The More Things Change the More they Stay the Same

While fancy coffee shops dot many city streets, neither chic restaurants nor glass-covered high rises have made their way into the far edges of Brooklyn. In a neighborhood where boarded windows remind residents of hard times, a little gentrification in Brownsville may not be that bad.

Gang life a reality for Brownsville residents.

Lured by a proximity to Manhattan, access to the waterfront, proactive economic development policies and responsive leadership, higher income households have moved into former urban working class districts and most New York City neighborhoods have been unable to thwart the movement. Supporters claim gentrification brings needed services to communities and improves the safety of the neighborhood. However, with or without gentrification Brownsville and its 85,000 resident have historically not been an economic development priority for city agencies.

“We look for neighborhoods where zoning could foster a positive economic development that would provide new and affordable housing and job opportunities in an appropriate place,” said Jennifer Torres, a spokesperson for the Department of City Planning via email in response to questions about Brownsville exclusion from the agency’s strategic plan.

However, the city’s most impoverished and crime-stricken neighborhoods should be considered for economic development projects. The proximity of communities like Brownsville to Manhattan should not deny them the benefits that arise when landowners, the gentry, spend their wealth in local real estate and businesses.

“I haven’t studied crime,” said Suzanne Wasserman, director of the Gotham Center for New York City History. “But I think there is a link between real estate prices going up and crime going down.”

Wasserman, who researched migration patterns of New Yorkers within the city, noticed patterns where the city’s wealthy lived in the center of the city while the poor lived in the outskirts. Then the wealthy moved out and the poor moved in. But now, “the wealthier people want to come back,” said Wasserman.

“In the 80s, I didn’t think developers wanted to build in the Lower East Side,” she said. “Look at it now.”

However, not all of Brooklyn has been immune to gentrification. Gentrification first began downtown and near the rivers.

“I was in Red Hook 15 to 20 years ago and it lacked the vibrancy of the rest of the city,” said William S. Wilkins, the Empire Zones coordinator for the Local Development Corporation of East New York. Red Hook, the westernmost Brooklyn shore once thrived as a busy port, then suffered a loss of waterfront jobs and now has been rediscovered by retailers like IKEA, condo developers, and even cruise ship companies. “Now you can’t live there,” said Wilkins about how expensive the area has become.

Still, progress has sprouted in Brownsville. Royal King Homes, a realtor, has a few three-bedrooms three-family homes on sale for $709,000 dollars off Pitkin Avenue. The Loews Pitkin Theater, which has been closed since the 1970s, will reopen as mixed market and affordable housing coupled with retail space as early as next summer. Common Ground, a New York non-profit, wants to purchase the old Chase Bank and hopes to convert the space to a community center, credit union and café.

Critics contend that gentrification changes the unique characteristics of an area and displaces local residents. Even Wasserman of the Gotham Center pointed out that even though Brownsville might be one of the last places to experience gentrification, “unfortunately, [the city is] becoming more homogenous white and wealthy,” she said.

Homogeneity, race and class have played major roles in Brownsville history. In Dr. Wendell Pritchett’s book entitled “Brownsville, Brooklyn,” the historian and lawyer examined Brownsville growth from a farmland prone to flooding, to a ghetto for Jewish immigrants priced out of the wealthier Jewish Lower East Side — which peaked in population in 1925 to 108,097 — to a modern Black ghetto strewn with public housing but with little else in public or private support. The common thread has been the population’s status as a working class landless people last on the city government’s list of the priorities. Things only got done in Brownsville after the city felt the pressure from local organizations.

But City Council Member Charles Barron, whose district includes a small part of Brownsville, blames racism in the allocation of New York City budget and a lack vision by the local leaders of the community, “except for Councilwoman Mealy, she’s new.” Councilwoman Darlene Mealy, who has a majority of Brownsville in her district, however, declined to comment and Community Board 16 District Manager Viola Green did not return a request for an interview for this article.

“I always tell Mayor Bloomberg, ‘well when crime goes up you bring in more police, how come when unemployment is in the double figures you don’t bring in more jobs,’” said Councilman Barron. “Police containment cannot be the approach to stopping crime. It must be economic development.”

Crime in Brownsville has dropped, nonetheless the neighborhood remains one of the city’s most dangerous. For example, the first day of spring greeted Brownsville with the horrible 30 minute rape of a 19 year-old, the second one in two weeks to occur in the Van Dyke housing projects and the fifth in the previous 28 days. In the same time period, Brownsville chalked up four murders, a figured that doubled from the same time last year. In fact, the New York City Police Department and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sent more rookies into Brownsville to participate in Operation Impact, an effort by the department to fight crime in the city’s worst neighborhoods.

