Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Its only 9AM and already sticky-hot. Every window in my apartment is slammed open but still there is no movement, no air. Its not even August yet and my movements are already labored and slow. It’s as if the atmosphere is so thick that, like in water, it takes all your energy just to move through it. As much as I am used to North East heat nothing quite compares to the mixture of car fumes and steam as it rises sizzling off the sidewalks and concrete buildings of a city, though at least the neighborhood is silent.

Unlike many of the major neighborhoods in NYC and Brooklyn, my neighborhood shuts down on the weekends in the most peculiar way- on one side of my street things are quiet Saturdays on the other its Sundays. This, I’m sure, has to do with the division between Hasidic Jews on one side and Christians on the other. And as testament to that, along with the quiet and as the sun sets each weekend day you see alternately:

men with curls and large black hats holding the hands of their wives in skirts and head scarves as their children run ahead in yarmulkes screaming at the top of their lungs at having lost the race.

deeply wrinkled elderly African American women walking in groups of two or three in bright pink, yellow, and blue skirt suits with the most ornate lace, tulle, and faux flower topped Sunday best hats you may ever see in your life.

Occasionally on a given Sunday you will also see these two groups entrenched in some sort of parade through the neighborhood. On one particular Sunday I was privy to a group of entirely male Hassid’s dancing and singing their way down the street behind a float of a giant crown that was turning and blaring music ahead of them. On another day I woke to hearing drums and horns making their way down the main street followed by elderly African American men in those straw hats seen so much around the 1940’s in political campaigns, women in that same Sunday garb moving tightly from side to side, and a casket topped with flowers being brought by four young African American men in suits. This neighborhood indeed has its own character.

The thing that saddens me about this neighborhood though is that not too long ago a major section of it was declared historic. While that works to preserve some of the buildings and the like, ultimately what it tends to be is a looming indicator of gentrification- for that matter so am I. The thing of it is that gentrification can occur in several ways from what I understand. By proclaiming a neighborhood historic what ultimately happens is it becomes increasingly difficult for the current landlords to make changes and improvements to their buildings without going through the proper community boards and historic societies. The cost of renovating a building so that it maintains its historic status and manner gets higher and higher with all the approval needed and all the mandates for type and quality of improvement increasing. Eventually landlords currently there cannot afford to maintain their buildings to historic standards and thus sell them off to wealthier and oftentimes whiter individuals and businesses.

Another way it occurs is this: since the real estate market in a given community is, in part, based on the crime demographics, statistics, and crime projections for the population of that community, and since crime demographics, statistics and crime projections are often heavily skewed to equate poverty with crime, blackness with poverty, and blackness with crime, when African Americans are in a neighborhood the property value remains low( read that again if you’d like, but it is an unfortunately true and terribly racist fact). When African Americans move to a neighborhood the property value actually lowers, and when whites move into a neighborhood it effectively goes up. When young white cheap rent hunters start to move to these neighborhoods this in turn allows the landlords to charge more for rent, effectively pushing out the lower income population which does tend to be African American - an unfortunate truth given the racism still rife in employment and education. This changes the neighborhood makeup toward a whiter population who can oftentimes afford more simply based on the fact that their pay scale is higher than that of the average African American. It begins with whites who produce high turnover for the neighborhood- namely young, single, trend seeking whites who move into and out of neighborhoods based on where the cheapest rent is. They locate the relatively lower income-but-on-the-rise neighborhoods and move on in. Being fresh out of college and on the job market they are making less than their older counterparts, but more than the majority of their African American counterparts and as such can afford to rent out more space for less people. This even has the effect of pushing out middle income families who are renting primarily because when landlords see young whites they remember the adage about the property value increase and work to actually push out many established families who may or may not be making them less money than the single white person. When they new group begins to earn more and populate the neighborhood, more shops, restaurants, and the like pop up to cater to their needs/wants over the needs and wants of the previous community. At this point the community can go one of several ways- it can either continue to grow as a den of commerce and work itself into a demographically white focused shopping/ dining area with a primarily singular population or it can blossom from a high turn over single white neighborhood into a neighborhood for young white families as they stay, procreate, and increase their level of income, or it can do a little of both.

Either way its clear what can happen and it is of significance that as my paragraph wore on my discussion of the lower middle class to middle class African Americans in the community faded out. The fact of the matter is that the majority get priced out and then demographically and socially weeded out. Its an unfortunate and very real cycle and as I sit here in my over heating apartment somewhere directly between the two much older and much better established communities I know for a fact- and have since the day I made the choice to move here- that I am part of this process. I am a young, single, white, woman who moved into this neighborhood because the rent was cheaper than the neighborhood I left. I moved into a spacious 1 bedroom apartment once inhabited by an African American wife and husband and their small child. Where two incomes once supported this apartment one now does and my landlord knows that where there is one young white person to fill a rent slot more can and probably will come.

So I guess the thing I grapple with when I begin this train of thought is what can I do about it? Do I move to a neighborhood I cannot afford? Do I move out of the city entirely so as to avoid the generally high prices that are rampant throughout? Do I make a concerted effort to support the businesses that are currently here so as to assist, in whatever tiny way, in the continuation of this neighborhood as is? The last is what I choose to do and yet I feel that it’s still not enough. I work and live in this community, shop as much as possible here, and try like hell not to be imposing about my needs and wants, but just as being only one person I did not create the gentrification process in this neighborhood, being only one person I cannot stop it. All I can do is live here, maintain my awareness, and work with what my community gives me- one side of the street shut down on Saturdays the other on Sundays and a whole lot of other fascinating little differences in between.