
Broken: What the Hell Happened in East New York? - sergeant3
http://digg.com/2016/broken-what-the-hell-happened-in-east-new-york
======
ubercore
I really can't make heads or tails of the writing here. I think the author is
trying to present a stream of consciousness impressionist view, but it just
makes me feel like I'm having a stroke and can't understand language.

~~~
StriverGuy
I came to the comments to see if I was the only one feeling this way. The
writing feels like the ramblings of someone who is either drunk or loves the
run on sentence.

~~~
pjlegato
This and its parent post are (honestly) mystifying to me. I found it very easy
to read.

I can only conclude that bite-sized Twitter and Facebook content have left
many people incapable of reading long-form prose.

~~~
kbenson
I think it has to do with the fact the first four paragraphs are 348 words,
but only 5 sentences. Any time you are using a single sentence for a full
paragraph, multiple times in a short period, you should probably examine those
sentences (at least if your intent is to inform or educate).

Long sentences make us keep more state about the current thing we are parsing
in our head, as later portions of the sentence may cause reinterpretation of
earlier portions.

What you may be seeing is less that people are becoming incapable of reading
long-form prose, but more that prose itself has shifted to using shorter
sentences and simpler structures, at least in contexts that have to do with
reporting.

I don't find it surprising that people that are exposed less to longer, more
complex sentence structures will have more problems parsing them correctly. In
any event, it's stylistic choice, and one that some may find pleasing, but it
does make the work less approachable (those used to longer sentence structures
should have no problem with shorter ones, but the opposite is not necessarily
true).

~~~
ubercore
I think you're half there, but in the end I stand by it just being kind of
poor writing. It's not so much a development of prose tending towards shorter
sentences. Rather, the author is making a stylistic choice that uses longer
sentences while _also_ loading the sentences with structural aberrations and
external, sometimes opaque, references.

I'd argue that it's always been a good idea to use style judiciously in prose,
and balance longer more complex sentence structure with fewer references or
other oddities. Or load up unusual structure and abstruse language, but keep
things shorter.

~~~
kbenson
I won't deny that longer sentences often seem to be the result of authors
trying to shoe-horn more than they should into the sentence, and that appears
to be the case here. Length is a bit less subjective (IMO, which of course
makes it subjective... ;) though, so I figured it might be easier to approach
the argument from that direction.

------
Animats
Well, for those who yesterday wanted more Government-subsidized low income
housing in San Francisco, this is what it looks like. East New York is only
1.9 square miles and has twelve different New York City Housing Authority
projects, with 86 buildings of 6 or more floors.

~~~
potatolicious
Low income housing comes in many forms - I don't know of anyone seriously
still in favor of the 70s model of low income housing that still haunt us to
this day, particularly in major cities like Chicago and NYC.

There are a bajillion problems with the "garden of towers" model of low income
housing (or really, just housing in general - middle and even upper income
projects following that model have largely also failed, though obviously
without such disastrous outcomes).

Stuy Town for example is an example of this model being applied to middle and
upper-middle class housing, and it has similarly failed to produce the
communities they were originally intended to, and are now more known for being
inaccessible and cheap than desirable in any particular way.

The modern model in NYC for low income housing is to mix them in to market-
priced buildings, and either subsidize the building directly or offer indirect
incentives (more height limit and buildable floor area being the big one). IMO
this works a lot better, and is at least closer to what Jane Jacobs IMO
correctly identified as a critical element of making cities work (the
geographic mixing of economic classes).

~~~
eric_h
> Stuy Town [...is] more known for being inaccessible and cheap than desirable
> in any particular way

The last I heard about Stuy Town a friend of mine was moving out of there
because he got priced out, and he was making ~90k/year.

~~~
potatolicious
Inexpensive relative to housing near it. Stuy Town is decidedly cheaper than
its surrounding areas, though obviously not immune to the pricing pressures of
being in Manhattan ;)

There's also a pretty interesting effect of pricing _within_ Stuy Town, where
apartments towards the center of the farm of towers are substantially cheaper
than apartments towards the edges of the "community". That whole area is a
dead zone - its intention is to be idyllic and serene, but it's actually just
sterile and unappealing, and housing is priced proportionally to how easy it
is to get the fuck out of there.

~~~
ghaff
It's something to be aware of when people are all "build up, build up!" (And I
know that building higher doesn't necessarily mean building true high rises
but, in general, the more stories the smaller the footprint.) I've actually
known people who moved into luxury high rises and ended up leaving because
they found the experience too isolating and removed from the surroundings.

~~~
potatolicious
High rises come in many, many forms, and particularly how they interact with
the streets below them is critically important to whether or not they work.

