Broken: What the Hell Happened in East New York?
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I can only conclude that bite-sized Twitter and Facebook content have left many people incapable of reading long-form prose.
> I've been hearing about how East New York, Brooklyn is 'that bad that hard that street' since 1983,
> when I was sixteen years old and heard a NYC felon...
The author quotes some felon he met in 1983, who boasted that his neighborhood, East New York, is "bad," "hard," and "street." The source is proud of the fact that his neighborhood is dangerous ("bad"), difficult to survive in ("hard"), and thoroughly imbued with the "street" culture of youth gangs -- as opposed to an area with a bourgeois or a working class culture, both of which looked down on gangs and gang culture.
The source is proud of the fact that he comes from such an area, as he highly values the sort of mental and physical toughness that mere survival in such an area requires.
> and dope shooter in a halfway facility playing as if he were in prison
The source is a heroin addict who is in a "halfway facility," a residential institution where people who suffer from various mental and physical problems, or who have recently been released from prison, live in a structured and professionally supervised setting, yet still have some access to the mainstream community. They are supposed to be learning the skills necessary to cope and adapt to life in mainstream society.
"Playing as if he were in prison" means the source is acting as though his halfway house were a prison. The halfway house is far less harsh and restrictive than a prison; the author thus says that the source is exaggerating his own degree of toughness by making his condition out to be worse than it actually is.
> calling out and toasting East New York cross streets (Pitkin and Pine)
The source is rapping, namedropping the streets of East New York and praising them, to demonstrate his deep personal connection to the area.
> as if the phrase was a standard thug-life signifier
The author states that the source believes the names of these East New York streets are well known by those in the thug / street gang subculture and connotated with being a valid and authentic thug from a tough area -- though in reality they are not, in the author's opinion, actually such signifiers in that subculture.
>on par with On the gate; On the lock In; Don't reach over my food; You better sleep with one eye open.
The author says the source believes that namedropping these East New York streets is equivalent to uttering these various phrases about prison life, which are supposed to be the authentic signifiers of a genuine thug.
The author believes this is not true and the source is exaggerating the degree to which he is an authentic thug, and moreover that the source is deluded into believing that others will accept his ENY street namedropping as the equivalent of uttering these standardized prison phrases in terms of proving authentic affinity for the thug subculture.
Long sentences make us keep more state about the current thing we are parsing in our head, as later portions of the sentence may cause reinterpretation of earlier portions.
What you may be seeing is less that people are becoming incapable of reading long-form prose, but more that prose itself has shifted to using shorter sentences and simpler structures, at least in contexts that have to do with reporting.
I don't find it surprising that people that are exposed less to longer, more complex sentence structures will have more problems parsing them correctly. In any event, it's stylistic choice, and one that some may find pleasing, but it does make the work less approachable (those used to longer sentence structures should have no problem with shorter ones, but the opposite is not necessarily true).
I'd argue that it's always been a good idea to use style judiciously in prose, and balance longer more complex sentence structure with fewer references or other oddities. Or load up unusual structure and abstruse language, but keep things shorter.
So definitely not TLDR-friendly format we see here , but it actually becomes a pretty nuanced, powerful, well-researched portrait of EYN and if you make it to the end.
There are a bajillion problems with the "garden of towers" model of low income housing (or really, just housing in general - middle and even upper income projects following that model have largely also failed, though obviously without such disastrous outcomes).
Stuy Town for example is an example of this model being applied to middle and upper-middle class housing, and it has similarly failed to produce the communities they were originally intended to, and are now more known for being inaccessible and cheap than desirable in any particular way.
The modern model in NYC for low income housing is to mix them in to market-priced buildings, and either subsidize the building directly or offer indirect incentives (more height limit and buildable floor area being the big one). IMO this works a lot better, and is at least closer to what Jane Jacobs IMO correctly identified as a critical element of making cities work (the geographic mixing of economic classes).
The last I heard about Stuy Town a friend of mine was moving out of there because he got priced out, and he was making ~90k/year.
There's also a pretty interesting effect of pricing within Stuy Town, where apartments towards the center of the farm of towers are substantially cheaper than apartments towards the edges of the "community". That whole area is a dead zone - its intention is to be idyllic and serene, but it's actually just sterile and unappealing, and housing is priced proportionally to how easy it is to get the fuck out of there.
