'From the Frying Pan to the Oven': Gentrification and the Experience of Industrial Displacement in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Abstract

This paper explores the effects of gentrification on industrial displacement. Although urban manufacturing centres are not as central to the urban economy as they once were, they still house a vibrant and varied manufacturing sector that serves urban niche markets and provides employment for a less-educated and largely immigrant and minority workforce. As urban neighbourhoods gentrify, these manufacturers are faced with displacement because their space has become attractive to developers who convert lofts into residences. This paper looks at the process of gentrification and the experience of industrial displacement in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, in order to challenge existing theories on the impacts of gentrification and thus help to make clear the processes and interests at work. Through buy-outs, lease refusals, zoning changes and increasing rents, small manufacturers are being actively displaced, endangering the diversity of the economy and the employment outcomes of unskilled and immigrant workers.

New‐build gentrification: its histories, trajectories, and critical geographies

“…This requires a move to reassert the place in displacement. As Slater (2009) points out, many qualitative studies of gentrifi cation (see Fried, 1963;Hartman et al, 1982;Hartman, 2002;Betancur, 2002;Curran, 2007) have uncovered a sense of bereavement in association with being displaced, especially for older people. It is these 'emotional geographies' that provide the best evidence of displacement.…”

Preventing the displacement of small businesses through commercial gentrification: are affordable workspace policies the solution?

“…Imrie and Thomas (1993) found some occupiers used compensation monies to upgrade and improve their premises but that these firms tend to be a small minority. Curran (2007) concurs with this in Williamsburg, where the wide range of businesses she interviewed told negative tales of their displacement, from being 'paid off ' by their landlord to allow for residential conversion, forced downsizing or closure, multiple displacements from one manufacturing area to another and 'indirect displacement' , whereby the displacement of other industrial businesses impacted negatively on their business, causing them to relocate or close down. Ultimately, she argues the loss of industry from Williamsburg is not only due to deindustrialization, but to real estate speculation for residential conversion, actively promoted by developers, city planners, policymakers, landlords and individual gentrifiers (Curran, 2004).…”

Risky Business: Sustainability and Industrial Land Use across Seattle’s Gentrifying Riskscape

“…Since Bell's 1973 book on the postindustrial society [63], many urban geographers have examined the land use conflict between industrial and non-industrial uses through a lens of gentrification beginning with Ley [64,65]. More recently, Curran [66][67][68][69] has published a series of qualitative studies on the displacement of small manufacturers via gentrification in the New York neighbourhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Other qualitative case studies on gentrification have covered the major Northwest cities of Portland [55], Vancouver, BC [48], and Victoria, BC [49].…”

“…Gentrification did not follow pollution cleanups and deindustrialization in the BINMIC area. Instead, industrial displacement through gentrification [66][67][68][69] better describes the process driving the restructuring of urban land use on Seattle's Northside.…”