CVK
There’s an excellent piece in the New York Observer about the race issues everyone tries to ignore when talking about gentrification of a neighborhood. This article focuses specifically on the development of Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn. During a panel discussion to review improvements for the area, one woman made everyone squirm by saying what nobody really wanted say:

“I want to know what the planners plan to do to attract a white clientele. You can walk from Jay Street to Flatbush Avenue Extension, and you may see no more than five white people walking down the street. The only store with appeal to the white middle class is Macy’s.”

Of course, everyone tries to steer clear of words like “white” and “middle class” and the author of the article suggests that the following euphemisms are used instead:

in order not to talk about race, here’s a glossary for civilized discussion about improving the Fulton Street Mall:

Area residents: largely white, largely upper-middle-class residents of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Fort Greene—though Fort Greene, admittedly, is racially mixed.

Local constituents: see “area residents.”

Non-users: people who don’t shop at the mall.

Underutilized: Area residents and local constituents are non-users.

What I found absolutely fascinating about the article is how economically successful Fulton Mall actually is!

And yet, ground-floor rents ($93 to $125 a square foot annually) match those on Grand Street and Mercer Street in Soho, according to figures from Massey Knakal and Cushman & Wakefield, two real-estate service firms, while the business improvement district claims that more than 100,000 people walk down the street each day—more than on Madison Avenue—and retailers along the nine-block strip gross more than $100 million a year.

So if Fulton Mall is actually doing so well, you have to wonder - who cares if it’s “under-utilized” by area residents? What’s the real issue here? That they’re uncomfortable with large crowds of black and Latino shoppers in their neighborhood?