Develop-Lament

When filmmakers Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg first took their cameras to the Sunset Park waterfront in the fall of 2017, the sixteen-building complex known as Industry City was already on track for a real estate glow-up. An investment group anchored by Jamestown Properties—the same developer that in 2011 bought Chelsea Market for $790 million, successfully filed for a rezoning of the area, and seven years later sold the property to Google for $2.4 billion—had decided to cash in on Brooklyn’s popularity. The consortium had gotten a deal on the buildings by buying them from the city right after Hurricane Sandy. Out of warehouses and manufacturing facilities, it fashioned “spaces” for “creatives” that feel like an uncanny simulation of a real place, disconnected from the rest of the city even though the views are right there, and so is the water. After awarding the first leases to artists and low-overhead small business owners who might prime the pump of gentrification, management hiked the rent and pushed them out, issuing a vague promise to spur the “innovation economy.” Corporate tenants moved in, as did restaurants and bars; the place became a glorified-mall-cum-office-park.

But one thing distinguished—and still distinguishes—Industry City from Chelsea Market: The lots on which it sits are zoned for manufacturing. For Emergent City, Anderson and Sterrenberg shot welders, garment workers, auto mechanics, and scrap metal workers plying their trade in situ. When a Jamestown representative pops up on screen and claims that the premises have long “lain fallow,” it’s hard to believe him. Same goes for the moment when an AECOM executive, at a party celebrating the office’s relocation to Sunset Park, calls the area a “blank landscape.” These blithe comments are meant to bolster the case for Jamestown’s proposed rezoning, which would remove much of the industry from Industry City and replace it with even more retail space, artists’ studios, academic facilities, and hotels—and replace well-paying blue-collar jobs with service jobs that, according to a leader of the environmental justice organization UPROSE, pay half as much. The film documents every step of the process, but its dramatic arc concerns the efforts by community groups to halt the rezoning initiative. Companies migrating from Manhattan in search of much bigger floor plates (superimposed text cites Buck, the studio behind Airbnb’s animated ads; ?WhatIf! consulting, a subsidiary of Accenture; and AECOM) set off a predictable chain reaction: Property prices go up, tenants in nearby buildings are displaced, and people with deep roots in the neighborhood feel the strain. Because of the time separating Emergent City’s production and its release, many viewers will know in advance that Jamestown’s proposal will be defeated. How does one tell a story whose ending has already been given away?

Promotional materials describe the documentary as an “epic,” and despite the filmmakers’ fly-on-the wall approach, the principal participants seem to understand their respective roles. There’s the big baddie, a looming agglomeration of notorious local developers—Jamestown, of course, as well as the firm Angelo Gordon and Belvedere Capital, plus their lackey, then–Industry City CEO Andrew Kimball, whom a community board member pointedly describes as an “errand boy” and a “gofer.” (He performs the same role in his current job as president and CEO of the New York City Economic Development Corporation.) Then there’s Industry City’s lawyer, a man named Jesse Masyr who dresses in ill-fitting shirts and suit jackets and sports a lopsided, aggressively unstyled haircut. His lines are so caricaturish that they’d all need to be rewritten should Hollywood ever adapt the story; he says things like “I don’t see how I would advise my client to act in any way other than the way I would advise him to act” and “I said I would respect [you], but this is absurd.” And there is, of course, Eric Adams, when he was still merely borough president of Brooklyn. In the film’s only jump scare, a scene of an UPROSE meeting is intercut with an unsettling effigy: a photo of Adams’s mug taped to a butcher paper diagram. Adams serves that antipathy right back: When activists begin to protest a public hearing he immediately shuts it down. (Then-Mayor Bill DeBlasio shows up for a split second to tell an organizer that he has no opinion on the development.)

On the other side are the underdogs, the fighters, the would-be heroes: Marcela Mitaynes, now a member of the New York State Assembly, then a tenant organizer; Alexa Avilés, a community board member who by the end of the film has become the district’s city council representative; Antoinette Martinez, a member of Protect Our Working Waterfront Alliance and the person we meet who is most radicalized by the fight against Jamestown. In one scene, she interrupts a city council advisory meeting and with a quivering voice shares her family’s worries about their housing stability. Later, she calls into another meeting from a protest. Elizabeth Yeampierre, the executive director of UPROSE, commands attention for her advocacy for “green reindustrialization,” a process that would, in theory, preserve manufacturing jobs, allowing Sunset Park residents to remain employed, but redirect them toward producing things like wind turbines and solar panels.

