new-build gentrification and the everyday displacement of polish immigrant tenants in greenpoint,...

New-Build Gentrification and theEveryday Displacement of Polish

Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint,Brooklyn

Filip StabrowskiDepartment of Anthropology, Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, USA;

[email protected]

Abstract: In response to research that has downplayed or denied the reality ofgentrification-induced displacement, critical urban geographers have called for rethinkingthe concept of displacement. This article takes up that call by examining the impact ofnew-build gentrification on the everyday place-making abilities of Polish immigranttenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Based on nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer,this article looks at the forms of “everyday displacement”—the ongoing loss of theagency, freedom, and security to “make place”—experienced by immigrant tenantswho struggle to remain in the neighborhood. Drawing upon Lefebvre’s spatial triadand Blomley’s work on the social relations of property, this article argues that everydaydisplacement is experienced through the production of new spaces of prohibition,appropriation, and insecurity that constitute a form of neighborhood erasure.

Keywords: gentrification, displacement, Polish immigration, New York City, property, housing

IntroductionIn May 2005, the New York City Department of City Planning and City Councilvoted to rezone the waterfront areas of Greenpoint and Williamsburg from indus-trial use to mixed and residential use. The Greenpoint–Williamsburg WaterfrontRezoning, encompassing 184 blocks of one of the most heavily industrialized areasof Brooklyn, was the largest single rezoning in the city’s history (Figure 1). It wasalso one of the most controversial and contested, as the city’s plan for waterfrontredevelopment ran up against community-driven plans for Greenpoint andWilliamsburg dating back nearly a decade. In April 2005, just one month prior tothe city council vote, hundreds of community members and activists assembledon the steps of City Hall to protest the city’s rezoning plan, calling for measuresto ensure publicly accessible open space, limit building height and bulk, retainviable industrial businesses, and preserve and create affordable housing in theneighborhood (Hill 2013).In response to these concerns, the city council added several amendments or

“points of agreement” to the rezoning text. Among these revisions was a commit-ment to provide a $2 million Tenant Legal Services Fund intended to “mitigate thesignificant residential displacement effects” of the rezoning. The New York CityDepartment of Housing Preservation and Development awarded a portion of thefund to a collaborative of seven local non-profit organizations. The contract scope

Antipode Vol. 46 No. 3 2014 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 794–815 doi: 10.1111/anti.12074© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

of services included: educating and advising tenants at risk of displacement;assisting tenants in locating and applying for affordable housing; providing tenantlegal services; and conducting workshops on tenants rights and affordable housing.As a “mitigating” measure, the Tenant Legal Services Fund was hailed as a victoryfor low-income residents of North Brooklyn—a rare example of progressive urbanplanning policy with respect to gentrification (Shaw 2008).And yet there were significant limitations to this approach of “mitigating gentrifi-

cation”, both practically and theoretically. In practice, the Tenant Legal ServicesFund was not distributed until March 2008, nearly three years after the waterfrontrezoning. This meant that during the most intense period of real estate speculationand residential displacement, in the years immediately prior to and following therezoning, no tenant services funds were available. Moreover, the funding wasprovided for only two years—on the presumption that gentrification would besufficiently “mitigated” by the end of this period. Finally, the very structure of thetenant services contract—in which funding for services was based on “perfor-mance”—rewarded certain tenant services, such as locating and securing affordable

Figure 1: Map of North Brooklyn. Source: New York City Department of City Planning.

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© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

housing for already-displaced tenants, over others, such as preventing displace-ment in the first place.More fundamentally, in theory the Tenant Legal Services Fund was premised

on a particular understanding of what constitutes displacement and how bestto combat it. This conceived of displacement as both temporally and spatiallycircumscribed—a distinct moment of forced physical relocation. As I argue in thisarticle, however, by reducing a social process to a singular event, such a restrictednotion of displacement misses an important dimension of gentrification. This isthe ongoing and protracted transformation of lived space in the homes, commu-nities, and neighborhoods being gentrified. While not denying the significance offorced spatial relocation, I suggest that a deeper understanding of displacementis in order—one that examines how gentrification’s processes of abstraction andaccumulation radically transform the physical and social conditions in andthrough which urban space is both produced and experienced.

Gentrification and Displacement in a Polish EnclaveSpecifically, in this article I explore the lived experiences of gentrification-induceddisplacement among working-class Polish immigrant tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.Greenpoint, where two significant waves of Polish immigrants had settled in the 1980sand 1990s, has been rapidly transformed—physically and socially—since the 2005rezoning. The frenzy of real estate speculation both prior to and following the rezoningdecision has driven property values and rental prices well beyond the affordability ofmost Polish immigrants. The gentrification of Greenpoint has hit Polish tenants espe-cially hard, particularly the elderly. Many have been forced out of the neighborhood—to cheaper areas of New York such as Ridgewood, Maspeth, and Glendale; to otherstates such as New Jersey; or even back to Poland (Kern-Jedrychowska 2008). Thosewho have been able to hang on to their apartments have done so in the face of intensepressures from rising rents, deteriorating conditions, and landlord harassment. In theprocess, their experiences of place—their ability, freedom, and security to inhabit—havebeen radically diminished, even as they themselves remain physically a part of theneighborhood. In this sense, they too should be considered among the displaced.This article is intended as a response to recent calls from critical geographers to re-

think displacement in a way that goes beyond simple spatial relocation, and exploresits ongoing and phenomenological aspects. I hope to contribute to this discussion byexamining contemporary experiences of what I call “everyday displacement” amongPolish immigrant tenants that remain in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint.I define “everyday displacement” as the lived experience of ongoing loss—of thesecurity, agency, and freedom to “make place”. This is the inherently violent processwhereby the systemic nature of capitalist gentrification colonizes ever-greater reachesof the lifeworlds of working class residents (Habermas 1981).At the same time, this is a study of the gentrification and displacement of immigrant

tenants from an immigrant enclave. This lends the processes themselves—of bothgentrification and displacement—a unique dimension. In Polish Greenpoint, the socialprocesses of immigrant enclave formation have conditioned the enclave’s dissolutionin and through gentrification. Social relations of property among Polish immigrants

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are being reworked, in a process that finds its expression in the manifold ways in whichimmigrant tenants experience “everyday displacement”. A “double-displacement”—from both home and enclave—is at work here. For Polish tenants who have come todepend on the immigrant neighborhood they have helped produce, this constitutesa particularly acute form of displacement—one that remains relatively understudiedin the wider gentrification literature (but see Murdie and Texeira 2011).

