 Hi everyone! We're going to go ahead and start. My name is Jenny and I'm proud to be presenting on behalf of the Brooklyn Museum tonight. I'd like to start by welcoming all of you to Thursdays at 7 at the Brooklyn Museum. Each week on Thursday evening we offer programs that range from film screenings to conversations to music. And once a month we offer a program titled In Conversation that addresses a specific hot topic issue. This month's In Conversation brings together project and thought leaders in a discussion that seeks to empower community members, organizers and artists to confront issues surrounding globalization and gentrification. It's my pleasure to introduce Todd Lester, Executive Director of the Global Arts Corps, Founder of Freedimensional and Creator of Lanshanet.org to begin our conversations tonight. Thank you all for coming out. So my name is Todd Lester and I'll just briefly give the names and a little bit about some of our panelists this evening. So on the far end is Paula Siegel. She's the founder of 596, one of the founders and lead coordinators of 596 Acres. She's also done a lot with street law teams and the list could go on and on. Sarah Schillman right beside her is the author of 16 books, one of which is Gentrification of the Mind, Witness to a Lost Imagination. Oh goodness, I always, sometimes I forget whenever I'm in front of people. Welcome, Sarah. Mitty Owens to her left is a community organizer. He's been living and working in Brooklyn for many years and has been working with Fury, Families United for Racial Equality and Economic Equality. And beside him is Risa Wilson, the founder of the Laundromat Project. So I'd like to first thank all of the panelists for agreeing to join this discussion and just tell you a little bit about why I wanted to bring this group of thinkers and doers together. Of late I've been occupied with or preoccupied with the question of how do we live with money and this, how do we live without it? Good question. It's almost like the, we'll get there. I was going to say it's almost, it's almost like a relationship that is not good for you but you're not sure whether you want to live with it or without it. I feel like money is kind of that way. I have for the last 10 years been an arts administrator and specifically an artist residency administrator and therefore I've become say acutely aware of a double-edged discussion around what art can do for communities. I think behind the claims of what art can do for communities there is what it can do and what it does end up doing and I would say that the difference between those two realities is five, 10, 15 years of engaging and holding steady and continuing to build consensus in an evolving way and not acting like once consensus is built that you can move on and that it stays that way. It stays stuck to the bulletin board but that it is a living thing. I'm also these days particularly interested in a growing rubric creative placemaking that I've been hearing a lot of lately in the same discussions as economic development. So what I would like to do before I invite the panelists to tell you a little bit of what's on their mind, what they're doing in their daily practice, what worries them. These are some of the questions I asked them to consider as they took this theme of globalization and gentrification to bear but before I do that you all know what we're going to talk about tonight and perhaps you know some of the speakers and I'd like to see very quickly if there's any pressing ideas or questions that the audience might have. I'd like to ask for one, two, or three, just 10-second interventions where you could, we can test the temperature a little bit and you can put some questions at the front of the table rather than in the Q&A that will follow the discussion. I've already heard one lady in the second row say how do we live without money. Are there any other observations on the topic or pressing ideas? Got one over here? Mine would be why here and why now. Anybody else, very quickly? No pressure. We'll, there's one in the back row here and then we'll, how do we live without money, why here, why now, and one more. This is also similar to the money issue I guess the biggest hot thing to for foundations to fund now is large-scale community development involves artists in some way so I guess I'm just kind of wondering about the coolest examples you guys know about that. All right. Or just sort of any thoughts on how to move forward in that direction. Did you say artists in subways? No. Large-scale community development. How to involve artists in that in some way. Some ways not subways because there is also an initiative for artists in subways so I wanted to make sure. Okay thank you for those questions and what I will do and I won't take much time doing it is I will try to answer the why here, why now for me and for the convening and then I'm going to hand it straight away to Risa Wilson to talk a little bit about her work. Why here, why now for me is that you know I've been in the Bed-Stuy Clinton Hill Crown Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn for over a decade. I am an artist and an organizer and an administrator and I get into a lot of discussions about the pace of our interventions and innovations in communities. I know having started a few things that when I get the zeal to start something and I think it's a good idea I don't just give lip service to consensus building but I do get a little bit of I get a little crazed and excited and ready to implement the idea so the ongoing dialogue I have with myself is remember that consensus isn't stuck to the wall that it's an ongoing thing and how do you make sure to calibrate the pace of what you're doing with the community's desires and their invitation to do so therein. I get in a lot of conversations with artists where gentrification is this sort of guilty we talk about it but we dance around it and we replace it with other words that rationalize our relationship to it and I personally think why here and why now it's it's a moment to kind of move that forward into some nuanced truths plural and with that I would again like to introduce Risa Wilson who will talk to us first. Okay good evening. Thanks so this is a hard conversation to be in because I do think gentrification is one of those topics that's a very loaded very hot button kind of topic and so I don't pretend I don't come into this conversation pretending to be an expert on gentrification it's not something I've studied or that this is what my professional work is around directly but before I talk about what the launch event project is and how that's relevant to this conversation as a human being I think how I come into this conversation is someone who's lived in Bed-Stuy for the last I guess 12 years it's the neighborhood that my four bears came to when they migrated to the United States I lived down the street from the house that my mother was born in it just so happens but I was raised in Philly and so even though I've been here for a while and even though I feel like I have deep roots in in Bed-Stuy I also understand myself as a gentrifier and I have to negotiate what my relationship is to privilege and what my relationship is to power and how am I actually contributing to my community how do I how do I understand my community how's my community understand me and so I think to live in this moment in New York to live in this moment on the planet is to is to kind of necessitates a very raw honesty about our individual relationships to privilege and power and access and what do we do with it that spills into my work in that I am very invested in what does it mean to be a citizen artist so that's one of the questions I actually have for all of us that I hope that we'll wrestle with in our kind of Q&A what does it mean to be a citizen artist what does it mean to be a creative citizen right how do we tap into our own innate creative capacity in ways that actually manifest to create the places that we want to live right and so understanding that the infrastructure that would allow each of us as human beings to tap into that creativity in a very systematic way in the way that we learn our ABCs in the way that we learn our multiplication tables that infrastructure is poor is has lots of holes in it is not equitable is not ubiquitous and so in that spirit the launch mat project leverages the spaces of neighborhood launch mats to mount art programs right so that's just a really easy fallow space downtime but but the fundamental skill is really how do we make it normal to tap into our creative capacity every day how do we make it normal to be an artist how does how do we make it normal to be an artist and be a neighbor and to really understand what our individual responsibility is to the places where we live so the launch of our project mounts these art workshops that range from bookmaking to making kaleidoscopes to silk screenings to sidewalk drawings but they always have some sort of curriculum attached to them that is about visioning around your particular neighborhood or understanding your particular neighborhoods history or understanding who actually lives here right now what's their story and so it's as much about meeting your neighbors whether you are three or you are 83 it's you know this kind of unexpected delight in seeing your neighborhood in a new light because it's also kind of like what is this you know not expecting that kind of that kind of moment to happen around the corner as opposed to these special buildings called museums right or this special designated place as a place of culture but to understand really that it is part of our everyday lives and how do we make it manifest so I don't want to kind of ramble on and on but but my own work whether it's with the launch mat project which I founded and which is now led by a very capable team of really smart people I sit on the board whether it's through the launch mat project or the work I do every day at an organization called link which is called stands for leveraging investments and creativity