The sounds of honking horns and supportive chants that brought the small gray house at 320 Tompkins Avenue to life have ended.

Today, it sits enveloped by a deafening silence.

In a spirited display of community solidarity, residents, local politicians and housing advocates gathered to thwart the scheduled eviction of 82-year-old Mary Ward, who was a victim of a predatory lending scam.

Real estate speculators target people of color, the poor and the elderly, which makes Ward and neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy ripe for fraudulent lenders and other scam artists.

Furthermore, Bed-Stuy has one of the highest rates of housing foreclosures in the country, in essence, rendering the community vulnerable to housing speculators at auctions.

This involuntary exchange of property into the hands of those looking to benefit off of another’s misfortune, weeds out many long-term residents, inevitably accelerating class gentrification.

The community continues to fight to save Ward’s home. If they are successful, great. However, what will be done about the hundreds more who languish in the same predicament. In other words, what is the community’s long-term action plan?”

Once a homeowner goes into default, eventually, it becomes public knowledge. Next, they begin receiving personalized solicitations in the form of a fake olive branch. Solicitors begin knocking on their door, calling their house, sending official-looking mail. Offering “help.”

Imelba Rodriguez, senior program director of the Bridge Street Development Corporation, BSDC, – a community based organization that offers a number of services including workshops on the dangers of predatory lending and foreclosures – said a lot of residents make the mistake of reaching out to and paying private solicitors before seeking help from local organizations.

Some residents equate cost of service with results and think that free community based organizations cannot do the same job offered by private solicitors, she said.

“They pay these people. But soon the office is closed, the phone number is disconnected, the person is gone, and they are out of money that could have gone towards their mortgage.”

There seems to be another reason some residents seek help from private solicitors first – they’re afraid to speak up locally. “Our houses are being taken. You can go to a block association meeting and the person sitting beside you could be in foreclosure and wouldn’t say a word,” she said. “People are private and don’t won’t to admit they need help.”

Once residents recognize there is no shame in seeking help, we can begin making progress by leaning on each other more and coming up with ways to save homes on a community level.

Yes, holding blockades for residents facing eviction is helpful, and perhaps we consider building a community association that arranges ongoing blockades for residents. But is that approach sustainable long-term?

Although protesting kept Ward in her home an extra week, 768 Dean Inc., the property’s speculators, plan to continue with her eviction. Another protest is planned for this Wednesday, but there is no guarantee that she’ll get to stay in her home.

What if the community had a Bedford-Stuyvesant Rainy Day Fund? Perhaps the community can come together and form a credit union where homeowners can opt to pay a certain amount (maybe $30-$50) every month into a fund where they can pull for their mortgage payment up to twice after a certain time-period of savings, if they fall behind.

More immediately, homeowners have to act quickly. Don’t wait. They must open their mail; answer the calls from the bill collector, make arrangements, something Rodriguez said many residents avoid due to fear.

More importantly, they must know the facts and reach out to community organizations that educate on foreclosure, and predatory lending first.

If we cannot recognize when it’s time to address a problem, or even feel comfortable enough to reach out to our community for help, we will continue to trust the wrong people and continue to lose our homes to real estate speculators at auctions.

*This article originally appeared in the Bed-Stuy Patch as a part of the column Change for a Dollar that focuses on gentrification. *

A Punk Rock band was an amped backdrop to a riveting poetic monologue that ripped into the air and put gentrification in a 50-minute choke-hold.

Gentrified Minds (the NY Horror, Volume 2) is a protest play by Dennis Leroy Kangalee. Kangalee performed as “The Nomad Junkie,” to the enthralling live beats from The Children of Warhol.

In his ode to New York City and its five boroughs, Kangalee showcased his contempt for the rise of hipsters, real estate development, displacement and corporate culture. He mourns the loss of authentic urban culture and local character– what he calls community.

