Following the second inauguration of President Obama this week, now is probably as good a time as any to take up the questions of race, class and commerce posed by Kelly Anderson’s piercing documentary, My Brooklyn: Unmasking the Takeover of America’s Hippest City. The film is a sincere, albeit unresolved, attempt to highlight the ways in which connecting to our neighborhoods as consumers can be way more consequential than connecting to them as active members of the community.

My Brooklyn focuses on the Fulton Street Mall downtown, and the 2004 re-zoning process that saw it change from a home for modest small businesses to an area that houses more mainstream corporate chain stores. That a shopping district was changed to adapt to the needs of a rapidly-changing population can hardly be called a bad thing, but My Brooklyn effectively lays out for the viewer the general outright dismissal of what was already there, by both government and consumers alike. The film effectively pairs such scenes as the newer shoppers at the nearby farmer’s market at Prospect Park making fun of what’s sold on Fulton Street, with the Korean hair salon owner who depends on her business there to support her family.

The notion of “retail diversity,” or offering consumers in a growing neighborhood more than what’s readily available, is one that’s becoming more relevant in Bushwick with every new bar, restaurant and yoga studio that has come to accommodate the influx of professionals who’ve arrived in the past few years. Nearby neighborhoods like Fort Greene are getting a glimpse at the future of gentrification; the reward for many of the small businesses who helped give the neighborhood its cultural cachet is often their own demise.