There Goes the Neighborhood
Written and directed by Ian Phillips
Unrated
74 mins.
Streaming on IndiePix Unlimited and Virtual Cinema October 6

by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

I’m stating the obvious here, of course, but New York City is big. Millions of people, hundreds of neighborhoods, and for almost 400 years a near endless desire among people to live here. In the past 30 years or so (and especially the last 20, from the Bloomberg years on) this has led to multiple waves of gentrification across the five boroughs (yes, even Staten Island — at least the North Shore, anyway), with market-rate renters left with little recourse.

Writer-director Ian Phillips drops viewers into one of these waves, from 2018 to 2020, with There Goes the Neighborhood, a “portrait of the city in five parts.” These five parts are in turn spread across four neighborhoods: Astoria in Queens, the Lower East Side of Manhattan (and, by extension, Chinatown), and the Prospect Heights and Bed-Stuy neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The two Brooklyn stories focus on the struggle to survive for businesses in areas where the cost of living is rising. Jerry Walsh owns Mayday Hardware on Washington Avenue, which survived the big, bad days of the ‘70s and ‘80s and the Giuliani years of broken-windows policing, and is trying to endure the gentrification wave just north of Prospect Park and east of the Barclays Center/Atlantic Yards project. Calvin Clark runs Club Langston, New York’s only Black-focused LGBTQ+ nightclub, which closes in Bed-Stuy midway through the film despite his efforts to keep the club running.

Otherwise, the city’s most populous borough ends up getting dropped out of the picture for the two residentially focused stories, and the doc’s two protagonists. The film begins with Dannelly Rodriguez, Dominican American, Astoria resident, activist, and CUNY Law student (and by the end of the film, graduate). He’s one of a cadre of northern Queens residents taking a stand against the rising unaffordability in the various neighborhoods, especially with the looming threat of Amazon’s HQ2, co-awarded to Long Island City (and Arlington, VA) early on in the film’s timeline. Meanwhile, on the Lower East Side, Arnette Scott — grandchild of the Great Migration and third-generation on the LES — overcomes historic segregation of the LES and Chinatown to organize and fight against high-rise towers in the Two Bridges neighborhood, led by a complex with possibly the dumbest name, One Manhattan Square. A set of two high-rises with a squat outbuilding for “affordable” units, the project as currently constructed already stands as a middle-finger to affordability in Lower Manhattan. With four additional skyscrapers planned, the group Scott helps steer takes to the courts — and the court of public opinion — against the development.

The bulk of the film is a staccato oscillation between the “No Towers, No Compromise” rallies and the fight against — and, at least for a token moment from the building trade unions, for — HQ2. Rodriguez and his fellow activists get the support of a coalition of other labor unions, immigrant activist groups like Make the Road, subchapters of the New York City Democratic Socialists, and eventually local politicians. Together, HQ2’s New York leg gets canceled (and with the hindsight of a mid/post-Covid world, dodges a bullet). Scott’s group wins a lawsuit stopping the towers, a moment of celebration on the Lower East Side, but (by the film’s epilogue) loses on appeal, the fight continuing. (Indeed, there’s another lawsuit underway now, the first citing a new “healthy environment” amendment to the state’s constitution.)

It probably would have been best if the film kept its focus entirely on the Scott and Rodriguez stories, or even just kept its focus on Astoria as the sole case-study — between HQ2, the degradation of NYCHA housing in Queensbridge, Ravenswood, and Astoria, and the scuttled Brooklyn-Queens Connector (BQX) light-rail project all either noted in the film or in the credits montage, there’s a wealth of stories that could have come from the northwest fringes of The World’s Borough. There could have been a greater focus on how things got this way in Queens — in particular, the Bloomberg-era rezoning of Hunters Point (along with the North Brooklyn waterfront) as part of the failed 2012 Olympics bid — and a greater historical grounding.

And it’s a shame, because these stories themselves are compelling enough and would make for a moving film with political impact. Instead, the film’s storyline is muddled across these four stories — and with a 74-minute runtime, there’s just not enough space to cover it all. Aside from the lived experience of Walsh and an all-too-short talking-head from the dean of NYC historians, Kenneth Jackson, the film sticks to the recent past or present. And in attempting to make a “portrait of a [whole] city,” instead of a singular story, Phillips’ reach exceeds his grasp. All of the Bronx and southern Brooklyn each get single shots in the credits montage. Eastern Brooklyn — one of the first sites to be rezoned in the Bill de Blasio era — and Manhattan north of Grand Street are entirely nonexistent in the story. And by the end of the film, amid early Covid and the protests to cancel rent and (after the murder of George Floyd) defund the police, the film loses focus even further. I can’t help but compare this film to the unrelated podcast series of the same title, which focused on gentrification in Brooklyn across ten episodes, with the depth the issue requires. In contrast, There Goes the Neighborhood is a well-meaning but flawed flyby across the affordability crisis in New York City.