Making Rent In Bed Stuy

A young African American millennial filmmaker’s funny, sometimes painful, true-life coming-of-age story of trying to make it in New York City—a chronicle of poverty and wealth, creativity and commerce, struggle and insecurity, and the economic and cultural forces intertwined with "the serious, life-threatening process" of gentrification. Making Rent in Bed-Stuy explores the history and sociocultural importance of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn’s largest historically black community, through the lens of a coming-of-age young American negro artist living at the dawn of an era in which urban class warfare is politely referred to as gentrification. Bookended by accounts of two different breakups, from a roommate and a lover, both who come from the white American elite, the book oscillates between chapters of urban bildungsroman and a historical examination of some of Bed-Stuy’s most salient aesthetic and political legacies. Filled with personal stories and a vibrant cast of iconoclastic characters— friends and acquaintances such as Spike Lee; Lena Dunham; and Paul MacCleod, who made a living charging $5 for a tour of his extensive Elvis collection—Making Rent in Bed-Stuy poignantly captures what happens when youthful idealism clashes head-on with adult reality. Melding in-depth reportage and personal narrative that investigates the disappointments and ironies of the Obama era, the book describes Brandon Harris’s radicalization, and the things he lost, and gained, along the way.

For decades, crime novelists have set their stories in New York City, a place long famed for decay, danger, and intrigue. What happens when the mean streets of the city are no longer quite so mean? In the wake of an unprecedented drop in crime in the 1990s and the real-estate development boom in the early 2000s, a new suspect is on the scene: gentrification. Thomas Heise identifies and investigates the emerging “gentrification plot” in contemporary crime fiction. He considers recent novels that depict the sweeping transformations of five iconic neighborhoods—the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant—that have been central to African American, Latinx, immigrant, and blue-collar life in the city. Heise reads works by Richard Price, Henry Chang, Gabriel Cohen, Reggie Nadelson, Ivy Pochoda, Grace Edwards, Ernesto Quiñonez, Wil Medearis, and Brian Platzer, tracking their representations of “broken-windows” policing, cultural erasure, racial conflict, class grievance, and displacement. Placing their novels in conversation with oral histories, urban planning, and policing theory, he explores crime fiction’s contradictory and ambivalent portrayals of the postindustrial city’s dizzying metamorphoses while underscoring the material conditions of the genre. A timely and powerful book, The Gentrification Plot reveals how today’s crime writers narrate the death—or murder—of a place and a way of life.

Boss of Black Brooklyn presents a riveting and untold story about the struggles and achievements of the first black person to hold public office in Brooklyn. Bertram L. Baker immigrated to the United States from the Caribbean island of Nevis in 1915. Three decades later, he was elected to the New York state legislature, representing the Bedford Stuyvesant section. A pioneer and a giant, Baker has a story that is finally revealed in intimate and honest detail by his grandson Ron Howell. Boss of Black Brooklyn begins with the tale of one man’s rise to prominence in a fascinating era of black American history, a time when thousands of West Indian families began leaving their native islands in the Caribbean and settling in New York City. In 1948, Bert Baker was elected to the New York state assembly, representing the growing central Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant. Baker loved telling his fellow legislators that only one other Nevisian had ever served in the state assembly. That was Alexander Hamilton, the founding father. Making his own mark on modern history, Baker pushed through one of the nation’s first bills outlawing discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. Also, for thirty years, from 1936 to 1966, he led the all-black American Tennis Association, as its executive secretary. In that capacity he successfully negotiated with white tennis administrators, getting them to accept Althea Gibson into their competitions. Gibson then made history as the first black champion of professional tennis. Yet, after all of Baker’s wonderful achievements, little has been written to document his role in black history. Baker represents a remarkable turning point in the evolution of modern New York City. In the 1940s, when he won his seat in the New York state assembly, blacks made up only 4 percent of the population of Brooklyn. Today they make up a third of the population, and there are scores of black elected officials. Yet Brooklyn, often called the capital of the Black Diaspora, is a capital under siege. Developers and realtors seeking to gentrify the borough are all but conspiring to push blacks out of the city. A very important and long-overdue book, Boss of Black Brooklyn not only explores black politics and black organizations but also penetrates Baker’s inner life and reveals themes that resonate today: black fatherhood, relations between black men and black women, faithfulness to place and ancestry. Bertram L. Baker’s story has receded into the shadows of time, but Boss of Black Brooklyn recaptures it and inspires us to learn from it.

