Sunset for Sale
By Eileen G’Sell
Emergent City
Dir. Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, U.S., Realistic Pictures
Two boys play cards on a concrete stoop. A family splashes in a fire hydrant spring. A group of grannies in colorful tees exercise to the beats of a carted boombox. A dog waits on the sidewalk, his leash looped to a rusted post. A hand sifts through a box of longan, filling a bag with leathery fruit.
In Emergent City, Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s documentary about Brooklyn’s Sunset Park district, community comprises more than a group of people who live within designated boundaries; it is a living, breathing body. But as we quickly learn from the film’s first scenes, this body is in peril: a global real estate firm has plans to transform the neighborhood’s vacant waterfront into a commercial-residential behemoth. Dubbed “Industry City,” the largest private industrial property in New York, the row of towering warehouses is converted from dilapidated eyesore into an “innovation district,” filled with tech offices, artisanal pizza, and outdoor fairy lights.
For those fond of upscale bakeries and Design Within Reach, Industry City would seem a boon to the area, attracting creatives and other “innovators” (filmmakers included) into a predominantly working-class and immigrant region. But as with most “reinvention” efforts, gentrification—and subsequent displacement of low-income residents—is part of the deal. If Jamestown Properties, the Atlanta firm responsible for Chelsea Market and other Manhattan developments, succeeds, Sunset Park will be rezoned to permit street-level luxury retail and hotels. Emergent City potently—and often poetically—conveys the layered stakes of the equation. Not all long-time residents of Sunset Park are against rezoning, and the divisions aren’t always set along race, class, and generation lines. “Residential beats commercial beats industrial,” asserts Ben Margolis, the wizened head of Southwest Brooklyn Industrial development. “It’s just the story of New York.”
Eschewing voice-over and didactic talking heads, Anderson and Sterrenberg rely on the power of community members, and their images, to clarify what’s at risk. When the camera isn’t following grassroots activists fighting for tenant rights, it is trained on the quiet details that animate the area. In one interstitial scene, a cobbler punches a hole in a young woman’s belt, an oscillating fan whirring behind them. The camera then cuts to a street view of their tiny quarters, next to which a “Store for Rent” sign hangs from the awning of an empty Chinese boutique. In such juxtapositions, we are gently implored to infer just what—and who—is affected when mass developments take over an urban landscape. What is abstract and systemic becomes granular and alive to any flaneur walking down the sidewalk.
For those of the creative class who have lived in Brooklyn—and I count myself among them—Emergent City makes it clear how developers prize our everyday ease and consumer desires, whether it’s a pour-over coffee down the block or a minimalist, sunny Airspace studio. “[Industry City is] making between 60 to 95 million dollars a year,” Renae Widdison, Director of Land Use and Planning for Sunset Park, explains to concerned residents in one of the many civic meetings depicted in the film. Later, in a company soiree held in an IC office, infrastructure consulting firm AECOM director Chris Ward toasts to the firm’s move from Manhattan, musing, “Where else in the world do you have such a valuable asset, such an incredible blank landscape? We get to write Brooklyn’s future on it.”
If Emergent City makes anything clear, it is that this landscape is not blank, has never been blank, but is ripe with human activity. Ward’s ignorance—of a piece with a larger pervasive “we” marked by economic privilege—is premised on profits and nothing else. No matter how Jamestown tries to spin the growth of Industry City as a force for neighborhood good, money is what motivates: 5000 square feet of manufacturing space pulls in only a fifth of that same space rented by a hotel. “Industry” City couldn’t be less about fostering an industrial district of the type that can employ residents of Sunset Park.
This is not a film that demonizes white or college-educated people, nor does it suggest that all people of color automatically agree on the issue. Emergent City is instead a film that exposes how the very presence of the creative class, no matter its progressive attitude or good will, can rupture a community. At the same time, the film suggests, that the privileged class can join with the working class to combine their strengths for real results. “We went out into the streets to collect signatures,” declares an organizer in Spanish, lifting a stack of papers. “These are from the Hispanic community, from the Chinese community, and from the hipster community that is here with us today…” With her last reference, people laugh in the crowd, fully aware of the irony that some of the same folks who look like the enemy are on their side.
The real heroes of Emergent City are the many who try to do the right thing, make mistakes, and learn from them. Councilman Carlos Menchaca, the first Mexican American elected official in New York and Brooklyn’s first openly gay legislator, is caught between the pressures of developers and the will of those he serves. After taking a tour of the buildings set for rezoning with Andrew Kimball, the affable CEO of Industry City, Menchaca politely shakes his hand before cycling back to an office swarmed with indignant citizens. When Menchaca attempts to compromise with Jamestown developers via a “Community Benefits Agreement,” it backfires wildly. When he's repeatedly badgered by the Jamestown legal team, at one point accused of “herding cats,” Menchaca remains as cucumber-cool as he is unwilling to capitulate.
Other passionate leaders are Marcela Mitaynes, a tenant organizer who rallies the members of her neighborhood across generation and language; Antoinette Martinez, an outspoken voice for the Puerto Rican immigrants whose mother provides free childcare during evening townhalls; and Elizabeth Yeampierre, a feisty attorney and activist in favor of green reindustrialization of Brooklyn’s waterfront. While the film’s title is justifiably alarmist—the displacement that follows redevelopment is an emergency—it ultimately suggests that all cities are, by definition, in the process of taking on new identities. Rather than indulge in nostalgic fantasies of a better New York of the past, we witness how the messy work of democracy can, at the systemic level, serve the people. A city emerges as its truest self when its citizens talk to each other, argue, get mad, make up, and, eventually, make things better.