MY BROOKLYN is a documentary about Director Kelly Anderson\u2019s personal journey, as a Brooklyn \u201cgentrifier,\u201d to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood along lines of race and class. The story begins when Anderson moves to Brooklyn in 1988, lured by cheap rents and bohemian culture. By Michael Bloomberg\u2019s election as mayor in 2001, a massive speculative real estate boom is rapidly altering the neighborhoods she has come to call home. She watches as an explosion of luxury housing and chain store development spurs bitter conflict over who has a right to live in the city and to determine its future. While some people view these development patterns as ultimately revitalizing the city, to others, they are erasing the eclectic urban fabric, economic and racial diversity, creative alternative culture, and unique local economies that drew them to Brooklyn in the first place. It seems that no less than the city\u2019s soul is at stake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, development officials announce a controversial plan to tear down and remake the Fulton Mall, a popular and bustling African-American and Caribbean commercial district just blocks from Anderson\u2019s apartment. She discovers that the Mall, despite its run-down image, is the third most profitable shopping area in New York City with a rich social and cultural history. As the local debate over the Mall\u2019s future intensifies, deep racial divides in the way people view neighborhood change become apparent. All of this pushes Anderson to confront her own role in the process of gentrification, and to investigate the forces behind it more deeply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She meets with government officials, urban planners, developers, advocates, academics, and others who both champion and criticize the plans for Fulton Mall. Only when Anderson meets Brooklyn-born and raised scholar Craig Wilder, though, who explains his family\u2019s experiences of neighborhood change over generations, does Anderson come to understand that what is happening in her neighborhoods today is actually a new chapter in an old American story. The film\u2019s ultimate questions become how to heal the deep racial wounds embedded in our urban development patterns, and how citizens can become active in restoring democracy to a broken planning process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11489,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"languages":[],"countries":[1443],"film_categories":[1230,1293,1204,1196],"master_copies":[],"pricing_grid":[],"press_types":[1191],"class_list":["post-11481","film","type-film","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","countries-united-states-fr","film_categories-economie-fr","film_categories-logement-fr","film_categories-politique-fr","film_categories-race-racisme-fr","press_types-critique"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n