Note on ResearchThis article is based on nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer and housingconsultant at a Greenpoint-based non-profit organization. From 2008 to 2012, whileconducting dissertation fieldwork, I spoke with hundreds of Polish immigrant tenantsin need of assistance and advice on tenants’ rights, apartment repairs and mainte-nance, legal representation in Housing Court, housing subsidy programs, andaffordable housing. During this time, I accompanied dozens of tenants to HousingCourt and wrote hundreds of letters to landlords and city agencies on behalf oftenants. I also organized several tenant associations and rent strikes in Greenpoint,among both Polish and non-Polish residents. In addition to everyday conversationswith Polish tenants, I conducted roughly 50 semi-structured interviews with tenantsand landlords. All interviews were conducted in Polish. For the purposes of privacyand confidentiality, I have changed the names of all of my informants.

Re-Placing Displacement in the Gentrification DebateSince Ruth Glass first coined the term (Glass, 1964), the phenomenon of gentrifica-tion has spawned a vast literature on the physical and social transformations of theurban core (Lees et al., 2007). As the process itself has mutated and migrated—fromthe piecemeal and pioneer-driven conversion of “modest mews and cottages” into“elegant, expensive residences” in Western European and North American cities, tothe large scale, state- and corporate-led transformation of poor and working classneighborhoods across the globe—so have our understandings of its causes and con-sequences been transformed. Throughout the evolution of gentrification studies,the question of displacement—whether it occurs, how it occurs, how it can be mea-sured, and what are its social and political consequences—has remained central.A first “generation” of gentrification scholars (up to the late 1980s) accepted

gentrification’s displacement effects on inner city working class residents as agiven—indeed, as the very essence of the process (Ley 1980; Rose 1984; Smith1979). Over time, however, as both Slater (2006) and Wacquant (2008) haveargued, gentrification research itself has been gentrified and “displacement itselfgot displaced” (Slater 2006:748). As an increasingly aggressive neoliberal urbanismharnessed state power to promote private sector development, and market-drivenapproaches were embraced as the most effective means of achieving social integra-tion and uplift, some scholars began to question whether displacement was even anecessary feature of gentrification.Part of this was undoubtedly rooted in methodological challenges; as Atkinson

(2000) observed, “Displacement is marked out by its near invisibility; where it has



happened no indicators remain.” What traces could be found, moreover, were oftenindeterminate—how does one distinguish between “involuntary” and “voluntary”moves, for example (Shaw 2008)? Beyond this, however, Slater (2006) identifiedtwo additional reasons for the “eviction” of critical perspectives on working classexperiences of gentrification: a polarized and prolonged “debate” based on grosssimplifications of Smith’s and Ley’s arguments about the causes of gentrification,deflecting attention away from its consequences; and the (often direct) link betweenresearch funding institutions and urban policies and agendas that have a vestedinterest in redefining “gentrification”as a benignmix of processes andpolicies referredto euphemistically as “regeneration”, “revitalization”, “reurbanization”, and “socialmixing” (Lees et al., 2007).In an important intervention that attempted to shift the very terms of the debate,

Davidson (2008:2386) pointed beyond the simple quantitative indicators ofdisplacement. Arguing that displacement had “become both underexamined andundertheorised”, he called for a reconceptualization of the process. He urgedgentrification researchers “to incorporate better the political, social and culturalneighbourhood changes related to gentrification, as well as wider economicneighbourhood changes”, into an expanded understanding of displacement(2008:2389). Davidson highlighted three aspects of gentrification-induceddisplacement that escape simple measurement, yet remain vital to how the processis experienced by its victims: indirect economic displacement; community displace-ment; and neighborhood resource displacement.Davidson (2009) continued this broadening of the conceptual parameters of

displacement by radically rethinking the very notion of place, as lived space.Informed by the work of both Heidegger and Lefebvre (1991), he argued that aphenomenological approach to displacement based on critical understandingsof place could illuminate dimensions of the process that are irreducible to simple,physical out-migration. Spatial relocation, the primary index of studies of gentrifi-cation, is but one aspect of displacement; though important in its own right, byitself it fails to capture how gentrification fundamentally alters the lived experi-ence of place. By “[reducing] a socio-spatial phenomenon to a purely spatialevent” (Davidson 2009:225), Davidson argued, dominant understandings ofdisplacement remain blind to the various ways in which it may entail a radicalreduction of place-making ability for low-income, working-class, and minorityresidents. Such approaches cannot make sense of the space/place dialectic: howspatial relocation can occur with no lived sense of displacement, and howdisplacement can be experienced even in the absence of spatial dislocation.

Emerging Spaces of Gentrification: Remaking PropertyThis focus on displacement as lived experience draws heavily upon Lefebvre’sspatial “triad”—his understanding of space as social process comprised of a trinityof spaces that interpenetrate and superimpose themselves upon each other: theconceived (representations of space), the perceived (spatial practice), and the lived(representational space). Conceived space is abstract and mental, “the space ofscientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers”; it is

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society’s “dominant” space (Elden 2004:189; Lefebvre 1991:38–39). Perceivedspace is concrete, material, and corporeal; it “presupposes the use of the body:the use of the hands, members and sensory organs” (Lefebvre 1991:40). Mediatingbetween the conceived and the perceived, the mental and the material, theabstract and the concrete, is lived space; the space of “inhabitants” and “users”,it is “the dominated… space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate”(Lefebvre 1991:39).For Lefebvre, capitalism advances in and through the colonization of space, the

reduction of place to a singular, abstract logic that denies difference and history.As an example, Lefebvre invokes the Heideggerian notion of (poetic) dwelling,and the threat posed by capitalism to its survival. Abstract, capitalist space, Lefebvreargues, reduces residence, with its organic connection to urban and social space, tohousing, a “mere box” for living (Elden 2004:190; Lefebvre 1991:315). This is aprocess of both measurement and separation, whereby social life is reduced to a“bare minimum” of necessary functions and their associated spaces.In much the same way, property boundaries—the clear division between inside

and out, “yours” and “mine”—are created and maintained through the spread ofabstract space. This process entails a re-conditioning of subjects’ behavior, suchthat property boundaries are adhered to and respected:

Abstract space works in a highly complex way. It has something of a dialogue about it,in that it implies a tacit agreement, a non-aggression pact, a contract, as it were, ofnon-violence … there is to be no fighting over who should occupy a particular spot;spaces are to be left free, and wherever possible allowance is to be made for “proxe-mics”—for the maintenance of “respectful” distances. This attitude entails in its turna logic and strategy of property in space: “places and things belonging to you donot belong to me” (Lefebvre 1991:56–57).

