Halsey Street touches on a lot of themes, like mothers and daughters, racial and cultural identity, and gentrification. How did you decide to write this story?
While I was at Fordham, I got a short memoir published in The New York Times. It was called “Remembering When Brooklyn Was Mine,” about a fading Brooklyn and one that was being remade. That made me want to spend more time figuring out what it’s like to feel stuck between two Brooklyns. I invented Penelope [Halsey Street’s protagonist] and knew the story would be about her resistance to her homecoming, and about her finding her place—in her old Brooklyn neighborhood and within herself. Then I started writing her mother’s point of view, and it also became about these two women trying to find their way back to each other.

Did you always see yourself as a writer?
I did, but in college at Yale I was premed. Because I was a smart girl of color, I wanted to be helpful to society, and being a doctor would be something my family understood as having made it. I got into med school, but I deferred. And I deferred again. Then I went to Fordham for my master’s in English. So it’s been nice to have the book come out and reassure my family that I’d be OK, even if there’s still uncertainty. And of course it feels like a huge victory for me too.

What’s been the reaction to Halsey Street?
The reception I’ve experienced overall has been really positive. But I have also been made really aware of how some basic facts of my characters’ lives can be seen as controversial or troubling. Like my use of Spanish when it would be natural for the characters, or to show the trouble with communicating across generations and languages. Or the fact that Penelope is someone who is attentive to color and race. I get frustrated when I read literature and there’s no mention of race or ethnicity until a black character comes out. So for me as a writer, if we live with the powerful fiction of race, I want to be honest about rendering that for various people, not just people of color.

Do you identify with Penelope?
I identify as both black and Latina, like Penelope. And as a scholarship kid since middle school, I also feel like I’m in this bubble, stuck between two worlds. But I don’t always agree with Penelope. The points of view [around gentrification]in the book are deeply flawed. I don’t like the terms gentrifier or gentrified; they’re flattening and not true to nuances. And they don’t acknowledge how gentrification is driven by structural forces and not just individual agency. But when people talk about gentrification, partially what they’re talking about is a sense of erasure, or theft, or appropriation. It’s a complicated position, which is why I wanted to have people on different sides of it and not have the narrative comment directly.

Is that idea of leaving open questions something you teach your students at Wake Forest?
Yes. I think some people teach writing like it’s this mysterious thing, or you’re just kind of born with it or not, which I don’t believe. I teach a first-year writing class and one about American identity, race, and belonging. I think that one really challenges students because it’s one of the first times they’ve been instructed to ask questions about what it means to be American. By the end of the semester, they’ve deepened their thinking and have more questions. I think it’s unsettling for some of them, in a good way.

Do you want to continue teaching?
I definitely want to continue working to cultivate young writers. Teaching is a way for me to remain connected to the value that fiction has for readers, and the value the practice of writing has for writers.

What are you working on right now?
I’ve got two book projects that are cooking right now; they’re both novels. One is a quest story, and the other is about a community in North Carolina, which is inspired by a short story I published about my time in Durham. I think they both build on the work of Halsey Street, but I don’t know which one I’ll finish next.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Alexandra Loizzo-Desai.

Annika Hinze is researching the best practices for making cities just, fair, and equitable for all.

Hinze, an assistant professor of political science and the new head of Fordham’s urban studies program, is working on a book examining the effects of three large-scale, finished or nearly finished urban developments: Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus extension, a housing project in Vancouver, and an arena in Berlin.

Two of the cases have personal resonance for Hinze, as she was born and raised in Berlin, and, until just recently, called Manhttanville home. She decided to include a third project, in Canada, because like the other two, it took place in a federalized democracy with a lot of political fragmentation and a lot of emphasis on local decision-making.

The Berlin arena is part of a larger entertainment area. The Vancouver housing project exists on the site of a former department store that closed in 1992, was overtaken by squatters, and was acquired by the city. The local government originally proposed developing it into affordable housing, but has instead settled for a building with 80 percent market rate apartments, and 20 percent public housing.

Both projects generated more vociferous opposition than any projects in New York City, she said. Her interests include the processes that led up to their construction and implementation, what democratic deliberations were held, and to what extent the community was involved.

In New York, the state government resorted to eminent domain to move the Manhattanville project forward, whereas no such actions were necessary in Berlin or Vancouver.

Hinze said she’s not advocating for direct democracy, but rather trying to tease out practical implications from the projects.

“A lot of literature has involved complaining, but with very few practical conclusions about what can be done. I want to know who are the actors are, what are they’re doing now, and what they should they be doing [for the future of cities],” she said.

Hinze said she’s also very interested in how local residents are displaced by such projects. Changes that accompany large-scale urban redevelopment projects are often dubbed “gentrification,” but displacement complicates the concept, she said.

“If you go into communities and interview people who live in what we call gentrifying communities, a lot of them welcome the changes in the neighborhood,” she said. “Everybody wants to live in a nice neighborhood, with good infrastructure, and good schools that come with gentrification. It’s just that the residents want to stay in the neighborhood once it turns.”

