Make the Road New York

Make the Road New York has centers in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Woodside and Jackson Heights, Queens and Port Richmond, Staten Island. Our membership comes largely from these and neighboring communities, but our advocacy work has citywide reach. Our mission is to improve the lives of all low-income New Yorkers.

Forrest Hylton, a long-time friend of Make the Road New York, author and historian, has prepared the following brief histories of the communities where we work:

Bushwick, Brooklyn: History and Community Profile

In 1638, representatives from the Dutch West India Company, the world’s first multinational corporation, purchased a deed from the Canarsie Indians, thereby helping establish the rights of private property under European colonial rule over the right to subsistence under Native American sovereignty. The deed included what later became Anglicized as Bushwick, along with Williamsburg and Greenpoint. In 1660, the governor of New Amsterdam Peter Stuyvesant chartered the area as ‘Boswyck’ (roughly: ‘town in the woods’), which led to the imposition of an economy geared toward commercial agriculture, private property, and petty commerce. Premised on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans, this rural economy and society lasted until the 1850s.

Then, newly-arrived German immigrants – fleeing a wave of political persecution that swept the homeland after the failed revolutions of 1848 – began to organize beer production for the local market. When the Lexington Ave. elevated train arrived in 1885, a building boom ensued, and property values shot up. By 1890, Brewers’ Row had twelve breweries in a twelve-block radius, and Bushwick’s Amphion Theater, a vaudeville house that seated 2,000, was the nation’s first to feature electric lights. Bushwick/Williamsburg was the brewing capital of the northeast. It was in this period that New York City became the industrial manufacturing capital of the U.S., and Brooklyn its major port. Led by German and Irish migration, between 1840 and 1860, Brooklyn’s population grew from 11,000 to 260,000 – a rise of more than 2,000% – and by 1890, it was approaching 1.2 million. By then, Brooklyn had become the largest port city in the world.

By the 1950s, Bushwick had become an Italian-American stronghold, but as Italian-, German-, and Irish-American families left for neighboring Ridgewood and Long Island, African Americans, West Indians, and Puerto Ricans began to take their places, buying homes at elevated prices, or moving into apartments with newly-raised rents. Block by block, the neighborhood went from being a solidly lower middle and upper working-class white neighborhood to being black and brown with a similar class composition. In spite of its vibrant block associations, solid schools, and neighborhood improvement projects, white flight led the City Planning Commission to re-classify Bushwick as a slum.

In the 1960s and 70s, businesses and retail had largely followed white ethnics and insurance companies out of the neighborhood, as Puerto Ricans continued to move in, now mainly from other areas of the city rather than the island itself. Redlining – the name for the process whereby banks and insurance companies cut off lending to businesses and homeowners – followed. As Bushwick declined, people with enough wealth or income to reside elsewhere left, and a cycle of arson and abandonment took over. By the mid-1980s, Bushwick was one of the city’s leaders in arson. Buildings owned by absentee landlords became homeless shelters until they changed hands or were set alight. Bushwick was deliberately starved of resources and services by city government, and left to rot.

The critical period for Bushwick’s decline was during the worldwide recession between 1973 and 1975, when financial institutions refused to continue lending the city money. On July 13, 1977, the whole of New York City was plunged into darkness after lightning struck a major transmission line near the Indian Point nuclear facility. By the time Con Edison restored power 24 hours later, raging fires had already engulfed Bushwick, and looting was widespread. In the wake of the blackout, one-third of local businesses closed and a full 20% of the housing stock was lost. Depicted as a natural disaster, the blackout serves as the starting point of most official stories of the decline, and subsequent rise, of Bushwick; but the urban deterioration that preceded and followed the blackout was a foreseeable result of disastrous public policies that came before, and were deepened afterward. This was nothing less than a full-scale assault on poor people of color.

During this time, like much of rest of Brooklyn and the Bronx, Bushwick witnessed the spread of the new AIDS epidemic. Incidences of tuberculosis – thought to have been successfully eradicated in public health campaigns designed to "clean up" slums fifty years earlier – increased by 700% between 1978 and 1990. Crack cocaine took over the neighborhood, with open markets along Knickerbocker, Troutman, Jefferson, and Putnam –known as “the well” for the depth of their supplies.