As Blomley (2004) argues, however, “settling” property is an inherently contestedsocial process. This is because property is not a spatialized “thing”—static, inert,immutable—but rather a bundle of social relationships (with reference to a thing) thatmust be produced and continually reproduced. Property, Blomley argues, depends onan active process of continually “doing” or “enacting”. It is a mixture of persuasion andcompulsion, consent and coercion, by which social relations are established and upheld:

As settle is a verb, so property is an enactment. This enactment can include what hasbeen termed persuasion, that is, communicative claims to others … But property is alsoenacted in more material and corporeal ways. Bodies, technologies, and things must beenrolled and mobilized into organized and disciplined practices … Police officers mustenforce the law. Legal contracts must be inscribed, signed, and witnessed. Citizens mustphysically respect the spatial markers of property (2004:xvi).

In his study of the struggles over Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Blomley(1997) shows how gentrification entails the creation and maintenance of one formof real property—what he calls the “ownership model”—over and above all otherforms of property and claims to land. The “gentrification frontier” constitutes theborderline aroundwhich conflicting entitlements to property, based ondifferent discur-sive andmaterial practices, are formed. Against the absolute and exclusionary claims ofthe ownership model, which include rights of alienation and profit making, are posed



the claims of low-income and long-time residents for use and access rights. These claimsare rooted in history, and justified on economic and moral grounds:

That border line is built around a number of dualities that speak to class divisions, moralfractures, and community differences…One distinction is that between the entitlementsof individual residents—particularly, long-time residents—to their hotel rooms, ascompared to the predations of unscrupulous landlords. The argument that is made forthis individual entitlement is that long-term occupancy should provide some securelegal entitlement, and that eviction constitutes not only an economic hardship but amorally indefensible social and cultural dislocation (1997:206).

Significantly, this “collective sense of property” extends beyond individual housingunits to encompass entire neighborhoods. To the extent that their collective effortsand struggles have produced neighborhoods socially and physically, longtime work-ing class residents maintain “ownership” claims on these spaces. The incursions ofproperty speculators and developers are locally resisted, as residents struggle toprevent “community erasure through displacement” (Blomley 1997:206).

Gentrification-induced displacement, therefore, as both Davidson and Blomleysuggest, should be understood as the ongoing, lived process in and through whichproperty relations are (re)enacted and (re)worked. Focusing on the lived experienceof space thus casts light on the myriad ways in which processes of gentrificationproduce displacement without relocation. Rethinking the non-measureable effectsof gentrification in this way also allows for an understanding of the “everydayness”of displacement—how the agency and security of tenants to “make place” aresignificantly diminished as property relations are transformed.To fully understand how displacement is lived by Polish immigrant tenants who

struggle daily to remain in Greenpoint, however, it is necessary to consider the“place biographies” of Polish landlords and tenants—how and why they settled inGreenpoint, the physical conditions in which they have lived, the relationshipbetween housing and work in the neighborhood, and the property relations intowhich they have entered with each other. It is precisely these histories and“lifeworlds”—the place-making activities of immigrant residents—that are beingfundamentally challenged and subverted by gentrification. As property is revalued,the abstract dimension of space—the space of capital, the state, exchange, andcontrol—subordinates more and more places and their associated subjectivitiesand behaviors to its harsh logic.

Greenpoint: The Formation of a Polish Immigrant EnclaveBordered by the East River to the west, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to thesouth, and the Newtown Creek to the north and east, Greenpoint is a peninsularneighborhood of roughly 34,000 residents with a long history of industrialemployment and immigrant and working class settlement (Susser 1982). Asindustry migrated from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn’s East River waterfront inthe second half of the nineteenth century, Greenpoint experienced multiple wavesof immigration from Europe—beginning with Germans and Irish in the latenineteenth century, and followed by Poles in the earlier twentieth century, Puerto

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Ricans and Dominicans in the early 1950s, and Poles again in the 1980s and1990s. Though historically a mixed-ethnic working class neighborhood,Greenpoint became a highly-concentrated area of Polish immigrant settlement—animmigrant enclave—in the second half of the 1980s, when political turmoil in Polanddrove thousands of refugees out of the country and into New York City. The collapseof communism in Poland in 1989 witnessed an even greater exodus of Poles to theWest, considerably increasing Greenpoint’s immigrant Polish population in the early1990s (New York City Department of City Planning 2004).The recent “Polonization” of Greenpoint has thus been a product of the neighbor-

hood’s particular historical geography. Family ties to Greenpoint, sometimes goingback several generations, attracted thousands of Polish immigrants to the area inthe 1980s and 1990s, and subsequent family chain-migration has sustained the flow(Bogen 1987). Even—or perhaps especially—for Polish immigrants without friendsor family in Greenpoint, the concentration of new arrivals hasmade it the logical initialdestination. Anna, who arrived in 1981, recalls her reasons for moving to Greenpoint:

Even in Poland, before I left for the United States, my cousin would ask, “So when are youfinally going to America?” And I would answer, “I don’t know. I’mafraid. Maybe I’ll get lostthere.” And he would say, “Don’t be afraid. When you step onto the streets, you’ll feel as ifyou were in Poland. You’ll go into a shop and they’ll speak Polish. Out on the streets they’llbe speaking Polish.”He had already been here, in Greenpoint. And thatmademe feel better.

