Erin Lilli, Ph.D

This research looks at how gentrification touches down in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and reproduces collective and individual experiences of racial inequality in home and place. Specifically, it explores the conditions under which Black homeowners, renters, and long-term residents of a predominantly Afro-Caribbean neighborhood acquire and maintain—and in some cases lose—their housing and sense of place and belonging. These residents resist varied tactics of anti-Blackness such as landlord and developer harassment, eviction, and displacement pressures that attempt to dispossess owners and renters of their homes and symbolically displace them from the neighborhood. Taking an historical materialist approach and drawing on residential oral histories, my findings reveal Crown Heights to be a space of contradictions, where familial traditions of care and ethnic/racial solidarity are central to residents’ resistance and struggle to (re)claim, in Katherine McKittrick’s words, a Black sense of place.

The NSS lecture series is made possible by generous contributions from Con Edison.