In Brooklyn, America’s Gentrification Epicenter, Building On A Model For Community Care
By Frances Nguyen
November 9, 2022
Long before becoming a Covid-19 hotspot, communities of color in Brooklyn have worked to guard their neighborhoods against the effects of gentrification.
When New York City emerged as the country’s first epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, community advocates in Brooklyn, the city borough seen by many as “the poster-child for gentrification in America,” needed to revise their response to their communities amid a new housing emergency. While hundreds of thousands of residents fled the city to escape the pandemic, far more had no other choice but to stay. New York City was under lockdown, forced to a standstill as the death toll spiked to four times the city’s normal rate, and nightmarish scenes from its streets were televised across the nation.
For decades, these advocates fought to keep their neighbors—many of whom are longtime residents going back multiple generations—in their homes amid an increasingly volatile housing market. Now, they had to make sure that their neighbors could survive there as they sheltered in place.
Posted on 09 Nov 2022, 01:28 - Category: News
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