99% Invisible - 212- Turf Wars of East New York

Episode Date: May 11, 2016

Neighborhoods are constantly changing, but it tends to be the people with money and power who get to decide the shape of things to come. New York City has an especially long history with change driven by landlords and real … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the Bay area where I've lived for a couple of decades now, I've watched the front line of gentrification move further and further east. This show is based in Oakland, as you probably know, and Oakland is quite big and heterogeneous, so you can never really talk about it as one thing, but in the last couple years, Rents have been going up, and the fear is that rents will continue to go up to a point where only wealthy tech workers can afford it. This phenomenon is not unique to the bay.

East New York, a residential neighborhood on the Eastern edge of Brooklyn is going through this now too. In the 1960s, East New York rapidly transformed from a mostly white working class neighborhood to an underserved community of mostly black and brown New Yorkers neglected by both society and policy. But now as New York City rents skyrocket, East New York is staring down a wave of gentrification that will forever change the character of this neighborhood that 120,000 people call home.

WNYC in New York and the Nation magazine have teamed up for an in-depth look at the gentrification of Brooklyn. They call their series, There Goes the Neighborhood. Today we're showcasing an episode from this ongoing series that's really fantastic. It turns back the clock and looks at how this new, rather unlikely hotspot for gentrification got to where it is today. This is episode three of There Goes the Neighborhood, Turf Wars, presented by Chi-Ride of the Nation magazine.

I could get a lottery. You're gonna sit there and have this year and take it to the country. You know what's interesting the other day I was walking in my neighborhood and I saw a black elderly gentleman That I hadn't seen in a couple months and he literally his eyes flew open and he said you're still here And I went yeah, and you're still here things have changed happened then and we were like yeah Black folks are disappearing. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus When everybody gave up on the neighborhood, we didn't. We stood in the neighborhood.

We worked it out, and we made it the better place that everybody wants to invest into now. We live on Bobby as family. We all live for each other. They have also the political power to modify. They can go and sit with commissioners and with high ranked people and say I need an extra block. I had a guy walking around my back y'all yeah I'm looking at my body's property I said we're looking for the property for my own. He says oh dude it's this is a four-course I said this

and do you refuse. All I see is overpopulating the city with others. The only ones that got afforded this rent is people that's not from New York. Okay and and my income doesn't even give enough for a room in East New York, so how the hell is going to give me for apartment? There goes the neighborhood. I'm Kai Wright and I'm an editor at the Nation magazine and my WNYC colleagues and I have been looking at this major demographic change that's happening all over Brooklyn now. Gentrification is one term that's applied to it. And a lot of people who are sick of hearing that term feel like, hey, this is just the

law of supply and demand. There's relatively cheap property available and all things being equal, the people who can afford it grab it. And the people who had it earlier, they reap the rewards. But all things are not equal. They never have been. For decades, public policies stack the deck of economic opportunity against black people.

writer Tana Hasekot has spoken a lot about this fact lately, and making his case for economic reparations. He made the link to gentrification succinctly during a recent talk in Brooklyn. The neighborhood changed all the time in their makeup and their ethnic makeup. The problem is black people don't really have the same level of self-determination to decide whether they want to stay and whether they want to leave. When we built the middle class in this country, we made decisions about who was gonna benefit and we decided black people weren't a part of that.

When we get to the point of talking about gentrification, you got to dig deep, you got to go further back. So today we take a long look back at East New York. The Brooklyn neighborhood that as we started exploring last time is now standing right in the path of gentrification. The first developer to set his sights on East New York was Colonel John Picken, way back in 1835. His family got rich on cotton and slaves, but went broke in the cotton crash of 1837. It was a lot like 2008, but back then,

the bubble was cotton not-sumprime mortgages. Anyway, Pitkin lost his shirt in the crash, but not before launching this neighborhood into existence. He bought up a bunch of farmland, built a shoe factory, and called it East New York. Brooklyn's famous Pitkin Avenue still bears his name. The Long Island Railroad came about a year later, and with it, factories to process foods from Long Island's farms.

