Jay Pharoah Quotes

I grew up in an inner city neighborhood called the Benson Hurst section of Brooklyn, which was a very embracing, warm, family-type neighborhood.

Sometimes, I feel that Manhattan in particular has gotten really tame and gentrified or something.

I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block.

I used to live in the Bronx, then I lived uptown on 106th St. and Broadway, and finally I moved to Harlem right before it became gentrified. I lived on 120th St. between Fifth and Lenox Aves. in a little brownstone. I knew the neighborhood was changing when they started putting trees in the middle of the block.

Compton is this amazing place with a rich history. I see it as a new Brooklyn.

I think it's good if areas get upgraded and gentrified, as long as the people who always lived there can stay. But they get pushed out to some place.

When I was growing up in New York, we were the anomaly. Our family stayed, but back then families didn't stay. Once you had a second kid, you immediately left, so the kids could run around outside.

I come from nowhere Brooklyn, New York. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. These days Williamsburg is kind of a hip area, but when I grew up there, the taxi drivers wouldn't even go over the bridge, it was so dangerous.

Liberals want to live downtown. All over America - in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown - there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.

I've lived through a lot of different neighborhoods.

I had never heard this term before - gente-fication - which is also happening in Portland, Houston; it's happening in a lot of cities. It's upwardly mobile Latinx who want to come back to their neighborhoods where they grew up - or it's Latinx moving to L.A. and looking for a Latinx neighborhood to live or open a business.

All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.

People tend to think of gentrification in terms of race because it's presented that way, and I think it's presented that way because in poor cities that's what's really going on. Beyond that, I think it's presented that way as a way for the people who are really pushing it to make it just a black problem, so people don't care.

I'm not dismissing prostitutes, but a lot has changed. This so-called gentrification, it can never be stopped.

When I read, you know, a rough neighborhood of Portland, I'm like - what? - they didn't have kombucha bars there?

People who gentrify are usually new transplants to a city, changing it to suit their particular cultural needs and whims.

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

I grew up in the Bronx.

Soho is a gritty former mercantile area that has, of course, evolved into the most bourgeois neighborhood in New York.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

If you've driven over to the gay section of Los Angeles, it's like a golf course... Real estate values go 'boom!'

I grew up on 135th Street. I grew up on the poor side of New York. I grew up in Harlem.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

I know we haven't cleaned up all the slums, but I didn't create the slums, did I?