91-93 Bowery in the Lower East Side; previously an empty lot (original location of the Music Palace theater, taken April 2009); today, it's the Wyndham Garden Hotel (taken June 2011)

Gentrification is a loaded, emotionally fraught fact of urban life that's had a dramatic impact in neighborhoods across New York City (especially in Brooklyn). Artist and programmer Justin Blinder, who has lived in a dozen apartments—his perpetual relocation prompted by rent increases—during his six years here, has taken raw data from the NYC Department of City Planning and the Google Maps Street View cache to create snapshots of what our city has become and might become.

Blinder's project, Vacated, was submitted for MoreArt's public art project, Envision 2017, which asked artists to imagine NYC in the future. Blinder decided to reverse engineer Google Street View "to highlight the changing landscape of various neighborhoods throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn."


Flushing Avenue

Blinder explains on his website:

Vacated mines and combines different datasets on vacant lots to present a sort of physical façade of gentrification, one that immediately prompts questions by virtue of its incompleteness: “Vacated by whom? Why? How long had they been there? And who’s replacing them?” While we usually think of gentrification in terms of what is new or has been displaced, Vacated highlights the momentary absence of such buildings, either because they’ve been demolished or have not yet been built. All images depicted in the project are both temporal and ephemeral, since they draw upon image caches that will eventually be replaced.


11 2nd Avenue, New York, NY: the former Mars Bar is home of the "$10 apartments"

Blinder also spoke to us about his project:

What was the most surprising/interesting example of gentrification you saw?

Justin Blinder: "Overall, 'Vacated' is a walking tour of the changing urban landscape — there are some more obvious examples of gentrification in the project, but it’s ultimately up to the viewer to decide whether this change is actual gentrification. To me, the more interesting examples are those in which an entire series of sequential addresses, comprising a whole block, transform into a single luxury condo. Since the earlier image often depicts a vacant lot, it only becomes clear how many previous units are taken up by a large condo when looking through the [NYC Department of City Planning's] PLUTO dataset."


190 India Street, Brooklyn, NY

Where is gentrification happening the most?

JB: "This will certainly differ based on who you ask, and it’s not a question my project is best at answering—though I do hope that Vacated prompts this question. I had used civic housing cost data to see which areas experienced the greatest price increases during the Bloomberg administration, and I focused on those areas in my gif examples: Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and the Lower East Side amongst others.


11 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, NY

"I think one example of gentrification that’s been quite striking involves the transformation of the waterfront in Greenpoint and Williamsburg after the Bloomberg administration rezoned the neighborhoods in 2005. Something like this might be happening in other neighborhoods with similar 'upzoning,' increasing the permitted height and density of new developments. It’s remarkable to see local skylines change so rapidly."


253 Eckford Street in Greenpoint: now a luxury condo (taken Jan 2013); previously an older residential building (taken June 2009)

What are the most ridiculous neighborhood names?

JB: "I think DUMBO definitely stands out, mainly because of how it was originally used to repel gentrification, but now holds so much social cachet. Also, RAMBO (Right After the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), sounds equally ridiculous as it does awesome."