The low-rise housing that still defines the area skyline came next, then more rail lines, connecting the area to Manhattan and the rest of Brookland, and it just kept growing all the way through the middle of the 20th century. East New York became a thriving suburb for the European immigrants who worked in all those factories. Germans and Italians and eventually Jewish families came here to feel, well, successful and American. It was sort of the suburbs in the city. It was a place where people strived to go. That's Ron Schiffman, a community organizer and urban planner who's been fighting the

development wars in Brooklyn since the 60s. He grew up in Westchester, but spent a lot of time in East New York as a high school kid in the 50s. My first girlfriend actually was in East New York. I used to travel from Lower Westchester County to Beaver at the... It's a long commute, you must have been allowed. It was a long commute. She was a daughter of a judge lived in East New York. He paints an almost Norman Rockwell portrait of the place. It was attached housing, but everybody had their own porch. It was a middle-income, upper-middle-income community in many ways.

We were aspiring community. It was not what we think of today. It was a white community. And then, all of a a sudden it wasn't. Over the course of just four or five years the neighborhood changed dramatically, from middle class to poor, from largely white to nearly all black. In 1960 East New York was 85% white. By 1966 it was 80% black and Puerto Rican. Why? What created such a stark change? A lot happened really fast, but there was a key moment.

It happened on a hot summer night on July 21, 1966. That's the day an 11-year-old black boy was shot. Jim O'Grady has the story. Here's a little hint that East New York was primed for racial tension in the summer of 1966. Some of its citizens got together and started a little self-help group called Sponge, SPONGE, the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything. Oh, 1966.

Of course, the group was white only. It's members part of the 20% of the neighborhood that hadn't become black or Puerto Rican. A neighborhood that is, Kai said, ethnic whites had dominated, demographically, economically, culturally, until as recently as five years before. Anthony Momino was a teenager when the changes came down. He was born in the United States. economically, culturally, until as recently as five years before.

Anthony Momino was a teenager when the changes came down. He was born in Tunisia, but he's Italian. A lot of the whites in East New York were Italian. I remember where I lived, and it was mostly all white kids. Anybody who was a nuclear damn, your black kid would cost there, they would chase them back there. In the beginning, it was sort of like playing chicken. The thing was with them, it was the game. So, you know, and the black kids used to come, I think, for the same reason, you know,

let's get the white kids to chase'es. Think about how disorienting it was to be in East New York in the early 1960s. If you're white, you've seen your tight ethnic enclave flooded with newcomers. Your friends are gone. If you're black or Puerto Rican, you're moving in for the affordable rents, or the American dream of home ownership. You might have also migrated from the South to find a job and escape segregation. But now these cranky old timers are telling

you this ain't your place. And you're probably thinking, dude, if this neighborhood is so wonderful, why did all the white folks, all at once, like a herd of antelope, move to Long Island? I used to deliver the Brooklyn Eagle, and when I used to get the Broadway, I see one side of the street was black, and the other side of the street was white, and I couldn't understand that. Then when I was in junior high, we got two black girls and then that was a big thing going on, you know. I still didn't understand it.

Then I had a friend of mine live across the street when Dan Alabama, and he got beat up for the super reason. he got up and gave a black woman a seat and when he came back to Brooklyn he had two black guys. So yeah, race relations in the South were obviously not good, but in 1965 America was reminded in a big way. They're not good anywhere. This is a network news report from the time. August 11, 1965, the bloodiest riot in 40 years

of America's troubled racial history begins. Los Angeles, California, the district called once. 34 persons die, $40 million worth of property is destroyed. Almost 4,000 are arrested. The American Negro, the invisible man, breaks out in a screen. Look at me, look at me. Know me for what I am. Look at me if you can." So now it's a year after images of LA burning have lit up American TV screens. It's the start of the summer of 1966, and every major city is wondering, could the Watts riot