BUILDINGS FOR PEOPLE Buildings for People: Responsible Real Estate Development and Planning explores how to balance social concerns with financial and investment considerations without sacrificing profit. This timely volume provides key technical and practical knowledge while exploring real estate development and planning through a multi-level lens—revealing the systemic factors that both govern and are governed by the real estate process. Beginning with site selection, the authors discuss financing, site improvement, architecture, landscape architecture, site planning, construction, and evaluation within a broader political, economic, and social context. Throughout the text, the authors explain key theories and methods of professional practice, and highlight how important social issues are interconnected to the business of real estate development and planning. Demonstrating how the desire for profit can be balanced with the needs of society Buildings for People: Responsible Real Estate Development and Planning is an excellent textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in real estate, urban planning, urban design, and urban studies courses, as well as a valuable resource for researchers and professionals who want a multidisciplinary understanding of the built environment.

Researching City Life: An Urban Field Methods Text-Reader examines the city from a street level perspective and provides readers with tools to conduct research on urbanism—the everyday experiences of people in cities. Contending that culture is central to understanding urbanism, editors Tyler Schafer and Michael Ian Borer address qualitative research in cities and how it provides insights unable to be captured via quantitative methods. Carefully selected and edited readings cover participant observation, interviewing, narrative analysis, visual and sensory methods, and methods for (re)presenting the city. Each section includes an introduction from the editors, a Reflection Essay from one of the authors, and exercises that prompt hands-on experience.

By the author of A Terrible Country and Raising Raffi, a novel of love, sadness, wasted youth, and literary and intellectual ambition—"wincingly funny" (Vogue) Keith Gessen is a brave and trenchant new literary voice. Known as an award-winning translator of Russian and a book reviewer for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times, Gessen makes his debut with this critically acclaimed novel, a charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twenty-first century. The novel charts the lives of Sam, Mark, and Keith as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle to find a semblance of maturity, responsibility, and even literary fame.

Broad in scope, Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose presents an overview of the different paths taken by artists and artist collectives as they navigate their way from formative experiences into pedagogy. Focusing on the realms in- and outside the academy (the places and persons involved in post-secondary education) and the multiple forms and functions of pedagogy (practices of learning and instruction), the contributions in this volume engage individual and collective artistic practices as they adapt to meet the factors and historical conditions of the people and communities they serve through solidarity, equity, and creativity. With this critically, historicist approach in mind, the contributions in Out of Place historicize, study, critique, revise, reframe, and question the academy, its operations and exclusions. The extensive range of contributions, emphasizing community-oriented projects both inside and outside the United States, is grouped into three overarching categories: artists who work in academic institutions but whose social and pedagogical engagement extends beyond the walls of the academy; artists who engage in pedagogical initiatives or forms of institutional critique that were established outside of an art school or university setting; and artist-scholars who are doing transformative and inter/transdisciplinary work within their respective institutions. Collectives and projects represented in Out of Place comprise Art Practical, Axis Lab, BFAMFAPhD, Beta-Local, Black Lunch Table Project, The Black School, The Center for Undisciplined Research, Devening Projects, ds4si, Elsewhere, Ghana ThinkTank, Gudskul, The Icebox Project Space, Las Hermanas Iglesias, The Laundromat Project, Occupy Museums, Peebls, PlantBot Genetics, Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts, Related Tactics, Side by Side, 'sindikit, Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative, and Tiger Strikes Asteriod.

Archaeologists have a history of being prime agents of change, particularly in advocating for protection and preservation of historical resources. As more social issues intersect with archaeology and historical sites, we see archaeologists and others continuing to advocate for not only historic resources, but for the larger social justice issues that threaten the communities in which these resources reside. Inspired by the idea of revolution and excitement about the ways archaeology is being used in social justice arenas, this volume seeks to visualize archaeology as part of a movement by redefining what archaeology is and does for the greater good.