Community Politics and the Middle-Class Desire for Diversity and Difference. Evidence from 40 Years-Span of (super)Gentrification in Brooklyn's Park Slope

The transformation of New York City into a global corporate city and the consequent deleterious effects on small firms and on dwindling employment opportunities for blue-collar workers began to create housing opportunities for some and to exacerbate displacement problems for others. By encouraging suburban home ownership, discouraging rental housing construction, and upwardly redistributing income through federal and municipal tax policies, Brooklyn’s Park Slope, at the beginning of the 1970s faced a racial and tenure status division between its neighborhood residents. Reform institutions emerged from neighborhood civic organizations and broad-based interest groups.

Drawing the evolution of its demographic and housing resettlement, I found that different social groups had different class interests and ideologies, and therefore they were differently affected by abandonment and resettlement processes. The involvements and influence in community politics of twenty community organizations were analyzed through archival and bibliographic researches from the late 1960s to the present time; among them four historical institutions – which still exist – and four more recent ones, were followed through the ethnographic activities and other researches and are reported in this work. There is, in fact, a social and 'moral pluralism' to understand (Schumaker 2013), especially when a neighborhood has been dealing with racial, ethnic, class, and religious changes.

This longitudinal study on the process of Park Slope super gentrification investigates the middle class’ desire for diversity and difference (Lees et al, 2008) as well as the influences of housing-abandonment and resettlement processes on 1) the types of institutions that emerged to represent different class interests; 2) the types of social groups that came to inhabit the neighborhood; 3) the pattern of that emergence over time; 4) the particular goals, scope, and strategies that these organizations evolved; and 5) developmental changes in the relationships between local institutions, government agencies, and private investors.