Ricardo Richardson

FUREE member

Brooklyn resident

City Tech student

Good morning. My name is Ricardo Richardson. I am speaking to you today as a FUREE member, as a young Black male, as a college student, and as someone who has lived in Brooklyn my whole life. I am also speaking on behalf of all of my ancestors.

When I am done talking I want you to remember three reasons why I think this development of condominiums at Albee Square are wrong. Those three things are that it does not benefit the existing community that it displaces people, and that is will destroy the culture already here.

What will happen to the small mom and pop shops? They can’t compete with that the condominiums will bring. The developers building these condos have a set price in mind, so they are bringing in people with salaries that we don’t have in our community. Places like grocery stores will raise prices. Certain businesses will raise prices to capitalize on the bigger income that will come into the community because of who will live in the condos. There’s a store that has been in my neighborhood for years and I never saw them remodel a thing. All of a sudden white people moved into the neighborhood and the store started to make all these repairs. What would benefit the community is a developer who is working with the community and not against it. If you don’t know what affordable housing is, then go to the existing community and find out what the average income is for that community. That would benefit us.

I already explained how mom and pop shops would be displaced by this development in Albee Square. What does this mean to the community? By displacing mom and pop shops we are talking away part time jobs from students like me who live and work here. By taking away part time jobs we are encouraging criminal activity.

There’s a healthfood store I go to in Downtown Brooklyn. All these new stores that would come in. How can smaller stores compete with that? These new stores would disrupt our routine, our way of life. There’s a karate school in Albee Square and a doctor’s office. Our people use those services. It’s true, Albee Square isn’t what it used to be. Everyday another business is being closed, so I can’t honestly tell you what’s in there. This is because developers are pressuring people to sell and leave so they can build this condo. That is wrong. We are tearing apart a community and the different relationships people have with the businesses in the community. You think Target or K-Mart would know the names of the people who buy their hygiene products or any other product? No. But the mom and pop shops know their customers.

Tearing Albee down and putting up condos would destroy the culture of the community. Albee Square is a successful source of annual income. Straight up and down, if you build this condo I won’t see many Black people in the area. My music, my arts would be gone. There wouldn’t be any stores that sell conscious books about Africa anymore. I wouldn’t see posters of Bob Marley or videos of Richard Pryor. I’d see posters of Tom Jones and Levi’s jeans. This community will be Europeanized. I won’t see Black businesses that inspire young Black entrepreneurs. These things will be extinct because of gentrification, displacement, and because people are money hungry. It’s like Columbus and the Native Americans. We are taught that Columbus came here with an open mind but we know that’s not how things worked out. His entire relationship with the Native Americans and the decisions he made were all based on the idea that he was better. It was like “Your religion is different from mine so you are demonic and barbaric. I’m gonna show you how to live right.” That’s what we have now in Brooklyn with the developers. We have people coming in from the outside telling us how to live and what we want to live. But they don’t actually care about us. This condominium at Albee Square is not for us. It’s for them. It’s for them but it’s where we live so it should be for us.