The Edge Becomes the Center Read online

I used to be a deputy tax sheriff, when I was nineteen, twenty years old. Public Enemy and X Clan were real big at the time. So I used to go collecting taxes in all black with a beret on. I was looking like little Shaft—it was too funny. And because I was a young African American, people would assume that I was a delivery dude. Then I’d flip out my badge and be like, “I’m Martin Keaton, department of Taxation and Finance.” And once I flipped that badge everything changed.

  But I couldn’t really do the nine-to-five thing. I have a butterfly brain. It definitely doesn’t work that way. So I went to college. I studied black and Puerto Rican studies. Was exposed to poetry. That lit up my heart. I started writing my own stuff and it was one of the most amazing experiences ever. When I would perform my energy would be kind of a cross between James Brown and Busta Rhymes. It was really lit up. High energy. We’d go and perform in prisons and do workshops.

  I started out with very political poetry, very antiestablishment poetry and then I was confronted by a guy on the corner in Brooklyn: “Yo, I go to these poetry readings and everyone’s talking about how their girlfriend did them wrong or their boyfriend did them wrong or how they hate the government. Every community has beauty—how come we’re not hearing that on the poetry scene?”

  And I heard that.

  This dude, his name is Ginger Brown, he made me reflect on who I am. In my heart I’m a romantic dude. I said to myself, you need to have your stuff reflect that. So my poetry’s all about love and sensuality.

  In 2005, I owned my dad’s houses, I had tons of debt, I was still poeting. I was popular, I guess, in my little underground scene but I was broke as crap. I needed to make some money. I’m an egghead—I’m not a hustler from the street or anything—so I thought, my parents come from real estate, I’ve been around real estate, I’ve been a landlord, and I love people, I love Brooklyn, so maybe I can just bring those gifts and see how it develops.

  The first couple years it was pretty hard. I had to be somebody’s assistant who was younger than me but definitely more knowledgeable. This dude was from the Bay Area, and he said, “I saw San Francisco turn around quickly. Light speed. So in order for you to be an effective marketer of real estate here, you can’t be focused on what this place was. You have to be focused on what it is and what it can become.”

  I finally caught up to that. And I have vision as well so that helps.

  Now I’m a real estate agent over here; I’m a poet, filmmaker, music dude over there. And as time’s gone on, real estate has given me the capital to build my studio and create a center where I can have artists come together where we can share ideas. I need to execute my ideas. For me, work is kind of about the crossing of boundaries and some type of understanding and some type of submission. And I think that the real estate game is also about people coming together and being understanding and being courageous and breaking through the space where they were and making something new in the universe for themselves.

  You know, people always talk, “Yeah, if I’d bought in Park Slope in the ’70s or the ’80s or the ’90s I would have made all this money.” And then I say to them, “Well, in the ’80s, Park Slope wasn’t the Park Slope you know.”

  All these places that have value, there’s a challenge. And people don’t want to deal with a challenge. They want to sit back and say, “I don’t know if I want to buy in Ridgewood or Crown Heights.” And then when these places blow up they say, “Oh, I should have bought there.” But they don’t want to do the heavy lifting. They don’t want to be a part of the community to help build it up. Which is where part of some of the animosity comes from with the whole labyrinth that is the gentrification conversation. Some renters feel like, hey, I had vision for this place twenty years ago and I made this my home and I helped build it up and some of the new people don’t see some of the old people as the folk that helped stabilize the neighborhood. They see the old people as old people and they are holding their breath, waiting until they move on.

  In New York City you have rent stabilization. So you can have these four million dollar places but the building across the street can be rent stabilized. People who live in these buildings can’t get kicked out. So when their lease is up the landlord is obligated by law to renew their lease until their rent hits a certain amount. It’s going to be a decade or fifteen years or more before that person can be moved out. If you go to other cities or counties, the landlords can do whatever they want. The thing that’s amazing about New York City is you have people who are billionaires rubbing elbows with people who are panhandlers because everyone’s always kind of on top of each other. Which, if you’re a landlord, can be a real pain in the ass.

  But I believe as a principle that we don’t need to dominate other people, we can just share. Because there’s enough for everybody. Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t think that it has to be this person’s Brooklyn or that person’s Brooklyn. There’s a lot of space here and the variety of it all is what makes it hot. When you’re greedy you starve. Or when you’re greedy you’re always hungry—even if you’re full!—which is like starving.

  Working in real estate for the last eight years, when I look at Brooklyn I see four sections.

  First, there are people who are renting, just five years ago they could have found a full-floor apartment for $1,000, and now that single apartment has appreciated 100 percent but their salary hasn’t appreciated 100 percent. So they’re like, “Where the hell do I go?” Now they think about moving deeper into Brooklyn. Some of these folk have this fear that things are changing around me and I don’t know how I’m going to survive. And that’s real. In the more frustrated sections of the community, that fear turns to animosity for what they perceive to be the new people. Sometimes they think the new folks are being arrogant, they’re not talking to us. So they move around the new people in a way that can sometimes be intimidating. Because they’re like, “Fuck you.”

