00:00this single photo destroyed an entire neighborhood one viral instagram post of trendy willensburg brought floods of wealthy transplants and rent jumped four hundred percent overnight
00:18i'm standing where a two hundred dollar rent control apartment just sold for four thousand dollars this is not the first apartment that this has happened to this is gentrification ground zero and it's spreading like wildfire
00:37watch this magic trick wealthy people move in and entire families kapoof disappear williamsburg lost seventy eight point seven percent of its original residents in just thirty years
00:54harlem's apollo theater survived segregation and great depression but it couldn't survive eight dollars artisanal coffee shops on every corner
01:07here is the crude math ninety percent of public housing is in poor areas but only twenty one percent survive gentrification the poor get poorer locations
01:24bedford stuyvesant went from do or die bed-sty to petite bed-sty overnight even biggie couldn't well wouldn't recognize his own neighborhood
01:39this bodega and many more like it had fed families for forty years now it's a twenty dollar smoothie bar that locals cannot afford cultural doesn't change it gets priced out
01:57long island city warehouses become glass towers so fast google maps couldn't keep up workers who built the city cannot even afford to live in it
02:11furthermore landlords don't just raise rent they weaponize it tenant harassment fake evictions and luxury venerations that nobody asked for
02:26new york city now has three hundred and fourteen super gentrified neighborhoods forming a ring of wealth around islands of poverty it is economic apartheid with a metro card
02:43photographers race to capture vanishing storefronts before they're gone forever we're documenting cultural extinction in real time
02:56this isn't progress it is cultural genocide with a real estate license the question isn't who's moving in it is who is being erased
Comments