Brooklyn hasn’t always been perceived as this artsy, boho, open-minded place the way it is nowadays. It has historically been associated with crime, drugs, poverty, and immorality. From the 1960s to the 2000s, the most “undesirable” communities made Brooklyn their own and built a self-sufficient system by being their neighborhood’s small businesses’ main, loyal clientele. This meant that all of a sudden, Brooklyn was up for grabs for wealthy real-estate developers. Rent had exploded in all boroughs by the 2000s, but no area has experienced quite the same transformation as downtown Brooklyn. Lower income residents and youths especially went there to spend their free time and socialize, no matter how far they had been displaced, and now, even their favorite mall was at risk. The loss of entrenched culture in downtown Brooklyn is a form of exclusionary displacement; it was never a residential area therefore it cannot be direct displacement but that feeling of belonging, being welcomed, and kinship is completely gone. The “Downtown Brooklyn Plan” directly targeted and sought to erase the people that made the area desirable for developers to begin with. Media outlets ignored concerned locals and insisted Brooklyn was getting improved, revamped and upgraded, but while it might be “nicer” looking to some, is it worth excluding so many people from it? No matter the way economic development officials have tried to twist it, gentrification is not automatically about ameliorating a community’s quality of life. What it does without fail is give away dozens of millions of dollars in tax cuts for luxury apartment developers much like the 421a program, which cost the city $1.1 billion a year in tax breaks as of 2016.

Luxury developers have absolutely no obligation to build affordable housing for the vast majority of residents that cannot afford paying a minimum of $4,500 a month for a one bedroom. Phillip Clay, a professor of housing policy and city planning at MIT said in 1979: “In the fourth and final stage (of gentrification), the neighborhood becomes so saturated by private developers, corporations, and the wealthy that even the original pioneers can no longer afford to live there.” The complete erasure of history, culture, and social ties is entrenched in gentrification.