NYC does this better than most places, but mostly by luck. Le Corbusier's
Radiant City philosophy of urban design (sleek towers surrounded by idyllic
parkland) gained a lot of traction in the 60s and 70s. This is why most
American downtowns are wastelands - most developed under that model. It's
characterized by lack of street life, lack of ground floor usages, lack of
mixed use, and mechanical features that separate buildings from the city
rather than integrate it (deep staircases leading to the base of the building,
large setbacks from the sidewalk, etc).

NYC has the benefit of predating that model, so besides the ubiquitous housing
projects and some 70s-era highrises, has survived mostly intact.

It's frustrating that in some American urban planning circles Le Corbusier's
name is still uttered in awe instead of derision. I think his ideas have been
thoroughly debunked by reality, but not everyone agrees.

There's nothing inherently wrong with highrises, there's everything wrong with
the prescriptive school of architecture and planning that are more concerned
with fantasy scenes of tower-dwellers living idyllically in the surrounding
parkland, than how people actually want to use that space.

~~~
ghaff
Fully agree. Even Boston, which is a generally walkable and mixed-use city by
US standards, has its monuments to 60s/70s urban planning like the Brutalist
monstrosity that is City Hall and its generally vacant windswept surrounding
brick footprint.

One of the problems has been that when cityscapes were planned, commercial
activity has often been seen as this impure thing involving people _making
money_ on public space. While you don't want to just give developers and
retail/restaurants a free ride, they have to be part of the mix or you end up
with these sterile spaces that no one wants to be a part of.

~~~
potatolicious
If you haven't read the book, Jane Jacob's _Life and Death of Great American
Cities_ digs deeply into this, and really nails the prescriptivist design
philosophy that contributed to this whole mess.

It's not necessarily that commercial activity was rejected - it was often
accepted but _only in spaces designated by the designers_ , which in turn bore
no resemblance to where people _actually_ wanted to shop, eat, entertain, etc.
And so businesses failed to populate these spaces, and they became wastelands,
with crime and decay following shortly after.

This philosophy extended beyond commercial spaces - these communities
inevitably had spaces set aside for children to play, adults to entertain,
etc, and deeply restricted the use of these spaces to these things, and these
things only. There's a deep, controlling, Big Brother-esque undercurrent to
that entire branch of urban planning.

And through all of this those same urban planners seemed to blame residents to
failing to uphold their utopian urban vision than realize that a reasonable
bit of laissez-faire is fundamental to functional cities.

~~~
ghaff
I ran into that recently as I was following some links. I guess I should read
it. (Funnily enough, I've mostly been largely rural--or at least exurban--but
I've long had an interest in this topic.) Thanks.

------
superswordfish
This could use a good revision/proofreading, it uses punctuation incorrectly,
jumps around, and is difficult for me to read. Which is a shame because the
article looks interesting. Maybe I'll give it another stab after a cup of
coffee.

~~~
eric_h
I agree, but I toughed it out and I felt that it was worth it.

It's very depressing and while I (who've lived in NYC for 14 years) have heard
mention many times of East New York, and how it's a really shitty
neighborhood, I had no idea that it really is the _worst_ neighborhood in NYC.

It's really quite depressing, though the author does mention some initiatives
that perhaps are a sign of a light at the end of a tunnel that's more than a
hundred years long.

------
pjlegato
It's a well-written article, interesting to read.

But the narrative suffers from one major flaw: the residents of East New York
themselves are denied any sort of agency whatsoever.

They are not treated as real human beings in this article, but rather depicted
as purely inert, incapable of taking any action themselves, entirely passive,
battered about by the cruel winds of fate. In this article, things are
exclusively done _to_ them, not ever _by_ them.

The city did this to them, failed to do that for them. Drug dealers and gangs
did this do them. Industry closed and did this to them. The NYPD did this to
try to help, but also did that to make things worse. And so on.

All probably true. However, there is another piece that he missed: what is
_the community itself_ doing about all this?

Nowhere in this article is any East New Yorker depicted as having any sort of
agency at all. The few times he actually talks with people from the area, it's
to depict them as passively asking for help from outside, or passively
complaining about what the outside did to them.

That's what's lacking here. Where are the voices of _the people on the inside_
who are trying to make things better? What steps have they taken, what is
working, what didn't work?

~~~
simplemath
Yeah, if only the children of ENY would find their fucking bootstraps...

They are in fact denied agency.

What's lacking in ENY are _any_ meaningful community resources, from
schooling, to infrastructure to policing.

It's not the people's fault they were born into that hellhole.

Let me guess, if somehow we could bring market forces to bear on Brownsville,
the free market fairy would save all of these communities from themselves.

Give me a break.

~~~
pjlegato
First, these are strawman arguments. I said nothing about bootstraps or market
forces at all.

The general tone (the emotionally charged use of the word "fucking," and so
on) is also entirely uncalled for. Are we here for a rational discussion, or
to berate and insult those who disagree with us?

Second, do you honestly believe that nobody at all in ENY is trying to do
anything at all to try to make anything better in their own community?