  The second section, the people who own, they’re not mad because it’s either I own and I’m good, or I’m about to sell and I’m about to make a grip. You know, Brooklyn Heights is $5 million right now, Fort Greene is $3 to $4 million right now. There’s a certain type of person who can afford to do that. Economic fences get erected when more capital moves in. The people that are buying these properties now are coming with all cash or with 50 percent down and I’m like, “Come on dude!” Really, who are these people?

  We had a joke the other day: the most affordable part of Brooklyn right now is Queens. Who would have even thought that would be a sentence ten years ago?

  So when people talk about new people moving the old people out, I’m saying, “But they’re paying the old folk a grip of money!” This isn’t eminent domain. Nobody’s being forced to sell at gunpoint. And some of the old folk may just buy an apartment around the corner and an estate down South somewhere. In terms of their trajectory and how they see their lives, that may be an improvement.

  Then you’ve got a section of people who come to Brooklyn, and they dig Brooklyn. And they could be considered the gentrifiers but they dig it here. They’re not holding their breath. They say, “I want to participate in how this becomes.” It’s good for new people to come into a place and regenerate it. Because if you’re in a place for so long you view it as “it’s been.” And you’ve already created possibilities for yourself ten years ago. But a new person steps in on the scene it’s like, “Oh, anything is possible—let’s do it!”

  And you’re like, “I don’t know if you can do it.”

  And they’re like, “I just did it.”

  And you’re like, “Oh shit, maybe I can do it!”

  Then you’ve got a whole other core, the last section. You’ve got new people that are moving in just because the price is cheaper and they couldn’t give an eff about Brooklyn. They don’t care about these neighborhoods and they’re holding their breath until the old folk go. You can almost see it on their faces, like they’re holding their breath because something stinks. They’re like, “I’
m just going to keep it straight ahead.” That’s not a good plan. ’Cause you’re creating a box, a fence around yourself and people don’t dig “the other.”

  I don’t like to deal with those people at all. When I sense those people, I’m not your dude. Seventy-five percent of the folk in Brooklyn are my people. And the other people who are holding their breath, I hope they don’t like the smell and they leave. I have no time for them. You know we get to choose who we spend our time with. And I’m not spending it with any of them.

  One time, I was showing this apartment and I had a woman ask me, “Well what do you think about the neighborhood?”

  I said, “I think it’s great.”

  She said, “Well, what do you think about the safety?”

  I said, “You could be comfortable here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “What do you mean?”

  And she said, “Well, I’m just afraid.”

  I said, “What are you afraid of?”

  She said, “I’m afraid I’m going to be the only white woman walking down the street. Am I going to be the only white woman walking down the street?”

  I said, “What do you mean? I don’t understand your question. What are you really saying?”

  And she had to just float in her own ignorance.

  I said to myself, I’m not going to come at her in a certain way, angry, but I’m not going to feed it either. That blew my mind! You can’t ask me that question and get an answer. Obviously—hopefully—I very much identify as black. I almost had to go home and look in the mirror. Is there something I’m giving off that would make people feel comfortable saying that to me?

  As a real estate agent you don’t want to say certain things, but I’m a human being: if you look at the history of violence in New York City, most of it was not African American vs. European. Most of it is otherwise. So it always bugs me out when people from certain neighborhoods come and say, “Am I going to be safe?” I mean, we don’t protest against other people moving into our neighborhoods. We don’t resist it on that level. For the most part the energy’s kind of open. Whereas if I were to want to move to a certain neighborhood, cats might be like, “No, this house is not for sale.”

  I’d be like, “But I called this morning and you said this was for sale.”

  They’re like, “Yeah, we got an accepted offer.”

  Wow.

  When I was growing up, I know that when people moved into our neighborhood we didn’t have that level of resistance. Not to say that people don’t get mugged, but, for instance, lets say somebody gets mugged. I don’t condone that but usually there’s an economic motivation. A lot of time when we’ve been in other areas, people were not robbing us, people were just saying, “Get the fuck out.” That’s crazy! And you’re dealing with that in the ’80s and the ’90s. There was a dude named Yusef Hawkins, who went to Bensonhurst in 1989, and he was shot to death because they thought he was coming to visit some European lady and they were like, “Naw man, that’s just not happening.”

  You’d be hard-pressed to find those examples in African American neighborhoods. I’m not saying there aren’t examples, there might be examples, one or two, but not thirty examples.

  He pauses, leaning forward to shake his head at the reality of what he has said. Then he sighs and falls back into his chair.

  I was born in Brooklyn. I’m making my way economically here and I love this place. So going from Park Slope to here is me planting a deeper flag in Brooklyn: I’m here to stay. Even if I get other properties around the world, this is my base. I’m gonna ride and die for Brooklyn. And I’m going to have influence because I choose to have influence in this city. And I’m not going to be afraid.

  I think vulnerability and a willingness to be open is a true springboard to freedom. I want to see the world. I want to be with people and check the vibe.

  About a month or so ago, the brothers who were hanging out across the street they approached me and were like, “Oh, I see you’re moving in. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe. You know it’s cool,” blah, blah, blah.

