http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/n...borhood-forces-residents-to-move-on.html?_r=0
Gentrification in a Brooklyn Neighborhood Forces Residents to Move On
By VIVIAN YEENOV. 27, 2015
Photo
Shirley De Matas said she was pushed out of her former home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, by high rent and repairs withheld by her landlord. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
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They are a living reminder of the challenges facing a city struggling to make room for all its current residents, and all the new ones to come: the people of an older Crown Heights, who cannot afford the new.
Like longtime tenants from San Francisco to Harlem, the African-Americans and West Indians who have made their homes for generations in this Brooklyn neighborhood are scattering, muscled out by surging rents and, tenant advocates say, landlords who harass tenants, withhold repairs or use evictions to make room for higher-income renters. Some move in with relatives. Some scrabble for a foothold in one of the city’s remaining cheap areas. And some give up on New York altogether.
“I would’ve stayed, of course. New York is my home. I love it,” said Kenlin Harris, 34, who left Crown Heights for Virginia after the rent rose and the rats multiplied at her apartment on Park Place. “But you look at it now, it’s like, O.K., actually, I can’t believe that we were living like that.”
Photo
Donna Mossman, a member of the Crown Heights Tenant Union. Ms. Mossman, who has lived in the neighborhood 38 years, said she recently refused a buyout to vacate her apartment. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
The prosperity that is remaking New York City one neighborhood after another came to Crown Heights invisibly and then unmistakably — slowly, and then all at once.
In prewar apartments, glossy new kitchens are replacing tired old ones. Limestone fixer-uppers are commanding seven-figure prices. Cocktail bars are opening where fried chicken used to be sold from behind bulletproof glass. And the New Yorkers who lived there are drifting away, their former homes renovated to make way for white college graduates and young families.
Across the country, transformations like this one have revived an impassioned debate over gentrification’s effects, good and bad — a familiar battle, constantly refought in academic journals and community forums alike. Less well documented is what happens to the people crushed between the city’s booming wealth and its affordable-housing crisis.
The New York Times interviewed more than three dozen current and former residents of the neighborhood, as well as tenant advocates, lawyers and sociologists, to explore the paths they travel after Crown Heights, to eastern Brooklyn, to the South or even back to the Caribbean.
Between 2000 and 2010, Crown Heights and the two neighborhoods to its south and east, Flatbush and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, all areas with large West Indian immigrant populations, each lost from 10 to 14 percent of their black populations, according to an analysis of the 2010 census released by the Department of City Planning.
No data exists to track those who have been nudged or pushed out of the neighborhood in recent years. But among those who remain, everyone seems to know cousins, friends or neighbors who have left.
Keisha Jacobs, a community organizer who has rallied tenants to protest predatory landlords, grew up in Crown Heights. Over the past 15 years, she has watched most of her childhood friends and neighbors move away.
“I’m one of the few who can still walk to my mom’s house,” she said.
Photo
Pricey shops and restaurants have opened in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as higher-income residents have moved in. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
The people arriving in Crown Heights are fleeing high rents in Manhattan and elsewhere in Brooklyn. Likewise, the people leaving Crown Heights often go farther east into Brooklyn in search of affordable homes, most commonly to East Flatbush, Canarsie and East New York.
The monthly rent on Shirley De Matas’s two-bedroom apartment at 1170 Lincoln Place was $800 in 1999, when she, her husband and their three children moved in. By 2014, it had risen to nearly $1,300, a sum that forced Ms. De Matas, a seamstress, and her husband, a mechanic, to skimp on everything else.
Compounding the strain were the pipes, which regularly burst in the winter. And the mice. And the rat that died in the wall, decaying until its stench pervaded the apartment. And the superintendent who, they said, did little to help.
Tenant advocates and lawyers believe that landlords in gentrifying areas like Crown Heights often withhold repairs or basic services from lower-paying tenants, hoping they will get frustrated enough to leave, then pack the apartments with higher-paying ones.
In February 2014, the De Matases moved to a $750-a-month apartment in East New York, the only affordable place they could find. When their daughter visited a former neighbor in Crown Heights this year, she said, they discovered that their vermin-infested apartment had finally been fixed up.