NYC does this better than most places, but mostly by luck. Le Corbusier's Radiant City philosophy of urban design (sleek towers surrounded by idyllic parkland) gained a lot of traction in the 60s and 70s. This is why most American downtowns are wastelands - most developed under that model. It's characterized by lack of street life, lack of ground floor usages, lack of mixed use, and mechanical features that separate buildings from the city rather than integrate it (deep staircases leading to the base of the building, large setbacks from the sidewalk, etc).
NYC has the benefit of predating that model, so besides the ubiquitous housing projects and some 70s-era highrises, has survived mostly intact.
It's frustrating that in some American urban planning circles Le Corbusier's name is still uttered in awe instead of derision. I think his ideas have been thoroughly debunked by reality, but not everyone agrees.
There's nothing inherently wrong with highrises, there's everything wrong with the prescriptive school of architecture and planning that are more concerned with fantasy scenes of tower-dwellers living idyllically in the surrounding parkland, than how people actually want to use that space.
One of the problems has been that when cityscapes were planned, commercial activity has often been seen as this impure thing involving people making money on public space. While you don't want to just give developers and retail/restaurants a free ride, they have to be part of the mix or you end up with these sterile spaces that no one wants to be a part of.
It's not necessarily that commercial activity was rejected - it was often accepted but only in spaces designated by the designers, which in turn bore no resemblance to where people actually wanted to shop, eat, entertain, etc. And so businesses failed to populate these spaces, and they became wastelands, with crime and decay following shortly after.
This philosophy extended beyond commercial spaces - these communities inevitably had spaces set aside for children to play, adults to entertain, etc, and deeply restricted the use of these spaces to these things, and these things only. There's a deep, controlling, Big Brother-esque undercurrent to that entire branch of urban planning.
And through all of this those same urban planners seemed to blame residents to failing to uphold their utopian urban vision than realize that a reasonable bit of laissez-faire is fundamental to functional cities.
They are tall but not dense, the latter being the thing that proponents of high rises and more development are actually in favor of.
I ended up getting priced out of that apartment (well, they jacked my rent and I was tired of paying that much for an essentially shitty, though somewhat spacious, apartment) and moved to a brand new building in queens.
Having known people who lived there, it feels like living in a housing project, but with the rent of a normal apartment. Not the best deal in the city, but it works for some.
The people living in these places are the ones with nowhere else to go (among the thousands of projects in NYC). Crazy people, sex offenders, crackheads, homeless, hopeless cases.
It's a dumping ground for everyone -- people, teachers, cops, etc.
It's very depressing and while I (who've lived in NYC for 14 years) have heard mention many times of East New York, and how it's a really shitty neighborhood, I had no idea that it really is the worst neighborhood in NYC.
It's really quite depressing, though the author does mention some initiatives that perhaps are a sign of a light at the end of a tunnel that's more than a hundred years long.
But the narrative suffers from one major flaw: the residents of East New York themselves are denied any sort of agency whatsoever.
They are not treated as real human beings in this article, but rather depicted as purely inert, incapable of taking any action themselves, entirely passive, battered about by the cruel winds of fate. In this article, things are exclusively done to them, not ever by them.
The city did this to them, failed to do that for them. Drug dealers and gangs did this do them. Industry closed and did this to them. The NYPD did this to try to help, but also did that to make things worse. And so on.
All probably true. However, there is another piece that he missed: what is the community itself doing about all this?
Nowhere in this article is any East New Yorker depicted as having any sort of agency at all. The few times he actually talks with people from the area, it's to depict them as passively asking for help from outside, or passively complaining about what the outside did to them.
That's what's lacking here. Where are the voices of the people on the inside who are trying to make things better? What steps have they taken, what is working, what didn't work?
They are in fact denied agency.
What's lacking in ENY are any meaningful community resources, from schooling, to infrastructure to policing.
It's not the people's fault they were born into that hellhole.
Let me guess, if somehow we could bring market forces to bear on Brownsville, the free market fairy would save all of these communities from themselves.
Give me a break.
The general tone (the emotionally charged use of the word "fucking," and so on) is also entirely uncalled for. Are we here for a rational discussion, or to berate and insult those who disagree with us?
Second, do you honestly believe that nobody at all in ENY is trying to do anything at all to try to make anything better in their own community?
Or do they sit idly by and wait for a wise, educated, ostentatiously sympathetic, upper middle class white liberal to come in and fight off the various boogeymen that they are incapable of tackling themselves?
Don't you think that's a rather condescending and patronizing attitude to take to people whom you clearly regard as your inferiors, whom you regard as incapable of doing anything for themselves?