The sustained immigration from Poland in the 1990s transformed Greenpoint, phys-ically and socially, into a classic immigrant enclave, where new Polish immigrantscould find housing, work, and access to social services. Polish shops and restaurants,employment agencies, contractors’ workshops, English language schools, andvocational programs (for home attendant services and asbestos removal, in particular)all emerged in the 1990s, attracting even more new arrivals.For Polish immigrants, finding and securing housing in Greenpoint thus enabled

access to vital social networks and resources. Co-ethnic roommates or even landlordswere potentially valuable sources of employment and information. Conversely,working in the neighborhood could serve as a means of finding housing—either fromco-worker/tenants in need of roommates, or from employer/landlords in search oftenants. Halina, for example, who began working at a Polish-owned supermarketin the early 1980s, was offered an apartment directly above the market. Her rentwas deducted directly from her wages, and the terms of her tenancy remainedentirely informal: “You work here”, he told her, “What do you need a lease for?”

Polish Property: The Making of an Ethnic Rentier Classin GreenpointAmong the thousands of Poles that immigrated to Greenpoint in the 1980sand 1990s, many were able to acquire property in the neighborhood in arelatively short period of time. In this respect, they bore striking resemblance totheir late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century predecessors—immigrants fromEastern Europe whose rates of home ownership quickly surpassed those of nativewhite workers of similar age and occupation (Zunz 1982). Throughout the



nation’s rapidly industrializing cities, available undeveloped land combined with anentire social world of fellow immigrants created the opportunity for acquiring prop-erty. As the historian David Roediger (2005:159) explains, “the new immigrant didnot so much ‘buy into’ the dream of home ownership as help create it”.Why and how did Polish immigrants to Greenpoint become homeowners,

landlords, and, eventually, “ethnic rentiers”? Again, like their predecessors, muchof the impetus for homeownership stemmed from the perceived security itprovided. Experiences of chronic housing shortages under communism likelyserved to heighten this desire for homeownership, just as land scarcity in ruralPoland did for the peasant-immigrants a century ago. Interminably long waitinglists for apartments, cramped living quarters, drab and impersonal concreteslab apartment complexes, and chronic shortages in building materials were en-demic under communism and created acute popular discontent (Kenedi 1982;Markham 2003). As Polish immigrants settled into the reality of life in extended em-igration, the desire for shelter security through home ownership was transposed toAmerica. Once the decision to remain had been taken, acquiring property in theirnewly adopted country had become not just a goal, but a “logical” next step inthe process of settlement.For Polish immigrant homeowners in Greenpoint, acquiring property was logical

because housing itself was an eminently useful possession. Indeed, the notion ofhousing as a basic necessity of life and precondition for survival lay at the root ofthe Polish immigrant predisposition towards homeownership. The focus was onhousing’s use value; its specific utility was that it enabled further life opportunities,thus serving as a means of social reproduction. Beyond the basics of shelter andsecurity, access to and control over housing has provided many Polish homeownerswith spaces for work, such as ground-level or backyard toolsheds, workshops, andcommercial spaces (agencies, shops, and bars). Moreover, a less tangible thoughequally important form of utility was the status that homeownership conferred uponthe immigrant homeowner. For many Polish homeowners in Greenpoint, to havejoined the ranks of the propertied is to finally put paid to the doubts and regrets thatinevitably haunt the decision to immigrate. This symbolic importance of immigranthomeownership is visible in Greenpoint’s very landscapewhere, as sociologist JeromeKrase (2005) observed, striking similarities exist in both commercial design (especiallysignage) and housing décor (interior and exterior) among business and home ownersin Poland and Greenpoint.The demand for housing among new arrivals to Greenpoint, moreover, provided

an additional use value for landlords. One Polish landlord, owner of several propertiesin Greenpoint, explained his decision to purchase his first home in the following way:

I didn’t have any experience. But I had life experience. And I knew that people need aplace to live and something to eat. And that even in a crisis, people will need a placeto live and something to eat. And so I thought to myself that [buying a house] is a goodform of investment because there will always be tenants to keep the house, pay for thehouse and, with time, generate profits.

Another Polish owner of multiple Greenpoint properties echoed the practicalbenefits of home ownership: “The decision [to purchase property in Greenpoint]

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was a very good investment. I could never work again and would have a place tolive, and income off of which to live.”These comments are suggestive because they reflect the fundamental utility of

home ownership, while pointing towards the underlying speculative nature—thepotential profitability—of urban residential property. Indeed, with the dramatic risein local real estate prices and rents beginning in the early 2000s, the potential forrealizing windfall profits on property increased considerably. The exchange valueof Greenpoint housing eclipsed its use value for homeowners and landlords. In thisprocess, landlords were assisted—even prompted—by Greenpoint’s Polish-speak-ing real estate agents. As one long-time Polish real estate agent explained to me:

I had to convince Polish homeowners who bought all these buildings to rent toAmericans. They did not want to rent to Americans! It was shocking … One of thelandlords said, “I don’t speak English well. Then you will have to translate whenI have problems later on.” I said, “No problem, I will translate” … So this is what I didfor a while. And eventually they overcame that fear to rent to Americans. Because theywere also saying, “We don’t know them. I don’t know their mentality, they are differentpeople, I don’t know how I will communicate.” I said, “My gosh, please, they will payyou more because they have good jobs, you know, they’re American. Don’t you wantto get more? Polish people will pay much less.” So through the pocket I was able to con-vince them slowly, one by one, to bring Americans here. And this is how it started chang-ing. About 10 years ago.

As housing prices and rents continued and intensified their ascent, moreand more Greenpoint landlords began to view their apartments as potentialincome generators. This had profound implications for tenant-landlord relations inthe neighborhood. For owners of rent-stabilized units, where rental increases werelimited and eviction protections firmly in place, long-time tenants were regarded asparticularly problematic. Not only did their presence keep rent rolls below potentialmarket levels, it also significantly reduced the resale values of buildings. As the fol-lowing sections will show, tenants went from being necessary “partners” inhomeownership to unnecessary burdens for enterprising landlords.