which itself is a 10-year project about strengthening the infrastructure support for artists right so I'm kind of kind of say a little bit of my own answer to what does it mean to be a citizen artist and kind of my own answer to how do we live without money you know fundamentally you have to have the capacity to pay your bills and to kind of understand to make housing choices that aren't just about desperation but that are actually about and that aren't just about buildings but are about who lives here and how do I want to be part of this collection of people what is it that I want to give and what am I taking away what's the exchange that happens and so I think the work at link really pulls up that artists are fundamentally human beings they're fundamentally professionals and that there there are universal needs around access to affordable healthcare and you know access to affordable places to live and work just like any other profession so I'm going to stop there thank you I also forgot to mention the a little bit about the format so each of the panelists are going to talk for a few minutes tell you what's on their mind on this theme but we're going to move into the Q&A pretty early we have until 8 30 here so another hour and 10 minutes and I want to to the best of our ability break down kind of the divide between the days and the audience and so please do think of questions and things you want to talk about and I hope we really turn it into a conversation after these initial presentations so with that I'd like to move on to Paula Siegel to tell us a little bit about her work let's see hi my name is Paula Siegel I run a little project called 596 acres which sort of in a head-on way tackles the space of the city and I have to admit that the word gentrification itself actually makes me a little bit uncomfortable because it speaks to so many different experiences at the same time and I really I really like what Risa said about sort of interrogating your neighborhood based on the lens of who lives here now and so what 596 acres does is identify vacant public land and put tools in the hands of the people who live closest to that land meaning vacant lots that are scattered around the neighborhoods of New York City put tools in the hands of the people who live closest to those vacant lots to open up the fences and turn those vacant lots into places where neighbors can meet each other and question of gentrification is one that's really loaded in that context the reason a lot of these lots are vacant is because the gentrification that was anticipated in the 70s and 80s didn't happen the way that policymakers thought that it would the city took a lot of land and through urban renewal programs and actually and also ended up with a lot of land through disinvestment that which came from you know basically insurance policies for how mortgages were insured just redlining is is the word that we're all sort of familiar with and what we're seeing still is how redlining has affected neighborhoods 40 years later the people who live in those neighborhoods now are not for the most part the people who lived in those neighborhoods before disinvestment those people left a lot of whoever could left situations that were created at that time were pretty desperate municipal services were cut and then the different people came in and these spaces in neighborhoods are the spaces where people who live in these places now can meet each other and some people have been here the whole time some people moved into these neighborhoods in a sort of a moment of a desperate housing choice and some people are moving moved in last week but it's everybody who's here now and my hope for the project is that it creates spaces where people can meet their neighbors and together build the city and the perspective on gentrification that I think is the most exciting to me is kind of taking it as a question of who decides and gentrification being in my mind something that is a decision that's made from the top down a decision that's made on the level of policy and really wanting to turn that around so I like to talk about the work that we do as work that's anti displacement that's work that creates bonds in neighborhoods and creates the power and the capacity in community to fight future displacements but the question of sort of gentrification is one of real perspective of like are you a policymaker are you a new neighbor are you somebody who's watched your neighborhood change in ways that are good in ways that are terrible in ways that are threatening that word encompasses all of those things and it's it's interesting to parse but I don't like to use it so I'll give some thoughts in between everyone and Paula just triggered or signaled me to you know that we've started the unpacking of gentrification I didn't select the title globalization and gentrification but I am happy with it because it gives me the opportunity to to really be in a research phase I am in the process of starting a project in the city of Sao Paulo Brazil and this event tonight is one in a series of events that we're having in major cities around the world leading into that project and so I'm in this really lucky position of working with the Brooklyn Museum to have this panel and to get to sit back and listen and the reason I am glad that those two words got together in the title is because in some ways it feels like they are they're very similar phenomena and since I've been working in Brazil of late I've heard this other word that sort of fits right in between them which is called Brazilianification and so if globalization is the the world and if gentrification is the city Brazilianification is defined as the state of the disappearing middle class and the broadening gap between the rich and the poor Brazil is a country that has five classes or so they stratify and so just so you know what I'm up to by doing this convening and and sitting back and listening with that I know that midi is going to pick up on this policy theme but also tell us a little bit of story about his life so I'm going to hand it over to him now hi thanks Todd um so wow when Todd gave us uh this topic and the different iterations it was big enough already and then entering into the space and hearing your questions and hearing my co-panelists it's it's even more huge and so I wear a number of different hats um most of the time and tonight I'm going to start with my party promoter hat because I want to invite you all to for the after party at my place which is fortunately is just about eight blocks away because we're never going to end this conversation by 830 in a meaningful way because there's it's so rich there's so much so um I'm sort of serious about that but if not tonight then let's definitely have a follow-up um maybe I'll start um I mean I have been an organizer I've also been a public policy person in a few different ways including teaching at NYU's Wagner school and I liked often to start my classes at NYU Wagner with a story about how it is that um my family uh developed some economic security and how we have been able to live just a mere eight blocks away um in short um my my folks came to the city in 1959 the city was obviously a very different place right this was now the continue at that point the continuation of four decades of a black migration from the south and a more recent major migration of people from the Caribbean to Brooklyn uh at the same time there was an exodus of the white middle class and working class from Brooklyn as a result of racial prejudice the fears being fanned by capitalist speculators who wanted to block bust basically buying up brown beautiful brownstones very cheaply and turning them into apartments and and basically preying on people's fears and let's not also forget the federal government incentivizing people to leave the city incentivizing some people to leave the city by building highways in the suburbs and new developments like levittown and not only the highway infrastructure but then enticing them with very affordable mortgages and the insurance and um and so a lot of people were fleeing people who could go there without getting crosses burned on their lawns um and so the city was a very different place home ownership was declining city services were declining the tax base was declining and yet still some people had the vision to see how incredible these neighborhoods were the architecture the streetscape um the incredible warmth of families the community despite the odds and that is the world in which my parents entered and after being renters and you know frugally saving um and and uh my mom dutifully combing the streets with my oldest brother in the stroller she found a house on prospect place between vandal built in carleton and said oh my god we have to have this well it was only eight blocks away from grand army plaza where my dad had become a library a librarian one of the first black librarians he was making seven thousand at the time 1959 they were both educated they did the right thing they were on that american dream trajectory and they had heard that mortgages were being provided at 80 percent so only 20 percent down even they with their meager savings could manage that at the 13 000 level right 20 percent down except when they looked into it more closely those 80 percent loans were being made out in the new developments in levittown and the suburbs because those were the federally insured mortgages that for the to the banks that were made at 80 percent and the back here in the inner city with our existing infrastructure and beautiful brownstones but which didn't quite make the federal government's guidelines of large lots single family detached homes and homogeneous communities that was actually codified in the federal housing administration's guidelines until 1962 and jfk got rid of that through an executive order though so in the inner city you could only get a 50 percent loan so suddenly my folks had to come up with 6500 bucks nearly my father's annual salary not exactly very possible for most new couples except