Continue reading the main story
Gentrification Comes to Crown Heights in a Rush
The wave of college-educated and higher-income residents has moved west across Brooklyn, creating new territory for coffee bars, ramen shops and other restaurants east of Prospect Park.
Sources: Census Bureau; N.Y.C. Department of Health
By The New York Times
Others in Crown Heights have been more selective. In interviews, many rejected the idea of moving to East New York, which carries a reputation of being too poor, too seedy and too violent, even among residents of a nearby community that not so long ago suffered its own share of crime and neglect.
Rather than contend with an unforgiving rental market, some have doubled up with relatives.
At her apartment at 761 Prospect Place, Angelique Coward had battled mold, flies and rats for three years before deciding, finally, to leave. Every time her landlord said the issue had been fixed, the problems came back, she said.
She and her four children decamped last year for her mother’s apartment, three floors above hers. Her own apartment was promptly renovated and rented to three young women who paid $3,100 a month for it, $1,400 more than Ms. Coward had.
A neighbor had similar problems. She moved to Georgia.
Ms. Coward, 35, a receptionist at a Manhattan hospital, wanted to stay. She tried looking for apartments in Crown Heights, Ms. Coward said, but she struck out even when she pushed her budget to $2,000 a month. With young daughters, she said, she did not feel safe moving to Brownsville or East New York. So she and her children remained with her mother, Ms. Coward sleeping on the living room couch and her children sharing two bunk beds.
“I’ve seen it when nobody wanted to live here,” she said. “As soon as I started to rent an apartment, the rents went up, and now it’s like we’re not even good enough to stay in the neighborhood anymore.”
At 930-940 Prospect Place, where tenants took their landlord to court in January last year over what they said was his failure to provide heat and hot water in winter — a tactic designed to push out low-income tenants, they said — Ransworth Blair, one of the plaintiffs, set up five space heaters in his toddler daughter’s room to keep her warm.
As the case limped through housing court, the landlord sued Mr. Blair over what he said were missing rent payments, though Mr. Blair insisted he did not owe anything. The judge eventually ruled in Mr. Blair’s favor, he said, but the stress of juggling two court cases and work was overwhelming. His marriage broke apart, and he left the building. The only affordable places he and his ex-wife could find were in the Bronx.
He still returns nearly every day to the old neighborhood, where his contracting business is headquartered. Everything is different now, he said. Even the produce at the corner grocery is fresher.
“Which I have no problem with,” he said. “The only problem that I have is the pushing people out of the neighborhood. They’re moving you because you don’t have money.”
Photo
Members of the Crown Heights Tenants Union met last month. The organization was formed to combat issues including rising rents, landlord harassment and buyouts. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
Still, he has a place to live. Some who have moved away have not been so fortunate. A November 2014 report issued by the city’s Independent Budget Office found that from 2002 to 2012, families entering homeless shelters came in the largest numbers from three neighborhoods in Brooklyn: Northern Crown Heights, East New York and Stuyvesant Heights.
A lucky few have ended up in public housing, finding more or less permanent refuge from the vagaries of the rental market.
Raquel Cruz, who makes a living doing cleaning and other odd jobs, took a $10,000 buyout from her landlord to vacate her apartment on Franklin Avenue in 2010. The agreement included three months of rent at a $1,300-a-month apartment that the landlord found for her in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. When the money ran out, she began pawning her possessions to pay the rent.
Ms. Cruz caught a break when her years-old application for public housing was granted a few months later. But most who take buyouts quickly run through even substantial one-time payouts.
A few years ago, the owner of 1159 President Street began offering tenants buyouts as much as $70,000 or more. A few took the offer.
Moving expenses and taxes swallowed large chunks of the payouts, said Donna Mossman, a longtime resident who belongs to the Crown Heights Tenants Union, a local pro-tenant group. When her former neighbors could not find affordable apartments elsewhere, she said, they moved in with parents or children or paid substantially more than they had in Crown Heights.
