7 Comments

1. Diego January 20th, 2009 at 1:24 pm

   talk about slanted reporting … I can understand personal opinions, but get concerned when entire media outlets try to push specific agendas – the end result is a widening gap between misinformed citizens.

2. pss11211 January 20th, 2009 at 2:19 pm

   Well, ya know… it IS the Observer, after all.
   Imagine if it was the Sun?

3. Armstrong January 20th, 2009 at 4:28 pm

   I don’t see it as biased necessarily. Bushwick is still an area characterized largely by (at best) a lot of quality-of-life, and (even worse) more serious, crime. Just ask me about my personal experience lately.

   The article also mentions the neighborhood’s upswing. Bushwick will be an interesting case-study regarding the economy. It’s all a big “we’ll see” for now.

4. mopar January 20th, 2009 at 4:55 pm

   Huh? What is wrong with the article? I don’t get it. The article doesn’t say anything bad about Bushwick.

5. Diego January 21st, 2009 at 1:17 am

   doesn’t say anything bad about Bushwick???

   Quotes from text:

   “Section 8 housing has allowed in all the “riffraff.”"

   “It’s like a Third World country,” he says. “Like a big sickness.”

6. yasky January 21st, 2009 at 7:26 am

   I don’t see anything so bad about the article and I don’t see it as biased. As much as I love the “Wick”, living here can be a real challenge from a quality-of-life standpoint for some people and everyone has a different experience.

   There were several quotes from people expressing their aggravations. Having gone through my own negative experiences here,I can understand. People living next door last summer (who happened to be Section 8) dealt drugs in/and in front of the house and created noise and garbage, breaking glass, breaking into cars into the wee hours of the morning.

   Why wouldn’t someone going through that type of experience say a sentence or two about Section 8 housing letting in all the riffraff? That’s their experience. They work hard and meanwhile they are afraid to walk home at night or are concerned about their children modeling bad behavior.

   Unfortunately, there’s a spectrum of low-income individuals that use the system not for betterment but instead to stay up all night on drug deals and drugging and then they sleep away most of the day. It may just be a small number but the effect on the surrounding houses and hard-working Bushwick-ites is profound and it gradually sours the “domestic bliss” of a block because regular people become nervous and afraid to speak up.

   It is also unfortunate because it gives a bad rap to Section 8, which can be used for the betterment of an entire family and is not necesarily a determinant of the quality of person it supports. The people that lived next door in the same apartments before the creeps moved in were Section 8 and they were fabulous, kind, community-oriented people.

   Overall, the article did not seem to go out of it’s way to dig up dirt. And it seemed balanced regarding positive aspects too. But crime & drugs can be an undeniable real factor in certain pockets of Bushwick.

7. Jeremy Sapienza January 21st, 2009 at 11:53 am

   The headline is about Bushwick’s “Big Sickness” — which is more like an annoying sniffle now compared to the SARS it had a couple decades ago. That was the issue I had — yes, Bushwick has problems, but it makes them sound like they just got here.

   Section 8 may indeed “let in” (it’s more like keeps in) all the “riffraff,” but it will never bring the effects of the projects, which are just a complete human disaster area no matter where they are, with few exceptions. That’s one bellyache Bushwick is saved — we only have a few hundred units of public housing.