my mom so so many families just had to give up despite the hard work despite pulling themselves up the by the bootstraps the dream of home ownership was not achievable for them which is of course had been the pathway to economic stability and upper mobility in the united states except what i haven't told you is not only is my mom who's sitting right here in the audience who asked the first question about how do you live without money um the troublemaker not only is she persistent but she's white and as a result of being white and having the historic white privilege her family had something more than what most black families had she was able to turn to her brother and say please he was a pharmacist please lend me some money for this down payment and he said what you don't know what you're doing everyone is leaving no one wants to live there but she's also like i said persistent and the younger sister and she broke down and cried to her older brother so our economic development economic security asset development strategy in this family which led to our college educations and my father's financing of his professional aspirations is not due to enlightened public policy or good bank policy but the precariousness of having a white relative with some historic privilege and resources and her being a younger sister who was able to cry to her brother is that is that what we want to hang our economic security and asset development strategies strategies on in this country do we want that to be our guiding principles or do we want enlightened public policies that will do what the new deal did which in five years from 1936 to 1941 doubled the rate of home ownership as the result of enlightened federal policy the federal housing administration ensuring mortgages again to certain people working with the banking system and doubling home ownership rates not to mention all the other incredible programs of the new deal i will stop there but i put that out there because one of the first questions i asked my students i was tempted to ask you all tonight to even stand up and respond to this question is do you have any confidence that government can truly impact gentrification and other such social issues in a major way does government is government even relevant to those phenomena as opposed to all the individualist behavioralist social interactions that we tend to focus so much on which are not insignificant but as we talk about gentrification i hope as we get further into this discussion we will of course talk further about the personal responsibility the role of artists and creative individuals and the role of civic organizations and how we address our personal consciousness and our personal responsibility how we dialogue how we have respect for these communities and and interact but there's something even deeper than that which is how do we have more enlightened public policy which sets the foundation because globally going back to globalization there is a global phenomena indeed as Todd said and that is the concentration of wealth in the hands of very few and the denial the the reduced democracy certainly in this country of the many to be able to control our resources our communities and our politics it all goes together so i hope we will be able to come back to these myriad themes thank you midi midi could you please run for mayor seriously he is from a family of politicians i believe sir before i give you the mic may i say just a few more announcements i and i'll admit this is not by design i should have said some of these things before everyone started but i was so anxious to get into the discussion and it also shouldn't be overlooked that last night we had part one of this two part event at a gallery in manhattan where visual artists nicky singleton and brian responded to sarah's book gentrification of the mind with an installation and performance and that has kept us up for the last three nights so some of it is actually me being forgetful but what i would like to point out before sarah starts is that my my math my counting on four fingers here says that everyone on the table is an artist i know at least midi is a drummer whether or not he takes it any further than that and i've heard so far the first three talks really sort of leaning into administration and policy so i hope that i can ask the audience to help me suss out the artistry and the art practice of the folks here at the table i'd also like to mention that we have a class who's on winter intercession at cuny from the pacific school of religion so at the very least i hope those students will help me ask those questions and before sarah starts i want to also give a plug for her book that gentrification of the mind tonight if you would like to have it there is a 20 off coupon on the back table and you can order it with that discount and i'll start to introduce sarah by saying that in her book she says that gentrification is a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves and with that i'll give it to you sarah so i want to tell the same story that you told but a little bit differently here's my version of the history of gentrification in new york city world war two they had the gi bill the gi bill enabled veterans to buy homes with very very low interest rates but because of and this was actually a way for the government to put money directly into the hands of developers who were developing the suburbs so as a government policy to funnel federal funds into the hands of developers because of race racism racial discrimination these suburbs were not available to veterans of color so this is what motivated what later became known as white flight the movement of ethnic whites out of the city into these suburbs and these suburbs were racially stratified they had they were very conservative arenas privatization compulsory heterosexuality car culture consumerism highly highly stratified cultures in which those former urban citizens were now raising their children in an opposite environment for the environments they had grown up in the city that was left behind the city of white flight was the city of low rents of open neighborhoods i know my parents paid 60 a month and got three months free rent for signing their lease okay so it was that kind of environment but don't forget that it also was the environment of urban rebellion and then the 60s and 70s now movements like black power and gay liberation were not created in the suburbs they were created in the cities because they required that mix that is the the life force of urbanity it required people of difference living together to produce new ideas and that's why cities were essential places for revolutionary ideas and for revolutionary art ideas and ideas that in the 60s and 70s were extremely threatening to the dominant culture and had a lot of impact on social transformation now in the mid 70s new york city went broke the the explanation that we were given was that there were not enough rich people living here we didn't have a tax base to sustain the payment for the city and so the deliberate process of gentrification began gentrification is not a normal evolution it was a deliberate process and you must keep that in mind and it was sold to the people of new york city with the claim that by attracting richer people we would have a broader tax base we'd be able to afford the infrastructure i don't know if you looked at our infrastructure lately new york city is overflowing with rich people and we are closing hospitals our schools are shit the subways don't work right none of this money has gone into the infrastructure because of the Reagan tax cuts so we brought in all of these rich people and none of the money is going back into the city now what they did was they started to do condo and co-op conversion with the idea of attracting who the children of white flight and i think that this is really an important part of the cultural shift that accompanies gentrification for me gentrification is a supremacy ideology that is masquerading as reality it does not see itself okay it looks in the mirror and thinks it's a window and it is very it has a lot of the the basic qualities of white supremacy and it's very connected to white supremacy so children of the white flight generation they had a a sentimental and emotional attachment to the city because their parents have grown up there they would come here to visit their grandparents they take the they come into the city to walk around and smoke pot or whatever they had a relationship to the city but they had grown up in racial stratification they had grown up in class stratification they did not have a comfort with urbanity and so when these people were attracted back into the city they brought suburbanization with them suburbanized values and suburban culture and this was the first time in america that we had suburbanization it was the first time that we had produced a generation that was a product of suburbanization and with them they brought certain values they brought the value of the gated community they brought the willingness to trade freedom for security they brought a sense of obedience that was contrary to urban life and so you start to see as the city through corporate welfare which is what it was okay tax breaks to wealthy developers this as the city started to bring these people in there started to be a flip in the perspective of how things were assessed so for example a neighborhood that was now becoming dangerous to its inhabitants was called safer right because it's not from the point of view of the inhabitants when a neighborhood became homogenous it's called better but actually it's worse so it starts to happen in new york city and the reason i've called this book the gentrification of the mind is that the homogeneity undermines urbanity and therefore the city becomes less and less a place that produces new ideas and you know what's really interesting is i realized very last night actually that the word gentrification has a different meaning for for more recent arrivals to new york and younger people than it