Some displaced residents are moving to the suburbs, while suburbanites decamp for the city, in what is sometimes known as the “great inversion.” But again, it’s complicated, as one can nowadays find pockets of socioeconomic and racial segregation in both cities and suburbs.

“I think we’re increasingly looking at a metropolitan mosaic in terms of the ways that communities live, income levels, and racial and ethnic makeup,” she said.

Because cities are growing in importance around the globe, Hinze said she’s eager to continue partnerships with institutions in Pretoria, Berlin, and Amsterdam, and recruit more international students to study in New York. Closer to home, courses like The Urban Lab, which is being co-taught this semester by former urban studies director Rosemary Wakeman, Ph.D., professor of history, and Fordham Law’s Sheila Foster, exemplify the way the urban studies degree is truly interdisciplinary.

“That’s very important because you can’t just say, ‘I’m interested in gentrification, but I’m only going to study it by means of this particular literature.’ It’s also a legal issue, a sociological issue, a political issue, and potentially an economic one,” she said.

“So the fact that we have faculty with expertise in all these different areas gives us a lot of strength in terms of how we teach.”

Researching her book, teaching political science, taking over a program, and raising her 3-year-old daughter has kept Hinze busy—but not so much that she couldn’t fit a 26.2 mile run into her schedule. On Nov. 6, Hinze ran the New York City marathon, finishing in 4:17. As part of the race, she raised $2,500 for Bronx Works, a charity in the South Bronx’s Mott-Haven area that helps residents improve their economic and social well-being.

“I live and work in the Bronx, and I feel like the urban studies program’s mission is to be involved in the Bronx communities, especially those around Rose Hill,” she said.

Training for the race required hitting the streets for long runs before sunrise, but Hinze said it balanced out the days when she had to sit through meetings. She was also grateful when, during the Marathon run, she saw staff members of Bronx Works cheering her on just past mile 20.

“It made me really happy that I could support them,” she said.

Ed Morales
Photo by Gina Vergel

Gentrification.

When the real estate market was booming, the dreaded “G” word caused anxiety in East Harlem, a journalist who documented the tension told Fordham students on Sept. 29.

Ed Morales, a journalist who has covered New York City for more than 20 years, discussed gentrification and whether has displaced the Puerto Ricans who once populated East Harlem in droves.

“We all know about gentrification,” said Morales, whose parents met and married in East Harlem, also called Spanish Harlem and El Barrio. “It’s been a problem for as long back as I can remember.”

Morales was a guest speaker at a class on “Hispanics in the USA” at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology, said she invited Morales because a documentary he co-produced, Whose Barrio?, fit in line with the topic students were researching in her class.

“[The documentary] focused on the economic shifts that occurred in these neighborhoods and their cultural impact, as opposed to the way in which it is more generally perceived—as racial or ethnic shifts,” Rodriguez said.

Morales showed excerpts from Whose Barrio?, which explores gentrification in East Harlem, where the median household income is just over $22,000.

“Downtown is moving uptown,” Morales says in the film. “Big changes are coming—what some people call development and others call gentrification.”

Shown at the HBO New York International Latino Film Festival in 2009, Whose Barrio? was co-produced with fellow journalist Laura Rivera. The film follows two East Harlem residents—Jose Rivera, a middle-aged man of Puerto Rican descent who was born and raised in El Barrio, and James Garcia, a 20-something seventh generation Mexican-American that bought a condo in one of the new buildings in the area.

While Garcia advocates for an upswing in the neighborhood’s “quality of life,” Rivera worries wealthier newcomers are forcing him out. “You can’t live here and expect to buy a home unless you’re making outrageous amounts of money,” Rivera said in the film. “’Luxury’ means I can’t afford it.”

At one point in the film, Garcia rails against residents, who he says are afraid of change and perhaps comfortable living among crime. Morales said this isn’t so.

“Community leaders have always asked for more policing,” Morales said. “Unfortunately, it seems to come only after the neighborhood is gentrified.”

Before the neighborhood became “hot” for gentrification, Morales said his own friends of Puerto Rican descent who were coming out of academia and other professions moved to El Barrio in an attempt to keep “a cultural presence.”

“They were rather idealistic,” he said. “Their goal was the save and buy in the area, which I thought was great. But then the skyrocketing real estate market happened and no matter how much they saved, they could never save enough.”

Morales said gentrification, while slowed somewhat, is still going on in Spanish Harlem. Most of the new buildings that were not able to sell units are now renting at rates of $1800 and above.

“In New York, the housing market has not gone down as other parts of the country have,” Morales said referring to rent prices that many in the area could never afford.

Whose Barrio? was not intended solely for the people of East Harlem, Morales said.

“It’s a universal film. People in many parts of the country, in one way or another, have been affected by the forces of the real estate market and have had to move out or have been priced out,” Morales said.

For more information about the film, visit www.whosebarrio.com.

A Latin music Newsday columnist and longtime Village Voice contributing writer, Morales’ work has appeared in Rolling Stone and The New York Times. He is the author of Living in Spanglish (St. Martin’s Press, 2003) and The Latin Beat: From Rumba to Rock (DaCapo Press, 2003).

—Gina Vergel