In preparation · Reckoning in Pixels · 96 pages in draft

Brooklyn: The Architecture of Displacement

Seven decades of policy, read as a built record

A decade-by-decade account of how Brooklyn was made available for extraction — from HOLC redlining through Title I clearance, in rem foreclosure, tax lien sales, and the rezoning waves — assembled from the legislation and the records themselves.

The volume is organized around the vocabulary that did the work: deregulation, redlining, in rem foreclosure, rezoning, financialization, tax lien sales, disinvestment. Each is traced to the instrument that created it and the neighborhoods where its effect is measurable.

It follows the Reckoning in Pixels citation standard — every claim carries a footnote, and the sources are named on the contents page rather than buried at the back.

What is in it

Foundation of Segregation (1930s–1960s) — HOLC redlining, Housing Acts of 1949 & 1954, BQE construction, Title I clearance, public housing siting
Managed Neglect & Disinvestment (1970s–1980s) — the blackout and arson era, in rem foreclosures, the Ten-Year Housing Plan, early deregulation
Financialization & Extraction (1990s–2000s) — tax lien sales, the TPT program, TIFs, vacancy decontrol, rezoning waves, Atlantic Yards, predatory equity
Demographic Inflection (2010s–Present) — Central Brooklyn demographic shift, the East New York rezoning, 2019 rent law reform, continued lien sale pressure, Manhattan spillover as a structural driver

Source Built from Federal legislation (Housing Acts of 1949 & 1954); NYC local laws (Tax Lien Sales 1996, Third Party Transfer 1996); academic research (NYU Furman Center); government reports (NYC Comptroller, NYC Parks); news archives (ProPublica, Mother Jones, City Limits); historical records and demographic census data.

The draft as it stands — not a finished cover.

Can I get it

Not finished yet. This one is still moving — chapters can be added, cut, or rewritten before it is done, so treat the page count above as where the draft stands today, not as a promise.

When it is ready, buying it will not be buying merchandise. Sixty percent of what you put in goes straight into the programs this book came out of — the workshop, the garden bed, the mural, the next piece of research. No profit is distributed, and you can hold us to that.

And if you are already in the Founding Archive, it is yours without buying anything. Knowledge is not a reward for financial capacity.

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Accompanies

Urban Dispossession: Why Brooklyn?

Brooklyn stands at the epicenter of urban displacement, gentrification, and state-sanctioned land dispossession in New York City. This project investigates how Brooklyn, more than any other borough, became the testing ground for development strategies that devalue Black life and extract Black wealth under the guise of progress.

Pillars

Participate

Help make this one true

This is a policy history, and the people it is about are its best fact-checkers. If you lived any part of this record — a block that was redlined, a building lost to lien sales, a rezoning fought or survived — your account belongs beside the documents. What holds is incorporated, with credit if you name yourself.

What are you adding?

A lived counter-example A correction A source Something else

What actually happened — on your block, in your family, at your job. A lived counter-example outweighs a tidy theory, and this work would rather be corrected than polished.

Point to what is wrong and say what is right, as you know it. Lived knowledge counts as evidence here — you do not need a citation to be taken seriously.

A book, a paper, an archive, an elder, a grower. People are sources. Tell us where to look and what it will show us.

If it does not fit any box here, it may be the thing we have not thought to ask for. Say it plainly.

Your contribution

Name the record credits its contributors

Email to verify authorship — never published

Reviewed before anything is published, per the data privacy policy. Your name and email are asked for because authorship matters here: a record that cannot be verified cannot be trusted, and a contribution that holds is credited to you by name in future editions. Your email is never published.