Social Relations of Landed Property: Gentrification of a Polish Enclave in Brooklyn

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12216
• Author: Filip Stabrowski
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Date: 01 January 2018

Social Relations of Landed Property:

Gentrification of a Polish Enclave in

Brooklyn

By FILIP STABROWSKI*

ABSTRACT. Despite the extensive literature on ethnic enclaves in

American cities, the role of landed property in ethnic enclave formation

and transformation has received no attention to date. Drawing upon

nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer, I address this issue by

examining how the social relations of landed property have been

integral to the formation, transformation, and deterioration of ethnic

ties among Polish migrants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Specifically, I

argue that the social relations of property among Polish migrants—

what I call “enclave property”—have enabled the acquisition,

maintenance, and improvement of landed property in and through the

production of ethnicity. With the gentrification of the neighborhood,

however, the social relations of immigrant housing that helped produce

the enclave in the 1980s and 1990s have been strained, and rising

property values have transformed relations of ethnicity among Polish

migrants into mechanisms for property accumulation by dispossession.

The upshot has been the “hollowing out” of the enclave, as Polish

migrant tenants have been displaced from Greenpoint, leaving behind

a co-ethnic landlord class and their wealthier American tenants.

Introduction

Over the past two decades, the North Brooklyn neighborhood of

Greenpoint—home to the one of the densest concentrations of Polish

*Assistant Professor of Anthropology at LaGuardia Community College, City Univer-

sity of New York. His research focuses on the political economy of housing in New

York City, and he has published articles in Antipode, the International Journal of

Urban and Regional Research, and the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and

Society. He is also an editor of the journal City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture,

Theory, Policy, Action.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 1 (January, 2018).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12216

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C2018 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

immigrants in the UnitedStates—has morphed from a classic immigrant

neighborhood of initial settlement to New York City’s trendiest (and

one of its priciest) places to live. Since the city’s 2005 decision to rezone

the area’s waterfront from industrial to residential, new luxury condo-

minium and apartment towers have risen like a wall along the East

River, while small new developments have sprouted up in patches in

the “upland” areas of the neighborhood in between the modest, vinyl-

sided two- and three-family homes of Polish migrants who arrived in

the 1980s and the 1990s.

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On Greenpoint’s commercial corridors, the

contrast between “old” and “new” is equally stark, as a dwindling num-

ber of Polish delis, bookstores, restaurants, and markets (the bars hav-

ing all closed) persist amid the rising commercial rents and rapidly

changing consumer demographic. Besides the occasional Polish-

language shop sign, visual indicators of Polish Greenpoint include

monuments to Polish heroes in the fight against communism,

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a mural

of the Warsaw Uprising at the Polish National Home, and an imposing

relief of Polish coats of arms on the sides of the Polish-Slavic Federal

Credit Union. The neighborhood’s sole water tower, once graffitied

with a massive Polish flag, has now been painted over in metallic grey.

Beneath and behind these external manifestations of neighborhood

change, however, how have social relations been transformed in the

process? Specifically, how have intra-ethnic relations among the Polish

migrant population in Greenpoint been altered by local gentrification?

What role has landed property in particular played in this process, as a

means of (re)structuring social relations of ethnicity within the ethnic

“enclave?”

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Finally, what might the gentrification of Greenpoint suggest

about the function and meaning of ethnicity in the late capitalist city,

where inexorably rising property values constitute the (perpetually

unstable) groundson which communities form and dissolve?

In this article, I argue that the social relations of landed property

have been integral to the formation, transformation, and deterioration

of the Polish enclave. What I call enclave property—an institution con-

stituted by and productive of relations of ethnicity—has served as a

means of access to other social resources within the enclave, an engine

of property accumulation, and a lever of dispossession. Polish migrant

social relations of housing in particular have been rapidly and radically

transformed in and through this process. As the enclave’s housing

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