The Brooklyn Rail

Late in the new documentary Emergent City (2024), which chronicles the struggle of the Sunset Park community of Brooklyn to contend with the threats of gentrification and displacement posed by a group of developers, a young Asian-American boy sings “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The occasion is the celebration of Sunset Park resident Marcela Mitaynes’s election to the state assembly. The child, who looks to be six or seven years old, is clearly thrilled to be the center of attention. He sings out with gusto for the crowd. But he also misses the right note more than once.

It’s the kind of real-world awkward moment that many filmmakers might edit out, or include only for a bit of humor. But the decision to include it encapsulates much of the story that Brooklyn filmmakers Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg set out to tell with producer Brenda Avila-Hanna in Emergent City. Where most stories about gentrification have a clear narrative—the developers villains, the community members heroes—Anderson and Sterrenberg work to simply chronicle what they see. And what they uncover is a much more interesting and complicated portrait of a local community.

The story of Emergent City begins with a group of outside developers who in 2013 bought “Industry City,” a group of sixteen massive buildings that once upon a time were the heart of the area’s thriving industrial community. Led by the Jamestown real estate firm’s Andrew Kimball, who served as CEO of Industry City through 2022, the group began renting property within the buildings to upscale businesses like a boutique light fixture shop or a private coworking space/club. “Innovation Alley” became a new fixture in the local community, with shopping space and cultural events that created new interest in Sunset Park. It also offered some space for nonprofits (including the Brooklyn Rail). But all of that also brought higher rents and long-term families losing their homes. Industry City’s request in 2017 to change some of its zoning from industrial to retail and hotel only reinforced for locals the potential catastrophe that Sunset Park faced.

The film spends quite a bit of time in the various meetings that happened in the years that followed, with an unprecedented level of access. The documentary team are at everything from the public forums to discuss Industry City’s proposal and community activist meetings to then-city councilman Carlos Menchaca’s advisory group sessions and closed-door conversations between Kimball and Menchaca and their staffs.

In large part this access is a result of the filmmakers’ pre-established relationships in the community. Anderson has lived in Sunset Park for fourteen years, and in Brooklyn for more than thirty-five. Sterrenberg has been in Brooklyn for fifteen years. Meerkat Media, the production cooperative to which he belongs, has its home in Sunset Park. Both have done other films about Brooklyn, including a documentary about participatory democracy in Sunset Park by Sterrenberg in which he heard the questions about redevelopment coming up.

But Menchaca also insisted that every meeting be recorded so that there would be a public record of everything that had been discussed. “He made this decision that he didn’t want to engage in any negotiations with [Jamestown],” says Sterrenberg, “unless they were on camera.”

With this extraordinary access comes an understanding of the people involved that many of the players themselves do not have. Menchaca is roundly lambasted by the people of Sunset Park when he suggests at a public meeting that simply rejecting the developers may not be the right decision. Meanwhile, we know from his advisory sessions that he has learned that simply refusing Jamestown may give the community a lot less power over Industry City’s future development than would an insistence on ongoing community involvement and regulation in the process. At one point protestors interrupt a private meeting between Menchaca and Kimball and their staffs. But having been there before they arrive, we saw that, in fact, Menchaca was not engaging in some kind of corrupt backroom deal, but telling Jamestown if there is not significant improvement in community benefits, he is going to say no. It’s a moment that unexpectedly confronts viewers supportive of the community’s concerns with the limitations of their own perspectives. Not every private meeting is a betrayal, and not every protest is helpful.

Sterrenberg and Anderson made the decision from the beginning not to offer any sort of guiding narration, but rather to allow the story to emerge from the many different people and points of view they encounter. “I think because we are both here in Sunset Park, we didn’t want it to feel like we went in and just talked to some people,” Sterrenberg explains. “We wanted the film to give the audience the sense of what this decade felt like.” In part what emerges is the deep goodness and generosity of the residents of Sunset Park, and also the terrible strain they’re under as rents around them rise and Industry City’s plans keep moving forward.

This non-directive, observational approach ends up exposing the deeper complexity in the community. An Uber driver from the area commenting on similar gentrification in Dumbo and Williamsburg notes, “It’s really nice. I really like the neighborhood.” And because of the redevelopment, he no longer has to travel to Manhattan to find an Apple store. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad,” he concludes. “I just don’t know.”

At another point a tour guide showing people through Innovation Alley describes their space as “an oasis” in the midst of the grittiness of the surrounding community. One Alley tenant says they and others coming to Sunset Park are giving it a sense of character. As these individuals speak, we see different parts of the local community, their very existence highlighting the underlying “empty continent” colonialism of this narrative.

Where most documentaries rely on B-roll of local people and events for transition and place setting, moments like this in Emergent City tend to have a more immersive feeling to them. The filmmakers stay in the scenes much longer. Anderson says their approach emerged from a feeling that typical B-roll “felt too distanced. You couldn’t tell if people knew they were being filmed.” They decided to work with someone local who could direct them to important community spots, then talked to the people they found there before filming them, and putting wireless mics on some so the “vignettes,” as they call them, could capture more of their own personal experience. “We didn’t want the film to feel extractive, like we’re grabbing shots of local color,” Anderson says. “Instead it’s ‘What is it really like to live in this community?’”

But intriguingly, that’s not to say that the community always looks prettier or more attractive as a result. This is a working class urban community, with all that comes with it—for every big celebration, there’s also some version of the kid who sings off-key.

One longtime resident shares her frustration about being yelled at by new neighbors for having her music up too loud on a Saturday afternoon. “Now my rhythm is considered outside, it needs to be managed and controlled,” she says. That insistence on “being civil,” being homogenous, “is a violent act,” she argues, “an evisceration of a culture.”

Her argument is compelling. But so is the idea that someone might not want music pounding through their walls.

That sense of uncertainty which these vignettes create, the dislocation from the standard narrative which exposes desires and assumptions that might otherwise be suppressed, “that’s what we wanted,” says Anderson. “What is really needed around community planning is for the neighborhood to be able to have real conversations about what people actually are thinking and feeling and worried about, and what they want. Instead of ‘You’re with us or against us,’ there’s so much gray area.”

Both directors believe that it’s crazy that New York forces working class communities to deal with private developers on their own like this. “It throws the entire community into disarray for years,” Anderson argues. “The city should be initiating a comprehensive planning process,” says Sterrenberg. They see the film as offering a kind of “meditation on the way the city works right now.”

Ultimately at the final hour the developers withdrew their rezoning application, much to the relief of the local residents. But Anderson notes, “Rents are still going crazy in New York, and Sunset Park is no exception.” Andrew Kimball left his job at Industry City to join Mayor Eric Adams’s staff as President & CEO of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which is responsible for partnering with businesses to promote growth. Under his leadership a new movie studio is coming to the waterfront without any consultation with the community, but there’s a new Climate Innovation Hub at Sunset Park’s Brooklyn Army Terminal, which is very much in keeping with ideas proposed in the film by the local environmentalist group UPROSE.

In the end, Emergent City provides no easy answers, because in truth there are none. “The future,” as Sterrenberg notes, “is contested.” What the film offers instead is a glimpse of urban life in the midst of all that is fragile, complicated, and precious.