does for me for me gentrification is a replacement process it's an undermining of diverse businesses and mixed communities that are affordable and a replacement with a bland and boring and banal homogenous suburban aesthetic that weirdly views itself as hip and cool when it's actually incredibly tedious but that's not what gentrification means to people today to them it means they see all of that homogeneity as neutral and as the way things are and when those places get replaced by dunkin donuts and banks and mcdonalds that's what they're calling gentrification but what's actually happening is that low income people have no place to buy anything so they're being forced into these fast food chains and these you know the kind of things that you know dunkin donuts these types of places because the places that new yorkers found affordable and express their culture and were already destroyed so that's where i see that we're at now okay that's it well i i'm watching both midi and risa sort of right furiously i can't see the tablets of sarah and paula but i think that there's some reaction um i before we get to that i would like to ask the panelists to converse amongst themselves a bit to ask each other questions for the next 10 or so minutes while the audience is gearing up with their questions but i thought i would i thought i would give them a time to gather their thoughts and read you a quote that i stumbled across and i'm still thinking about and i want you to think about it too i have not read the book telegraph avenue by michael chevon but i did read a review about it in the american reader and this is a passage that has stuck with me i have nothing against michael chevon by the way um michael chevon cannot help but fall into the trap pierre bordeaux in distinction ascribes to the narad niki of all times and all lands that of confusing one's relation to the working class condition with the working class relation to that condition what this means for chevon is that the research process itself infiltrates the fabric of the object of research it installs itself as the grand narrative meta excuse me as the grand metaphor behind all other activities in an endless series of knowledge checks culture checks and taste checks now why i wanted to read that is as um as a culture worker as an artist as a sometimes you know person with an idea that i want to activate quickly this slows me down and um that's one of the things i wanted to talk about tonight was what slows you down what um how do you make sure and this is a question to the panel how do you make sure that you are working in tandem with the communities you're working in and not outpacing them uh with the added value that i believe everyone at this table is making um i'll start with risa i met risa um some eight nine ten years ago i guess uh right when um the laundry mat before i think you you proposed the laundry mat project and i remember when it kind of got off the ground and when i believe it was it was intent the intention was that it would be one laundry mat that the project would purchase and that the the income would cross subsidize the artistic activities and i probably simplifying that but i think that in the meantime you've moved into a sort of scaling out of that idea where rather than immediately purchasing a property that you're actually engaging autonomous laundry mats with your idea and in some way that speaks to the pacing question i'm asking where i see that you have actually opted to work in more than one neighborhood and not take sort of a capital um expense on as a project manager i'll just leave it at that and see if you have anything to anyone's remarks you'd like to say i would love to tell you that that was out of some very deliberate strategic what have you but i think it really does reflect a lot of what has been pulled up right which is um you know uh our policies our structures have not been designed for people of color women of color without a lot of money to go by a building to go be a commercial landlord to go i mean that's that's more the reality than um you know this very thoughtful strategy but it was kind of like all right well fuck you i'm going to do something so you know if i can't buy a building you know if you if you won't front the money to buy the building if you won't be an investor um then let me get on with the work which is really fundamentally about how do we reach people where they are and how do we and and so it's a happy accident right so that the happy accident is um we are now figuring out what's available the kinds of conversations that can happen the kind of cultural shifts that can happen because we are working in multiple neighborhoods and so i want to pull up something that you you brought at midi which is really right on you know i i think and actually you also pulled it up sarah right like it's important for us to hold our government accountable and for our policies and structures to be designed for us to actually live the way that we want to live that's that's real right and it's important that we don't take on more responsibility than is appropriate personally and at the same time i also think that um cultural shifts are what produce lasting change right um it's it's what what makes people angry about policies that don't work it's what produces it's it's all the dynamics that you're pulling up right about how we imagine something different and i think that there's there's a reason why there are many people that are complacent with the kind of guilty elephant of i know i'm a gentrifier and i think you know we have to own our agency in upholding the effects of these policies right so how do we get honest about negotiating what access to power we have and how we're exercising it whether that means that we you know those of us who have the capacity to advocate for different policies are doing that whether that is those of us who are cultural workers who want to see some sort of difference are thoughtful about the the way that we invite someone to consider what we're doing and understand it as a proposal and not my inherent right to do this just because i live here and this is my address um to just i think culture is very real and so i'm really interested in how we negotiate um the the happy marriage of the two of these kind of cultural shifts and structural shifts at the same time i might take a crack at uh chiming in here um there clearly is no um there's no dichotomy here um obviously between the culture slash personal slash community level and the policy quote unquote because good policy is only formulated and implemented is a big difference when the people who are most affected are somehow at the table or an involved involved whether it's at the local level or whether it's a national healthcare bill right when we are truly at the table and we have more control over it then we will get the policies we want otherwise we'll get something if we get something we'll get something terribly watered down or missing the mark so one of one of the questions that was going through my brain for the two of you uh risa and pala was is thinking about how you all are you able to use the public spaces that you have or private spaces that you then are able to transform into public space which is so fantastic and then the public lots to to facilitate dialogue community dialogue about issues and what is that process like especially in a country where and I've traveled a lot and I've I've never seen such almost disdain for sort of political discussion as in this country in many ways that that's not totally fair because actually I find on the on the more grassroots level I find people do naturally go into talking about politics in an organic way issues that affect them in their daily lives so I really take that back um so what is that process like is there a discussion about deep meaningful things and and an orientation towards yes we can use this space in this dialogue to through the creativity through the public space to organize mobilize put together an agenda does that transform into taking power and taking action I mean this kind of goes to the mechanics of how 596 acres works um but it continues to stun me so there is a lot of land in this city maybe not quite 596 acres when you actually look at it very closely but a lot of land in this city that's being held on to by the city in a sort of land bank that's designed to give land away to future speculators that have not you know arrived yet at a moment where they want to speculate in the areas where the city is just holding on to this land and land that's being held because that was acquired by public actors for public projects that never happened that land is kind of invisible it's sitting behind fences it looks just like any other lot that's being warehouse by a speculator it's got trash on it there's probably a dead cat you know it it looks that way um and simply labeling it simply putting a sign on it like an arrow and a phone number that says hey this is what our government is doing this is what our very local government is doing and here's the person that's the person you can call who's accountable for this lot full of trash and the dead cat that actually starts a conversation that surprises me by cutting across a lot of personal politics and then coming back and starting at a really political place as a real accountability place and its neighbors talking to each other with this one piece of information that's really solid and lets people take the next step as well and what's I've been doing this for about a year and a half and the way where I work with people from all over where wherever the land is um and what surprises me is how much I see over and over again in these different groups some of which I haven't even met as I know that sometimes we'll get an email or see something how much they're suddenly engaging with their community boards their local council races people are asking questions that are super mechanical about how civic associations work how government works how money is distributed in the city for people to be