Edition: U.S. / Global

Blurred Battle Lines Over Gentrification; Son of Park Slope Seeks Share Of Boom, but Poor Have to Move

Published: July 22, 2000

Ronnie Fatato, the unrepentant gentrifier of Park Slope, is a man with sad, drooping eyes, and he assures you that deep down he is a real softy. But then there is that sign at the entrance to his offices. ''Show Me the Money,'' it commands. The sign, he says, fits him fine, too.

In his office one day, Mr. Fatato -- a robust Show-Me-the-Money version -- insists that he does not care, not even a little, that a powerful neighborhood group called the Fifth Avenue Committee has branded him a destroyer of Park Slope, a landlord of uninhibited greed who evicts poor families to get twice the rent from Manhattan refugees venturing into Brooklyn.

What, he asks, do the do-gooders know about him? Do they know about his wife, a social worker who drives her Eldorado into Harlem? Do they know that he was born above his grandfather's beer business in lower Park Slope, or that his family hung tough back when the lower Slope was a ramshackle mess. As others pulled out, the Fatatos expanded into real estate and meatpacking. Where were the do-gooders when Ronnie Fatato, home from 14 months in Vietnam, was shoveling hamburger alongside Hispanics?

So now, as prosperity pushes the professional hordes right into Ronnie Fatato's lap, he asks another question: Why shouldn't he cash in? Where is the sin in clearing out ''undesirables''? Hey, he tells you, he would love to live on Park Avenue, but he can't afford it. Do you hear him whining?

''This,'' he barks, ''isn't Russia!''

Mr. Fatato says these things as if they were self-evident truths. Yet in truth, little is self-evident about Park Slope's latest gentrification war. It is a house of mirrors where self-proclaimed heroes extol the value of diversity, yet acknowledge their own roles in causing gentrification in the first place. Those they cast as villains profess a love for Park Slope, a hunger to improve the community -- all in the cause of raising the rents of longtime residents 50, 75, 100 percent.

Mr. Fatato, his antagonists and his tenants demonstrate the elusiveness of easy labels in the tangled economics of Park Slope, a place where the effects of gentrification were being debated long before the first latte was sold on Seventh Avenue.

The controversy found vivid new expression last fall when the Fifth Avenue Committee, a respected community development organization, declared a 36-block area of lower Park Slope a ''displacement-free zone.''

Warning against the evils of a monochromatic neighborhood, the committee pledged to intervene on behalf of low-income residents being forced from suddenly valuable apartments. The committee's earnest young leaders said they would try quiet diplomacy first. Where that failed, they promised noisy publicity. So they bused 70 people to picket the Long Island home of a landlord threatening to evict a pair of elderly sisters. End of eviction.

But when the committee turned its offensive on Ronnie Fatato, it encountered something else. One day the committee sent a Roman Catholic priest to ask Mr. Fatato to ease off on a 33 percent rent increase for a struggling single mother. Mr. Fatato, a Catholic, did not appreciate the guilt trip, and he says he strongly suspected that the committee hoped to raise its profile by making him and other landlords easy scapegoats. He sent the priest packing.

There is another sign on Mr. Fatato's office wall. It reads, ''I'm the Boss, That's Why.''

The Fatatos have deep roots in Park Slope, starting with Luigi Fatato, who opened the family business there in 1912. For decades the family lived in a small apartment above their Old Bohemian beer distributorship at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Second Street.

Today, Luigi's grandson, Mr. Fatato, commutes from a century-old Tudor in Irvington, a village in Westchester County. A 54-year-old father of four, he has the expansive, no-nonsense air of a blue-collar boy who made good. As big city landlords go, though, he is a minor player. He owns 30 units in four rent-stabilized buildings in lower Park Slope. But he also owns four walk-ups next to his meatpacking warehouse on Second Street. Because each walk-up has only three apartments, Mr. Fatato is allowed to charge whatever the market bears.

For years that was not much. In the early 1990's, he plowed money into his apartments to attract some of the same young professionals who were flocking to upper Park Slope. No one came. So Mr. Fatato continued to rent to low-income Hispanics who, over all, say they regarded him as a fair and forgiving landlord. If they fell behind on rent, he set up payment plans, or even wrote off rent debts. ''They come in, they cry the blues, how you gonna throw them out?'' he asks.

The market changed last year. Finally the white-collar crowds were coming, driven down the hill by $2,500-a-month rents in the upper Slope. Mr. Fatato made his move early last summer. He informed his tenants that he intended to raise rents by 30 percent and higher, knowing that they could not afford such increases. He was counting on it. To soften the blow, and avoid costly legal battles, he paid moving expenses and waived back rent.

Still, there was no sugarcoating the disrupted lives.