The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century

1.

Opportunity in New York springs from strong neighborhoods. When we demand that big developers build affordable housing, and fight to keep our hospitals from becoming luxury condos, it’s not to punish the real estate industry. We do these things so the everyday, hardworking people who anchor our neighborhoods can live and work and be healthy in the communities they love. That’s how we all rise together.

It is November 5, 2013, and Bill de Blasio stands on a stage surrounded by an exalting audience. The crowd sways to Lorde’s anticapitalist anthem Royals: That kind of luxe just ain’t for us. We crave a different kind of buzz. Victorious on this election night, de Blasio will soon be a mayor in charge of a budget with more than three billion dollars in surplus. The money started flowing into the city several decades ago, the spigot dripping steadily by the early 1990s when Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton built a police force muscular enough to frisk its way to a city free of broken windows and tagged stoops; a city with a lower rate of violent crimes, capable of seducing developers to buy up abandoned buildings. The capital surged under a twelve-year Michael Bloomberg administration, despite the fact that he took office three months after the city’s two tallest buildings, its welcome beacon to global capitalism, collapsed.

Now here we are: Bill de Blasio, recently arrested while protesting the closure of a hospital, becomes the 109th mayor of New York City just as a leading real estate agent says that 80 percent of his clients are hedge funds; not individuals concerned with the quality of vegetables at the corner bodega but corporate entities who see potential in the bodega’s square footage.

I set out to understand how gentrification affects lives and not far into my trip I realized the word gentrification is useless—rendered so by overuse, too broad to adequately capture a huge range of disparate experiences, contexts, and, ultimately, meanings. But no matter how idiosyncratically one defines gentrification, it is an idea that never strays far from money—investment, capital moving into the neighborhood.

I’ve spoken often about a Tale of Two Cities. That inequality—that feeling of a few doing very well, while so many slip further behind—that is the defining challenge of our time. Because inequality in New York is not something that only threatens those who are struggling. The stakes are so high for every New Yorker.

The stage where de Blasio stands is not a curtained number in a midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom; it is a temporary platform constructed in the center of a stone and brick building that was originally an armory for the 14th Regiment of the National Guard on Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn. The building has had several incarnations, a YMCA at present. This is Park Slope, de Blasio’s neighborhood, and thus a meaningful place to party, but more to the point: one hundred and eight mayors preceded this man and not one chose Brooklyn for his election night celebration—a fact not to be underestimated. This outer borough feels front and center.

Outside the YMCA the streets are relatively calm. The flames of the de Blasio fire only carry so far. Voter turnout for this revolutionary election was 24 percent. This is not an easy city to rile, politically speaking, particularly when the violence of gentrification that fuels the de Blasio battle cry is so subtle, less like a bullet or a blade and more like the slow encroachment of carbon monoxide, filling one building after another. The mayor’s neighborhood of Park Slope—reminiscent of The Cosby Show and the affluent middle class—is already subsumed and the vapors are advancing on the crumbling brick facades farther into Brooklyn.

I follow the vapors.

By the time I reach Lincoln Road in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, there is no trace of the din from the de Blasio uprising. I find a forty-five-year-old man on the front porch of a towering Victorian home. It is late, deep into the night but still his snug, gray suit remains unwrinkled. His polka-dotted pocket square hasn’t budged. The pinpointed fashion shaves ten years off the bachelor’s age; his demeanor has a confident bounce to match. Prospect Park—formed by glacial debris some seventeen thousand years ago, sculpted by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1867—is two blocks away.

My name’s mTkalla. I always get questions. mTkalla?—how do you say that? And I tell the story: My full name when I was born was Martin Kennedy Keaton. My mom named me after both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. I was born in 1968. I used to win awards as a kid doing Martin Luther King speeches. I remember once when I was nine I did the I Have a Dream Speech and a woman in the front row—an older black woman—was balling with tears and she told my mother, I can’t believe that a little boy did this speech. I performed like I was in front of Martin Luther King.

Then in ’88 or ’89 there was so much violence against black American men in Brooklyn. People getting beat up. People getting shot by the cops. I was doing some research regarding the whole middle passage and people getting brought here, European names being forced on them. I read Assata Shakur’s autobiography and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Here’s a man whose only true god was the truth as he understood it. He could go on for years and years saying one thing, but once he understood the truth to be different, he admitted that the truth is different now. He lived that. And he continues to be an inspiration for me.

So recently I decided to change my name officially. I decided to put the silent m in front of the name Tkalla. The m is homage to MLK.

