Mr. Jeffries’s outrage was set off by reports that real estate agents were using the name ProCro to peddle properties on the border of the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Prospect Heights and Crown Heights, an area within his district. He also said the name “sounded silly.”The name ProCro stirred up discussion in February after it appeared in a Wall Street Journal article titled, "Prospect Heights Edges Into Crown Heights." But the Journal was a bit late on this story: about two years ago I moved into a fantastic apartment on Franklin Avenue and St. John's Place, but in the Craigslist post the landlord inaccurately said the apartment was in Prospect Heights, rather than Crown Heights.
The Journal article gave superficial treatment to a substantive issue, and set the tone for the subsequent backlash. A filmmaker posted this stupid video (at bottom), featured on Gothamist, of folks on Franklin Avenue 'reacting' to the notion that they lived in a neighbourhood called ProCro.
Nick Juravich, one of Crown Heights' most devoted bloggers, took issue with the video linked to on Gothamist for mocking the fake name along with the real residents:
If this is all one big joke, as the introduction suggests, it misses an opportunity to actually engage residents about the exercise of power that (re)naming wields. Sure, there's potential value in satirizing a Wall Street Journal article that helps to reify such a name change, but ultimately, the joke's not very funny, and there are ways to provoke these conversations as a reporter without reducing your subject material to farce.Regardless of its impact on real estate prices, renaming something indicates possession. So it's understandable that residents might resent labels imposed externally. Franklin Avenue residents got stirred up late last year when some businesses on the strip wanted to co-name part of the street "Panama Way."
The sense of ownership among the residents of Franklin Avenue for their neighborhood is linked in no small part to their sense of accomplishment over two decades. "Franklin Avenue has a name," a neighborhood block association member told the Daily News. "We need to keep going with that success story."
Crown Heights was so saturated with drugs and crime in the late 1980's that a squad of corrupt cops were able to openly rob and extort street dealers for years before being caught. The neighbourhood was rocked by black riots against Hassidic Jews in the early 1990's. So when a sudden, city-wide drop in murders began and the city experienced a flowering of economic growth at the start of that decade, nowhere in the city felt the change more than Crown Heights.
Neighbourhood efforts at improvement may not have led the upturn in public safety and economic prosperity, but they lent locals a sense of investment in the improvement. That outside interests want to capitalize on neighborhood gains but wrench the name away from the locals stirs their ire.
While Juravich's dismay at the media reaction resonates with this former Crown Heights resident, he and I parted ways over Jeffries' declaration of war against forces renaming neighbourhoods.
Neighborhood change doesn't start with renaming a hood, and somehow gagging realtors' imaginative efforts at labeling places won't reel in real estate value.
When I moved into the Franklin Avenue apartment two years ago, I thought it somewhat ridiculous for the landlord to advertise the place as Prospect Heights. This wasn't mere geography, although traditionally Washington Avenue has divided Prospect from Crown Heights. It was a matter of neighborhood scene: On my block we had African hair braiding salons, and the clothing shop on the corner sold Coogi. I lived above a jerk chicken spot. The corner bodega offered single Newports for seventy-five cents, and there was an NYPD Skywatch tower parked at the intersection. The bar across the street was named I-95, served soul food, and played hip hop and reggaeton.
My roommate and I didn't move to Franklin Avenue because we thought we were moving to Prospect Heights; we and everyone like us moving into the neighbourhood were doing so because the neighbourhood sported reasonable rents, excellent access to transit, nearby groceries, and felt more or less neighbourly. It was a good area, and it was improving. But, I thought calling it Prospect Heights was a goofy attempt to convince apartment-seekers that the place was in a whiter, more bourgeoisie neighbourhood.
Any cynicism I had about the landlord's re-labeling vanished when it became clear that I wasn't a drop in a bucket; I was part of a tsunami. Over the course of the summer, a beer garden grew around the corner, and expanded into a gourmet burger restaurant. An organic coffee shop opened up next to it, and then another one opened up the block. A fresh juice and smoothie place opened its doors at the end of July. The jerk chicken shop closed, and is scheduled to be replaced by a wood-oven pizzeria. More young, thin white adults like me showed up on the sidewalks, and the city soon installed new bicycle racks along the avenue.
I'm sure that the influx of people like me into the area raised concerns among some previous residents. Rising rents put pressure on residents and undercut their economic security. They lost familiar institutions and businesses. And they saw an infusion of new public investment for basics like public safety that they didn't seem to merit before people like me moved in. Neighborhood change never stops, either, and if trends continue, the gentrifiers could soon be priced out of Franklin Avenue as glass condos sprout between the rowhouses.
But if Jeffries hopes to somehow tap into these grievances, in an appeal to 'nativism,' by assigning blame for these serious and powerful trends remaking lives in his district, he's falling short of properly addressing these issues.
Jeffries, and everyone in Crown Heights, would love to see positive growth, but they fear dispossession. And rightly so: many people in Brooklyn live on razor-thin cost-of-living margins, and rent price hikes can put them out of home. Jeffries' reactive attempt at regulation showcases the dearth of real neighbourhood protection. Defending the people of the district may require stronger residential and business rent controls, better public safety enforcement for all, and local employment incentives. But these things require legislative fights, and strident dedication. They may not be priorities for a catatonic state legislature or a disempowered city council or a mayor who defends tax breaks for millionaires.
This is why the discussion over the name ProCro is so frustrating; the fact that it's going on suggests a public awareness of vital residential issues but a dearth of faculty to respond.
Update: My former Franklin Avenue roommate writes:
There's also the question of where change is coming from. Tony Fisher has owned that corner for decades. The juice bar guys are hardly white outsiders. Ron of the pizza place certainly is, but at the anti-pawn shop rally [City Councilor] Tish James said something like "this neighbourhood doesn't need a pawn shop. It needs more sit-down restaurants" and there was loud cheering from the crowd.
There's this woman, Japonica Brown-Saracino, who writes about "social preservation" as an alternative discourse to gentrification.That is, people who move into neighbhourhoods because they LIKE them and they want to live there, not just housing speculations.... it's important to recognize that gentrification is not just one monolithic thing, it happens in different forms and has different effects.
Compelling writing on the gentrification of Crown Heights here.
Crown Heights Locals React To "Pro Cro" from Gregory Stefano on Vimeo.
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