Fort Greene Community Speaks Out
By Ann Schneider and Valerie Joyner

Nearly 200 people crowded the pews in the historic Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in June, looking very much like the people in the 1976 mural decorating the walls of the sanctuary, which depicts the Fort Greene neighborhood’s diversity.

Billed as a "community speak-out" by the group that organized it, six-month old Fort Greene Together, residents were invited to address the causes of the gentrification that is so apparent as one walks along lower Fulton Street. Scores of new restaurants have opened on DeKalb Avenue near Fort Greene Park. The complexion of the neighborhood has become much lighter, as financial-industry couples find their money can buy more in Brooklyn than in Manhattan. One brownstone was recently sold for $1 million, and Corcoran Realtors opened an office in March to capitalize on the inflated housing market.

Longtime residents are concerned about plans by the Brooklyn Academy of Music Local Development Corporation (BAM LDC) to create a 14-block "cultural district" bordered by DeKalb and Flatbush avenues, Hanson Place and Ashland Place. While no written development plan has yet been made public, BAM LDC, chaired by Harvey Lichtenstein, former director of BAM, the musical institution, has said it will spend $560 million over the next 10 years to build new performance spaces, offices and residents for artists, plus retail space, gallery space and a boutique hotel. Another proposal among many competing visions privately expressed by BAM LDC is for a New Jersey Performing Arts Center-style pavilion, which would mean much greater displacement of current residents and merchants.

Residents’ concerns are fueled by the fact that BAM LDC has not to this date, held a public meeting about its plans, but instead insisted that three invitation-only forums held in January and June constituted dialogue with the community.

BAM LDC extended the borders of its cultural district to include the African-identified merchants on Fulton Street stretching down to South Oxford Place, where some displacement of merchants has already occurred. Jonathan Adewumi’s store, Nigerian Fabrics and Fashions, was priced off Fulton Street in April after a 60% increase in rent on his storefront. He has relocated to Myrtle Avenue, with the help of the Pratt Area Community Council. Adewumi, who blames the January announcement of the creation of the BAM LDC for the rent increase, is president of Bogolan Merchants Association, a group of businesses clustered around Fulton Street that takes its name from bogolanfini, the mud-dyed cloth made in Mali.

BAM LDC has said it is "in dialogue with" about 90 artists’ organizations, some of whom will be the lucky beneficiaries of new office and performance space. Their estimates of the number of these groups who are presently based in Brooklyn have wavered from "about 35%" to "about half," leading Assemblymember Roger Green (D-Brooklyn) to rename the project the "Manhattan Displacement District for Racial and Cultural Exclusion." Green was instrumental in forcing BAM LDC to provide space for the Bogolan Merchants Association as part of its plan.

Bruce Ratner, chair of BAM’s Board of Directors and a member of the BAM LDC board, is the president and principal owner of Forest City Ratner Companies, which built the nearby MetroTech and Atlantic Center office and retail complexes. Ratner controls development rights to the two parking lots slated for new construction by BAM LDC, and is about to build a second shopping mall at Atlantic Terminal, above the Long Island Railroad train station. This new mall, unrelated to BAM LDC, has already leased 80% of the yet-to-be built space to retailers like the Gap, Target, Victoria’s Secret and the Children’s Place.

BAM LDC has proposed to include 20% subsidized housing in the plan along with market-rate new units, likely to cost $2,500 per month in rent. Many of the African-American poets, artists and writers who make Fort Greene their home live on less than $20,000 per year and cannot afford to pay more than $500 per month in rent. The poverty rate for Fort Greene as a whole is 31% outside of the three public-housing projects, Lafayette, Farragut, and Whitman Houses. Within those projects, the poverty rate is 46%.

Meanwhile, Realty on the Greene, a real-estate firm owned by Kathryn Lilly, has been raising rents of property it manages to $2,400 per month from $1,400 per month. Lilly, who owns her building, just evicted a 91-year old Guatemalan woman and her daughter, who had lived in the building for 23 years. A community campaign to dissuade her from proceeding with the eviction was unsuccessful. Most of the housing stock in Fort Greene is exempt from rent regulations, because it primarily consists of two- to five-family houses. The state’s 1971 Urstadt Law bars the city from extending rent regulations to cover those buildings.

One idea is for Fort Greene Together to lobby the City Council to call upon Albany to repeal Urstadt. Another is to borrow tactics from the neighboring Fifth Avenue Committee, which has created an "anti-displacement zone" in Park Slope to bring pressure to bear on the realtors it sees as most responsible for driving up housing prices.