The Patch Interview: Flatbush Anti-Gentrification Activist Imani Henry

FLATBUSH, BROOKLYN — Imani Henry refuses to discuss his respective campaigns individually. Instead, he refers to an "intersectional" set of crises confronting the working-class black and brown residents of Flatbush.

Police brutality, gentrification and the harassment of small business operators are all linked, he told Patch on Thursday, part of an easily observable effort to displace low-income minority New Yorkers so their neighborhoods and homes can be turned over to those with greater economic resources.

"Why in a million years would anyone stand for this?" the 47-year-old, Boston-born activist said, explaining his work. "We're not giving up Flatbush. Where are we supposed to go, Venus?"

In 2013, Henry founded Equality for Flatbush, an organization dedicated to documenting and resisting what it labels as unjust policies and practices impacting the neighborhood.

A trained social worker, Henry said he saw a developing series of pressures being applied to those in Flatbush, a community he had at that point called home for a decade.

Henry says his point of view is widely shared in the area, but it's one that stands in stark contrast to the conversation had in other parts of the city.

For example, the NYPD has gone to great lengths to laud its new community policing model, which top officials, such as outgoing commissioner Bill Bratton, describe as a key tool in the force's ability to build constructive relations with locals around the city.

But Henry says he and those in his community suffer from police abuse routinely.

"The police are an occupying entity in our neighborhood that has access to military structures and weapons," he said plainly.

Even when violence isn't the issue, the NYPD still disproportionately focuses enforcement efforts on neighborhoods like Flatbush, Henry said. Tickets are handed out to individuals selling goods on the street, while the drivers of dollar vans — a cheap alternative to MTA transportation — are ticketed as well.

Henry said that activity is designed to dissuade such businesses from operating. What's more, he said, the NYPD's presence increases in gentrifying neighborhoods, with the police effectively doing the bidding of new arrivals at the expense of long-standing locals.

Along those lines, Henry rejects the media's portrayal of alleged neighborhood crime hotspots and related news narratives — such as the K2 "epidemic" that was reported in Bed-Stuy this past summer.

While whites and people of color use drugs in equal measure, Henry said, such stories link drug use to minority communities which can then be demonized.

"Developers are happy when there's a K2 scare in the news," Henry said. Those developers, he continued, effectively say, "We're going to get those people out and you [people of privilege] can be there."

The same forces are at work in the housing arena, he said. With the help of the police, landlords harass low-income tenants in rent-stabilized properties, aiming to force them out so their apartments can be pushed into free-market territory.

And Henry dismissed the de Blasio's administration's Mandatory Inclusionary Housing plan as a cover for displacement.

"The mayor's housing plan is about building luxury properties," he said. The MIH approach doesn't create enough affordable housing for those who need it, he explained, and also encourages neighborhoods to be transformed culturally and economically by high-income arrivals.

In short, those in gentrifying neighborhoods are forced to confront the fact that "everything you love about your neighborhood is being taken from you."

Equality for Flatbush is part of a broader network of activist groups known as the Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network, or BAN.

BAN's next public meeting is scheduled for Sep. 13 at 6:30 p.m. at 147 West 24th St. in Manhattan. Equality for Flatbush will also host a "strategy session on gentrification" on Sep. 24 at 2:30 p.m. at the Flatbush Library, located at 22 Linden Blvd. in Brooklyn.

Pictured at top: Imani Henry. Photo by John V. Santore