happen here? New York's new mayor, John Lindsay, is fixated on preventing it. Lindsay has been gathering a national reputation for walking the streets of New York at night without a security detail mostly in poor neighborhoods as a gesture of concern. Here's how he describes the tension in places like East New York. The city governments have been largely absent from the getters. Their chief presence, usually, has taken the form of a policeman. And it has been his unhappy launch to be the lone representative of the man, white people, the honkies, and by extension the entire public

and private establishment. Lindsay's chief of staff was Jay Kriegel, who was 26 at the time. Today he's a white-haired executive with the real estate giant related companies. His office has a powerbroker's view of Columbus Circle where he and I talked. When I emailed Kriegel to set up the interview, I asked if he remembered a particular incident from that summer of 1966. The shooting of an 11-year-old black boy named Eric Dean, he wrote back like it was yesterday. So this incident begins with a conflict over turf.

It's a classic turf battle of a something called a triangle right below the East New York subway station. And it's a battle between attacking kids who've always lived there. This is their turf and black kids who newly moving in. Shouting matches, fist fights, by all accounts, the neighborhood was on the verge of exploding. Lindsay decides to go out to East New York, which as you know is a long way away from City Hall because there's an eruption of violence between the two communities. And Lindsay and three of us race out there and go to a little pizza polla, which is right under the subway station where Lindsay meets with these kids.

Kriegel says the sit down at Frank's restaurant on New Lots Avenue goes well enough, except for the group of whites who march by shouting, two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate. Lindsay leaves around 10 p.m. and then the explosion happens. An account in the New York Times says about 30 whites from Spongebob. Remember Spongebob? The Society for the Prevention of Negroes getting everything? They start picketing at a traffic island behind police barricades. A group of black counter demonstrators form and the group's exchange words. Spongebob members burst through the barricades

and give chase. The groups don't physically clash, but a block away near a group of blacks, a gun goes off. A witness later tells a jury that nothing happens for a minute before, quote, a little boy stands up and lays down in the gutter. It's Eric Dean. He's taken away by ambulance and soon dies. The time says groups of black residents then roam the neighborhood, some throw garbage cans through store windows and bricks at police cars.

The disturbance lasts about four hours. At City Hall the next day, Mary Lindsey calls his aides in and asks them who knows East New York, what's going on, who were the players. Jake Kriegel says everyone sort of looks at each other. Previous mayors could have gotten these answers quickly because previous mayors were Democrats. Lindsay is a Republican. The city had been run by Democratic mayors

using the Democratic machine. So the city wanted to know what was going on in East New York. It would call the local district leader and would call the local clubhouse. And that was really the city's branch office in these communities across the city. Kregel says this is why today we have community boards with professional staff.

The boards existed in 1966, but they were voluntary and they were pretty sleepy. Lindsay beefed up their powers and gave them money. So he'd have locals on the ground to talk to when stuff hit the fan. Lindsay also oversaw a change in police tactics. Bringing the cops into the community early for in the afternoon, rather than 9 o'clock at night in the dark. Instead of cops running down the streets in the dark, we're there scared because they

don't know where they are. The people are scared to see an army marching in. Cops come in the daylight, they stand around, they talk to people, they get acclimated, they see what's around and the people get acclimated to them. Krigel says cops were instructed to leave their night sticks at the precincts, to not use force, and to not stand on rooftops with rifles. Those tactics helped calm East New York.

Besides Eric Dean, no one died that summer during public unrest. A local black teenager was later charged with the dean shooting and put on trial, but a jury acquitted him. In the end, Lindsey managed to keep New York relatively free from the major fires and fatal racial violence that ignited around the country in places like Newark and Detroit and other cities. But within a year, almost every single white family moved away from East New York. White flight then spread through neighborhoods around the city, especially the outer burrows. But the turf wars between teenagers were just one symptom of a larger process that was unfolding.