I believe most people in ENY are just trying to get out. I'm not sure anyone is terribly optimistic about inciting change from the inside.
This is precisely the sort of thing that the author should have covered in the article.
It's basic libertarian boilerplate bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
I said nothing at all about the community needing to do anything whatsoever. I was talking about the article, not the community.
I also very explicitly said that all the various outside forces that the author blames for these problems are probably true.
What about the place being a hellhole and how to fix it?
I don't think they were implying it's the fault of the people in ENY [ie they weren't suggesting they bootstrap themselves], just asking to hear their actual perspective.
How about you make wherever you live better. Quit your job and dedicate your life to improving things. Clearly it's your fault that anything anywhere is broken if only YOU had worked harder.
PS: Your comment was clearly pointless blame shifting.
"Enough for me" is not the question. I pass no judgement on what the residents of ENY are or are not doing.
I was rather commenting about the article, not the residents. The article purports to be a piece about the decay of ENY, yet did not mention anything about what people who actually live there are doing about their own situation.
I am fairly certain such people exist, yet the author neglected to interview any of them, in favor of a pure "passive victimization by outside forces" narrative.
In the end community action is often pointless at a larger scale.
PS: Not to be overly negative but guess where the poor area is on this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_map#/medi...
See my other comments in this thread for a fuller explanation.
He is the voice of the person on the inside trying to make things better.
(as if that hadn't been rehashed enough)
My +1 was gentrified out of Crown Heights about 3 years ago and moved to Brownsville. Brownsville is where a lot of the crime in East New York is concentrated.
It's a rough place, but the article was completely sensationalistic. I'm not going to sugar-coat East New York, but take his description of Jamaica Bay:
"On its southern border is polluted Jamaica Bay, and a 6,000-acre 26th Ward Waste Water Treatment Plant (broken — under emergency federal funding and undergoing a $407 million upgrade)."
This is the Jamaica Bay I know:
http://www.nyharborparks.org/visit/jaba.html
It needs substantial environmental remediation, but it serves as a tranquil wildlife refuge. I've been there a couple times and enjoyed it.
I've spent on average three days a week in the southern part of Brownsville over the last two years. My non-representative, privileged experience as a white, middle-aged, male financial programmer visiting the neighborhood has been surprisingly positive. I expected the worst, and I have had nothing happen to me. I've had people welcome me.
I have taken the train rides in the article at all hours of the day and night. I've hopped off the 3 train alone at Junius coming home from work in a suit at 12a and walked 5 blocks alone through the neighborhood multiple times without incident. At least once a month on the weekend I've been on the L between 2a and 6a. I shop regularly at the Food Bazaar, the corner bodega, and the liquor store, all of which are across the street from the projects. I've had my motorcycle parked in front of my +1's place for two years, and it's fared better than it did on the streets of Park Slope (also mentioned in the article, by contrast). I also take the bus to the neighborhood down Church to the end of the line, usually late at night. I signed up for Brownsville Recreation Center, and only stopped going because my hours at work made it impossible.
When Renewlots was open, I went there for dinner every night I was in the neighborhood. The food, art, and performances were great. There's also an ambitious community garden down the street from the L stop. I went to the massive Brownsville Old-Timers Block Party last summer.
Brownsville is the most troubled neighborhood in the city, but the city has changed a lot. The author is disingenuous to use scare stats from the early 2000s. It's not so much that Brownsville is a war zone, it's that the rest of the city stopped being one and the contrast is now striking. Unlike the author, I won't whitemansplain the reasons the neighborhood has suffered, but it's not an island in the city beyond redemption. Even the projects are likely to have less impact on the surrounding neighborhoods over time, in the same way that the Gowanus Houses (which I lived next to for two years) and the RedHook Houses no longer define their neighborhoods.
Hipster kids are now switching between the J and L at Broadway Junction in the middle of the night to get between East Bushwick party destinations. North Brownsville will probably be the next destination for street cred and cheap warehouses.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/9/14/gentrifying-...
Unfortunately, the people who suffered while the neighborhood struggled, like my +1, will probably be displaced as soon as the neighborhood picks up.
Finally, whoever wrote the stuff above about Stuytown has no idea what they're talking about. If I could get into Stuy/Peter Cooper for under $3,500/month, I'd jump on it. The only legit complaint about them (other than the price) is that they're far from the train. I spent a lot of time there, and I have a friend who lives there. The common corridors are dingy, but his place is beautiful.