But opponents of gentrification don’t want to change the character of the neighborhood, a risk that could continue to condemn Brownsville to the black hole of city planning. “There’s a benefit that it does not look like the rest of the city,” said Wilkins of LDCENY. “It may be the ghetto, it may be impoverished but it looks like Brooklyn.”

This attitude may not help sixteen year-old Antoinette Nimmons, who lost one cousin to gun violence and has another paralyzed from a gunshot wound. Nimmons doesn’t like the crime in Brownsville. To cope she found an escape.

“I go into Manhattan for the clothes, the stores, the shopping,” said Nimmons a Brownsville-native, who likes the retailer H&M and goes to the 42nd Street Loews Movie Theater. “It even smells better. Like coffee.”

Small Businesses Feel the Effects of the Slump in Spending

By 2 pm, Pitkin Communications had only serviced three customers from the moment the cellular phone store opened at 10 am. The customers came in to buy minutes for their cell phones; a transaction that only brought in five percent per card and did not, by itself, help meet business expenses. To make sure that they could pay the overhead, the business owners, George Wolinsky and his wife Daisy, have stopped going out to eat and on this day they ate leftover soup.

“I told her to dress warm,” said Wolinsky, who had a $400 dollar electric bill the previous month. “Because I wasn’t going to turn the heat on.”

The national downturn in the economy and slowdown in consumer spending has had an acute effect on the stores of Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn, an area distinguished for a poverty rate that hovered around 51.5 percent on 2000. Here, the stores prayed to survive until neighborhood residents — 85,000 according to the last census — received their tax returns and stimulus package rebates to supplement a median household income of $15,042.

“This is one of the places where you will be able to see if the stimulus package really works,” said Gerald Coleman, executive director of the Pitkin Business Improvement District, BID. “The majority of our consumers are at the lower end of the consumption class and they will spend that money on things sold on Pitkin Avenue: sneakers, jeans, household items.”

But until the people in this neighborhood received their rebate checks, the shoppers on Pitkin spend their money on necessities.

“I try to find a lot of bargains, that’s why I shop every day,” said Shamene King, a thirty-something mother of eight children. “I go to all the stores.” King also said she saved on entertainment because the kids had all they needed at the house.

Michelle Blair, a single mother of a two kids, said she watched her money.

“The cost of living has gone up and there is an increase in prices,” she said. “I don’t shop as much as before. Only when necessary.”

On the avenue, the window at Pitkin Wonderful Shoes displayed winter boots and sale stickers. Andrew Song, the second-generation co-owner of the family-run business worried not just about the consumers tightening their wallets, but also the lackluster winter.

“Another factor is that there is no snow,” said Song. “Storeowners bought a lot of boots and now they’re stuck.”

The winter had been particularly difficult for the shops on Pitkin who had seen a decrease of 15 to 30 percent in their sales receipts this winter compared to last, an oddity since the holiday season usually helps businesses turn a profit for the year. One store in particular, Shopper’s World, saw a 50 percent decrease on February 11, 2008 from same-day sales on February 11, 2007. The Jimmy Jazz store near the corner of Amboy Street had 50 percent off signs, the lowest discount they had ever given, said Amer Ali, the store manager. And despite the sale signs, merchants had been unable to move merchandise off the shelves. The gloomy sales had begun to affect the storeowners.

“I just did a survey of the merchants on Pitkin,” said Coleman. “Across the board everyone was very depressed and disappointed with their sales during the holiday season.”

At Shopper’s World, where leftover Valentine chocolates and teddies — the bear and lingerie kind — still filled shelves at the front of the store, the general manager had tried not to lay off any of his 35 employees, so he made a few adjustments.

“I had to cut hours back due to insufficient sales,” said Mark Tanis, who’s been at the 40 thousand square foot store four years. “I tried to keep as many employees as possible.”

If sales do not improve, stores on Pitkin might have to let go of more people. “I had a guy working here but I had to let him go,” said Wolinsky. “It’s just me and her.”

The New York City Independent Budget Office, which analyzes local and national economic reports, said in their January 2008 report that the total employment growth in 2008 will be 500 jobs compared to over 41,000 created in 2007 and over 62,000 in 2006. The United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in January non-farm payroll declined 17,000 jobs. The result of the lack of job growth will be declines in personal income.

“We are looking at virtually no job increase in 2008 and a modest growth in 2009,” said Douglas Turetsky, director of communications at the New York City Independent Budget Office, IBO. “That does not bode well for the merchants on Pitkin or throughout the city.”

Pitkin Avenue with its 200 storefronts had been the main economic hub in Brownsville for over 50 years. Some stores had weathered previous bad economies, while some closed. Still, Pitkin Wonderful Shoes, which had been in the same location for 35 years, knew it would get by.

Snow flurries began started to fall as Song stood outside his family’s front and watched the passersby. “Great, now it snows,” he said.

Another way to look at Brownsville: