When a neighborhood becomes popular

There is the story of gentrification in New York, increasingly complicated by many factors. I'll give the back of the cereal box version: the intensifying dirth of affordable housing for a larger swathe of people, not just for low-income households; immigration patterns, which of late show that new immigrants who traditionally moved out of the city once they got a foothold are now staying in the city to take advantage of its services and amenities provided by either the city or de facto by communities; and shifting local economic development patterns.

Our neighborhoods are changing - quickly and for everybody.

And community organizing reflects this change. Where once upon a time it was the old school community organizers that tried to either shut out the "artist", "hipster," you-name-the-trendy-group, we're witnessing newer groups adopting the same goals but in a very different way.

Take Williamsburg, for example. I don't know why the Village Voice's article "Discovering Williamsburg" is news, since the community has been collaborating since at least 1990 to stem the tide of gentrification that came with their success in turning back the tides of disinvestment from the 1970's, and people on the Southside have been worried for decades. Now, in addition to the traditional community organizing groups, St. Nicholas Neighborhood Preservation Corporation, Greenpoint Waterfront Association for Parks and Planning, the Southside Mission, the People's Firehouse, the North Brooklyn Alliance, among many many others, there's the Williamsburg Warriors taking charge of a very different form of community organizing. (Is that why it's news?)

I don't know the Lower East Side as well, but in addition to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the LES BID, the Lower East Side People's Federal Credit Union, among many, many others, there is now LOCO.

These groups - Williamsburg Warriers, LOCO - are onto something I really really like. They have to take the history and traditions of community organizing that probably came out of the 1970s movements and couple them with the new - ways of accounting for new people, of growing local businesses, of dealing with new symptons of success, such as movie shoots. They're new resources for these neighborhoods which have been a little stuck. They can sometimes come up with innovative ways of dealing with standard problems (check out the YIMBY post from yesterday).

I wonder how much of the older organizers efforts affected the formation of the new, though I very much hope that the new groups share the limelight with other like-minded organizations in their neighborhood.