“I’ve been here 38 years; I’m not going anywhere,” she said, explaining her decision to refuse the buyout. “But if you’ve never had $50,000, that seems like a lot of money.”
Brooklyn was once the home the residents of Crown Heights took for granted. Now, for many, it seems an impossibility, falling out of reach the moment they leave their family’s rent-controlled apartment.
Photo
Glady's, a trendy Caribbean restaurant on Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights, opened in 2013. Credit Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
With few options, some are returning to the Caribbean, once their home, or their parents’ home.
“They just give up on everything,” said Tony Blackmun, a metalworker who has lived in Crown Heights for more than 30 years. Several of his neighbors and friends have left for their native Trinidad.
Many of the regulars at Trinidad Golden Place, a bakery on Nostrand Avenue, have moved to join West Indian communities in Boston, Maryland or Philadelphia. Once or twice a month on weekends, however, they come back on the bus to shop at their favorite groceries and bakeries: a reunion of the old neighborhood, as the owner, Wazo Rahaman, called it.
For many looking for a fresh start and easier living, Atlanta, the Carolinas and Virginia are popular destinations. Their migration reflects a larger, countrywide trend of blacks leaving big cities in the East and Midwest for the South.
Ms. Harris, who worked as an assistant to the C.E.O. of a health care company in New York, lived in Crown Heights for 30 years, most recently at 767 Park Place. When she began having problems with vermin, heat and hot water that she said the building’s owners did not take care of despite repeated requests, she tried looking elsewhere in Crown Heights, hoping to stay close to her mother.
Nothing came up. But her fiancé had moved to Virginia Beach to join relatives. She agreed to follow him.
With a backyard and a car, she has found life in Virginia affordable and pleasant, but “extremely boring,” she said.
She once paid $1,280 a month for her Park Place three-bedroom. Last year, another three-bedroom in her old building was rented for $2,595.
“We would like to move back to New York, but it doesn’t make sense — in Brooklyn, all the money I was making would go right back to rent,” she said. “So I think we’ll be staying in Virginia for a while.”
Gentrification in a Brooklyn Neighborhood Forces Residents to Move On
By VIVIAN YEENOV. 27, 2015
Photo
Shirley De Matas said she was pushed out of her former home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, by high rent and repairs withheld by her landlord. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
Continue reading the main story Share This Page
They are a living reminder of the challenges facing a city struggling to make room for all its current residents, and all the new ones to come: the people of an older Crown Heights, who cannot afford the new.
Like longtime tenants from San Francisco to Harlem, the African-Americans and West Indians who have made their homes for generations in this Brooklyn neighborhood are scattering, muscled out by surging rents and, tenant advocates say, landlords who harass tenants, withhold repairs or use evictions to make room for higher-income renters. Some move in with relatives. Some scrabble for a foothold in one of the city’s remaining cheap areas. And some give up on New York altogether.
“I would’ve stayed, of course. New York is my home. I love it,” said Kenlin Harris, 34, who left Crown Heights for Virginia after the rent rose and the rats multiplied at her apartment on Park Place. “But you look at it now, it’s like, O.K., actually, I can’t believe that we were living like that.”
Photo
Donna Mossman, a member of the Crown Heights Tenant Union. Ms. Mossman, who has lived in the neighborhood 38 years, said she recently refused a buyout to vacate her apartment. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
The prosperity that is remaking New York City one neighborhood after another came to Crown Heights invisibly and then unmistakably — slowly, and then all at once.
In prewar apartments, glossy new kitchens are replacing tired old ones. Limestone fixer-uppers are commanding seven-figure prices. Cocktail bars are opening where fried chicken used to be sold from behind bulletproof glass. And the New Yorkers who lived there are drifting away, their former homes renovated to make way for white college graduates and young families.
Across the country, transformations like this one have revived an impassioned debate over gentrification’s effects, good and bad — a familiar battle, constantly refought in academic journals and community forums alike. Less well documented is what happens to the people crushed between the city’s booming wealth and its affordable-housing crisis.
