Bed-Stuy’s Black Exodus: Goring’s Documentary Maps Loss, Lament, and the Price of Nostalgia

Gentrification in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy is not merely a local saga, but a parable for urban transformation and displacement in American cities.

Inside a stately brownstone on Macon Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Yasmine Tiana Goring’s family once thrived alongside cousins, uncles, and a grandmother—a close-knit collective typical of Black Brooklyn’s heyday. Today, the brownstone’s facade serves as a backdrop for Vogue photo shoots, and its interiors house tenants at market rate, managed by new white developers who never knew the history steeped in its walls. Goring’s loss is not hers alone: Bed-Stuy has seen its Black population halved over two decades, and New York City overall has shed some 200,000 Black residents since 2000.

This is not a routine tale of urban change; it is the crucible for Goring’s recent documentary, “222 Macon St.,” which gives the microphone to those witnessing their neighborhood become, in her words, “a commodity.” For Goring, now a 26-year-old PhD student in anthropology, the sale of her family home after the 2008 housing crisis fractured the foundation of her upbringing and set her on a path of displacement familiar to many New Yorkers. Her film, released earlier this year, asks a pointed question: “How much of change is natural and how much is violence?”

The displacement Goring documents is neither theoretical nor rare. Over the past twenty years, Bed-Stuy—once a byword for Black identity, jazz, and activism—has become emblematic of a transformation afflicting much of Brooklyn and, by extension, New York City. In too many streets once dubbed “Chocolate City,” Black-owned homes and businesses are being replaced by upscale groceries, third-wave coffee, and rental listings for upwardly mobile newcomers. The pattern is as predictable as it is poignant: rising property prices, ballooning rents, and a steady departure of longtime residents.

For the city as a whole, the implications are stark. The Black exodus means not only the loss of families like Goring’s, but also a weakening of cultural institutions, a dilution of neighbourhood character, and the fraying of informal support networks. Demographic churn, in itself, is no calamity—New York, after all, is perpetually remade by waves of migration. But the velocity and scale of today’s change, critics argue, portend a city that is markedly less diverse and less affordable. If housing in Bed-Stuy and neighbouring Bushwick is increasingly out of reach for those with roots there, the vaunted American dream becomes, for many, a paradox in bricks and mortar.

Economically, the influx of higher-earning residents has buoyed tax receipts and compelled investment in local amenities: new restaurants, renovations, and retail have flourished on thoroughfares that once suffered from neglect. Yet, as Ms. Goring notes, the benefits are distributed unequally. Markets that welcome high-end goods often leave old-timers priced out of staple groceries; rising property taxes strain fixed incomes, while landlords angle for eviction through “renoviction” or, in more nefarious cases, harassment. The market’s verdict is clear: nostalgia carries no cash value.

The city’s politics, too, are shifting under the surface. Gentrification has sparked bitter contestation over affordable housing, racial equity, and land use. Progressive policymakers decry displacement and call for rent regulation, community land trusts, or property-tax reforms. City Council members representing districts like Bedford-Stuyvesant, such as Chi Ossé, must now balance the interests of remaining longtime constituents against those of new arrivals, many with louder voices and deeper pockets. Savvy mayors—including Eric Adams, a Brooklyn native born in Brownsville—must straddle a similar line if they are to retain credibility and votes.

Costly comparisons in a world of changing cities

New York’s drama may be uniquely poignant, but in its outlines it mirrors stories from San Francisco, London, Berlin, and beyond. The tale of historic populations supplanted by affluent newcomers is a global phenomenon in large cities buoyed by global capital and the myth of urban opportunity. For African American New Yorkers, the historical irony is especially pungent: neighbourhoods like Bed-Stuy were themselves built through cycles of earlier migration and racial transition. The current wave, however, diverges from 20th-century “white flight” in character; now, it is often Black residents who are compelled to leave, rather than white residents choosing to go.

Yet, as in other world cities, the pendulum will not swing forever in one direction. In recent years, modest though still insufficient efforts have been made to protect tenants and to foster affordable housing. The debate has even nudged some developers to support inclusionary zoning—sometimes out of enlightened self-interest, sometimes out of expedience. But these initiatives are toothless against the calcified problem of housing shortage, stoked by puny rates of new construction and by nimbys left and right.

The fate of families like Goring’s thus illuminates a central predicament: cities must balance dynamic growth with the preservation of community. Attempts to freeze neighbourhoods in aspic would throttle economic energy; but indifference to displacement courts a hollowed-out urban core, rich in capital but poor in character. Those cities that find a middle way—enabling more, denser housing, while shielding the most vulnerable—are likely to thrive over the next generation.

In Goring, New York has found not only a chronicler of loss, but also a protagonist of the push for recognition. Her shift from television news to documentary is representative of a new cadre of articulate, media-savvy New Yorkers documenting the ebbs and flows of urban life. They remind us that displacement, though economic in origin, is lived at the level of kin and kitchen tables.

The ending to this story is not preordained. If New York is to avoid becoming the “commodity” Goring laments, further engagement with uncomfortable truths will be required—among policymakers, investors, and residents alike. The city remains a vital laboratory for urban change, but whether this experiment bodes renewal or merely stratification will depend on the choices made today. As ever, reality in Brooklyn is more complicated, and more instructive, than its photographs. ■