and “naturally occurring cultural districts.” Sessions at the annual conferences for Imagining America and Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA, organized with the Art and Social Justice Funders Workgroup) explored gentrification in the context of institutions of higher education and grantmaking. The GIA session, held at el Puente, incorporated a theater piece, “Happy Nail Flower,” by Radha Blank, to spark the discussion.

The Community Arts Convening and Commissioning Project supported the Pratt Center’s collaboration with the Hip-Hop Theater Festival to organize and document the dialogues during the All City Tour (and two additional dialogues at the Public Theater). The Pratt Center identified David Freedlander — a Greenpoint Brooklyn-based former arts journalist and current managing editor of City Hall News — to write about the All City Tour. His article, “Gentrification Blues,” published in American Theatre Magazine, focused on gentrification in New York and his response to the Hoch play.

In years past, certainly no one would have guessed that the biggest problem facilities in 2009 would be that too many people with cultural and actual capital want to live in them. That cities do have this problem doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be mitigated — with more affordable housing, inclusionary zoning and efforts to improve neighborhoods before they gentrify — but the attendant benefits of gentrification shouldn’t be lost, either. In fact, it is one of the more hopeful phenomena to have happened in the past 20 years. This reverse migration has had some real effects across the globe—cities, for one thing, with their density and ease of public transportation, are now vastly more sustainable than the suburbs that surround them.

With this essay we intend to extend the documentation to include the community voices and to reflect on issues raised in the dialogues and the Pratt Center’s related work. The Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens conversations were videotaped with support from Fractured Atlas, and the Public theater conversation was audio taped.

A Broader Frame and a Shifting Narrative: Art, Culture and Equitable Development

One of Danny Hoch’s most nuanced characters in “Taking Over” is himself, an artist troubled by his complicity in gentrification, experiencing an existential moment in a Whole Foods Market. In one of the dialogues, Radha Blank spoke about the complexity of the topic, describing the generations of gentrification in Brooklyn, and raising the issues of intention and community engagement of the gentrifiers.

My parents were part of a group of black and brown artists that moved into Williamsburg in the late '60s and early '70s. So they were gentrifiers. But their intention was very different. I mean it was a different type of presence. They were really interested in engaging the local community. So, there was this new energy but there was this investment in who was already living there. A lot of people don't even know that some of the first artists in Williamsburg were black and brown, painters, jazz musicians…. There was a gentrification on top of the gentrification, on top of the gentrification… the identity of the person who's gentrifying the neighborhood has changed but most importantly, their intention has changed.

Danny Hoch, Radha Blank and others involved in the dialogues such as Charles Rice Gonzalez, Sheila Lewandowski and Deborah Masters are examples of artists who are engaged in their communities. In Masters’, case she was a long-time resident who has joined with neighborhood activists fighting for the environment and public health of the community. She also played a key role in organizing artists who were thrown out of a building in Williamsburg on one of the coldest nights of the winter. After they regained access to the building, the landlord raised her studio rent to an unaffordable $4,500 per month. The day of the el Puente performance and dialogue, Masters was in the middle of moving to upstate New York, where she found several other artists who could no longer afford to live in New York City. The following year, at the Grantmakers in the Arts dialogue, she reflected:

We have all worked so hard to improve our community and I feel that that work has gone unappreciated. I’m concerned that there will be no more Hispanic population to attend el Puente or win the title at the Roberto Clemente ball field. There will certainly be no more artists (of course we can find another undeveloped community). We have suggested to the mayor that artist and low-income housing be developed in the 33 apartment buildings that have gone bankrupt. This could be a situation where the city, or the mayor, could admit that policy mistakes were made. He could embrace this concept and redirect these buildings for these low- and medium-income populations. It’s time to revert to real populations in NYC.

While many artists are displaced by gentrification, arts and culture can also be its leading edge. In Williamsburg, newcomer artists can be polarized from long-time residents — with differences in race and class increasing the divide. There is both a perception and a reality of artists being disconnected from their neighborhoods. This was described in various ways during the dialogues: Sometimes artists are transitory (or perceived to be transitory), they don’t identify their community by geography, or their activism is limited to the arts (and their advocacy for arts space may even pit them against potential allies). Sometimes they have good intentions but haven’t yet found a way to get involved. A participant in the Public Theater dialogue noted that it took him awhile to figure out how to connect in a significant manner:

So I am more on the gentrifier side in Williamsburg for about ten years. I thought it was a wonderful, wonderful play. It does seem that I'm left with two feelings and one is a very powerful visceral emotion.… But I'm also left with another question. Certainly a lot of people are transient, but a lot of people aren't and don't necessarily know how to access community resources.… It might be interesting to also hear ways that new New Yorkers can also access their community, join the community boards, join foundations and things that they believe in.