Caught in the middle is Carlos Menchaca, the city council member who represented Sunset Park at the time. Because the council routinely defers to the representative of a given district on land-use matters, Menchaca has, as Mitaynes puts it early on, “the last word.”

Anderson and Sterrenberg present political heavy hitters coolly, keeping them at arm’s length. Long drone sequences set an easy, contemplative pace that contrasts the action and puts the audience into the role of removed observer. It helps that the filmmakers had ample access to every part of the rezoning process: They seem to attend every planning session, public hearing, community board gathering, building tour, protest, and city council meeting. They listen in on every conversation, recording plenty of muttered complaints and offhand remarks. Flashing graphics break down the business of bureaucracy and make a complex procedure intelligible. B-roll of the neighborhood—children and adults playing in the spray of an open fire hydrant, a group exercise class attended by ladies in visors at the park; a fish vendor telling a customer he’ll pick crabs for her and “if it’s not good come back and yell at me tomorrow”—lends substance to a portrait of the area without being precious or tokenizing. It rounds out a picture of Sunset Park as a real place, inhabited by real people, and demonstrates the filmmakers’ maturity: There aren’t any gotcha moments here, only a clear point of view.

When that sight is trained more closely on Industry City, it reveals a telling set of tensions. In a short scene of a tour led by the Municipal Art Society, a visitor remarks positively on the area’s palpable grit, prompting the guide to issue a corrective: Industry City is an “oasis” within a “working-class” neighborhood. You can tell that she means that last phrase derogatorily by the way she raises her eyebrows as it comes out of her mouth. The camera underlines this erasure in canny ways. When it lingers on the busted-out windowpanes of the complex—a sign of neglect, sure—it does so primarily to call attention to the humming activity inside. The editing is subtle but leading, as when a frame of an especially gritty sidewall idles for a beat longer than you’d expect—then a chime goes off, and the formerly flaking surface is now a smooth, gleaming red. (The audio cue recalls the sales tactics of an infomercial.) Juxtapositions like this one—clever, tongue-in-cheek—infuse some humor into an otherwise tense, high-stakes narrative and establish a baseline skepticism toward the smallness of the developers’ vision. Kimball and his backers want to create a hub that capitalizes on an image of Brooklyn’s hipness (a clip of an outdoor dance party in one of the complex’s courtyards encapsulates this well) but that has no room for, no conception of, the particularities that make this corner of the city what it is. For them, Industry City is less a place than a machine to turn a profit for its investors. You’ve seen this movie before.

Menchaca, who genuinely believes there’s some benefit to be had, tries to mediate between the for and against camps but comes off as clumsy and Panglossian. He’s a font of empty, optimistic terms like “owning it,” “conversations,” “next steps,” and “engagement.” He eventually comes to resemble a villain; after losing control of a public hearing organized by his office, he tells an aide to “cut the sound” to prevent audience members from speaking into the mic. He also cuts the lights, and his constituents conduct the rest of the meeting under the cold glow of their phone-camera flashlights. Menchaca ultimately votes against the rezoning, but the move registers less as a demonstration of conviction than weakness. He’s failed to negotiate with the developers, to collaborate with his constituents, or to persuade others on the council to join him in voting nay. The bid looks all set to pass. In fact, the rezoning never happens—not because the city council rejects the plan, but because the developers decide to pull it, citing the “political environment, and a lack of leadership precludes a path forward for our rezoning proposal.” (Menchaca doesn’t quite know what the moment requires of him. “I didn’t get a call from Andrew [Kimball],” he tells someone off-camera. “Am I supposed to get a call from Andrew? Like, is that what happens? Like, is he conceding, like, an election? Like, do I get that call? Like, he hasn’t called me—do I call him?”)

The narrative concludes in greater Sunset Park, at the launch of the green reindustrialization initiative pioneered by Yeampierre. This vision of locally run offshore wind facilities and solar panels manufactured in Brooklyn, along with the preservation of manufacturing jobs, imparts a tentative feeling of hope. But it’s not quite enough to eclipse the film’s most heartbreaking moment, just a few beats earlier, when community board members realize that because they have turned down every proposal, the city council will not receive any of their recommendations for, or opinions about, the Industry City development. They have effectively silenced themselves. Considered in this way, Emergent City serves as a kind of cautionary tale. When the developers have already won, all that’s left to do is for the people to go at each other.

But maybe that’s too grim. Five years on from its conclusion, the fight over Industry City continues to have repercussions in New York’s political firmament: In June, Avilés was reelected to the city council, capturing 72 percent of the vote, and last November Mitaynes kept her state assembly seat as well, winning by 77 percent. They, alongside the community they represent, might write a story whose ending we don’t yet know.