Landlord–Tenant Relations in the EnclaveFundamental to the emergence and growth of Greenpoint as a Polish immigrantenclave in the 1980s and 1990s was the relationship between immigrant tenantsand their often co-ethnic, immigrant landlords. Along with the Polish & SlavicFederal Credit Union, created in Greenpoint in 1979 to provide immigrants withmortgages at a time when the neighborhood had been severely redlined, fellowPolish immigrants in search of local housing constituted an essential resource for aspir-ing property owners. Similar to late nineteenth and early twentieth century processesof immigration and urbanization, whereby immigrant homebuilders and tenementowners acquired property within a “dual housingmarket” that provided boarders, ten-ants, and co-ethnic sources of labor, the steady flow of immigrants created the condi-tions of possibility for Polish immigrant landlordism in Greenpoint (Day 1999; Zunz1982). Not only did Polish tenants provide rental income for mortgage payments,



but they also constituted an informal labor pool by which landlords were able tomaintain and even renovate their buildings. To this day, it is not uncommon for Polishtenants to live/work this way, either as building superintendents and onsite handy-men, or as individual tenants renovating their apartments in a piecemeal fashion.Significantly, in the early years of enclave formation, tenant/landlord relations among

Polish immigrantswere conditionedby a local housingmarketwhere the supply of apart-ments outstripped demand. A kind of “renters’ market” prevailed, particularly amongthe Polish immigrant community. According to Jozef,who arrived toGreenpoint in 1993:

Back then you didn’t have to look for an apartment in Greenpoint, because the landlordswould look for tenants. They would walk around the neighborhood, in the parks, andlook for Polish immigrants for tenants. We didn’t have a problem with housing—thelandlords had the problems. Now of course it’s the opposite.

In this environment, property relations between tenants and landlordswere relativelyfluid and informal, even in buildings that were subject to rent regulation. Leases wererare and restrictions on use and occupancy—especially regarding overcrowding—werefrequently overlooked. Multiple-family buildings were often converted into de factoboarding houses for immigrant tenants, with the tenants themselves regulating theoccupant flow. Stefan recalls his first Greenpoint apartment, in 1990:

When somebody moved out or left for Poland, then another would appear, maybe aftera month or so. It was like that the whole time. Five of us lived there, then there would bebreaks, then someone would find a sixth. In the other apartments in the building itwas the same—when spots would open up, they would ask whether anyone from ourapartment knew of someone looking for housing.

Moreover, like the “Russification” of Brighton Beach, which occurred at roughly thesame time, the “Polonization” of Greenpoint was widely associated with the neighbor-hood’s “revitalization” in the 1980s and 1990s (Brown and Wyly 2000). Newimmigrants occupied and soon began to renovate the often run-down, multi-familyresidential buildings, while the proliferation of Polish-owned shops, markets, restau-rants, and agencies dramatically remade Greenpoint’s commercial strips. Physically,this transformation was visible in the fabric of the neighborhood’s built environment.Socially, Polish in-migration enabled Greenpoint’s white ethnic homeowners to“defend” their neighborhood against Hispanic “incursions” through informal practicesof racial discrimination and residential segregation that favored the new Polishimmigrants (DeSena 1994). Though not in itself reducible to gentrification, in hindsightthis process can be seen as an important precursor to the larger transformations thathave followed.

From Immigrant Enclave to Waterfront CitadelThe 2005 waterfront rezoning introduced an entirely new pace, scale, and classdimension to the ongoing physical and social transformations of Greenpoint. Notonly did the rezoning sound the death knell for industrial employment in NorthBrooklyn (Curran 2004), it also brought immense pressure to bear, in the formof speculative real estate investment, on the low-income and working-class tenantsof Greenpoint. In the early years of his administration, Mayor Bloomberg had

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targeted the waterfront areas of Greenpoint and Williamsburg as key sites for hisNew Housing Marketplace—a long-term plan to “catalyze and harness the strong realestate market to create affordable housing” (City of New York 2004). On the ruinsof industry, private developers were given the green light to erect their visionfor North Brooklyn—one that anticipated the construction of over 10,500 units ofluxury residences, a 54-acre park, and a continuous esplanade to the water’s edge.The rezoning decision, which included tax abatement and density-bonus pro-

grams to actively promote private development, serves as an example of what

Table 1: Average property sale values for multifamily buildings (2010–2012)

Location 2010 ($ psf*) 2011 ($ psf*) 2012 ($ psf*) Percentage change

Greenpoint 184 204 219 +19.0Williamsburg 177 200 304 +71.8Brooklyn 152 153 173 +13.8

Source: Greenberger (2013:8)*psf, per square foot.

Figure 2: (source: City Limits)



Hackworth and Smith (2001:468) call “third wave gentrification”. Four featureshave characterized this “post-recession” form of gentrification:

First, gentrification is expanding both within the inner-city neighbourhoods that itaffected during earlier waves and to more remote neigbourhoods beyond the immediatecore. Second, restructuring and globlisation in the real estate industry has set a contextfor larger developers becoming more involved in gentrifying neighbourhoods … Third,effective resistance to gentrification has declined as the working class is continuallydisplaced from the inner city, and as the most militant anti-gentrification groups morphinto housing service providers. Fourth … the state is now more involved in the processthan the second wave.

The effects of the rezoning on residential development and housing costs in the areahave been profound. Though Williamsburg has experienced the brunt of the post-rezoning construction boom, Greenpoint has also witnessed its fair share, especiallyin the “upland” areas away in the neighborhood’s interior. The spike in condominiumdevelopment in particular has led to a steep increase in average home prices. The salesvalues of multifamily buildings in both Greenpoint and Williamsburg have alsoskyrocketed during the building boom, as Table 1 and Figure 2 indicate.The explosion of market rate residential development has been accompanied by a

spike in median rents. From 2002 to 2011, median market-rate rents in GreenpointandWilliamsburg increased by 82%, higher than in Brooklyn as awhole (50%) and evenManhattan (76%) (Mason 2012:67). Rent burdens have also gone up. As Table 2(for Greenpoint) indicates, median gross rent as a percentage of household incomehas increased in all but two Greenpoint census tracts from 2000 to 2009, with fourcensus tracts registering median gross rents of more than 30% of household income.The post-rezoning real estate frenzy has dramatically transformed the socio-

economic character of the neighborhood. From 2000 to 2010, as Table 3 indicates,Greenpoint residents’ median age declined, while educational levels and medianhousehold income increased significantly.