From a field perspective, when arts and culture are typically recognized in relationship to community development, it is often outside of a context of equitable development, cultural pluralism and social justice. Creative-economy models seek to generate economic growth, but rarely involve a critical analysis of who they serve and who they exclude, whose culture is valued and whose vision drives the development. They often perpetuate cultural and community hierarchies, with low-income communities not having the opportunity to determine for themselves how arts and culture can best strengthen their communities, how development will be shaped or how benefits will be shared. On the other hand, many equitable development and social-justice approaches to urban planning fail to understand the importance of arts and culture, and in some cases have a knee-jerk reaction against artists that prevents them from engaging with creativity, meaning, and cultural vitality — essential components of community life.

WNYC Halted Development Map. Courtesy wnyc.org Click here to visit Brian Lehrer's interactive development map.

At the time of the All City Tour, New York City’s economic narrative was shifting from one of economic prosperity with unequally shared benefits, to one of economic crisis. Wall Street was in the news, but the neighborhoods visited by the tour took some of the hardest blows: Lost jobs, low wages, foreclosures, cuts to already strained public services, high energy and commuting costs and still unaffordable housing combined to stack the odds against opportunity and shared prosperity. The skeletons of half-built high- rise condominiums remain as ghostly reminders of a housing boom that offered most people no hope of housing. A map of halted development created by the Brian Lehrer show (and his listeners) on public radio WNYC illustrates the extent of this “uncommon economic indicator”: http://blogs.wnyc.org/lehrer/2009/07/15/halted-development.

Brooklyn City Council member Brad Lander has also created http://www.stalleddevelopment.com an interactive web tool to address the vacant, stalled or abandoned development sites in his district. He is asking community members to help the effort by viewing the pictures and information on the sites, providing feedback, tracking the progress of each site, and supporting a three-point plan "to convert local blight to community benefit".

Creativity can be a powerful form of organizing communities from the bottom up. The economic crisis gives us a chance to rethink the role of creativity in making a vibrant economy and civil society (Jeff Chang).

In March of 2009, when the news was thick with stories of the economic crisis, the Pratt Center’s Arts & Community Change Initiative brought together a cross-sector national conversation about the role of arts and culture in economic stimulus and community recovery. This conversation included an extraordinary mix of people from such groups as the Service Workers International Union (SEIU), League of Young Voters, Center for Rural Strategies, LISC, Humphrey Center, Hip-Hop Theater Festival, Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media, Policy Link, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Jobs with Justice, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and Public Allies along with writers such as Jeff Chang and Arlene Goldbard.

We framed the conversation like this:

In a time of crisis, there is a tendency to focus inward and circle the wagons to survive. Here we want to do the opposite: to expand and reframe the conversation about economic stimulus and national service, so that arts, culture and media are part of a greater vision for equitable, democratic, and culturally vital communities. Our frame is not the survival of the sector — be it arts or community development — but rather the role of cultural vitality in the survival and revitalization of our communities.

Roundtable participants spoke about how they could work together across sectors and with new allies, and the nuts and bolts of effective partnerships. Said Dee Davis, director of the Center for Rural Strategies:

We have to re-imagine who our allies are. Instead of pitting rural and urban against each other as if they are opposed to each other, it is time to frame a different set of alliances. If we can get to common purpose we can craft a common policy.

We discussed how arts and culture could become an integral part of policymaking on issues of concern, such as sustainable development, immigration and jobs, and what could be learned from the lessons of the WPA of the Great Depression, CETA in the ‘70s, and programs following September 11, 2001, that incorporated the arts. How can we develop an affirmative framing for and articulation of the integration of arts and culture in community recovery and social change. How might this incorporate new stories and images that communicate what is possible and how to get there? Clyde Valentin noted:

We can’t recover what we never gained in the first place. So we must be aware that change, and not recovery, is what we seek. The word "change" should not be the domain of the perpetual campaign we see emerging before us and the word "renaissance" does not have to be an era that transformed the Western Civilization 500 years ago. Rather, it can be the engine we all seek at this moment to push past crisis and into a more joyous, enlightened future.