From a century-long low point of 92,500 in 1980, Bushwick’s population expanded to 102,600 by 1990, and to 104,400 by 2000, with working-class immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean constituting almost the entirety of the inflow. A big wave of immigration to New York City happened in the 1990s, but in Bushwick the population growth was a mere 2%, compared to 11% during the 1980s. As in the previous decade, Dominicans were the largest group of immigrants in the 1990s, to the city in general and to Bushwick in particular. But they were increasingly joined by people from the countryside of Mexico and Ecuador.

Today in Bushwick, two-thirds of first-generation Mexicans, Ecuadorians, and Dominicans do not enjoy, and — if pending immigration legislation passes — cannot look forward to citizenship rights, which forces them to exploit themselves and their family members through endless work. Their children are their only hope. While the neighborhood’s public school "performance" has improved steadily in recent years, given the current structure and sectoral composition of New York City’s economy, few first-generation Dominican-, Ecuadorian-, or Mexican-Americans in neighborhoods like Bushwick are likely to find educational and job opportunities that would allow for significant upward mobility. They are more likely to follow the path set by Puerto Ricans and African Americans, who have been trapped at the bottom of U.S. economy and society. Although there is a small Dominican middle class, Dominican poverty rates are higher than those of African Americans, and the Mexican middle-class is almost non-existent in New York City. Mexicans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans have some of the lowest rates of home ownership in the city.

Dominicans are still dominant among immigrant groups in Bushwick, and thirty-five percent of Bushwick’s total population is foreign-born: of this percentage, 32% are Dominican, 15% Ecuadorian, and 14% Mexican, with Asians representing 3%. At 28%, there are 5% more African Americans in Bushwick than in the city as a whole. Though the poverty rate has fallen compared to other districts, at 28%, it is still in the top 10 for the city. Forty percent of households are made up of foreign-born immigrants. In terms of wealth and property, 54% of households in Bushwick earn less than $33,000, and 27% less than $16,000, while only 6% earn more than $93,000 – this in stark contrast to middle-class neighborhoods like Port Richmond and Jackson Heights/Elmhurst-Corona.

Bushwick is overwhelmingly working-class: Latin American immigrants, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans make up the vast majority, and 87% of residents are renters rather than homeowners. Although the percentage of whites in Bushwick nearly tripled from 3% to 8.8% between 2000 and 2005, this was hardly enough to offset the out-migration of 45% of whites between 1990 and 2000, while the average number of whites in the city was 44% during this time.

Along with the highest rates of mortgage lending, including sub-prime lending, Bushwick has the highest rates of foreclosure in the city, as well as the highest rate of housing code violations. At 13%, its rates of homeownership are roughly two-thirds lower than Jackson Heights, and 75% lower than Port Richmond. Bushwick has a high rate of low-weight births, hospitalizations due to asthma, and the second-lowest amount of open space. At $790 per month, Bushwick had some of the city’s lowest rental prices, but only 37% of the neighborhood’s housing units are rent-regulated; thus low rents may not last.

Like Port Richmond, Bushwick was nearly destroyed in the transition from an industrial economy producing manufactured goods to an economy based on finance, insurance, real estate, and business services that began in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1970s. Both neighborhoods are now undergoing redevelopment. But because residents of Port Richmond were largely white ethnic, they were not subject to the same degree of institutional racism – in the form of redlining and white flight – that afflicted black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Also, like Jackson Heights, Port Richmond has a high rate of homeownership and a low rate of poverty, whereas Bushwick has a low rate of homeownership, a high rate of poverty and housing code violations, and increasing inequality between white residents with education, wealth, and resources, and working-class African Americans, Puerto Rican, and Latin American immigrants. Compared to Port Richmond and Jackson Heights/Elmhurst-Corona, Bushwick may be the most representative of current socio-economic and demographic trends in New York City.

Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Corona, Queens: History and Community Profile

340,000 people live in Queens Community Districts (CDs) 3 and 4, two of the most diverse in Queens, and indeed the world, if measured in terms of nationality, race, and ethnicity rather than class. These districts have the largest population of South Asians and Latin American immigrants in New York City. In Elmhurst/Corona, 8 of 10 people were born outside the U.S., an increase of 12% since 2002; in Jackson Heights, the figure is 7 of 10, a 5% increase since 2002. Immigrants from Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and Uruguay comprise 60% of neighborhood residents, while Indians, Bangladeshis, Chinese, Filipinos, and Koreans account for 20%. Similar to the rest of New York City, there is also a large, multi-generational European population of Italian, Jewish, Polish, Irish, and Russian descent.