able to talk across difference um and ask real inquisitive questions instead of political questions about how how government structures our lives I think figuring out ways to do that is really really important and what we have is like this one little key that turns one little lock that lets that happen and if we could do that everywhere I think we would have we would have real accountability we'd have real demand for accountability uh I think Todd mentioned earlier that I was involved I'm involved in bringing street law programs to youth around New York City um I'm actually trained as an attorney and I've spent some time working for a civil rights firm and in law school we actually set up a system so that anybody who's a teacher or works at a community based organization can have a centralized way of saying hey I'd like a law student or an attorney to come and do a street law training that's a harm reduction training in constitutional rights and how to deal with police encounters um and setting up that infrastructure also is another way there are no answers and when you show up in a you know a ninth grade classroom to talk about how you know a particular neighborhood is overpoliced and how particular individuals could maybe protect themselves in those encounters you're not going to stop, stop and frisk and you're not going to stop the violence of those interactions in people's lives but you're going to start conversations that maybe have never happened before you're going to start conversations in spaces that are neutral where people where there is difference where people have really different experiences based on their color of their skin based on where they live in the city and to be able to have those conversations about something else that's like wow why do the police stop people and to start that to be able to start those conversations again a little tiny key but it's building a constituency that's sort of me talking about me I just want to talk a little bit about the gentrification of the arts which is a big factor in all of this um you know I think that the proliferation of MFA programs and the professionalization of the arts has had very significant consequences on gentrification if you now that basically you're required to get an MFA if you want to have a professional career if you want to teach in your field you have to have an MFA and it's it operates as a you know it's a it's like a gang system right so everyone so the other people who have your brand whether your brand you know whatever your school is that's your gang and that's your brand and those other people with that brand will help you and that's how you advance now there's so the this all produces homogeneity for a number of reasons the first thing is a community does not have an entrance requirement right anybody can be in a community but if you have to apply and be accepted into a professionalization program they're already filtering you so they want a certain type of person and you also have to be able to pay right and we know that these things are grossly I mean the idea that somebody pays $200,000 to get an MFA in poetry is really crazy okay so now you've been filtered in you're the kind of person that they want and you have the money or you're willing to go away into debt and you have the time so already most people who would have become artists without those conditions are not going to go into that system then you come in and you have common influences you're reading the same books you're listening to the same teachers right this is counter indicated to art making itself art making is about individual vision and you know before this professionalization was imposed you became an artist by making art looking at art and talking about art basically with other artists and each person had their own path through life and you would eclectically acquire information or or be exposed to things or read some book or whatever and each person develops their own points of reference and it becomes their vision but when you systematize it and you make a mandatory then you have very very narrow range of work that gets created with shared vocabulary and values that are class-based and mostly racially based and repetitive and this is just killing the arts in new york city i mean it is you know sometimes like i'm a novelist and sometimes i'll sit on a panel or something and i'm looking at and you can tell what program people went to by how they write i mean it's so mass produced and i want to say that i want to go back to peter's question which i think is really important about why here right now why now and i think it's because the gentrification discourse is itself becoming gentrified you know one of the things about capital is that it's able to absorb everything you know and as soon and i've had this experience i'm old i'm 54 and i've had this experience multiply that you you do cultural activism you discover something you develop it you articulate it and as soon as it becomes viable they swoop in and take it from you and even the gentrification discourse itself is being branded and marketed so that's why you know here and now thank you um okay so sarah did kind of get to the art of it all but uh we still need to hear from paula uh risa and midi about their own artistic practices so i'm gonna leave that to the audience because we're pretty swiftly gonna segue to um q and a because i'd really like to hear what you all are thinking and what this has provoked in you before the video changes because i think that's what's about to happen let me tell you what you've been watching and what you're about to watch so the slideshow right now is a mix between some images from 596 acres and some images from a walk i took in salpaolo with a photographer photographing lunch on that and i just thought i'd share with you a little bit of my passion paula is also a fellow lover of salpaolo i believe um knowing her work there the next slideshow you're about to see is from housing as a human right it's an organization based here in new york i believe the risa has helped us get a slideshow movie of some images and they go pretty slow so we'll put them on as the backdrop for um the q and a and todd could i just interject about your project because i watched a video that you have online about your project and one of the things that i was that was so intriguing um for me about the luncheonette project is i believe you said that the luncheon in in in in salpaolo which is rapidly changing and gentrifying that the luncheonettes are one of the few remaining spaces which were publicly accessible and attracted across class group of people so you'd have various people sitting there and that was one of the few spaces that really facilitated that interaction i guess laundry mats one one could say in in in changing neighborhoods could also do that um so although obviously the the very rich don't have to go to the luncheonettes but luncheonettes everyone needs to eat and they eat out so that was intriguing for me because otherwise i was wondering why the luncheonette and and that that particular space as a as a as a place that facilitates that interaction is uh in in changing demographic is curious to you gave me a wonderful setup i've promised that i'm not going to belabor the luncheonette project too much because it's a five-year project that just started and i'm still in a really uh exploratory mode with it but i will say that there are postcards on the back table if you'd like to read a little bit about it and i will speak to that very briefly because i think it's germane to what we're talking about i make the argument or or maybe the hypothesis i'm not sure yet i don't want to be too academic with the project but i say that in a particular area of the center of salpallo salpallo being a vast space unlike say rio where the favelas are in the mountains and so poor live on top of rich in salpallo it's vast and wide and so the poor live at the periphery but there still remains a center of the city that is let's say un gentrified and it is slowly being squeezed out and pushed to the periphery and this includes all of the uh south and latin american diaspora communities bolivians all Haitian communities in the center the big marketplace and it's an old architecture so my argument is is that even though the luncheonette is ubiquitous in the the city and in the country there are thousands there like our bodega the architectural design of the luncheonette in the center which is changing our open front and or open corner meaning that in some cases two walls are removed where you really can walk through the corner and be in a luncheonette so it's i'm not hyper focusing on one luncheonette but really just the symbolism of here's this space where you do still get the brushing of elbows of different classes taking their coffees taking their vitamina juices in the morning watching a football match etc so please pick up the card and a couple more plugs before we switched to the q and a i know that paula has a book that's on the back table or maybe on the front table from the 596 acre project it is for sale for ten dollars and if you happen to have one please don't forget to pay her and with that are we ready to talk do we have questions already um i see karen atlas at first i see some other hands here's the deal please do not talk for a long time like ask a question i'm also going to apologize to the side of the room i'm a little bit like barbara stricen in the sense that this is the side i want to be filmed so i'm going to start with karen atlas's question and um we'll go from there thank you i think we got a really good layout of how um bad public policies get made in whether it's housing or culture um and the impact they have i want to i want to hear about good progressive public policies examples of them how they happened when they happen what makes them happen and how artists um have and cultural organizers have been part of them or if they haven't um why not and we'll go one by one for now and and just anyone on the panel can answer to that if we get uh