The roundtable also considered the shift we need to take to have a proactive and propositional role in making change when we have grown accustomed to being reactive. Claudine Brown, director of the Arts and Culture program of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, described the power of art to make this happen:

This is the time when the country needs a new spirit. Artists can help us to imagine that new and different world. As the recovery process proceeds, artists are needed to teach our children to dream and to create solutions for a sustainable world.

This rich conversation has continued in several other contexts: a White House briefing on art, community, social justice, and national recovery (downloadable here as a pdf) sessions at Grantmakers in the Arts and the Community Arts Convening in Monterey, CA; Jeff Chang’s cover story in The Nation, “The Creativity Stimulus” and in “Art and the Public Purpose,” a new framework, developed by the Cultural Policy Working Group; to name a few.

From Dialogue to Activism

It’s a question of equity, it’s a question of justice, and right now, if you don’t get involved, we’re going to have neighborhoods and communities that don’t look anything like how we remember them (Jon Furlong, New York Habitat for Humanity).

In his New York Times review of “Taking Over,” “Endangered Species in Gentrifying Williamsburg,” critic Ben Brantley described the show as “pulsing, seamless studies of character clashing with context, of people learning to sink or swim in suddenly unfamiliar waters.” Both the title and content of this review reinforce the idea of gentrification as a force of nature over which people have little control. This was often reflected in a play that powerfully illustrated how gentrification pushed out long-time residents, and in the painful stories of displacement that people told afterward.

However, while the community stories were filled with anger and despair, they were also about action: boycotts, coalition building, organizing and civic participation. They reflected the recognition that policies support inequitable development, and policies can be changed.

For me, one of the biggest problems with gentrification is community erosion. It’s the person who doesn’t see; it’s the person who doesn’t know you’re there. It’s you not knowing who your neighbor is. This may sound like a little thing, but I don’t think it is. It’s harder for people to make decisions that are detrimental to a neighborhood if they know who you are.… So, it is important to be involved directly in your community.

The question is, “Do you still want to live here?” This isn’t the New York I grew up in … the city is this organism, and it’s always going to change. What part are you going to play in that change? Are you going to sit around living in the past, or are you going to let a bunch of people come through and change it for you?

In the Queens dialogue, artist and Chocolate Factory Executive Director Sheila Lewandowski had an exchange with performer and radio producer Judith Sloan about both the need and the challenges of getting involved:

I think it’s very important not to stop trying. I joined my community board because I saw some of my artist friends leaving, I saw artist studios closing, I saw the local businesses trying to keep open and being replaced by something else. If anything, I want to see you there at the community board meetings. Get involved. It’s not easy, but it’s easier with more people than with less (Lewandowski).

[My husband and I] got involved in this housing battle, going door to door in Queens. I hear you say, go to your community board; go to your city councilperson. We did a lot of organizing, and we got vilified when we went before the community board. People get really scared when they’re fighting development, bulldozers, all the other little predatory ways they get pushed out (Sloan).

What you’re saying, that’s part of the reason why I joined the community board. Fear was a big part of it.… So, don’t let fear stop you. Join me so I’m not the only one, so you’re not the only one.… We’re not going to stop all the problems, but we can make a difference with some of the problems (Lewandowski).

From the Emotional Power of Story to Policy Change

Following the All City Tour, the Pratt Center, Hip-Hop Theater Festival and Fractured Atlas joined the Public Theater in organizing two post-show discussions during Hoch’s run there. The first, like those during the All City Tour, started with people’s stories. This proved to be much more challenging in a formal theater context, where the audience’s stories were as much about being a gentrifier as being gentrified.

We chose to focus the second dialogue on what can be done by connecting activism and policy change. It took place in early December 2008, just one month after the election, and I was the moderator.

We introduced it as follows:

A lot of times people feel like development or the economic crisis or policy-making is something that gets done to you. Where you basically have no control or say. We wanted to put together a panel that responds, “You do have a say in it. And there's a number of ways you can have a say in it. And some of those ways are through community organizing, or through equitable development or through policy-making that's actually accountable to communities.”