Whereas Bushwick and Port Richmond were colonized by Dutch real estate and commercial interests in the 1600s, and later became industrial manufacturing port cities after the U.S. gained independence from Great Britain in 1782, Queens was largely marshland and swamp until the Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1908. Thereafter, Edward MacDougall developed the area through the Queensboro Corporation, and as in Bushwick, large numbers of Italian immigrants streamed into the area, but unlike industrial Brooklyn, Queens was designed as a commuter suburb to Manhattan. The borough was largely a creation of the city’s banking, insurance, and real estate industries, as mortgage-lending led to home ownership on the suburban model established in Long Island, Staten Island, and New Jersey.

Although homeownership rates are far lower in New York than other U.S. cities, like much of Queens, Jackson Heights and Elmhurst-Corona have higher rates of homeownership and average income than Bushwick. Unlike Bushwick and Port Richmond, Queens has not been subject to the economic and social decline that set in after de-industrialization accelerated in the 1960s. After a crime wave in the 1980s and early 90s (related to the evolution of and armed competition between Colombian drug mafias from Cali and Medellín) crime rates fell and property values rose in the 1990s, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority invested more than $100 million to renovate the neighborhood’s most important transport hub at 74th and Roosevelt Avenue.

In terms of wealth, income, and resources, CDs 3 and 4 are among New York’s least diverse. Jackson Heights and Corona/Elmhurst are bulwarks of immigrant home-ownership: 36% own their homes in Jackson Heights, and 21% of households in Elmhurst-Corona are owners. Single-family homes, six-story "garden apartments" marked for historical preservation, and co-ops predominate, while rent averages $955 per month. Forty percent of apartments are rent-regulated in Jackson Heights, while the figure is 53% in Elmhurst-Corona, down from 60% in 2002.

Sub-prime mortgage lending, foreclosures on homes, tax delinquencies, and unemployment rates are all relatively low, and school performance is average for the city. CDs 3 and 4 have the city’s lowest rates of low birth-weight babies. These indices contrast sharply with Bushwick.

New York City is increasingly divided by great disparities of wealth and property – between and within neighborhoods – along the lines of race, nationality, and ethnicity, yet Jackson Heights and Elmhurst/Corona are solidly middle class. Twenty-two percent of households earn more than $33,000, 22% earn more than $55,000, and 12% earn more than $93,000 annually in Elmhurst-Corona. In Jackson Heights, the figures were 25%, 18%, and 10%, respectively, and the neighborhood has the lowest rate of economic diversity (i.e. inequality) in the city, with poverty rates falling to 12% in 2005.

With many of the newest immigrants in Elmhurst-Corona fleeing severe economic and political crises in their home countries, the poverty rate went up 6% after 2002, and 20% of the neighborhood’s residents are poor. However, New York’s City’s poverty rate is double the U.S. average, such that 21 of its 59 community districts had higher poverty rates than Elmhurst-Corona.

CDs 3 and 4 have not followed the citywide trend toward increasing inequality, and reflect the peculiar history of Queens: middle-class and lower middle-class homeowners predominate, and there are fewer African Americans and Puerto Ricans than in Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Manhattan. Today, the former group comprises just 8% of the population, compared to 23% for the city as a whole. Native-born whites account for just 18% of the population, compared to 44% in the rest of the city. As immigrants have moved into Queens since the 1970s, whites have moved out, replicating earlier patterns of white out-migration set in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan.

In the future, Jackson Heights may be dominated by more middle- than lower middle-class immigrants, and vice-versa for Elmhurst-Corona, but it is too soon to say, since statistics provide nothing more than a useful measure for historical processes that are ongoing and open-ended.

Port Richmond, Staten Island: History and Community Profile

After the US won independence from Britain in 1782, the British occupation of New York City ended, and Port Richmond served as an overnight ferry point on the coach ride between the country’s two most important political and commercial centers, New York and Philadelphia.