Whites and blacks were in conflict, but they were being pitted against each other by much larger forces. Brooklyn was in the process of absorbing two great migrations. Southern blacks coming north in search of industrial jobs, and Puerto Ricans fleeing the decimated economy of the island. But segregation limited these migrants' housing options. So Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods like Bedstuy and Harlem quickly became overcrowded. People began desperately searching for places to live. And landlords and real estate investors saw opportunity in that desperation. They hone two tactics that have shaped neighborhoods

all over the country ever since. Fear-induced white flight and predatory lending. You can sell your home as is, all cash, at no cost to you, and your home can be sold fast. Even if you're facing four corners, you lose. Here's how it worked. It started in the years after World War II, and a stretch of tenements on the neighborhoods Western Edge.

The white families who lived there were already frustrated with the landlords neglect. Owners wanted to do the least and get the most out of these buildings. But something larger was about to play out. We were very much afraid of the atomic bomb. This is Ron Schiffman again, the urban planner who's been working in Central Brooklyn since the 60s. And that's right, Brooklyn since the 60s. And that's right, he said that Adam Baum, the fear during the Cold War permeated American

policy. Coming out of World War II, the policy of the federal government was the dispersed essential populations to allow people to move out of the cities, to allow manufacturing and essential industries to move out of the cities. So white tenants were giving it out. The feds began subsidizing mortgages in highways and what became a wildly successful effort to create a new class of suburban homeowners, but only for those essential populations.

Essential populations were considered to be white and educated and wealthy. And all of the major real estate lobby groups advocated for restricting black buyers from the loans and neighborhoods that our public dollars financed. In East New York, white renters seized upon the chance to buy homes.

And the landlords were happy to see them go. They've been a pain in the butt, and now there are all of these black and Puerto Rican renters who faced a housing shortage and could be price-couged. But it didn't stop there. The real opportunity that segregation offered for real estate speculators was in flipping the houses that East New York's Italian and German and Jewish immigrants had owned for years.

But to make a profit off of that, they had to get those white homeowners to sell for cheap. People would come in literally and hire somebody to go out on the street and get into a fight in front of your house, all right, to scare you from leaving. So that you'd feel like there's violence in the neighborhood. There were even pamphlets put out that were attributed to black people. When you read them, it was obviously written by a white pretending to be such. And they would say what? what would the flyers say? You know, we're gonna get whitey because of this

or something or other. There was scare tactics going on. There were people coming in and basically saying that if you don't sell, you're going to lose the value of your home. They would just show up and knock on the door and say, hey, they went and solicited door to door, knocked on the door in a way

saying, we're willing to buy your house for all cash today. You may not get this tomorrow. What we now think of as white flight began in East New York. Remember one person she had a house up on 4 Bell Street. Again, Tony Momina. They came one day yesterday when it's so she says, no, they came the next day, you want to sell. She says, no, after about a week, they get up in the morning and the front door is on the floor. A little something to focus the woman's mind on the offer. The next day, the buyer's returned. So she

want to sell now, this they took the money and ran. This is blockbusting and it worked. While teens fought in the streets, their parents fought over property. And the blockbusting, it set up the next stage in the process for real estate investors, predatory lending. They set up these fast foreclosures schemes, where they would buy cheaper from the white families, resell it at a higher price to African American and Latino families. The aspiring black or Latino homeowner would sign a contract with the investor, but the arrangement would look a lot like those rent to own deals on appliances today. They'd be on the hook for way too much money, more than they could afford, and more than

the house was worth. After two to three months, they couldn't make their payments, so they finally moved to evict them, and within a year or two, they evicted them, and they had the housing back in their own hands and sold them again. So they churned these buildings. Wait, are you talking about the 60s or the early 2000s at our foreclosure crisis? That sounds very similar to the subprice. It is very similar.

It is very similar. It was very similar. Throughout all of this, racial tensions, of course, emerged. They always blamed each other for what happened. Primarily, the white families blamed the blacks who moved into the neighborhood for the abandonment and the decay of the neighborhood

when it was really the real estate manipulation going on behind the scenes. This played out in fights between teenagers. Those fights blossomed in the gang wars. The summers of 1966 and 1967 were marred by conflict. And then Eric Dean got shot and killed. By the end of 1967, Barod Swass of East New York were as much as 97% black and Puerto Rican. Today, Tony is in the same house, but he says he can count the other whites in the surrounding area on one hand.