The New York Times interviewed more than three dozen current and former residents of the neighborhood, as well as tenant advocates, lawyers and sociologists, to explore the paths they travel after Crown Heights, to eastern Brooklyn, to the South or even back to the Caribbean.
Between 2000 and 2010, Crown Heights and the two neighborhoods to its south and east, Flatbush and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, all areas with large West Indian immigrant populations, each lost from 10 to 14 percent of their black populations, according to an analysis of the 2010 census released by the Department of City Planning.
No data exists to track those who have been nudged or pushed out of the neighborhood in recent years. But among those who remain, everyone seems to know cousins, friends or neighbors who have left.
Keisha Jacobs, a community organizer who has rallied tenants to protest predatory landlords, grew up in Crown Heights. Over the past 15 years, she has watched most of her childhood friends and neighbors move away.
“I’m one of the few who can still walk to my mom’s house,” she said.
Photo
Pricey shops and restaurants have opened in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as higher-income residents have moved in. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
The people arriving in Crown Heights are fleeing high rents in Manhattan and elsewhere in Brooklyn. Likewise, the people leaving Crown Heights often go farther east into Brooklyn in search of affordable homes, most commonly to East Flatbush, Canarsie and East New York.
The monthly rent on Shirley De Matas’s two-bedroom apartment at 1170 Lincoln Place was $800 in 1999, when she, her husband and their three children moved in. By 2014, it had risen to nearly $1,300, a sum that forced Ms. De Matas, a seamstress, and her husband, a mechanic, to skimp on everything else.
Compounding the strain were the pipes, which regularly burst in the winter. And the mice. And the rat that died in the wall, decaying until its stench pervaded the apartment. And the superintendent who, they said, did little to help.
Tenant advocates and lawyers believe that landlords in gentrifying areas like Crown Heights often withhold repairs or basic services from lower-paying tenants, hoping they will get frustrated enough to leave, then pack the apartments with higher-paying ones.
In February 2014, the De Matases moved to a $750-a-month apartment in East New York, the only affordable place they could find. When their daughter visited a former neighbor in Crown Heights this year, she said, they discovered that their vermin-infested apartment had finally been fixed up.
Continue reading the main story
Gentrification Comes to Crown Heights in a Rush
The wave of college-educated and higher-income residents has moved west across Brooklyn, creating new territory for coffee bars, ramen shops and other restaurants east of Prospect Park.
Sources: Census Bureau; N.Y.C. Department of Health
By The New York Times
Others in Crown Heights have been more selective. In interviews, many rejected the idea of moving to East New York, which carries a reputation of being too poor, too seedy and too violent, even among residents of a nearby community that not so long ago suffered its own share of crime and neglect.
Rather than contend with an unforgiving rental market, some have doubled up with relatives.
At her apartment at 761 Prospect Place, Angelique Coward had battled mold, flies and rats for three years before deciding, finally, to leave. Every time her landlord said the issue had been fixed, the problems came back, she said.
She and her four children decamped last year for her mother’s apartment, three floors above hers. Her own apartment was promptly renovated and rented to three young women who paid $3,100 a month for it, $1,400 more than Ms. Coward had.
A neighbor had similar problems. She moved to Georgia.
Ms. Coward, 35, a receptionist at a Manhattan hospital, wanted to stay. She tried looking for apartments in Crown Heights, Ms. Coward said, but she struck out even when she pushed her budget to $2,000 a month. With young daughters, she said, she did not feel safe moving to Brownsville or East New York. So she and her children remained with her mother, Ms. Coward sleeping on the living room couch and her children sharing two bunk beds.
“I’ve seen it when nobody wanted to live here,” she said. “As soon as I started to rent an apartment, the rents went up, and now it’s like we’re not even good enough to stay in the neighborhood anymore.”
At 930-940 Prospect Place, where tenants took their landlord to court in January last year over what they said was his failure to provide heat and hot water in winter — a tactic designed to push out low-income tenants, they said — Ransworth Blair, one of the plaintiffs, set up five space heaters in his toddler daughter’s room to keep her warm.