Table 2: Median gross rent as a percentage of household income (2000–2009)

Census tract 2000 2009Percentage change

(2000–2009)

499 26.2 29.5 +12.6559 18.6 20.8 +11.8563 26.6 30.6 +15.0565 25.3 29.5 +16.6567 24.3 26.6 +9.5569 25.9 27.7 +6.9571 24.1 31.1 +29.0573 25.5 31.3 +22.7575 27.7 26.7 �3.6579 34.7 29.3 �15.6589 22.0 23.5 +6.8591 24.8 28.2 +13.7593 24.5 38.2 +55.9

Source: US Census Bureau (1990, 2000, 2005–2009)

806 Antipode


Table

3:

Selected

socio-de

mog

raphicch

aracteristic

s(200

0–20

10/11)

Prop

ortio

nof

family

househ

olds

Med

ianag

eProp

ortio

nof

pop

ulationwith

atleastaBa

chelorsDeg

ree

Med

ianho

useh

oldinco

me

(201

2$)

2000

2010

Percen

tage

chan

ge20

0020

10Pe

rcen

tage

chan

ge20

0020

11Pe

rcen

tage

chan

ge20

0020

11Pe

rcen

tage

chan

ge

Green

point

55.1

41�2

5.6%

36.8

33.8

�8.2%

20.9

45.4

117%

45,249

61,263

5.4%

Williamsburg

57.8

62.9

8.8%

29.8

30.7

3.0%

22.3

45.7

105%

37,051

52,033

40.4%

Broo

klyn

66.3

62.5

�5.7%

33.1

34.1

3.0%

42.1

29.2

�31%

44,437

45,516

2.4%

Source:(Green

berger

2013

:9)



Concomitantly, the Polish-born population in Greenpoint declined significantly.Table 4 indicates a nearly 37% drop in Polish-born residents throughout theneighborhood.In short, the 2005 rezoning has served as a catalyst for the profound physical and

social transformation of Greenpoint. Since the rezoning, Greenpoint has morphedfrom immigrant enclave, where working-class immigrants could find work, hous-ing, and social services, into a waterfront citadel, where economic and cultural elitesproduce their own landscapes of privilege and exclusion (Marcuse 1997:247). Partand parcel of this process has been displacement of neighborhood’s longtime andlow-income Polish immigrant tenants.

The Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant TenantsIn addition to direct and exclusionary displacement, however, Polish immigranttenants in Greenpoint have been subjected to what I call “everyday displace-ment”—the ongoing, lived experience of the loss of the security, agency, andfreedom to “make place”. Like displacement pressure (Marcuse 1986), everydaydisplacement is experienced by low-income and working-class residents whoremain physically a part of the neighborhood, even as their living conditions,sense of security, and access to local resources are all being eroded. Thisunderstanding of displacement as ongoing and lived highlights thetemporally-extended and quotidian aspects of gentrification. Gentrification is aprocess of accumulation—of capital and profit on the one hand, and dispossessionand insecurity on the other—and not merely a discrete, isolated moment ofphysical dislocation.Indeed, as a tenant organizer in Greenpoint, I was made intimately aware of the

everyday displacement of Polish tenants struggling to remain in the neighborhood.I counseled tenants on a daily basis and over the course of a year wrote over 150

Table 4: Polish-born population in Greenpoint (2000–2009)

Census tract Polish born (2000) Polish born (2009) Percentage change

499 696 328 �52.9559 10 0 �100563 750 607 �19.1565 786 479 �39.1567 1359 1099 �19.1569 467 496 +6.21571 3051 1486 �51.3573 1371 762 44.4575 1812 1178 �35.0579 135 172 +27.4589 648 489 �24.5591 1750 981 �43.9593 788 549 �30.3Total 13,623 8626 �36.7

Source: Census (2000), American Community Survey (2005–2009)

808 Antipode


letters on behalf of tenants to their landlords. Table 5 lists the types of complaintletters drafted, providing a sense of living conditions confronting Polish tenants.As Table 5 indicates, by far the most common complaint among tenants has been

poor housing conditions due to landlord neglect. This includes the need for majorrepairs, vermin and pest control (including bed bugs), and general maintenance(such as painting and appliances).

ProhibitionsThe expansion of abstract capitalist space, according to Lefebvre (1991:50),“operates negatively”. It denies history, difference, and use-value, and does soby enacting a series of prohibitions. Lefebvre writes:

The meanings conveyed by abstract space are more often prohibitions than solicitations ofstimuli (except when it comes to consumption). Prohibition—the negative basis, so to speak,of the social order—is what dominates here…Most such prohibitions are invisible. Gates andrailings, ditches and other material barriers are merely the most extreme instances of thiskind of separation … Prohibition is the reverse side and the carapace of property, ofthe negative appropriation of space under the reign of private property (1991:319).

In Greenpoint, landlord-enforced prohibitions of tenant practices have beencentral to the expansion of the gentrification frontier. While Polish tenants havelong been used to landlord neglect, the intensification of gentrification followingthe waterfront rezoning has led to new forms of displacement pressure: landlordhyper-vigilance and surveillance. For tenants in rent-stabilized units this meansthat the physical conditions of individual apartments often remain neglected, whilethe “common” areas of buildings—which lie beyond the strict confines of the apart-ment—are patrolled with a heightened intensity. Landlords have effectively remadeproperty relations by restricting the spatial practices of their tenants. “Customary”rights that had once extended beyond individual apartments and into “common”areas of the building—from external satellite dishes providing access to Polish-lan-guage television, to basement storage areas, to clotheslines running from the backsof buildings—are abolished in this struggle in and through space. Tenants who re-fuse to comply by the new rules are regarded as boundary-transgressors and are

Table 5: Complaint letters to Greenpoint Landlords (2009–2010)

Type of complaint Number of letters

Poor housing conditions 88Rent overcharge 32Refusal to renew lease 19“Roommate law” 10Verbal harassment 28Total 177

Source: North Brooklyn Development Corporation tenant lettersNew-Build Gentrification andDisplacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants



subject to eviction. For many, this is experienced as a kind of displacement—ashrinking of space and attenuation of place-making abilities.Greenpoint landlords have also “enacted” new property relations by disciplining

their tenants’ movements through space. Tenants who live in rent-stabilized unitsare subject to the “primary residency” requirement, according to which they mustspend at least half of the year in their apartments. For Polish tenants, particularly theelderly, who often return to Poland for months at a time—for health reasons, work,or extended family visits—this presents significant risks. Landlords seeking groundsfor eviction, for example, may monitor the duration of these visits; some even waituntil their tenants leave the country to initiate eviction proceedings. Tenantsmust either rush back home to answer such “notices to cure” or risk losing theirapartments. Others simply opt not to travel.Landlords may even attempt to illegally restrict the occupancy rights of tenants.