We invited people who represented both activism and policymaking to start the conversation. Policymakers included Joe Lentol, the state assemblyman for Williamsburg and a strong supporter of the arts, who has lived in the area all his life and experienced both the benefits and challenges of gentrification. Melissa Mark-Viverito, a New York City Council member, was formerly a labor and community organizer. Activists included Michelle de la Uz, director of the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC), which offers practical strategies for affordable housing and living-wage jobs, Demaris Reyes, from Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), which organizes around housing in the neighborhood near the Public Theater, and Brad Lander, then director of the Pratt Center, who has since been elected to the City Council. They all found a place of recognition in the play, and responded to its powerful stories.

I'm council member Melissa Mark-Viverito. I represent East Harlem, part of the South Bronx, and part of the Upper West Side in Manhattan. And our community is very much living gentrification. And when you're seeing it (in the show), from the perspective as an observer and through the characters, you really are sensing the turmoil, inner turmoil my community is living, of the constituents that I represent. We have to win the fight against some of these faulty policies that really do speed gentrification in a negative way to squeeze our communities. So you're involved in that. But then, seeing it from an observer perspective, it's very touching, very moving, very powerful and it just seems a little more real.

Demaris Reyes, an organizer on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and a public-housing resident also felt a strong connection to characters in Hoch’s show.

We are not being gentrified, we are gentrified. We are literally fighting for whatever space is left. The very reason that many people want to come to our community is the very thing that's changing. We find ourselves in this daily struggle where we're trying to be true to the history and the heritage of this community, which was an entryway for people from all over the world. So, we feel very strongly that we don't have a right to say that people cannot come to our community. But, we do feel that we have a right to say that we should not be excluded from that community.

Brad Lander named the challenge of moving from the powerful emotions of the play’s personal stories to building the power needed to shift policy, the “disconnect between the way I was hit in the gut tonight and what it would take to try to move these public policies forward.” At the Pratt Center he led public policy campaigns resulting in New York’s adoption of a new "inclusionary zoning" program promoting affordable housing in new developments in Greenpoint-Williamsburg and the West Side of Manhattan, as well as a citywide reform of the City's outdated 421-a property tax program that closed loopholes that benefited developers but not communities.

He described two significant problems related to gentrification:

Gentrification certainly has some positive impacts in a neighborhood, but I think it has two different undeniable problems. One is there are the cultural aspects of it. The ways in which the character of the neighborhood and the culture and identity of people that have been there a long time are erased. But a second, overlapping but different problem is just the way in which it's a fulcrum for inequality.… It would be easier to feel positive about the up aspects of gentrification if you believed that the improvement in public schools actually served the diverse people in the neighborhood.… but honestly, the schools micro-segregate so rapidly that I'm not sure there's a moment when they're as diverse as the neighborhood that surrounds them.

I think it has to take a step beyond wanting to make the neighborhood better. There are a lot of great groups that want to improve their neighborhood and ally with others who want to improve it. But, I'd also like to figure out how to address together those deeper inequalities that are expressed through gentrification. And that is not easy. We're going to have to build something a little more like a movement that has the power.

Lander offered the example of a demonstration happening that day where 1,000 people got together uptown to call for the repeal of vacancy decontrol, the main loophole that's destroying rent stabilization in New York City. For him, rent stabilization is “probably the number one most important policy that makes it possible for people that have been here to stay here year after year.… New York is one of the only cities in the country where it's left and we're going to lose it if we don't mobilize politically to save it.”

Assemblyman Joe Lentol raised the issue of politics,noting his excitement over the election ofBarak Obama the month before and hopes for a newly Democratic state senate:

I don't want to talk about politics, but politics has to enter into the discussion, because you're not going to get anywhere with change unless you have the right politicians in office.… So we can do some solid things in order to change the rent control laws in our city. We may even have a shot to save the artists.

Lentol was the co-sponsor of a bill in the ‘90s to create a new loft/tenant law to benefit “the artists that came in the early ‘90s and lived in the buildings that nobody wanted to populate.”

Until the artists moved in and then it became fashionable for everybody to want to move in, because it was cool in Williamsburg. And you know what happened? The people who owned those loft buildings kicked the artists right out so that they can get much higher rents for those apartments. And we were unsuccessful in passing a law for those artists, because we couldn't get it past the state senate. I think this year we have a shot to do that.

Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito agreed about the importance of “having the right people in office” who support community-based planning processes that involve communities in decision making.

What I try to bring to the table is that the most effective public policies and legislations are the ones that are really deeply rooted, in this case, in community-based planning. Where you really are involving the affected communities in the decision making.

The Fifth Avenue Committee is a community organization based in South Brooklyn that supports community-based planning and decision making. Executive Director de la Uz reflected:

This entire conversation is about values. What do we value as a society, what do we value as individuals? And what are our intentions in terms of putting those values into focus through public policy and through the actions that we take as individuals?

We've had a hyper-capitalism and hyper market-driven approaches and sometimes it seems as though it's so overwhelming that it's hard to pause. Certainly the economic downturn provides us all with the opportunity to pause and plan and to strategize. That combined with what’s going on with the national agenda can inform how we move forward.

The mission of the Fifth Avenue Committee is to advance social and economic justice in South Brooklyn principally by developing and managing affordable housing and community facilities, creating economic opportunities, organizing residents and workers, providing student-centered adult education opportunities and combating displacement caused by gentrification.FAC has also been breaking down land-use processes, zoning and tax policies so people can better understand them. They’ve put this information in a comic book format in both English and Spanish and are teaching these concepts through adult education and literacy classes. Said de la Uz:

Fifth Avenue Committee has pushed many different things. Some successfully, some unsuccessfully. But I think it's all been about elevating the "we" over the "I" … insuring that the public good is something that we're talking about as much as individual benefit, understanding that that individual benefit has to be shared. So, we've done everything from creating a displacement-free zone that literally had very little legal standing, because most of the property in the area was not subject to rent regulation. But, we had moral authority. We proposed legislation that would provide benefits. There are many landlords out there who want to help … and they shouldn't be penalized for that.

De la Uz also named two collaborative citywide efforts — One City One Future (a collaboration between the Pratt Center, National Employment Law Project, and New York Jobs with Justice) and the Right to the City Coalition — that bring community voices to policymaking.

Speaking about the need for “low-income communities of color to build power,” Demaris Reyes, executive director of GOLES, described her organization’s holistic approach to organizing. “As a neighborhood housing and preservation organization, GOLES is dedicated to tenants' rights, homelessness prevention and community revitalization.” They organize in public, Section 8 and rent-regulated housing, and just worked three years on rezoning their community hoping to curb the out-of-scale luxury development. They commissioned a study to make recommendations to the city about policies that preserve small business in gentrifying neighborhoods, and won a $1.4 million settlement for back wages for retail workers that were being exploited.

Try to think about the 120 million different ways in which we can make this city more equitable for real New Yorkers and make sure we're just not this big tourist attraction. So, it takes lots of resources and lots of ingenuity. Having your staff in three different meetings, working 75 hours a week, come on! Let's be honest about that.

The key here is how do we have equitable development in a way that really takes into account the needs of existing communities and makes room for new communities because that is what makes us so beautiful, that we're ever-changing. We need to understand or figure out how to honor those traditions and how to embrace new ones. Otherwise, we're not New York. We're not the Lower East Side, the place where we have Ukrainians and Russians and Polish and Italians and Chinese and Puerto Ricans and all of the folks that make that neighborhood a place I would want to live in.

So, can we figure out the magic fix? I don't know that we can. But what I do think is we have to be really honest about race in this country, that oppression still exists, that money still controls so much, and that we have to really vote for really good elected officials that are going to promote effective public policies that are going to promote equity.

What Else Can the Arts do?

In New York City, and across the country, arts and culture are supporting equitable development. Here are some examples of how this happens.

Humanize the impacts of policy:

• Scribe Video Center’s Precious Places community oral history project connects community members, researchers, and filmmakers in Philadelphia, Pa, to document the buildings and public spaces that define where they live. The videos have been used as part of efforts to impact public policy related to displacement and eminent domain.
• “Housing is a Human Right” (HHR) is an ongoing multimedia portrait of the struggle for home in New York City, dedicated to telling the first-person stories of individuals fighting to find and create homes. Composed of oral narratives and photographs, along with testimonies and memories of home, HHR exhibited in a Brooklyn Laundromat and collaborated with the Right to the City Coalition.

