The breakneck pace of gentrification in Crown Heights has forced even recent residents of the neighborhood out, DNAinfo reported.
The area surrounding Franklin Avenue has transformed at such a pace that even those who moved there three or four years ago are struggling to keep up with the rents, members of the neighborhood’s Crow Hill Community Association told DNAinfo.
“The concern that’s in the public conversation is about long term residents being displaced, but I didn’t realize that many of the new residents who are already paying much higher rents are already getting pushed out,” Trish Tchume, an organizer of the association, told DNAinfo.
Indeed, the popularity of the area has led brokers to stop referring to it as a section of Prospect Heights – a tactic they once employed to disassociate it from images of crime and squalor.
But Tchume told DNAinfo that it had been a struggle to get residents to rally around the issue of affordability, mostly because gentrification is now thought of as the norm.
“When you frame displacement as something that just naturally happens,” Tchume said, “people feel like there’s nothing they can or should do.” [DNAinfo] – Hiten Samtani