sort of jammed up we'll take a few at a time but we'll start with that um i can take a crack um well i guess about two decades ago fort green two day good yeah i guess two years um fort green really experienced a major renaissance from and by you know the black community spike shop came in was it 20 years ago or even more it's more yeah spike shop came in 48 years in a mule and um and then the whole development of the bogalon was called the bogalon district i forget what that means but it was an african word um that really sparked this incredible renaissance in fort green that for a long time was not only clearly black run uh you know black owned i don't know if all the properties were owned but suddenly the shops were black owned you get a flavor of african and caribbean and black american shops um but um was also very class diverse um and that i thought that was an incredible phenomena and i don't know the full story um i know there were a couple of individuals who were particularly active i was actually not living in new york at the time but whenever i come back to visit um i i always would go there to shop to support local black businesses um i'd go to four w circle blessed elma jackson she was certainly a an anchor there and that's a story which does anyone know if that story has been written it is not it really needs to be oh is there movie by nelson george about it okay i believe it's called brooklyn bohem brooklyn bohem oh okay good so anyway not not to not to dwell too long that you want to chime in on that yeah only only to say that i think you're bringing up a really good point about the business district so we've heard a lot around kind of the cultural renaissance of fort green but there was this very thriving small black business district that just was was disappeared like when we talk about gentrification and you know folks being displaced and being priced out that had a very real concrete impact on the fort green that we see now right so it's that it's that both and right and some of those businesses were able to hang in there but a lot of them were displaced and actually you know it's interesting because obviously bam is right around the corner but in terms of the the that strip itself on fulton there was such richness culturally that even though i don't remember if there were art shops particularly they're it always felt artistic and and it was certainly culturally vibrant um and and very creative and then um yeah then the various you know forces over the more recent years um developing anyway so let me just also mentioned that um you know this this is a different place but but certainly in new warlings post Katrina there's been a lot of attention to the you know nefarious forces wanting to really do a lot of gentrification and push a lot of folks out and uh there's been a group of artists along like the st claude avenue strip that have really been an anchor at facilitating dialogue and so everything that that sarah was saying about the arts from the sort of a conceptual and intellectual framework which i i so appreciate in terms of independence and um you know a bow work against the homogeneity and the commercialism i totally agree with there's also of course a more utilitarian approach and role of of the arts and and artists facilitating in a creative way the dialogue creating that space for people to come together in a safe way um and a number of artists there and and a theater there a community theater have facilitated that process to make sure that as they have improved the community and brought in brought in better transportation improved the housing stock etc that the people who have hung in there and been there the indigenous businesses and and residents are not automatically pushed out they still are concerned about that because you need rent control and and and stabilization commercial and rent and and residential um you need inclusionary zoning you need a lot of different good public policies to ensure that those things don't happen before i take a question from this side karen did you want to suggest something that you know of um back to you karen atlas um is there something an example of just the same question you asked is that we spend a lot of our time talking against gentrification and less of our time talking about what are the public policies we want and what does affordable housing look like what does the fight of artists alongside of people for affordable housing look like and i appreciate the new Orleans example all right thank you i i'm going to give a little plug for karen and speak to the participatory budgeting work that she's doing in her district as a culture worker extraordinaire thank you karen for being here i'm going to go here tony lester um no relation but a good friend hi thanks um you know one of the things i wish we teased out a little more is how you define artists because um listening to sarah talking about there's been the suburbs in the city and i was thinking there's a way in which we're talking about artists as somebody separate and distinct from other people almost like a professionalized way somehow and i'm thinking about like people and my mind went to certain aspects of the black church and music and choir masters and you know the aesthetic of that which is spectacle and celebration and that is artistry to me but yet we're not really thinking about that when we talk about what's a cultural worker and it's kind of an abstraction that's really removes it from community and so for me it's the sense of that you know if you're going to talk about the history of when the artist was just someone who was functionally working in a community and not recognized as separate and distinct to now somebody's hauled up somewhere in some little loft not making a lot of money you know maybe thinking of Langston Hughes he was a bus boy you know and that's an artist so i like to tease out how we're defining what an artist is what is the role of someone who's artistic but doesn't get recognized and then i have to take the plug for the suburbs because there's arts going on all around the place especially with black folks it can't be denied wherever they're located and so and not so much a criticism but just a kind of honoring of that i mean i'll hop in not to define artists right because that's big but but i think your point is well taken around these labels and then who gets who identifies with those labels and then how do they come to opportunities that are marketed towards artists with a capital a i think i think we and i have lingerie projects hat on very deliberately and i'll talk about link as well so we at the lingerie project commission artists to do projects in their local lingerie met but we're also very deliberate that it's it's not about showing it's not about showing your mfa credentials right it's really like are you someone who lives in a neighborhood who has a creative capacity that you want to contribute and then can show that you have some track record of delivering on that full stop right but you are absolutely right that even marketing something to artists there there's a particular body of people who understand themselves as that and there are folks who you know do not and that's kind of part of the work that we're really engaged in is sort of how do we all as everyday people feel a sense of ownership around our creative capacity and and have the boldness to decide that we want to identify ourselves with you know with the moniker of artists when the instance comes up link as a national project i think also has tried to even though we are still working in some of the abstractions that you're talking about has tried to talk about artists and cultural bearers you know so those things that are about tradition that are about ritual that met you know definitely are not necessarily about a kind of formal education but are about a mastery are about the things that happen from apprenticeship that are about the informal and so not making the gateway the ticket into this conversation being about you know showing your credentials but really about you know how how much time do you invest in this craft you know what what and also not even about are you earning a living from it because you can be a professional artist and that does not mean that that is what pays the bills that is that's the reality for the majority of people who call themselves professional artists with a capital a so yeah full stop okay thank you what i want to do now and i'm gonna can i chime in for what i'm sorry i know i'm saying a lot but i'm chomping with a bit around that question i'll try to make it brief because a couple of months ago i had a discussion with someone that prompted something i want to i believe in everything that recently was saying i want to take it a step further because in thinking about broadening the definition of the arts and artists i think we also need to broaden how we think about cultural preservation in communities my daughter can go to all the mark morris african dance classes or you know that that that might exist that's not going to give her a strong sense of being a little black girl right so it is fantastic that we have cultural institutions black-owned ethnically owned or not that certainly do appreciate the culture the diverse cultures of brooklyn and offer these things but if our funding and our focus is only on those cultural institutions as opposed to looking more deeply and profoundly how is cultural preserved for any of you irish italian jewish whatever how does your culture get inculcated in you and your children it's not through just going to classes i mean that might be a piece of it you know and and many chinese folks go to chinese class language class but even there it's being surrounded by businesses and people and traditions you know and so when you mentioned the church and i'm not a churchgoer but i certainly appreciate the role that the church plays in transmitting some fundamental things about black culture i also think about the pan yard the steel pan yards in bed style right those will go away those