His words ricocheted off the mic as he demanded, “What happened to the brother on the block?” The silent audience sat waiting, and finally he shouted, “He turned into a Starbucks!”  Kangalee infuses humor and rage in the satirical theater piece that professes, “The powerless will always be a play thing for the rich, and our neighbors will always be pawns.”

Kangalee’s poems and songs are raw. And if they prove too radical for some, it’s because they’re supposed to be.

He wants honest debate and hopes to inspire aggressive social progress. Kangalee wants to agitate, challenge – elicit a visceral reaction. I chatted with the Nomad Junkie for a peak into his mind about artists’ role in social change and what he has coined as the “gentrified mind.”

Q. You’ve said that gentrification is a cultural, economic, and artistic war and that artists can and will play a significant role. What is that role?

A. The role of the artist in this war is to remind people that identity, self-definition and folk-culture is at stake and is worth fighting for besides what POP culture/mainstream has to offer. The artist has to remind people that weirdness, strangeness, the offbeat in life is just as integral to a healthy balanced life as is green grass, natural food and a decent wage.

Our role is to put up or shut up.  We must reclaim our swagger from the self-effacing smug yuppie-hipsters who have done everything possible to destroy the demonstrative nature and lifestyle of the “artist.”  They are poseurs who write on paper, when they should write poems on their spleen and pull them out of their chest!

I believe the artist should not be concerned with the modes of pop culture or making people feel good. Artists are truth-tellers, not mommies. Sometimes the truth hurts, and sometimes artistic revolutions do not look like progress, but a huge mess.  And it is all right for things to be a mess as long as we are being as honest as possible.

Q. You’ve written about being on the edge of our imagination. How do we make everything we’re conscious of historically inform and inspire the now?

A. So many people are aware of, say, Ghandi, Franz Fanon, Orson Welles or Joni Mitchell but don’t ask themselves what kind of social environment prompted those activists or artists. And if they are artists themselves, don’t they also have a responsibility to wrestle the demons of their times or generation as these artists have?

I believe our generation and the succeeding ones are obsessed with either pleasing their predecessors as opposed to challenging them. What’s disturbing is that nearly every artist in history whose work has been documented or cited has agreed every generation should incite a change and create new works for new times, steal and pay homage in their own way.

Van Gogh to Miles Davis would agree, which begs the question: Why hasn’t their been any major cultural changes in pop culture in the past 10-15 years?  The answer is because artists have become gentrified, as in tamed by media and corporate vultures.
Q. Gentrified Mind is not only a theater piece and a song, but also a state of mind. What does it mean to have a gentrified mind?

The gentrified mind is the symbol of our cultural apocalypse.  They are style over substance and do not believe in passion, but being cool– as in detached, irony.  The gentrified mind is the person who does not see a yesterday he only sees a today. Unaware of culture, indifferent to anything that may have come before him, and is convinced he and his ilk are capable of improving everybody– that the pavement he stomps on is better for it.

They believe wholeheartedly in the mass media’s rendition of what is “supposed to be,” and that property value is more important than personal value.  And so, the gentrified mind doesn’t think, act, or commit in an appropriate way — because their souls have been usurped, “re-developed”(like the communities) to suit corporate interests.

Gentrified Minds premiered at the Manhattan Movement & Arts Center as part of NYC’s 9th Annual Downtown Urban Theater Festival. Since then Kangalee has received interest from universities that would like him to perform in the fall, however he admits that getting into local performance spaces in Harlem and Brooklyn, which he calls “hot-beds for gentrification” have proven “tricky.”

He’s been met with, “Yeah we’d like you to do the show, but it’s going to alienate people. We don’t want to alienate people. We have to be careful.” Kangalee admits that a performance piece can be perceived as more dangerous than other forms of art, but thinks controlling what we say and how we say it is a problem.

*This article originally appeared in the Bed-Stuy Patch as a part of the column Change for a Dollar that focuses on gentrification.*