The so-called “roommate law”, which permits primary residents of rent-regulatedapartments to live with a non-relative roommate (and his/her immediate family),has frequently been ignored by landlords intent on driving their tenants out.Verbally, or even as written “clauses” on lease agreements, landlords have deniedpermission for tenants to add roommates. Though unenforceable in HousingCourt, such prohibitions serve to harass and intimidate tenants who are oftenunaware of their statutory rights.Finally, it is not uncommon for quasi-communal or informal SRO-type living

arrangements, in which rent is pooled among multiple tenants occupying a singleapartment, to be replaced by “prime tenancy”, in which a single occupantis granted legal occupancy and protection against eviction. In this way, all otheroccupants are transformed into “roommates”with tenuous rights to residency. Thisprocess of identifying a “primary tenant”, though consistent with New York Staterent regulation law, is often a prelude displacement, for the new rent levels are of-ten beyond the capacity of single occupants (even with a roommate). Quasi- com-munal forms of housing are thus abolished by landlords seeking to enact newforms of individualized and exclusionary property relations.

AppropriationsEveryday displacement is felt particularly acutely among Greenpoint’s long-timePolish tenants, whose local histories of labor and hardship often underpin a senseof not just attachment, but even entitlement to the neighborhood. This is becausePolish tenants in Greenpoint, like the low-income residents in Blomley’s study ofVancouver’s Downtown Eastside, tacitly subscribe to a kind of “labor theory ofproperty”—what Blomley describes as “a doctrine of property as a reward to usefullabor” (Blomley 2004:64). This sense of entitlement to property extends to the en-tire neighborhood, whose long road to renewal they feel themselves to have been apart. Indeed, many tenants associate the sudden influx of Polish immigrants toGreenpoint in the 1980s and 1990s—including their own experiences of settlement—with the “revival” of the neighborhood’s shops, businesses, homes, and streets.Grzegorz, a Greenpoint tenant since the early 1980s, offers the following views onthe impact of Polish immigration on the local housing stock:

810 Antipode


Why is Greenpoint a good neighborhood for real estate investment? I’ll tell you why.I’ve been walking and observing where Poles have been buying homes … There’sa noticeable difference right away: renovations, new siding, new sheetrock inside,new electrical wiring. Any Pole who bought a house began to renovate right away.Everything—entrances, gardens, outside walls made of brick—everything’s elegant.And you know it’s a Polish home. So when Poles began to buy homes, Greenpointchanged before my eyes. Whoever bought a house, made it pretty. Each Pole wantedto be better than his neighbor. This is the Polish way. Even if we don’t have money, wesave to buy a home and make it nice.

Significantly, Grzegorz also attributes Greenpoint’s renewal to the displacementeffects of Polish immigration on the neighborhood’s Hispanic population:

The changes in Greenpoint came after some time. In the beginning, when I first arrived,a lot of Latinos lived here. It was impossible to pass peacefully through the neighbor-hood—there would be loud music past 11:00pm, and you had to be careful of whatyou had in your pockets. Then Poles began to purchase houses, renovate them, andthe rents went up. And the Latinos couldn’t afford to stay in Greenpoint and movedout. Down past Graham Avenue. Now there are only a few Latino families left.

The post-rezoning gentrification of Greenpoint, however, which has spawnedluxury new-build developments throughout the neighborhood, is regarded bymany Polish tenants as a process from which they have been excluded. In thissense, their experiences are similar to those the low-income and working-class res-idents of Newham studied by Watt (2013), who feel left out of the “regeneration”of East London following the 2012 Olympics. As Anna, a Polish tenant who haslived in Greenpoint since 1982, remarks:

Greenpoint has changed a lot, a lot. Manhattan Avenue, which was horrible, wasfixed. There were huge holes and the sidewalk was uneven—one time I even almostbroke my ankle walking down the street. I have a scar to this day. McGuinnessBoulevard was also renovated. So was the Pulaski Bridge. And also the new shopshave opened, a lot of old shops have closed, a lot has changed. And also the newbuildings, everywhere are new buildings—these just popped up recently. Like theones at the end of Manhattan Avenue, near the corner of Driggs—how I would loveto live there, on the very top floor. But how much would that cost—that’s not forme. But they’re very pretty.

If many Polish tenants feel themselves to be an essential yet excluded part ofa collective process of neighborhood transformation, many feel that theirexperiences as individual tenants have had an equally profound impact on localhousing conditions. Along with their rent payments, their own labor has enabledtheir landlords to maintain and improve their apartments and buildings. Some-times, tenants labor out of pure expediency and of their own accord; other times,they do so in agreement with landlords and in exchange for rent reductions.This sort of “tenant sweat equity”, whereby tenants sweat for their landlords’

equity, is a frequent source of irritation for Polish tenants in Greenpoint. That manytenants themselves work in the construction industry can breed further resentment,for they are all too aware of the contribution that their own labor has made to theirlandlords’ property values. In many cases, tenants who have renovated their own



apartments feel that their landlords are trying to evict them not despite the work thatthey have done, but because of it. Zbigniew, for example, complained to me that thework he had put into his apartment—including re-finishing the floors—had providedhis landlord with an even greater incentive to evict him. “I did the work for him”,Zbigniew recalls. “Now, all [the landlord] has to do is evict me to get the higher rent.”Not just labor and sweat, but also suffering and endurance have instilled

among tenants a feeling of entitlement to local housing. Those who have longbeen living in neglected buildings and apartments feel that they have earnedthe right to remain in place. When the rising tide of gentrification jeopardizes eventhis kind of housing, however, the bitter fruit of endurance becomes all too clear.For many Polish tenants a sense of loss and dispossession—of everyday displace-ment—emerges alongside the realization that landlord neglect of their apartmentswill last only as long as their tenancies. Once higher-paying tenants have taken theirplace, it is believed, much-needed maintenance and renovations will surely follow.As Wojciech explains:

We’ve done all the renovations ourselves. How much money have we spent this yearalone? And we have to do this all the time. But it’s like that with all tenants who livesomewhere for a long time—they have to do all the renovations themselves. Unless ofcourse we were to move out of our apartment—then he would make renovations inthe meantime and find a new tenant, then everything would be clean and new. But ifsomeone lives in an apartment longer, then they have to do it themselves.