He watched them move one after another over the decades. Either the Howard Beach or Al Thalong Island. I don't know if people will help a beach or better than where I am, but the whole thing is they have the name Howard Beach. A lot of people are afraid to say East New York, when somebody asks me, I tell them East New York, I'm proud of it.

That pride is not a small matter when it comes to neighborhood development. In the decades after Eric Dean was killed when public and private investment drained out of the place, the real difference between the dark stereotypes of East New York and the reality of community has been residents sheer well. Tony retired from driving delivery trucks 33 years ago. He spent most of that time volunteering at Cypress Hills local development corporation.

He's been part of dozens of initiatives, from watchdogging the local police precinct to working with banks to fund building projects. And he's not alone. Harold Green and his wife moved here in 1978 when they bought a house up on the hill by Highland Park and what is still one of the tonier parts of the neighborhood. It was nice. It was very nice.

It was very quiet. It was transportation accessible. And the price, the price was very affordable at the time, and we have a nice two-family house. By the early 80s, he was volunteering at the development corporation with Tony. One of my neighbors was on the board of the Cypress Hills, and she kept insisting how do you come down and you know, like volunteer your time. So, you know, I came, you know, being in management and social services.

I had some communication skills and I also had some financial back, so it worked out. Today, long retired, he's the board chair. He drove me around and showed me some of the stuff they've built during the years of divestment, a grade school with a green house on top. Three and four-story apartment buildings with affordable units, senior housing for which they've just broken ground.

You have to do for your community because no one else would do for you. And now, like most other property owners here, he's got mixed feelings about the city's plan to spur more development. He's more than happy to see the new resources and even eager to see new people with their new money. It's just, well, what will happen then? We've been watching from Williamsburg up through Ford Green Bushwick, so we are aware of

what's happening and we're just trying to position ourselves to get the best results and the best response from the city administration to make, help make each New York Cypress Hills, Broadway junctions, surrounding areas as vibrant, as safe, and as livable as possible. But you know, for guys like Tony, it's been livable for a long time. Why did you never move? Oh, I can move. My son's got a big house up in Newberg that I could have moved there. You know, no problem.

Everything on the main floor and everything. But what am I going to do there? Once a day watch the amadella go across the grounds to drink the water. You know, that's the most exciting. And over here we have a little shooting, we have a little car accident, you know. You get to go outside, talk to the people, you know, different views. I still don't understand this black and white thing, different, you know, I treat people as they treat me."

This black and white thing, we're still talking about it, and we're hearing about it in every neighborhood we visit with this podcast. It comes up with foreclosure and the history of racially targeted subprime lending. It comes up with the demographic shifts people are seeing now, and it explains a lot of the anxieties people have about the city's redevelopment plan for places like East New York. Because after generations of flipping, of blockbusting to chase out whites, predatory lending to bring in blacks and Latinos, and decades of abandonment that followed.

People are skeptical of manufactured change. [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background,

playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, the Nation magazine. Recorded and mixed by Casey Means, research by Sean Carlson and Anakwa Dramina. Digital production by Lee Hill, Delaney Simmons, Kevin France, Frank Roberts, and Annie Shields. It was reported and produced by DWI Gibson, Rebecca Carroll, Jim O'Grady, and Chi Wright, and edited and executive produced by Karen Frelman. You can hear the rest of this series and you really should, it's just fantastic, at wnyc.org slash neighborhood.

99% invisible is Sam Greenspan, Delaney Hall, Kurt Colstead, Katie Mingle, Avery Truffleman, Sheree Views F and me Roman Mars. Intro and outro music this week by our friends O.K. Akumi on Hell Audio that's Utah's finest, electronic and experimental music label. We are a project of the 9-1.7KALW San Francisco and produced of the offices of ArcSund, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful, downtown, highly desirable, Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. You can follow us all on Twitter and Instagram, but the best way to explore the 99% invisible activity that shapes the design of our world

is to become friends with our website, it's 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX. Radio Tepi-O. From PRX.