The Eminent Domain

A post on Brownstoner about FUREE’s upcoming annual convention has generated a wave of comments that are pretty astounding in their hostility to the people and businesses that have been in the area all along. Other posters are fighting back in defense, and the messages are worth reading. Here are some of them:

I think community organizing is important. Too often developers get away with anything they want as community boards and city planning let developers do whatever they want.

Only when community members get involved do people get what they want. So what is wrong with letting people ask for what they want.

I hope that community members fight hard for what they want. Nobody will fight for them.

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That shopping area exists as it is, in fact, because it is profitable and ideally located in the middle of the second biggest subway hub in NYC. Of course it used to be an almost exclusively white space (not that white people ever notice when something is predominantly white) until all of your parents and grandparents fled to the suburbs. Those without that luxury or option filled the vacuum of white flight. The businesses in Fulton Mall are a reflection of that and the concomitant disinvestment by the city, as well as the lack of capital resources available to the tenants for major structural improvements.

But these days white flight is going the other way; the upper-middle class is pouring back into cities and suburbanizing them as quickly as possible, remaking them in their own image. And just like their parents couldn’t possibly understand why blacks would be angry about economic disenfranchisement, social exclusion, and segregation (yes! I am talking about 20th century BROOKLYN here), these wonderful new “Brooklynites” can’t possibly imagine why people would be angry enough to fight back, when what little space and community they have garnered for themselves is ripped away to make room for the aesthetic taste and consumer culture of the “upper class.”

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I’m one of those white suburbanites who grew up and moved to Brooklyn, and a big reason why is because I couldn’t stand the lack or racial and economic diversity where I grew up. Downtown Brooklyn has a long history of racial cooperation, since back when those houses on Duffield Street were Underground Railroad stops and free slaves settled the neighborhoods nearby. The proposed redevelopment threatens to upset the historic balance we have and impose an unwanted homogeneity on our racially mixed neighborhood. Whether or not I shop downtown or on Smith Street is irrelevant. Smith Street already exists for me to shop on, and downtown Brooklyn exists for my neighbors. The expected cultural encroachment is greedy and unnecessary.