Living in the Gentrified Version of Fort Greene, Brooklyn

Julie Lasky reports from Fort Green, a neighborhood located in the northwest of the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, which has undergone rapid change in recent years.

Fort Greene is a historically African-American neighborhood, which hosted a cultural revival in the 1980s and 1990s that has been compared to the Harlem Renaissance. According to the Furman Center at New York University, the black population in Community District 2, comprising Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights, was 25.8 percent in 2017, down from 41.8 percent in 2000.

Still, even recently the neighborhood was missing amenities, like access to banks, because of the "economic ravages of 1970s New York," according to Lasky.

The article functions as a visitors guide to the neighborhood for outsiders (including people looking to buy or rent in the neighborhood) while also providing a review of the land use and development controversies of 2019 Fort Greene.

Filmmaker Spike Lee is a native of Fort Greene, and a famous critic of gentrification, and the varying depictions of the neighborhood in Lee's work make a cameo in the article as well.