Four Questions for ‘My Brooklyn’ Producer Allison Lirish Dean

Talking to the urban planner who made a film about a city-backed effort to redevelop a commercially viable slice of black Brooklyn.

My Brooklyn tells the story of how Fulton Mall evolved to be an important cultural hub for black Brooklynites. Photo credit: Jamel Shabazz/My Brooklyn

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I first met My Brooklyn producer Allison Lirish Dean in 2005. She was an urban planner studying the rapid gentrification of downtown Brooklyn for the Pratt Institute. I was a reporter covering the transformation for a local newspaper. I interviewed her for a story about a proposed mixed-use rezoning of Fulton Mall, a crowded, somewhat run-down pedestrian mall I knew as the place to buy highly affordable animal print leggings, maybe an engraved gold tooth, if the need ever arose.

The rezoning would allow for housing and increased density, intended to make the neon-lit den of hip-hop clothiers and cell phone stores more attractive to real estate developers who would be able to build towers on top of existing low-rise storefronts. Eventually, the logic went, the “loft-style” apartments promised by the rezoning would handily lure the young professionals flooding the blocks of brownstones surrounding the mall.

The strange part was that the mall was already attractive to businesses. There were few vacant storefronts. Retailers were paying $100 to $200 per square foot in rent, putting market values on par with the thoroughly fancified strips nearby. There was no question Fulton Mall was serving a market. The issue was which market. Brooklyn development officials were ready for Fulton Mall to catch up with the gentrification that had made nearby commercial corridors attractive to higher-end retailers like Trader Joe’s and Urban Outfitters, not to mention boutiques and cupcake bakeries. (This was the early 2000s.)

Dean was concerned, and rightly so, that the redevelopment would lead to displacement. Seven years later, there is a movie.

My Brooklyn, made by Dean with director Kelly Anderson, tells us what happens when public policy and corporate real estate interests converge on a strip of discount stores that happens to mean something to the people who shop there.

Next City: Why Fulton Mall?

Allison Lirish Dean: I was interested in Fulton Mall, as a student, because it wasn’t gentrifying like the rest of Brooklyn. I was curious, as an urban planner, why this area was resistant to gentrification, why it stayed as its own island of culture even as the surrounding neighborhoods transformed. That curiosity led to our Pratt study, which focused on the impact of rezoning the area for higher-density towers. So the film really started with this ethnographic study.

It’s important to remember that most of the dominant media in and around New York City was so negative about Fulton Mall. Reporters would say this is kind of blighted, or tacky or ugly. I could understand that. But when I started talking to people there, I had a different idea. It’s a whole planning 101 thing — you have to understand what people who use the space value about it before you redraw the map.

NC: Have the predictions of change come true?

Dean: It’s a very different place than it was in 2003 and 2004. A lot of the shops that catered to the black and Caribbean community are gone. Beat Street is not there anymore. You could get underground records there. All kinds of mix tapes. Hip-hop artists would come and perform there. A store that sold religious items catering to the Caribbean and Haitian community. A lot of Haitians shopped there. There was a temple there. That is gone. The barber shops gone. Other stores have moved, but I doubt that they are going to stay there long term. Since the rezoning, the rent has just kept going up. Corporate tenants have replaced the small stores. There is a Sheraton Hotel now.

Not all of it is about shopping. It’s about public space. There was a lot happening on the streets that isn’t happening there [now]. Street performing. Praying. Dancing. People selling things they were making. It isn’t happening the same way now.

NC: Was the change inevitable?

Dean: One of the big points we make in the film is that the decision to rezone and redevelop Fulton Mall happened at a time when New York’s real estate market was going wild, yet the city didn’t leverage its resources and the market to create the greatest public benefit. That was the mistake. They just let the market go without working with the existing community to figure out a development strategy that would have distributed the benefits more broadly. The development with increased density would have been okay had they worked with the community, instead of seeing the community as an obstacle.

[Journalist] Alyssa Katz brings up this point in the film that [redevelopment advocates] would talk about how to ‘move out’ the wig stores and other shops they found undesirable…There is this idea that the wig stores or whatever are gong to be a liability, that no one “desirable” will want to be near those things. That way of seeing things really doesn’t allow for a solution that works for all stakeholders.

NC: It sounds like you are saying that it’s possible to redevelop an area in such a way that allows for change and improvements without displacing the existing businesses and users. Are you proposing a third way beyond keeping the status quo and totally transforming it?

Dean: I do think there is a third way but there is not a clean, easy way to get there. People need to talk about race and class… The gentrifier needs to see him or her self in the conversation and confront the issues. Once we have these conversations, we can think about the policy answers — creating affordable housing, regulating real estate speculation, reforming the land use process, examining the subsidies. These are things that a lot of people would get behind if they were more aware.

The idea of a bad or good neighborhood is so embedded in our mind — either a neighborhood where I would send my kid to school or not — that we have trouble seeing beyond it. We have to get people to see outside of their own frame of reference. It’s about changing the conversation. That’s what we are trying to do with this movie, with all this.

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Ariella Cohen is Next City’s editor-in-chief.

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Tags: gentrificationbrooklyn

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