Povertygentrificationcrimeracism and broken windows
smartypants.substack.com
I live in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. It’s a sub-neighborhood of Flatbush where you find large Victorian houses on some streets mixed in with apartment buildings and small businesses on the avenues, all a short bike ride from Prospect Park. It’s diverse, first off, by income. Some of the people who own those houses are obviously well-off (you can see by the expensive construction jobs some are undergoing), but many others have been homes for generations, from a time before the real estate boom/crisis pushed people outward from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens to farther and farther parts of Brooklyn and Queens (we are around 20 to 30 minutes from Manhattan by train at an express stop, so not as desirable as many more popular neighborhoods). Plus, many of the large homes here are subdivided and shared to make them more affordable, and the apartments are still reasonably priced — at least for New York — and unfancy. Ours has a roach problem, an often-in-need-of-repair elevator, and one part-time doorman who works from 4 to 10 pm and never actually opens the door, but does greet me with a nice “Hello, Dear” whenever I enter. Most people in the building say “hello,” in fact, and our maintenance is low, so it works for us and people like us, for whom owning an apartment is about having a pleasant and affordable place to live, rather than an investment or status.
Povertygentrificationcrimeracism and broken windows
Povertygentrificationcrimeracism and broken…
Povertygentrificationcrimeracism and broken windows
I live in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. It’s a sub-neighborhood of Flatbush where you find large Victorian houses on some streets mixed in with apartment buildings and small businesses on the avenues, all a short bike ride from Prospect Park. It’s diverse, first off, by income. Some of the people who own those houses are obviously well-off (you can see by the expensive construction jobs some are undergoing), but many others have been homes for generations, from a time before the real estate boom/crisis pushed people outward from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens to farther and farther parts of Brooklyn and Queens (we are around 20 to 30 minutes from Manhattan by train at an express stop, so not as desirable as many more popular neighborhoods). Plus, many of the large homes here are subdivided and shared to make them more affordable, and the apartments are still reasonably priced — at least for New York — and unfancy. Ours has a roach problem, an often-in-need-of-repair elevator, and one part-time doorman who works from 4 to 10 pm and never actually opens the door, but does greet me with a nice “Hello, Dear” whenever I enter. Most people in the building say “hello,” in fact, and our maintenance is low, so it works for us and people like us, for whom owning an apartment is about having a pleasant and affordable place to live, rather than an investment or status.