The result sounds like Ta-KAH-la. There is an unkempt yard in front of the porch where we sit. Up against the sidewalk, an overgrown hedge hides us from the street. A busted car (broken windows and flat tires) lists in the driveway alongside mTkalla’s Porsche SUV (tinted windows and polished tires). The house looks mostly empty through the windows; a few walls have been partially removed and drywall dust covers the floors and banister and built-in shelving of the decrepit mansion.

This place is part of my story actually. I’m moving from Park Slope—my mom’s still there. You familiar with Park Slope? My father bought a couple of houses there a long time ago. Had to take out a big mortgage to pay off the family to keep the properties. A lot of debt. He passed about fourteen years ago. So I decided to sell everything and have a house free and clear. I had an opportunity to move somewhere else, some suburb, some palatial something. But why would I move away from Brooklyn? I consider it the planet. So I bought this house—he points back over his shoulder at the looming structure—which is a little bit of a big deal because my mom always wanted to live in a place like this. But there’s a lot of effing work, man, there’s a lot of work.

When I tell people that I’m moving out of Park Slope back to Lefferts Gardens people are like, You’re crazy. You’re bugging out. How could you move? You’re one of the only black dudes that owns in Park Slope, da da da da.

And I’m like, First of all, you don’t even know what I’m moving to. If you saw where I was moving, you’d get it.

No, you’re bugging out.

And then they come here and they’re like, Oh, I get it.

I’m so excited about this house.

The lot is a hundred feet wide and a hundred feet deep and you can fit like eight cars in the driveway—there’s a two-car garage.

mTkalla escorts me over to his driveway, which extends the length of the property. In a city where drivers circle for hours searching for a spot and spend $747 million on parking tickets in one year, the long driveway looks even longer, feeling more like a landing strip for small planes.

To have a driveway—mTkalla smiles like a conquering teenager—I just like saying it: driveway—I could just repeat driveway, driveway, driveway …

The smile runs on with the incantation of the word until mTkalla turns and walks toward the garage. He stops suddenly—I’m no Hugh Hefner or anything like that but—and continues walking.

Someone shot a short film here not too long ago. If I’m talking too fast or moving too fast just let me know. I’m trying to say three sentences at the same time.

We walk around to the backyard. The jungle that I saw in the front yard is deeper here, richer. And there are certain additions: various piles of garbage and demolition—splintered wood, bent siding. But for all of that, it is still a backyard in the center of New York City—the center of Brooklyn, to be precise, which, for mTkalla, is the center of everything—he requires Manhattan for nothing. Manhattan is a museum dutifully toured when friends from out of town visit. mTkalla has not been there in a month.

Circling back around to the front of the house, we enter through the main door and stand in the parlor. mTkalla envisions the following tweaks:

We’re going to paint a little bit darker to give it more of that richer look. I want to leave as much undisturbed as possible.

We’ll keep that—pointing at the fireplace before ascending the dark wood staircase to the second floor.

Originally, I wanted to move from Park Slope to Bed-Stuy ’cause a lot of my business is in Bed-Stuy. But those homes are, at the most, twenty feet wide and for someone who doesn’t really do stairs—my mom can’t use the stairs—that doesn’t really work. She’s seventy years old. And I’m not going to move any place that my mom doesn’t approve of, ’cause she sacrificed so much for me and I need her last few years to be good. So I came here, and I stood right in this place—pointing at the recently sanded flooring beneath his feet—and I started getting chills all over my body. I went home, I said, Hey Mom, I found the house.

She said, Really?!? You found the house?

I found the house.

We walk down a hallway here, a hallway there, and wind up in a mostly empty room with an unmade bed in the middle of the floor.

I’ve kind of co-opted this room until everything else is done downstairs. You can control the construction better when you’re on-site. Eventually, this will be my master bedroom.

He points to one massive window between two other massive windows:

We’re going to do a deck off there. This is away from the street, this is southwest exposure, I mean, you know …

He rolls his eyes, displaying a bit of ecstasy, and continues:

We’ll rip out the kitchen. We’re going to do a nice, all-white kitchen, Carrara marble, blah, blah, blah.

This is going to be my living room.

That room will be the family thing.

That’s a classic baby room. I have no babies so I have no idea what’s going to happen with that.

This is actually the only house on the block that has a legal commercial space. This room is an addition—they used to run a little school out of here. So I’m using it as my office, consultancy, whatever—where there’s film, editing, music production, design. I plan on blowing that wall out there, keeping the ceilings kind of raw and doing a nice industrial type of kitchen in the corner. A three-quarter bathroom. And this will be the reception area for the mTkalla Group, the Casa Brooklyn, the whatever the hell—we want to take over the world. Or take over Brooklyn. Because it’s not about taking over the world. If you take over Brooklyn, it’s partly like taking over the world.