  I was like, “Dude, I grew up around here.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, seven blocks from here!”

  He laughs.

  And one of the guys was like, “We’re happy that you have the place.” Which really means: the trend here is that the new people who buy may not look how I look. It’s almost a given that if there’s going to be a turnover, the turnover isn’t going to be to someone who looks like someone from the community. And they were kind of surprised that the person who was getting this house looks like me. But then, I don’t know if it’s the way I walk or talk but I’m still approached as though I’m a gentrifier. Because, again, gentrification isn’t about color, it’s about perceived class.

  There has to be some way that I’m able to contribute, or help build a platform where different people in this city have the opportunity to meet each other and mingle. Not in a political forum, not in a seminar. Just somebody’s having a barbecue, different people come. Once people have different experiences they say, “Oh, this is not what I thought.” And sometimes it’s that simple, because you can’t legislate to change somebody’s heart.

  The thing my business partner says is really attractive about Brooklyn is that things are still evolving, there are more possibilities here. Because there’s some places you can go in Brooklyn where there are empty storefronts, or affordable storefronts, so regular people can participate in starting something here. And when I’m saying regular people I mean people that don’t have a net worth of $10 or $20 million. And that’s not to say those aren’t regular people, they’re people, they’re human beings—I get that—but they’re operating on a different strata. Even a person with a six-figure salary can struggle in New York City. People like that can have an original idea, rent out a storefront, and test the idea on real people. Whereas in Manhattan, how much would it cost for you to get a storefront? Man! That’s a whole level of backing, it’s many millions of dollars and that’s too much, that’s too prohibitive for a lot of folks.

  Listening to my mom, she talks about fifty years ago, about the Fox, the Paramount—you used to have all these cultural centers in Brooklyn, and people who lived in Brooklyn didn’t need to go to Manhattan to entertain themselves. And she feels like something happened in the ’60s or the ’70s where certain powers that be said, “We need to drive more traffic to Manhattan so these things are going to stop.” I grew up thinking that you had to go to the city to entertain yourself ’cause there was nothing here in Brooklyn. But now Brooklyn has how many restaurant rows? And there’s the Barclays Center. The thing that trips me out: it was a hole in the ground for decades. Nobody wanted it. All of a sudden a developer comes round, he’s got multimillion-dollar plans to develop it, says, “I’m going to create a stadium, I’m going to create thousands of high-rises.”

  And people are like, “Oh no! This is crazy!”

  Really? How many people got displaced by that? And it wasn’t displacement. These people got paid for that—that’s the truth. And the people that held out the longest got paid the most. And now people from Brooklyn, instead of going to Madison Square Garden to root for the Knicks, they can wear Brooklyn on their chest. Do you know how many people from Europe wear Brooklyn on their chests? People come to Brooklyn from all around the world. There are people at Brooklyn Nets games who don’t even care about basketball; they just want to be in Brooklyn. They just want to do that. There’s no chant in Madison Square Garden like, “Go New York, Go New York, Go—” gimme a break! And I’m a Knicks fan! I’m a die-hard Knicks fan! But now I say the Knicks are my mistress because I give my money to the Nets. Whoever you give thousands of dollars, that’s where the commitment is at, right?

  He laughs.

  I don’t know what it is about Brooklyn. I think there’s something to be said about word power. For the first eighteen years of my life I was Martin Keaton. And when I changed my name to mTka
lla, people just reacted differently to me. And the feeling of saying the word Brooklyn, I don’t know if it’s the double o’s or the way it drops, but when I was touring Europe, people would say, “Are you American?”

  I’d say, “No I’m from Brooklyn.”

  And they would always say, “I get it. We feel you on that.”

  Now when I’ve been talking to people about Brooklyn becoming the primary city, or the primary attraction of New York City, people aren’t looking at me like I’m crazy. Queens doesn’t have that gravity. Manhattan doesn’t have the same energy. Manhattan is concrete. And you have to have a certain amount of power to puncture that. Brooklyn has real people, they’re down people that care about each other. There are people who have been here for decades and they came and spotted that southern influence that allows the seeds to get into the ground and germinate and really become something different. ’Cause there’s soil here.

  2.

  The story of mTkalla’s name has not been told in its entirety: several days later he emerges from a weekly sales meeting; breezing by his desk, rarely if ever visited, he passes his associate, Adam Sikorski, who greets him as “TK.” The nickname further complicates the man.

  The brief conversation between mTkalla and Adam is obscured by arcane real-estate speak, indecipherable to the rest of the world. Adam, forty-two, is just three years mTkalla’s junior but mTkalla has been in the business longer and brought Adam to the bosses to get made over a year ago. mTkalla has added a fedora to his gray suit; Adam wears a hand-loomed, herringbone scarf artfully wrapped around his neck, somehow not incongruous with his burly, thick beard. His chest is thick, too, and in his wool hat, he brings to mind Yukon Cornelius from the 1964 claymation television movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Adam offers to let me tag along with him out to Bedford-Stuyvesant—Bed-Stuy—the Brooklyn neighborhood where the mTkalla Group is currently selling several homes, or, as they would put it, moving a lot of inventory.