Wow! This was NOT what I expected to see. Crazy stuff.
For a long time now, I kept hearing about a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Brownsville. People kept saying - you think the South Bronx is bad - you need to see BROWNSVILLE. It’s roooough. And the data backs it up - Brownsville has been called the most dangerous neighborhood in New York City. It has a bad reputation that goes back a long time.
So of course I had to see it. So I went there. It was a cold and breezy day in NYC the day I arrived - the sun was out, but it was only 38 degrees. We’re gonna take a drive through the worst neighborhood in the city, learn a little bit about the place, and talk to residents who live here.
Ahh Brownsville. The notorious BBK. If you live in the greater New York City area, you’ve heard of how bad this place is. There’s shootings and robberies here all the time. It’s located on the eastern side of Brooklyn, near East New York, about halfway between Manhattan and JFK. 58,000 people live here, packed into a 1 square mile. It’s just about one square mile of housing projects.
It’s been dangerous here for 100 years now. In the late 1920’s, the organized crime group Murder Inc operated out of Brownsville. They were the enforcement arm for the Italian Mafia and the Jewish Mob.
This place used to be called Browns Village. It was marketed to the Jewish community, and then a lot of African Americans moved in in the 1950s because it was affordable. Many of the black families that moved into Brownsville were already poor, and their timing was bad - as soon as they began to arrive, factories began to shut down.
Then the NY Housing Authority built a lot of housing projects here, which brought in a lot more African Americans and Latinos. We’ll see many of the housing projects as we drive along. It’s said Brownsville has the highest concentration of housing projects in the nation. There’s 100 different housing projects here.
When things got dangerous here, the Jewish factory worker families moved out.
As poor families flooded in, crime began to spike here. Soon, by the 1980s, this place was known nationwide as outrageous for crime and poverty. Many of these housing projects had the highest per-capita arrests of any housing developments in the city. Unemployment and welfare plagued the housing developments here, which flamed the spike in crime. The single-mother rate in Brownsville was also twice the national rate.
In the 70s, they tried knocking down a lot of the abandoned tantament style apartments and putting in townhouse style apartment homes. But crime kept going up, as local gangs used the new apartments for their operations.
Today, things are still really bad. Gentrification hasn’t taken hold, since the neighborhood is surrounded on all sides by other high poverty, high crime hoods.
Only half the kids in Brownsville graduate high school. 40% of the population lives in poverty, and 1 in 6 people hasn’t worked in a long time. It’s the poorest neighborhood in Brooklyn and the 7th poorest in all of New York City, where families bring in about $22,000 a year. That’s why so many live in these housing projects.
It doesn’t help that 40% of the kids born here are to teenage mothers. Nor does it help that the incarceration rate among Brownsville residents is the 2nd highest of all New York City neighborhoods, either. Drug related hospitalizations, obesity, lack of health insurance, mental illness, a lot of businesses closing here. It’s sad and it’s tragic.
Crime wise, it is certainly the most dangerous neighborhood in all of New York City.
Today, this part of Brooklyn is one of the most affordable neighborhoods you can live in New York City. But affordable to New York might not sound affordable to you. A single family home here ranges from $500 to $800,000 and a two-bedroom apartment is about $2k a month.
Overall, while Brownsville continues to struggle, Brooklyn isn’t THAT bad anymore. It’s actually getting gentrified at an alarming rate. There’s all these new big fancy new buildings sprouting up everywhere, and much of the west side of Brooklyn closer to the Brooklyn Bridge is much nicer than what we just saw 316
#NewYork #moving
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