Stop Judging Neighborhoods By Their Transplants

By Jack Lourie

Bushwick gentrifiers are treating L train gentrification like a Manifest Destiny. Williamsburg used to be Polish, Black, and Latino. Now, it is the home of trust fund babies looking for an “authentic” Brooklyn experience. A Gothamist article – titled The African American exodus from New York City – shows that non-Hispanic Black residents have declined by more than 125,000 over the last 20 years. But domination of capital is not enough – many want to engage in a cultural erasure that centers around themselves. This encroachment must be categorically rejected by New Yorkers and well-meaning transplants, alike.

Not only are neighborhoods changing, but our opinions of them are too. Growing up in Greenwich Village, I didn’t think much about Williamsburg beyond an occasional trip to Peter Luger’s. When I would (rarely) visit my friend Michela, I didn’t prescribe an identity to Williamsburg; rather, I simply saw the single-family homes with envy. Now, I hear about it all the time. My relationship with Williamsburg has been formed in a post-gentrification landscape. I have never known it as any place but a playground for the elite. If I allow myself to see it through their eyes, I will be accepting the terms of their gentrification. When we visit another neighborhood, we might not even see the culture wars that have already been lost. For well-meaning transplants, a significant amount of personal research is required to truly understand our city, including where it is appropriate to live.

Gentrifiers naturally sort themselves by personality type into neighborhoods — a tool they use to redefine what it means to be the average resident of an area. This association makes it easy to delineate neighborhoods on the gentrifier’s terms. I do, for example, catch myself associating Park Slope with young parents, Ridgewood with hipsters, and Downtown Brooklyn with morally fluid CFOs.

In 2023, a group of transplants led by Priya Rose moved from San Francisco to East Williamsburg (formerly Bushwick), in hopes to “bring high-energy, emotionally intelligent New Yorkers within walking distance of each other.” Of course, people native to Bushwick find folks like Priya to be condescending, and resent the sentiment that they do not have emotional intelligence. While she was lambasted online at the time, let’s be honest: her vision is being seen into fruition. Priya, as well as other wealthy folks in the tech industry, are marketing to the rest of us that if you are like them you should move to their neighborhood. This puts New Yorkers with less capital at a disadvantage. Locals wouldn’t be calling for influxes of wealth to enter their area, because that would mean that they would be displaced. Priya is using her capital to build one community on top of another. That said, for upper-middle class folks like myself, I am more likely to have a Priya in my life than a local from Bushwick. So, if she were to show me around her neighborhood, I might see it through her eyes, walking past the mom-and-pop shops and into a sound room (whatever that is), or boutique coffee shop.

Some people move to Bushwick to colonize, others to belong. It makes sense why someone queer from a small town would move there. Without knowing anything else about the city––without being familiar with gentrification — it makes sense why someone who felt “otherized” where they grew up would move into an area with a culture where they feel represented. But once you are here, it is impossible to miss how the culture of Bushwick is bending towards the gentrifier. Once you are here, you see you are pushing people out of a place they have called home for generations.

The Village, for most of its history, has been an epicenter for queer liberation and artistic expression, with gay bars dating back to the 1890s, and creatives and visionaries such as Edgar Allen Poe, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, and Martha P. Johnson all calling it home. These people were not born there, but were integral pieces to the fabric of the neighborhood. New Yorkers are always going to have more sympathy for folks who are escaping unfair home lives instead of people such as Priya, but we must critically think about where one can live without kicking someone else out.

Gentrifiers and real estate agents work together to rename neighborhoods on behalf of the gentrifier. This is a tool of colonization — a demarcation indicates that a neighborhood is now for the gentrifier, rather than the local. Real estate agents have artificially formulated the neighborhoods of Kensington (once Flatbush), Clinton Hill (once Bed-Stuy), and Cobble Hill (once South Brooklyn). @Meemshou, an influencer with over 100,000 Instagram followers, recently collectively renamed the West Village and Chelsea the “New Murray Hill.” A seemingly benign action further strips the communal identity from those who came before. I associate my neighborhood as a bohemia for queer folks and creatives, but by labelling it the “New Murray Hill,” the land would bend towards accommodating the identity of the finance bro.

Narratives around neighborhoods have been reshaped tremendously by the transplant class, but locals are still here. If we define neighborhoods by their local communities, we can all form a stronger sense of respect and connection. Treat gentrifiers and their businesses as a backdrop, just as they do to the locals. By forging bonds with the New Yorker, we help put money into the pockets of those who have a long-term, vested interest in their areas. People who love their neighborhood, not the neighborhood as a concept.