He laughs and heads back out to the last traces of sunlight on the front porch. Across the street is an apartment building with three or four or five men standing near the entrance, laughing and talking, coming and going. The rest of the block is lined with spacious, free-standing homes like mTkalla’s, making the street seem misplaced in a city where most people live in boxes stacked much closer and higher.

I can’t wait for this to be somewhat done so we can just relax and have people over. Raise a family or create a vibe, man.

It’s funny because I remember growing up in Bushwick, six blocks from here. I was a nerd, and people would say, Where you from?

I had to drop it in a certain way: Yo, I grew up in Bushwick.

People would be all, Really?

Now people say, Ah, Bushwick, what does that mean? Hipsterville?

Even if I could have afforded to live in Park Slope I would not have chosen it. There’s no vibe. I think Park Slope is definitely one of the more Manhattanized parts of Brooklyn. When you walk the streets it doesn’t feel like Brooklyn. There’s something cold about that neighborhood. A lot of people who live there, who own there, who rent there—they’ll say the same thing.

For all the time mTkalla spends distinguishing between different neighborhoods—and there are distinctions to be made—these neighborhoods don’t correspond to borders observed on a map—not always, anyway. Urban historian Suleiman Osman writes that before the 1970s Brooklyn had no real neighborhoods. Those who did use enclave names could rarely distinguish where the area began and ended. Early attempts to locate Brooklyn’s authentic neighborhoods were not by local residents but by two groups of outsiders with very different motives: community organizers and real estate agents. The labeling—and, ultimately, branding—of Bushwick and Fort Greene and Clinton Hill and Sunset Park and Stuyvesant Heights and Park Slope et al. is recent and evolving. And regardless of the monikers, a neighborhood is where daily life plays out, and daily life does not involve lines on a map; it is a spectrum of places: a home, a school, a playground, a diner. And the people who fill those spaces:

When I talk about a neighborhood, I think 70 percent of it is the people and how they relate to each other. And a lot of people who are in Crown Heights or Bed-Stuy—particularly African American folk—come from the South. Both sides of my family come from the South, from Virginia. My pops came from Bloomingburg. I remember driving down this road there and everybody that passed, my dad waved to them. Every single bloody person. I’m ten years old and I’m like, Hey Pops, do you know all these people?

And he’s like, No.

So why are you waving at them?

That’s what you do! When you come down here you wave at everybody.

And I’m like, Are you serious? It seems tiring to me!

He laughs.

And we’d go into a store and people were taking their time, and I was like—he snaps three times in rapid succession—and he said, You need to calm down man, you’re on Brooklyn energy. You need to turn it down.

My father came up here with his brother in the ’50s and they bought property when New York was going through a recession and no one wanted to live in Brooklyn. The two homes he bought in Park Slope, they were either seventeen or twenty-seven thousand dollars.

I don’t ask mTkalla the current sticker price for the Park Slope properties though it’s safe to say the going rate on those homes is upward of three million dollars. But you could fit two Park Slope brownstones inside his palatial spread on Lincoln Road and there’d still be plenty of driveway, driveway, driveway.

I used to be a deputy tax sheriff, when I was nineteen, twenty years old. Public Enemy and X Clan were real big at the time. So I used to go collecting taxes in all black with a beret on. I was looking like little Shaft—it was too funny. And because I was a young African American, people would assume that I was a delivery dude. Then I’d flip out my badge and be like, I’m Martin Keaton, department of Taxation and Finance. And once I flipped that badge everything changed.

But I couldn’t really do the nine-to-five thing. I have a butterfly brain. It definitely doesn’t work that way. So I went to college. I studied black and Puerto Rican studies. Was exposed to poetry. That lit up my heart. I started writing my own stuff and it was one of the most amazing experiences ever. When I would perform my energy would be kind of a cross between James Brown and Busta Rhymes. It was really lit up. High energy. We’d go and perform in prisons and do workshops.

I started out with very political poetry, very antiestablishment poetry and then I was confronted by a guy on the corner in Brooklyn: Yo, I go to these poetry readings and everyone’s talking about how their girlfriend did them wrong or their boyfriend did them wrong or how they hate the government. Every community has beauty—how come we’re not hearing that on the poetry scene?

And I heard that.

This dude, his name is Ginger Brown, he made me reflect on who I am. In my heart I’m a romantic dude. I said to myself, you need to have your stuff reflect that. So my poetry’s all about love and sensuality.

In 2005, I owned my dad’s houses, I had tons of debt, I was still poeting. I was popular, I guess, in my little underground scene but I was broke as crap. I needed to make some money. I’m an egghead—I’m not a hustler from the street or anything—so I thought, my parents come from real estate, I’ve been around real estate, I’ve been a landlord, and I love people, I love Brooklyn, so maybe I can just bring those gifts and see how it develops.

The first couple years it was pretty hard. I had to be somebody’s assistant who was younger than me but definitely more knowledgeable. This dude was from the Bay Area, and he said, I saw San Francisco turn around quickly. Light speed. So in order for you to be an effective marketer of real estate here, you can’t be focused on what this place was. You have to be focused on what it is and what it can become.

I finally caught up to that. And I have vision as well so that helps.

Now I’m a real estate agent over here; I’m a poet, filmmaker, music dude over there. And as time’s gone on, real estate has given me the capital to build my studio and create a center where I can have artists come together where we can share ideas. I need to execute my ideas. For me, work is kind of about the crossing of boundaries and some type of understanding and some type of submission. And I think that the real estate game is also about people coming together and being understanding and being courageous and breaking through the space where they were and making something new in the universe for themselves.

You know, people always talk, Yeah, if I’d bought in Park Slope in the ’70s or the ’80s or the ’90s I would have made all this money. And then I say to them, Well, in the ’80s, Park Slope wasn’t the Park Slope you know.

All these places that have value, there’s a challenge. And people don’t want to deal with a challenge. They want to sit back and say, I don’t know if I want to buy in Ridgewood or Crown Heights. And then when these places blow up they say, Oh, I should have bought there. But they don’t want to do the heavy lifting. They don’t want to be a part of the community to help build it up. Which is where part of some of the animosity comes from with the whole labyrinth that is the gentrification conversation. Some renters feel like, hey, I had vision for this place twenty years ago and I made this my home and I helped build it up and some of the new people don’t see some of the old people as the folk that helped stabilize the neighborhood. They see the old people as old people and they are holding their breath, waiting until they move on.

In New York City you have rent stabilization. So you can have these four million dollar places but the building across the street can be rent stabilized. People who live in these buildings can’t get kicked out. So when their lease is up the landlord is obligated by law to renew their lease until their rent hits a certain amount. It’s going to be a decade or fifteen years or more before that person can be moved out. If you go to other cities or counties, the landlords can do whatever they want. The thing that’s amazing about New York City is you have people who are billionaires rubbing elbows with people who are panhandlers because everyone’s always kind of on top of each other. Which, if you’re a landlord, can be a real pain in the ass.

But I believe as a principle that we don’t need to dominate other people, we can just share. Because there’s enough for everybody. Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t think that it has to be this person’s Brooklyn or that person’s Brooklyn. There’s a lot of space here and the variety of it all is what makes it hot. When you’re greedy you starve. Or when you’re greedy you’re always hungry—even if you’re full!—which is like starving.

Working in real estate for the last eight years, when I look at Brooklyn I see four sections.

First, there are people who are renting, just five years ago they could have found a full-floor apartment for $1,000, and now that single apartment has appreciated 100 percent but their salary hasn’t appreciated 100 percent. So they’re like, Where the hell do I go? Now they think about moving deeper into Brooklyn. Some of these folk have this fear that things are changing around me and I don’t know how I’m going to survive. And that’s real. In the more frustrated sections of the community, that fear turns to animosity for what they perceive to be the new people. Sometimes they think the new folks are being arrogant, they’re not talking to us. So they move around the new people in a way that can sometimes be intimidating. Because they’re like, Fuck you.

The second section, the people who own, they’re not mad because it’s either I own and I’m good, or I’m about to sell and I’m about to make a grip. You know, Brooklyn Heights is $5 million right now, Fort Greene is $3 to $4 million right now. There’s a certain type of person who can afford to do that. Economic fences get erected when more capital moves in. The people that are buying these properties now are coming with all cash or with 50 percent down and I’m like, Come on dude! Really, who are these people?

We had a joke the other day: the most affordable part of Brooklyn right now is Queens. Who would have even thought that would be a sentence ten years ago?

So when people talk about new people moving the old people out, I’m saying, But they’re paying the old folk a grip of money! This isn’t eminent domain. Nobody’s being forced to sell at gunpoint. And some of the old folk may just buy an apartment around the corner and an estate down South somewhere. In terms of their trajectory and how they see their lives, that may be an improvement.

Then you’ve got a section of people who come to Brooklyn, and they dig Brooklyn. And they could be considered the gentrifiers but they dig it here. They’re not holding their breath. They say, I want to participate in how this becomes. It’s good for new people to come into a place and regenerate it. Because if you’re in a place for so long you view it as it’s been. And you’ve already created possibilities for yourself ten years ago. But a new person steps in on the scene it’s like, Oh, anything is possible—let’s do it!