As the case limped through housing court, the landlord sued Mr. Blair over what he said were missing rent payments, though Mr. Blair insisted he did not owe anything. The judge eventually ruled in Mr. Blair’s favor, he said, but the stress of juggling two court cases and work was overwhelming. His marriage broke apart, and he left the building. The only affordable places he and his ex-wife could find were in the Bronx.
He still returns nearly every day to the old neighborhood, where his contracting business is headquartered. Everything is different now, he said. Even the produce at the corner grocery is fresher.
“Which I have no problem with,” he said. “The only problem that I have is the pushing people out of the neighborhood. They’re moving you because you don’t have money.”
Photo
Members of the Crown Heights Tenants Union met last month. The organization was formed to combat issues including rising rents, landlord harassment and buyouts. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
Still, he has a place to live. Some who have moved away have not been so fortunate. A November 2014 report issued by the city’s Independent Budget Office found that from 2002 to 2012, families entering homeless shelters came in the largest numbers from three neighborhoods in Brooklyn: Northern Crown Heights, East New York and Stuyvesant Heights.
A lucky few have ended up in public housing, finding more or less permanent refuge from the vagaries of the rental market.
Raquel Cruz, who makes a living doing cleaning and other odd jobs, took a $10,000 buyout from her landlord to vacate her apartment on Franklin Avenue in 2010. The agreement included three months of rent at a $1,300-a-month apartment that the landlord found for her in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. When the money ran out, she began pawning her possessions to pay the rent.
Ms. Cruz caught a break when her years-old application for public housing was granted a few months later. But most who take buyouts quickly run through even substantial one-time payouts.
A few years ago, the owner of 1159 President Street began offering tenants buyouts as much as $70,000 or more. A few took the offer.
Moving expenses and taxes swallowed large chunks of the payouts, said Donna Mossman, a longtime resident who belongs to the Crown Heights Tenants Union, a local pro-tenant group. When her former neighbors could not find affordable apartments elsewhere, she said, they moved in with parents or children or paid substantially more than they had in Crown Heights.
“I’ve been here 38 years; I’m not going anywhere,” she said, explaining her decision to refuse the buyout. “But if you’ve never had $50,000, that seems like a lot of money.”
Brooklyn was once the home the residents of Crown Heights took for granted. Now, for many, it seems an impossibility, falling out of reach the moment they leave their family’s rent-controlled apartment.
Photo
Glady's, a trendy Caribbean restaurant on Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights, opened in 2013. Credit Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
With few options, some are returning to the Caribbean, once their home, or their parents’ home.
“They just give up on everything,” said Tony Blackmun, a metalworker who has lived in Crown Heights for more than 30 years. Several of his neighbors and friends have left for their native Trinidad.
Many of the regulars at Trinidad Golden Place, a bakery on Nostrand Avenue, have moved to join West Indian communities in Boston, Maryland or Philadelphia. Once or twice a month on weekends, however, they come back on the bus to shop at their favorite groceries and bakeries: a reunion of the old neighborhood, as the owner, Wazo Rahaman, called it.
For many looking for a fresh start and easier living, Atlanta, the Carolinas and Virginia are popular destinations. Their migration reflects a larger, countrywide trend of blacks leaving big cities in the East and Midwest for the South.
Ms. Harris, who worked as an assistant to the C.E.O. of a health care company in New York, lived in Crown Heights for 30 years, most recently at 767 Park Place. When she began having problems with vermin, heat and hot water that she said the building’s owners did not take care of despite repeated requests, she tried looking elsewhere in Crown Heights, hoping to stay close to her mother.
Nothing came up. But her fiancé had moved to Virginia Beach to join relatives. She agreed to follow him.
With a backyard and a car, she has found life in Virginia affordable and pleasant, but “extremely boring,” she said.
She once paid $1,280 a month for her Park Place three-bedroom. Last year, another three-bedroom in her old building was rented for $2,595.
“We would like to move back to New York, but it doesn’t make sense — in Brooklyn, all the money I was making would go right back to rent,” she said. “So I think we’ll be staying in Virginia for a while.”
The rent is getting higher and its only going to get worse in BK.
