Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

by Andrea Elliott

The early pioneers of Fort Greene’s gentrification were, in fact, African American. In the 1960s—long after the neighborhood was redlined, allowing banks to disinvest—Black middle-class families took ownership of Fort Greene’s brownstones. The 1980s and 1990s brought a cultural revival that is likened to the Harlem Renaissance, with Black writers, musicians, and actors planting roots in Fort Greene—among them Chris Rock, Erykah Badu, and Branford Marsalis. Their de facto mayor was Spike Lee, whose homegrown 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It takes place in the neighborhood. By the time Dasani was born here, in 2001, Fort Greene was the beating heart of what Essence magazine called Brooklyn’s “Black Mecca,” a neighborhood that Black families had dominated for half a century. It was on a bench in Fort Greene Park that Richard Wright had written passages of his landmark 1940 novel, Native Son. Then came a seismic change. Much of it began in 2003, with Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to remake downtown Brooklyn. Through aggressive rezoning and generous subsidies, developers broke ground on nineteen luxury buildings in Fort Greene, all in the span of three years. Within a decade, the neighborhood’s real estate prices had doubled and its portion of white residents had jumped by 80 percent—while an estimated three-quarters of Fort Greene’s Black-owned businesses closed. Brooklyn was seeing the opposite of white flight—a white landing of sorts. This was coded in the language of class: the arriv...