And you’re like, I don’t know if you can do it.

And they’re like, I just did it.

And you’re like, Oh shit, maybe I can do it!

Then you’ve got a whole other core, the last section. You’ve got new people that are moving in just because the price is cheaper and they couldn’t give an eff about Brooklyn. They don’t care about these neighborhoods and they’re holding their breath until the old folk go. You can almost see it on their faces, like they’re holding their breath because something stinks. They’re like, I’m just going to keep it straight ahead. That’s not a good plan. ’Cause you’re creating a box, a fence around yourself and people don’t dig the other.

I don’t like to deal with those people at all. When I sense those people, I’m not your dude. Seventy-five percent of the folk in Brooklyn are my people. And the other people who are holding their breath, I hope they don’t like the smell and they leave. I have no time for them. You know we get to choose who we spend our time with. And I’m not spending it with any of them.

One time, I was showing this apartment and I had a woman ask me, Well what do you think about the neighborhood?

I said, I think it’s great.

She said, Well, what do you think about the safety?

I said, You could be comfortable here.

Are you sure?

What do you mean?

And she said, Well, I’m just afraid.

I said, What are you afraid of?

She said, I’m afraid I’m going to be the only white woman walking down the street. Am I going to be the only white woman walking down the street?

I said, What do you mean? I don’t understand your question. What are you really saying?

And she had to just float in her own ignorance.

I said to myself, I’m not going to come at her in a certain way, angry, but I’m not going to feed it either. That blew my mind! You can’t ask me that question and get an answer. Obviously—hopefully—I very much identify as black. I almost had to go home and look in the mirror. Is there something I’m giving off that would make people feel comfortable saying that to me?

As a real estate agent you don’t want to say certain things, but I’m a human being: if you look at the history of violence in New York City, most of it was not African American vs. European. Most of it is otherwise. So it always bugs me out when people from certain neighborhoods come and say, Am I going to be safe? I mean, we don’t protest against other people moving into our neighborhoods. We don’t resist it on that level. For the most part the energy’s kind of open. Whereas if I were to want to move to a certain neighborhood, cats might be like, No, this house is not for sale.

I’d be like, But I called this morning and you said this was for sale.

They’re like, Yeah, we got an accepted offer.

Wow.

When I was growing up, I know that when people moved into our neighborhood we didn’t have that level of resistance. Not to say that people don’t get mugged, but, for instance, lets say somebody gets mugged. I don’t condone that but usually there’s an economic motivation. A lot of time when we’ve been in other areas, people were not robbing us, people were just saying, Get the fuck out. That’s crazy! And you’re dealing with that in the ’80s and the ’90s. There was a dude named Yusef Hawkins, who went to Bensonhurst in 1989, and he was shot to death because they thought he was coming to visit some European lady and they were like, Naw man, that’s just not happening.

You’d be hard-pressed to find those examples in African American neighborhoods. I’m not saying there aren’t examples, there might be examples, one or two, but not thirty examples.

He pauses, leaning forward to shake his head at the reality of what he has said. Then he sighs and falls back into his chair.

I was born in Brooklyn. I’m making my way economically here and I love this place. So going from Park Slope to here is me planting a deeper flag in Brooklyn: I’m here to stay. Even if I get other properties around the world, this is my base. I’m gonna ride and die for Brooklyn. And I’m going to have influence because I choose to have influence in this city. And I’m not going to be afraid.

I think vulnerability and a willingness to be open is a true springboard to freedom. I want to see the world. I want to be with people and check the vibe.

About a month or so ago, the brothers who were hanging out across the street they approached me and were like, Oh, I see you’re moving in. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe. You know it’s cool, blah, blah, blah.

I was like, Dude, I grew up around here.

Really?

Yeah, seven blocks from here!

He laughs.

And one of the guys was like, We’re happy that you have the place. Which really means: the trend here is that the new people who buy may not look how I look. It’s almost a given that if there’s going to be a turnover, the turnover isn’t going to be to someone who looks like someone from the community. And they were kind of surprised that the person who was getting this house looks like me. But then, I don’t know if it’s the way I walk or talk but I’m still approached as though I’m a gentrifier. Because, again, gentrification isn’t about color, it’s about perceived class.

There has to be some way that I’m able to contribute, or help build a platform where different people in this city have the opportunity to meet each other and mingle. Not in a political forum, not in a seminar. Just somebody’s having a barbecue, different people come. Once people have different experiences they say, Oh, this is not what I thought. And sometimes it’s that simple, because you can’t legislate to change somebody’s heart.

The thing my business partner says is really attractive about Brooklyn