Resisting Displacement and Dispossession
Resistance to Gentrification and Global Real Estate Finance in Sunset Park, Brooklyn with Neighbors Helping Neighbors, UPROSE, Protect 8th Avenue Coalition and Sunset Park for a Liberated Future
3:00 PM, Room 211
Sunset Park is a heavily working class, immigrant Latinx-Asian neighborhood currently faced with two transformative mega-development proposals. The Department of City Planning certification of Industry City’s rezoning proposal to expand destination retail, office space, and build two luxury hotels on the industrial waterfront was delayed by City Council Member Menchaca and CB 7 to allow for more community engagement and review. On 8th Avenue -- the neighborhood’s dense Chinese commercial corridor -- a ‘ginormous’ mixed use residential, retail, and office development called Eighth Avenue Center is proposed for a parking lot adjacent to North Dyker Heights. These two projects will add 2.5 million square feet of new, market rate development in destination retail, upscale hotels, and luxury residential and commercial spaces. Augmenting the scale of these two projects are Sunset Park’s nine Opportunity Zones that are census tracts where investors in real estate development can defer, reduce, and even eliminate their capital gains tax. Our panel is comprised of Sunset Park activists/scholars in a discussion on the challenges and opportunities in building alliances to resist global real estate finance and gentrification.
Panel Speakers
bio
Tarry Hum
Tarry Hum - Tarry's family moved to Sunset Park in 1974 where her father continues to reside. She is the chair of the Urban Studies Department at Queens College, CUNY and author of Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn's Sunset Park which received a 2015 Honorable Mention for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Paul Davidoff Book Award.
Marcela Mitaynes
Marcela Mitaynes -- Four Generations of my family have called Sunset Park home. In 2008 I was displaced from my rent stabilized home, where I had lived for over 30 years. I have spent the last 10 years as a tenant advocate and organizer, helping tenants stay in their homes.
Shaun Lin
Shaun Lin -- Shaun is pursuing a Ph.D in geography at the CUNY Graduate Center, where his research interests include immigrant communities, food and foodways, and abolition geography. He is an adjunct lecturer in Urban Studies at Queens College. Originally from Los Angeles, Shaun is a longtime resident of Sunset Park, Brooklyn where he organizes with Sunset Park for a Liberated Future (SPLF), Protect 8th Avenue Coalition, and No New Jails NYC against gentrification, displacement, policing and prisons.
Adan Palermo
Adan Palermo was raised in Sunset Park, the community that has also welcomed him as an artist since youth and where he organizes with his peers. His experience as a muralist in NYC allowed him to understand the complex relationship the city has with artist and their work in public art characterized under gentrification as beautification, in low income neighborhoods primed for new development. He works as a organizer with local non-profit organization UPROSE, organizing and doing outreach in his community on campaigns against displacement and gentrification, co-facilitating workshops educating the community in the rezoning process, public actions, and producing art for marches. His main interest in the natural environment is what influences him to learn about climate justice and hopes to also grow toward learning more about agriculture and his cultural background. Adan celebrates the diverse urban and ethnic culture of his community as the soul of his community.