will not exist with the gentrification where will all the folks who produce the incredible carnival where will they produce them will they have to go out to the suburbs and be pushed out in the outer boroughs i mean outer outer areas in order to be able to then come back in they produce those if you go along nostril avenue that is a place where culture is retained and transmitted what funder ever thinks about hey maybe i should fund some pan yards because that's keeping Caribbean children understanding what steel pan and and and costume making and and being from their countries is all about thank you that's not at all part of the dialogue right now okay thank thank you i'm only speeding you because i want to get a lot of questions i mean 15 more minutes i'm going to take three the time over here but before i do that i'm going to reiterate uh risa mentioned link that's leveraging investment and creativity uh the best pan yard i know is at the corner of Tomkins and Fulton the film that was mentioned back here brooklyn bohem about fort green and there's another one my brooklyn that's more recent about the moving of the mall out of downtown and now i'd like to take three people whose first names i don't know if you'll just put your question on the table and we'll get the the panelists to respond all at once just in any order cool hi thank you so much for the conversation um he started off by asking like how do we live with money and um i'm just wondering if it's useful to like have a conversation about gentrification and also globalization without talking about capitalism and capital and sarah you briefly mentioned like the idea of capital and so i'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that and money and if it's just reached the point of this like totality that we don't feel we have the liberty or freedom or language to like think outside of that and and how we can't imagine outside of that thank you one more person uh please hi thank you guys so much um so you talked a lot about the gentrification of the arts but in the past few years there's been a real rise in this uh phenomenon of crowdfunding most notably with Kickstarter which uh really fuels independent creative arts projects so i was wondering if you guys could speak to that do you know about it are you cynical optimistic skeptical okay so i i didn't hear the the first question of the second person but i did hear the first question of the first person about um living with money and i heard um the next question of how do we motivate neighborhoods so i'll hand that to whoever wants it kind of it doesn't matter how much arts funding there is if it all goes to the same people right right that's Kickstarter and that's kind of Kickstarter right like if you come from a community of privilege you're gonna get your project funded and if you don't then you're gonna ask your friends and they're gonna say that's really cool i wish i could give you some money um and that's sort of that worries me a lot about Kickstarter um and that's the thing that we're a release we're a really really young organization that's trying to figure out how to sustain itself um and trying to figure out whether we should be trying to sustain ourselves or whether we've we're sort of you know maybe we're done with this because maybe we've planted the seed and now we get to go do something else we're at that point i'm not asking you guys for advice um but the the Kickstarter thing is is real it's like okay so how do you leverage privilege how do you leverage access to information we try to do that as a practice in terms of what we're actually doing but in terms of sustaining ourselves and how do you live with money or without money which is what i thought your email said actually and i was surprised to hear it the other way um it's really really complicated and it seems like it's much easier um i'm starting to learn about foundation funding it's much easier to get funding for something that seems productive in that capitalist realm if you can say like we're gonna this community is gonna get 500 pounds of kale that it didn't have before and that makes a lot more sense or an art opening of this artist that never heard of this place before that makes a lot more sense then there's gonna be a place where people can meet each other and that kind of falls flat in the foundation world where there's you know it kind of awards the product so even when you get outside of talking about money this like industrial production industrial food production even on the small scale all of these value judgments are really embedded in the way we decide whether things are worth doing um i just wanted to respond since you called me out by name how do you motivate neighborhoods i don't think you have to i think for really and truly if you say to people here is a space and as long as you all work together you can do whatever you want here that is that's motivation enough i'll take three more questions if there are them can i contribute so so when i think about like how the arts can contribute to facilitating that dialogue like i think about born on organic level certainly but also like mochata having the exhibition on gentrification a few years ago which sparked a whole lot of dialogue and they actually brought it out into the community and had pictures in the community so i think that's a great example spark dialogue didn't provide easy answers um and linking the first question the last question the capitalism with the Kickstarter and i think that's essentially what you are doing there there are fundamental issues of privilege and access and it's it's what what has happened to society is that we're on such a treadmill the 99 percent of us simply to keep our heads above water that most of us even though we're creative and brilliant to whatever do not have the means to develop our creative talent they're brilliant doctor scientists poets whatever but we are working for the man just to pay for the rents the rapidly escalating rent the health insurance etc and so when i look around there's less social mobility in the united states today than there was in the 1920s when i look around me and i see those people are doing really creative funky stuff and they're actually surviving off of that they're basically living off of subsidy and i'm not putting it down if they got that means great they're living off a trust fund they're living off their parents whatever that's great if they can do it but the fact is that let's recognize that they're all such other people out here are just as creative who are not don't have those social networks to be able to to fund their creative ideas it's sad thank you midi can i get a show of hands with questions please okay what i'd like to do is if you'll keep it to 15 seconds or so i'd like to just go straight through all the questions and get them on the table so that we have them before the closing remarks so whoever has pardon can we start back here yeah start to move across the room but really please briefly or we won't get through everyone i'm wondering what you think the role of the church is or could be in this i think that when we think about changing neighborhoods churches have often survived whether or not that's because they're supported from the top down or not but they're also large physical footprints so what kind of partnerships do you think could develop which excellent examples have you seen what is the role of the church thank you yes what do you think is the role and potential of social media specifically facebook and twitter and is there a taher square of anti gentrification in new york city so just keep your hand up so she sees you as she's moving close hi i'm i'd love for the aids crisis to be brought in particularly through sarah and anybody else of course being you know i think it also relates to uh tony's question about what makes an artist because the aids crisis decimated a whole generation of creative people certainly most of them a lot of them didn't have mfa's and um being 51 holding a place on 14 student east village this is a long-term survivor the modernization of gay culture i think is tremendously tragic thanks sir um my name is andrew bideon i've done a lot of work in east harlem along issues of gentrification um with the project called a body of tours and the biggest struggle i had was how to communicate how do you communicate um to white liberals who might look at a community that they're just moving into and be completely you know out of their element how do you communicate to them understand they are part of this community how do you establish a relationship with them and work with them to move forward the second thing is then how to work with my own community as a Puerto Rican how do we get people who are at risk of gentrification how do we get them to realize that and then get involved in the fight before someone's knocking on their door saying they have to leave so we kind of touched on how um to get across differences but how do we get to people um who are living day to day how do we get them involved in the fight because if they all just stand together their asses in their own seats or their biggest asset but how do we get them to realize that because i'm i grew up middle class i'm very lucky in that so i can dedicate sometimes to this how do you get people who are working two jobs to get involved to add another question um i i was wondering how the hipsterdom fits into this i think it's uh what it's it's it's always a punchline a joke people even laugh when you say it but there's something it's not about tight genes there's something very sick about using education um as uh de-politicizing education using it to build people's tastes as opposed to using it to learn about your position in the world and how you need to fight for the things that are important so i'm wondering how that and i see that as a in sarah's book i kept thinking of that because it really fits into that kind of blending of culture and and defanging of people thanks brian so we need to move a little quicker or everybody won't get to