| The term “gentrification” wasn’t invented until 1964, but the practice has probably existed since the first cities. In this week’s New Yorker, the novelist Jonathan Lethem looks at the process in the neighborhood where he grew up: the Brooklyn area now known as Boerum Hill. The son of a white middle-class family, Lethem, the author of “Motherless Brooklyn,” was part of a wave of similar newcomers then transforming the neighborhood—often at the expense of the poorer residents who got there first. Lethem’s essay engages in a dialogue across nearly half a century with another piece from The New Yorker: Jervis Anderson’s “The Making of Boerum Hill,” published in 1977. For much of a decade, Anderson had been the magazine’s only Black staff writer, the start of a thirty-year tenure in which his contributions included portraits of New York City that were both exhaustively researched and energizing to read. In current meme-speak, his Boerum Hill piece has “aged well”—the article remains insightful, thoughtful, and remarkably evenhanded. The social and economic dynamics behind the creation of Boerum Hill are described with clarity and understatement, capturing a time when some “brownstoners”—as many gentrifiers called themselves—proudly perceived their efforts as a form of civic service. Anderson also spoke to newcomers who recognized that the story wasn’t so simple. One of the more circumspect arrivals acknowledged the tensions between the veterans and the transplants, identifying an aspect of real estate that often goes underappreciated. “Many of the young people who have come into the community have found much satisfaction in being neighbors with the people who were living here before,” she told Anderson. “They are the ones who are more fascinated by people than by houses.” | 
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