Emergent City

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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My son lived in Brooklyn for years. As you know, Brooklyn is a borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island. Named after the Dutch town of Breukelen in the Netherlands, Brooklyn is the second most densely populated county in the U.S. (following Manhattan, its next-door neighbor). If it were a stand-alone city, Brooklyn would be the fourth most populated city in the US.

With 37,339.9 inhabitants per square mile, space is at a premium.

That’s why locals got upset when a section known as Industry City got purchased by a consortium of five real estate companies intending to turn the 35-acre area into a “glorified mall and luxury apartment bloc, jacking up property values and pushing out the same people who’d found a little paradise in one of the United States’ most expensive cities.”

Once known as Bush Terminal, Industry City is manufacturing area located on the Brooklyn waterfront near Sunset Park, the neighborhood just north of Bay Ridge. A middle-class, demographically mixed area, this is where Tony Manero lived in “Saturday Night Fever.” Now those families who settled there to escape rising rents in Manhattan and increasingly pricey parts of Brooklyn were being pushed out by this gentrification.

“Emergent City” – now showing at Tropic Cinema – is a documentary about the political battle over Industry City.

The consortium behind the takeover of Industry City is led by Jamestown Properties, the gigantic company that bought Chelsea Market in Manhattan and then sold it to Google for billions of dollars. The developers hope to reprise that financial success.

Residents fear the change, likely “jacking up property values and pushing out the same people who’d found a little paradise in one of the United States’ most expensive cities,” explains Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com.

“If you’ve watched a beloved and still-affordable big city neighborhood with a unique character and history get turned into a yuppified mall full of restaurants and bars with cliche exposed-brick walls and twenty-dollar cocktails, and apartments and condos that sit half-empty for years because most of them were purchased as investments rather than places for humans to live in, you’ll recognize what has already happened when the story begins—and dread what feels like a preordained outcome.” 

Industry City was struggling along to develop on its own. During the early 2020s, it gained additional tenants, including New York University’s Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center, a 100-seat theater, and several design firms. Also, the complex began hosting the Brooklyn Night Market. An indoor climbing gym opened at the complex in 2024.

Too little, too late.

Directed by Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, “Emergent City” is a look at rezoning – changing the land use from manufacturing to mixed use – “so they can rent out the spaces to Manhattan companies looking to relocate, most of them unconnected to manufacturing, as well as real estate developers who want to build the equivalent of high-end shopping malls … and restaurants where a burger and fries costs more than you’d pay for a pair of shoes on Temu.”

Many of those Sunset Park families don’t make enough money to just pick up and relocate.

Fortunately for the mostly Latino inhabitants, rezoning must pass an approval gauntlet – from community boards to city council to the mayor – with many public hearings giving them a chance to protest.

Unfortunately, as often happens in these instances, approval seems to be a fait accompli.

This will remind you of such community-based films as “In Jackson Heights” and “Ex Libris.” However, unlike those three- or four-hour movies, “Emergent City” is a more tolerant 97 minutes.

While Anderson and Sterrenberg follow the journalistic rules of present both sides of the argument, viewers can’t help but side with the distress of neighborhood people versus the smug real estate company and its lawyers.

As Washington City Paper describes the film: “ ‘Emergent City’ is not a polemic, nor does it fall into the ‘all sides’ trap of equivocation. It’s curious and patient, taking the time to understand its subject. It leaves enough wiggle room for the audience to make up its own mind, a kind of nonfiction Rorschach test to help us illuminate how we really think about everything from housing costs to climate change.”

“An absorbing study,” adds The Moveable Feast. “You can see the architecture of how modern cities are designed and who they are made for.”

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com