Michael Rapaport calls out Spike Lee on gentrification: 'Brooklyn got better'

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Michael Rapaport has now become the second former Spike Lee collaborator who’s called out the director for his controversial gentrification remarks.

Lee made headlines in February with an off-the-cuff rant about the recent influx of upper-class whites into his hometown of Brooklyn.

“You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart,” the director said in an expletive-filled tirade.

“So, why did it take this great influx of white people to get the schools better? Why’s there more police protection in Bed-Stuy and Harlem now? Why’s the garbage getting picked up more regularly? We been here!” Lee added.

During an interview with Huff Post Live, actor-director Michael Rapaport, who co-starred in Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled, took the director to task for his comments.

“I mean, Spike lives on the Upper East Side. If the people that donated money to Spike Lee’s last film saw the apartment that he lives in, they’d bug out. So I don’t know what he’s talking about,” the actor said.

“Brooklyn got better. And he’s making money off the fact that it got better,” he added.

Actor Anthony Mackie has also criticized what he considers Lee’s hypocrisy on the issue of gentrification.

In an exclusive interview with theGrio, the Captain American: The Winter Soldier star said, “I live in Brooklyn. My address is in Brooklyn. I have two restaurants in Brooklyn. I don’t have a problem with gentrification. The people [who] want to live in Brooklyn, move to Brooklyn.”

He added: “Some people might say when Spike moved to Manhattan, that was a type of reverse gentrification. As your tax brackets changes, I guess your zip code changes.”