Demystify policy and make it accessible:

• The Making Policy Public series of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) aims to make information on policy truly public: accessible, meaningful, and shared. Each poster is the product of a commissioned collaboration between a designer and an advocate.
• CUP’s Affordable Housing Toolkit is a portable workshop that housing advocates, policy experts, community boards, developers, and others can use to teach their constituents about land use and development in New York City.

The Panorama of the City of New York, the “jewel in the crown” of the collection of the Queens Museum of Art, built by artist Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair. The 9,335 square-foot architectural model includes every building constructed before 1992 in all five boroughs. For the museum’s exhibition “Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center,” May 31-September 27, 2009, artist Damon Rich inserted hundreds of neon-pink plastic triangles represent blocks in the city where there have been three or more home foreclosures. Click here to enlarge

Make the invisible visible:

• In “Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center,” at the Queens Museum of the Arts, artist and designer Damon Rich created a striking display on the 9,335-square-foot Panorama of the City of New York. Hundreds of neon-pink plastic triangles represent blocks in New York City where there have been three or more home foreclosures.
• “Place + Displaced,” a project of Fractured Atlas, is a N.Y.C. community mapping and civic participation project that seeks to foster dialogue and strategic alliances between artists and other residents at risk of displacement. The project will result in an online map with a searchable database and digital stories, as well as a report.

Support civic dialogue:

• “Brooklyn At Eye Level” is an ongoing creative investigation by the Civilians theater company into the heart of neighborhood, community change, and development. The first phase was presented as a performance of theater, dance and music created from interviews with both old and new residents, community activists, developers and politicians, focusing on the controversial Atlantic Yards project.
• “Built” explores the daily personal, civic and economic choices that determine how contemporary cities function, and how people and institutions imagine the future of cities and communities. Sojourn Theatre blends performance and dialogue in a site-responsive participatory performance the heart of Portland, Oregon’s emerging South Waterfront district.

Art and media as part of organizing:

• Groundswell Community Mural Project worked with Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) to design a poster for their campaign around real-estate development in downtown Brooklyn. FUREE also created “Some Place Like Home, The Fight Against Gentrification in Downtown Brooklyn,” a video that tells the stories of community residents and small businesses that are displaced to make way for high-end retail and luxury condominiums.
• El Puente is a community human-rights institution in Brooklyn with a history of leadership in community organizing grounded in arts and culture. They are creating a “Green Light District” in South Brooklyn that will reflect the organization’s holistic understanding of community development and wellness that includes public health, environmental justice, educational viability and cultural vitality.

Provide a participatory vision for change:

• Project Row Houses was established by African-American artists in Houston’s Third Ward to preserve community and create a vision for affordable housing linked to the rich culture of the neighborhood. Its six-block campus includes artist exhibition and/or residency spaces, houses for young mothers, office space, a community gallery, a park and low-income residential and commercial spaces.
• Los Angeles Poverty Department’s (LAPD “Utopia/dystopia” engaged long standing and new residents of Skid Row (including homeless and formerly homeless, working poor, immigrants and their families and the area’s burgeoning loft-living population) in strategic public art actions and convenings about the vision for downtown LA. The “Walk of Fame,” created with the Community Redevelopment Agency, includes permanent public artworks with images of neighborhood residents whose visionary actions have contributed to reknitting the social fabric of Skid Row.

These and other examples of media, arts and culture that are directly tied to activist campaigns and policy change will soon be found on a new interactive Web resource being developed by the Pratt Center’s Arts & Community Change Initiative and the Arts & Democracy Project.

Thanks to Anusha Venkataraman for her help with this essay and to all of the participants in the dialogues for their thoughtful and heartfelt comments.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2009-10, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The project's Editorial Board includes: Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; and Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, Wesleyan University.

Caron Atlas is a Brooklyn-based consultant working to support and stimulate arts and culture as an integral part of social change. She is project director of the Arts & Community Change Initiative of the Pratt Center for Community Development and the Arts & Democracy Project of State Voices. She also directs the Place + Displaced community mapping project for Fractured Atlas, consults with the Ford Foundation, and teaches at New York University's Art and Public Policy program and Pratt Institute's Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment.

Original CAN/API publication: February 2010