For Polish tenants who manage to hang on to their apartments in Greenpoint,there will be no reward for their suffering; on the contrary, the longer they endure,the more their landlords will ratchet up the pressure to get them out.

InsecuritiesYi-Fu Tuan’s (1977:3) claim that “place is security, space is freedom” provides yet anotherway of conceptualizing the everyday displacement experienced by low-income andworking-class residents in gentrifying neighborhoods. The loss of security associated withinexorably rising rents, landlord harassment, the disruption of social networks, and loss ofneighborhood resources is central to this understanding of displacement (Davidson2008). Among Polish tenants in gentrifying Greenpoint, insecurity is also rooted in theirchanging relationships to an immigrant enclave in the process of dissolution. Asgentrification drives more and more Polish tenants out of the neighborhood, andlandlords remain flush with demand for their apartments from more affluentapartment-seekers, Polish tenants feel increasingly embattled and insecure.Indeed, as a housing consultant I regularly met with Polish tenants who were

deeply suspicious of their landlords’ behavior and intentions. A landlord’s failureto provide a timely renewal lease for a rent-regulated apartment, for example, oftenarouses deep concern among tenants fearful of the slightest pretext for eviction.Tenants are also afraid of asking their landlords for even basic apartment repairs,fully aware that repairs may serve as a ruse for landlords intent on either movingtenants out of their apartments—and possibly never back in—or raising their rents.

812 Antipode


Tenants are thus caught in a dilemma—either continue to live in sub-standardconditions, or run the risk of a rent hike or eviction.The exodus of Poles from Greenpoint has also made it more difficult for Polish ten-

ants to find roommates with which to share their rent burdens, exacerbating housinginsecurity. This has been particularly stressful for elderly Polish tenants, who oftenspeak no English and are fearful of taking in non-Polish speaking roommates.Whereasbefore, Polish tenants were frequently allowed to find their own replacements whenmoving out of their apartments, enabling a kind of local market of informally adver-tised apartments, now landlords are far less tolerant of such practices. Vacated apart-ments are immediately renovated, rent increases are applied, and apartments areadvertised by real estate brokers with access to much more affluent clientele.Finally, everyday displacement in Polish Greenpoint is also a process by which the

social benefits of inclusion in the immigrant enclave are eclipsed by the risks ofdependency on these very same relations and resources. The dual edge of the enclaveis thus exposed: inclusion into a social formation through ascribed ethnicity is based onan underlying exclusion from formal housing and labor markets. This renders low-income tenants particularly vulnerable and insecure. The interdependence of housingand work relations—as the above example of Halina, who lives in her employer’sbuilding, illustrates—creates heightened forms of precarity in the context of gentrifica-tion. Having retired from her job at the market above which she lives, Halina nowfinds herself facing the likelihood of eviction by her former employer. Like many otherPolish tenants in Greenpoint, she now lives in a state of constant housing insecurity.

Conclusion: Everyday Displacement and NeighborhoodErasureGentrification displaces low-income, working-class, and minority residents andcommunities in multiple ways. Forced spatial relocation is often but the culminationof a protracted displacement process that is experienced in and through thetransformation of lived space. As the gentrification frontier moves across theurban landscape, spaces of social reproduction are increasingly brought under thecapitalist imperative of accumulation, subordinating social use values to monetaryexchange values. In the process, gentrification produces its own spaces—of prohibi-tion, appropriation, and insecurity—which conflict and collide with the place-makingpractices of low-income and working-class tenants.In Greenpoint, waterfront rezoning and new-build development have catalyzed

the revaluation of real property, thus transforming its social relations of production.Property relations that have underpinned the emergence and growth of theneighborhood as an enclave of Polish immigrants have been reworked in theprocess of enclave dissolution. Landlord–tenant relations among Polish immigrantshave reflected and driven this transformation. The process, however, has not beenfree of conflict; as the examples given above suggest—and the steady demandfor tenant services among Polish immigrants confirms—the daily struggles in andover space continue.Indeed, for many Polish tenants in Greenpoint, direct, physical displacement

has been accompanied by what I have called everyday displacement—the



inexorable whittling away of agency, freedom, and security in their apartments andneighborhood. This spatial transformation of the lifeworlds of Polish tenants hasbeen driven by the imperatives and rhythms of a higher-order process of gentrifica-tion—one that has harnessed the power of the state in claiming and colonizing ever-greater reaches of the city for the wealthy. The upshot has been a particularform of neighborhood erasure, whereby even the working-class tenants whomanage to remain in Greenpoint do so in increasingly restricted, impoverished,and vulnerable spaces.For urban policies that seek to mitigate or even rollback gentrification, the

ongoing and protracted nature of the process suggests that anti-displacementmeasures by themselves are insufficient. As this paper has argued, “everyday”displacement may persist, even intensify, in the absence of forced, physical reloca-tion. Insofar as housing is valued as a source of real or potential profit over andabove its social utility, the imperative to remake places of dwelling into spaces ofaccumulation remains. Limited and temporary funding for tenant services, whilelaudable, is inadequate. What are desperately needed, rather, are more robustand concerted efforts to de-commodify housing—by building more public housing,strengthening and expanding rent regulations, prosecuting abusive and negligentlandlords, and ending policies (including state subsidies, tax abatements, andzoning without planning) that encourage speculation in real estate.

AcknowledgementsFor helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, I would like to thank Conrad Barwa,Sharad Chari, David Madden, Hyun-Bang Shin, and three anonymous reviewers at Antipode.Melisa Lima has provided invaluable assistance and support throughout the research andwriting process. Finally, I would like to thank the tenants and landlords of Greenpoint whoshared their histories and experiences with me.

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