Or do they sit idly by and wait for a wise, educated, ostentatiously
sympathetic, upper middle class white liberal to come in and fight off the
various boogeymen that they are incapable of tackling themselves?

Don't you think that's a rather condescending and patronizing attitude to take
to people whom you clearly regard as your inferiors, whom you regard as
incapable of doing anything for themselves?

~~~
simplemath
You DID though, implying that it's the community that needs to take more
concerted better action on its own, to reverse 100 years of endemic
sociopolitical dysfunction.

It's basic libertarian boilerplate bullshit.

~~~
pjlegato
You are, again, putting words into my mouth.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man)

I said nothing at all about the community needing to do anything whatsoever. I
was talking about _the article_ , not the community.

I also very explicitly said that all the various outside forces that the
author blames for these problems are probably true.

------
zeveb
Wow, when did digg switch to long-form articles?

~~~
autotune
The more interesting story here is that it somehow hasn't completely died yet.

~~~
spyspy
Digg has actually transformed into a decent content curator. I believe they
use a combination of human and computer generated content recommendations.
Even the ads are pretty high quality.

------
_of
Having lived in New York for more than 3 years, I'm ashamed to say that I did
not know about this neighborhood. I guess it's hard to pull yourself out of
poverty when you are born into it. Being a foreigner in this country I feel I
have no right to criticise it.

------
GBond
10 years ago, no one thought East Bushwick would be gentrified. Perhaps there
is hope for ENY.

~~~
figushki
[http://renewlots.org/](http://renewlots.org/)

My +1 was gentrified out of Crown Heights about 3 years ago and moved to
Brownsville. Brownsville is where a lot of the crime in East New York is
concentrated.

It's a rough place, but the article was completely sensationalistic. I'm not
going to sugar-coat East New York, but take his description of Jamaica Bay:

"On its southern border is polluted Jamaica Bay, and a 6,000-acre 26th Ward
Waste Water Treatment Plant (broken — under emergency federal funding and
undergoing a $407 million upgrade)."

This is the Jamaica Bay I know:

[http://www.nyharborparks.org/visit/jaba.html](http://www.nyharborparks.org/visit/jaba.html)

It needs substantial environmental remediation, but it serves as a tranquil
wildlife refuge. I've been there a couple times and enjoyed it.

I've spent on average three days a week in the southern part of Brownsville
over the last two years. My non-representative, privileged experience as a
white, middle-aged, male financial programmer visiting the neighborhood has
been surprisingly positive. I expected the worst, and I have had nothing
happen to me. I've had people welcome me.

I have taken the train rides in the article at all hours of the day and night.
I've hopped off the 3 train alone at Junius coming home from work in a suit at
12a and walked 5 blocks alone through the neighborhood multiple times without
incident. At least once a month on the weekend I've been on the L between 2a
and 6a. I shop regularly at the Food Bazaar, the corner bodega, and the liquor
store, all of which are across the street from the projects. I've had my
motorcycle parked in front of my +1's place for two years, and it's fared
better than it did on the streets of Park Slope (also mentioned in the
article, by contrast). I also take the bus to the neighborhood down Church to
the end of the line, usually late at night. I signed up for Brownsville
Recreation Center, and only stopped going because my hours at work made it
impossible.

When Renewlots was open, I went there for dinner every night I was in the
neighborhood. The food, art, and performances were great. There's also an
ambitious community garden down the street from the L stop. I went to the
massive Brownsville Old-Timers Block Party last summer.

Brownsville is the most troubled neighborhood in the city, but the city has
changed a lot. The author is disingenuous to use scare stats from the early
2000s. It's not so much that Brownsville is a war zone, it's that the rest of
the city stopped being one and the contrast is now striking. Unlike the
author, I won't whitemansplain the reasons the neighborhood has suffered, but
it's not an island in the city beyond redemption. Even the projects are likely
to have less impact on the surrounding neighborhoods over time, in the same
way that the Gowanus Houses (which I lived next to for two years) and the
RedHook Houses no longer define their neighborhoods.

Hipster kids are now switching between the J and L at Broadway Junction in the
middle of the night to get between East Bushwick party destinations. North
Brownsville will probably be the next destination for street cred and cheap
warehouses.

[http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/9/14/gentrifying-...](http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/9/14/gentrifying-
brownsville-changing-brooklyn.html)

Unfortunately, the people who suffered while the neighborhood struggled, like
my +1, will probably be displaced as soon as the neighborhood picks up.

Finally, whoever wrote the stuff above about Stuytown has no idea what they're
talking about. If I could get into Stuy/Peter Cooper for under $3,500/month,
I'd jump on it. The only legit complaint about them (other than the price) is
that they're far from the train. I spent a lot of time there, and I have a
friend who lives there. The common corridors are dingy, but his place is
beautiful.

------
percept
"fifty prior arrests"

~~~
metaphorm
do you know much about the NYPD?

