An NYC comedian joked about the upside of gentrification. Then came the firestorm.

About a month ago, comedian Saidah Belo-Osagie posted the latest video in her TikTok series, “girl who’s secretly happy her neighborhood’s gentrifying.” She didn't expect it to get nearly 2 million views, let alone ignite an online conflict.

In the 47-second clip, a friend tells her that a beloved local bar is getting shut down and replaced by a members-only club.

Suddenly, Belo-Osagie’s mood flips. She leans into the camera, pretending to be nonchalant. When she finds out the club is for “artists and emerging creatives,” she struggles to mask her glee.

It’s been weeks since the video was originally posted, and people are still debating it in the comments. Belo-Osagie said she’s found the sudden attention rewarding, and a sign that she’s tapped a raw nerve among some of her local followers, for whom gentrification is not just a theoretical debate but one that has shaped their experience of New York City.

Nearly 1,500 people — including seasoned New Yorkers, recent transplants and tourists who commented on the post and were interviewed for this story – have fought it out in the comments section. About half thought it was funny, saying they related to being excited about new businesses coming into their neighborhood, while the other half seemed repulsed by joking about something so sensitive.

Still, Belo-Osagie said she has no regrets about posting the video. She hoped it would poke fun at the embarrassing truths that some people may feel but are too afraid to say out loud.

“I want to embrace the contradictions that exist within us,” she said last week at Clem’s, a bar in Williamsburg. “It's using comedy to be like, ‘Am I alone in feeling two different things at the same time?’”

Some commenters described feeling joy when a Trader Joe’s or a Pilates studio opened near their home. Some insisted that “progress” is good and they enjoyed their area getting “nicer.”

“Damn y’all lowkey sellouts,” responded one commenter.

Many wrote about the sadness of seeing their favorite spots shut down, struggling with rising prices or feeling like outsiders in their own homes.

Belo-Osagie, 28, said she only started taking TikTok seriously last August, around the time when she quit her job to pursue comedy full-time. She said she had no idea her content would resonate so much, and she’s already had quite a few hits — mostly satires of New Yorkers and their quirks. Her videos include “girl who has Muslim friends” and “your friend whose apartment was a ‘Covid deal’” and several have gotten hundreds of thousands of views.

In particular, her parodies have struck a chord with residents in their mid-20s, many of whom feel she's captured truths about living in New York City. And Belo-Osagie should know, as a lifelong New Yorker. She was born to Nigerian immigrants and raised in Elmont, on the border between Queens and Long Island.

“I want these videos to scratch a bit of those things that people might feel but no one actually wants to say,” she said. Despite the fact that she now lives in Williamsburg, she swears she’s not a “Williamsburg girl.”

Belo-Osagie came up with the series in December 2024 before she moved into her Williamsburg apartment, while temporarily living with her parents in Elmont. One day, she was craving coffee, but the only place within walking distance was Dunkin’. The closest shop “remotely similar to a Brooklyn cafe” – meaning it might offer fancy espressos or expensive sweets – was an 18-minute drive.

“I had this awful thought: If gentrification had happened, I’d be able to just get an oat latte around the corner,” she said.

Belo-Osagie laughed at the confession. In order for her to get her favorite brew, people would have to get displaced.

"And I would never want that, because I would potentially get displaced," she said. "But I also want to drink an oat latte!"

She said she’s been both the cause and a casualty of gentrification. She’s been unable to afford rent, she’s watched culture dissipate as high-income newcomers arrived, and she’s seen her friends and family struggle to keep up as the neighborhood got more expensive. She said she’d never condone displacing anyone at the cost of upward mobility.

But, she said, she thinks it’s important to voice the opinions others are afraid to.

Nyala Hall, 27, is an active TikTok user who commented on the gentrification video. She said in a phone interview that she had mixed feelings about the skit because she was priced out of Harlem and now lives in the Bronx.

“The reason we got priced out of our apartment was because we were getting a luxury grocery store where the Rite-Aid used to be,” she said. “I don’t need $20 grapes. I need a pharmacist that I can get to conveniently.”

Still, she said that she appreciated the contradictions Belo-Osagie was trying to illuminate.

“The truth is, we hate to see our neighborhoods gentrify,” said Hall. “But at the same time, we love to see some of the conveniences that we get downtown, uptown.”

Toni Huang has lived in the Bronx her whole life and said New York stores historically accommodated their communities. Now things are changing.

“We want New York to stay New York, and white people are coming in thinking that they’re going to save the neighborhood, one store at a time,” she said. “It’s erasing culture.”

Harlem resident Haylee Price, 28, has seen this displacement firsthand.

“When I was younger, I would literally walk a mile to get to the nearest grocery store,” she said. “Now it’s easy access, many options, and we’ve got Whole Foods.”

While she appreciates the new grocery options, she also wonders why they weren't available when she was younger.

Gentrification experts like NYU’s Gianpaolo Baiocchi, a sociologist whose work focuses on affordable housing, said Belo-Osagie’s video captured something very real about the contradictions of well-to-do locals.

“Makes me think of folks who protest the police during the day but constantly call the cops on their loud neighbors at night,” he said.

He and several other urban development experts interviewed for this story criticized the “false choices” that New Yorkers feel like they have to make, such as having a downtrodden neighborhood or a revitalized one, or a long-standing dive bar or a fancy art gallery. With “sane” housing policy, he said, it’s possible to have both.

CUNY’s Alan Takeall, whose research examines social mobility and income inequality, said in an email that the pro-gentrification TikTok comments reflect the “callous ambivalence” of people looking for housing while ignoring gentrification’s negative effects on people of color. But he said New York has gotten so expensive that the way we talk about gentrification has become “quaint.”

Nowadays, he said, most middle-income New Yorkers are just trying to keep up with rising housing costs. He said gentrification today is not always a process spurred by marginally wealthier newcomers pushing into a new neighborhood, much like the “hipster Williamsburg, chic Crown Heights, and even bougie Black Central Harlem” of years past.

Instead, he said, that kind of neighborhood change is part of a much larger process of urban development, driven by placing the interests of the wealthiest above the city’s workers and residents.

Belo-Osagie knows that gentrification is a sticky subject, and she said she doesn’t have all the answers. She’s said she's just here to “clown out,” and unite her audience with humor, even if they see the debate differently.

“Maybe you’ll see something in yourself that you're embarrassed by,” she said. “And now you can laugh at that part of yourself and feel less alone.”