go and i'd really like everyone to say what's on their mind those who have their hands up so hi uh timothy excuse me timothy pierce gargoyle pierce from california pacific school religion and my question would be to tease out that question about the church and i'm a church gore so i would like to hear um specifics with regards to the black church because um in after the civil rights movement a lot of our pastors that receive those doctors and those high-profile pulpits are very conservative in their views nonetheless they are in their seventies and eighties and still pastor in these churches and they are applauding gentrification and here i am a young man coming into ministry having to change that mindset can you speak to that how would we bring the church back into conversation as it was a church of the 1960s and the 30s thank you we definitely need an after party right but let's let's keep going at a pretty good clip and then we'll find we'll find out where the after party is hi my name is silver i'm very and i have no mfa by the way i'm a novelist and uh i i wanted to ask sarah i thought it was very interesting your comment about how the dialogue i believe that may not have been the exact word on gentrification has been gentrified itself i'd like to hear more about that wondering if you were referring to the sort of here we are sort of white liberals of not everybody's white clearly but there's a sort of a certain artsy thing going on and um going to the word globalization how that would fit in in terms of you know who's really pulling the strings at the top of all of this is a global elite and that does go across racial and ethnic lines it's all over the world so um i once wondering if if that has anything to do with what you're talking about in terms of can we expand the conversation to be about a much higher strata of power and how that controls and thank you anyone else quickly if wants to talk about the barkley center and why they think didn't work that we opposed it and it's still there i love to jump up i'm a little incapacitated at the moment um so many things on my mind but the primary one is in our class we're discussing how cultural memory and urban space is often examined as contested space especially in new york city i'm wondering how the stage is becoming contested when plays like rent are getting more exposure than in a diverse smith fires in the mirror any more questions throughout a word queer gentrification if anyone could speak that particularly sarah or anyone else queer gentrification thank you more questions anybody i know the panelists are writing down the ones they want to answer so we'll get into a good ending remarks very soon so is there any movement to get like bathhouses back in the city of what bathhouses miss that say again you know bathhouses like where yeah can we can we have them and also like the bathhouses ever exist for like women and interested in women that was a question that my research hasn't really produced an answer to yet like where the public space public sex spaces for women and shouldn't women i don't okay okay wait just one more one in terms of globalization how it's affecting the removal of people from from land outside of the cities and how it's affecting people in such a way that it forces them into the city okay thank you all closing remarks we'll start with sarah okay i'm going to just talk about aids um aids is being gentrified we're being told a false story about aids where the most privileged people are being held up as the universal experience so there's a lot of rhetoric about we've survived a plague or aids is over that's right there's 1.2 million people with hiv in the united states only 30 percent of them are undetectable that means only 30 percent are getting the standard of care that exists the medications that exist in new york city 1600 people died of aids last year half of them were diagnosed in the emergency room so what that is telling you is that it's a crisis of access to health care which means it's a class and race crisis and any rhetoric about aids being over is is false okay that's all i have to say um i i i might try to use the church question as um a vehicle to talk about something broader than maybe essential here which is the the vital importance of independence and the black church which again i'm not an active churchgoer but certainly as the first person mentioned there has always been an opportunity um more or less realized for the church to have to be a real independent voice because for the most part it's supported by its own congregants and therefore in theory it should be able to remain certainly when they own their own space and their own voice as an independent voice now broadening that out the importance of independence here as sarah certainly so wonderfully pointed out that we are losing those unique independent voices as we are driven in a profit maximizing homogenizing commercializing culture so any space that we have on the macro or the micro to have that independent voice to facilitate those dialogues we need to grab and i would say one other opportunity there is of course non-profits that have been around for a long time and i when you mentioned Harlem i actually thought about also the Bronx in terms of like the point or in Williamsburg El Puente some organizations have been around for a long time that have been able to hold it hold on even though they're so dependent on funding which of course is not you know self sustaining um but to also be a place for community voice and and protecting that community space but again they're always in a precarious position um the very last thing i guess i would say is again this balance of sort of seeing gentrification on the personal and social side um both the problems of those moving in i'm less concerned about those who are moving in and they're sort of i'm more concerned about all those who have to be pushed out who are losing ground the 53 percent decline in black wealth in five years from 2004 to 2009 that's that's nationally but of course how that plays out locally with a with 5 000 mortgage uh foreclosures uh last year in new york in the black you know in the black community alone uh disproportionately in the black community so all of this how this is playing out in very real tangible ways in terms of the loss of ownership and wealth and therefore then the independent voice i feel physically spent by this entire event um and i i mean really and i literally feel like this might be the last panel i do on gentrification for real because i actually think it's really crazy we don't have the answers like we are not four people with with the answers and there will be no four people with the answers and the range of the questions that we're just asked really reveals the spectrum of work that has to get done and so the next conversation i have about gentrification is going to be in a circle or we're going to be exchanging and it's going to be for real what are we going to do because i mean honestly honestly like i i don't even know i literally don't know where to begin and i know just as an individual human being i sometimes hope that there is this institution or there's this expert or there's this person who is studying this who's in you know who's immersed in this and who has some secret insight that i don't have and i think the reality is we are all going to have to wrestle with it together um and that means that we can't just show up we can't just show up to a panel right and i think i'll i'll answer your question most directly around how are we getting all the various actors who are stakeholders in this conversation which is everyone right how do we get all those actors to be having the conversation i mean we're there that's not going to happen when we have at the brookly museum and i love the brookly museum but that's not going to happen here right so how do we actually force ourselves to now that we have been in this room say i'm never going to have another conversation that's academic that's theoretical that's just you know let's compare ideas like for real if we're going to talk about it let's talk about it what we're going to do that's it thank you risa and thank you everyone um so Todd can we ask does anyone do we or anyone else know of groups that are really focusing particularly on this issue city-wide should be can we name them either arts groups or organizing groups or some combination of both so we can at least put that out like i think of right to the city i think of housing as a human rights but i don't think of many groups that city-wide are are really fostering that dialogue and action plan does anyone else but again yeah more in locally fury fifth avenue committee make the road and locally but city-wide right a and hd just tell him what's up listen i just have a few closing remarks and then i think we don't get pushed out immediately you can stick around and talk which is good i wanted to go just in closing to go back to what paul was saying one of the things that has sparked off the novel loose development plan that she mentioned was i think the city's first internet international architecture competition it was won by Herzog de miran and i think that that's something just to keep in mind that that big cities are looking to our big cities new york and when these sort of status symbols of international architectural competitions and things like that catch on they they do have an impact i'll also give a statistic i recently heard that 30 of the 31 sub-mayors of salpaolo or former military and you can imagine what that means when these occupations who don't consider themselves invaders as they're called by the government what it will look like when they're moved out of those buildings it will certainly be a military operation um i didn't know yeah right right right um i i agree the person does have a choice um an hour and a half is certainly not enough time to discuss this issue and all the issues that it tries to encapsulate but i would like to thank the brooklyn museum for hosting us and letting us try to get it started