Beginning in the 1840s, Irish and German immigrants settled in the neighborhood, just as they did in Williamsburg/Bushwick and lower Manhattan, thereby changing the ethnic-national and class composition of the city as a whole. The Irish did most of the dangerous, unskilled labor of building the city’s ports, roads, turnpikes, and canals, and Germans were concentrated in skilled crafts or skilled positions within burgeoning industries, which began with whale oil, followed by linseed oil, as well as timber and coal yards.

Port Richmond’s economy and population reflected the changes New York City went through in becoming the world’s major port and manufacturing center. In 1866, Port Richmond incorporated, making it one of Staten Island’s first neighborhoods. Aside from the North Shore, most of the island was rural farm country supplying local markets in Manhattan and New Jersey. By the 1880s, Richmond Avenue had become the major retail district, linked by the Staten Island Railway to the rest of the North Shore. The first African American church was founded in 1890, and large numbers of Italian, Polish, Norwegian, and Swedish immigrants began arriving in great numbers. Like Williamsburg/Bushwick and lower Manhattan, Port Richmond was a port neighborhood composed of immigrant workers from all parts of Europe with a minority of African Americans. Many of these workers joined trade unions and contributed to making New York the city with the country’s best public health, housing, and education programs.

Once the Verrazano Bridge was built after World War II, linking Staten Island to Brooklyn and Manhattan, commercial development and private investment shifted to the rural center of the island, where mortgage lending by banks encouraged suburbanization. Real estate developers carved suburbs out of the island’s forests, sub-dividing the land as they did in Queens, Long Island, and New Jersey. Extensive highway construction meant that middle- and working-class men could now drive cars to work using the Verrazano Bridge, and like Long Island, New Jersey, and Queens, Staten Island filled up with whites fleeing Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx.

Like the rest of the North Shore, Port Richmond underwent a devastating process of de-industrialization during this period. The elevated train along the North Shore was closed in 1953, leaving Port Richmond cut off from its neighbors. Stores along Richmond Avenue were boarded up, and storefronts abandoned. Nothing symbolized the deliberate isolation of the neighborhood from the main currents of the new era better than the closing of the train station, which was then left to rot, along with the track. Port Richmond had been an important spoke in the wheel of New York City’s dense industrial manufacturing and transport network; as that wheel was dismantled in favor of one whose axis was banking, real estate, and insurance services, the spoke was discarded.

Today, Port Richmond’s homes are mainly single-family units. In racial and ethnic terms, the neighborhood is overwhelmingly white ethnic (75%). African Americans are the largest racial-ethnic minority, at 12%, which is average for the country but far lower than the rest of New York City. Mexican presence in New York City and the metropolitan area has increased dramatically since the 1990s, and Mexicans comprise 10% of neighborhood residents. Port Richmond Avenue now features many Mexican businesses catering to the new arrivals. Three percent of the neighborhood’s people come from Asia, mainly from China and the Philippines.

Port Richmond is part of the same district as St. George and Stapleton, which is the most racially diverse in Staten Island, although just over half the population of 162,000 is white – nearly 6% more than the rest of the city – and 18.5% are African American, as opposed to 23% in the rest of the city. The district of which Port Richmond is a part has the same percentage of Latinos as the rest of the city (23%), and fewer Asians (8% as opposed to 9.5% for the city as a whole).

The district is one of the city’s most homogenous in terms of wealth and income, and at 8.8%, its poverty rate is among the lowest in the city, nearly three times lower than the city average. Twenty-one percent earn more than $33,000 annually, 25% earn more than $56,000, 23% earn more than $94,000, and the district is among the city’s top 10 in terms of median household income.

Like Jackson Heights, Port Richmond’s rates of sub-prime mortgage lending, foreclosures, tax delinquencies, and crime rates are low. Only 23% of its apartments are rent-regulated, and a full 58% of residents are homeowners, compared to 30% in the city as a whole. Even more than Jackson Heights, Port Richmond and St. George/Stapleton are bastions of middle-class homeownership, with native-born whites – rather than immigrants, as in Jackson Heights – dominating. In fact, at 22%, the area has one of the city’s smallest populations of immigrant households. It also has one of the city’s lowest population densities and the largest amount of vacant land.

Unless the slump in the real estate market – a result of a torrent of sub-prime lending after 2001 – triggers a nationwide recession, the waterfront along the North Shore will be targeted for significant real estate and commercial investment in the coming years. If it materializes, such investment will likely raise property values and increase inequality between white, property-owning citizens and African American and immigrant renters.