Nestled between the high-rise brick buildings of the Bushwick Houses is a chlorine oasis: Bushwick’s own public pool, aptly named Bushwick Pool. I was unaware of a pool in the area until my roommate, who works for the Parks Department, informed me of one’s existence. So, on Tuesday, I headed over to the projects on Bushwick and Flushing to go check it out.

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I got a letter from HPD today inviting Bushwick residents to a seminar on bedbugs, “including how to recognize them, prevent infestation, and eliminate them from the home.” The meeting is Wednesday, March 12 from 6-8PM at 195 Linden Street at the Hope Gardens projects. Hm, I thought the idea was to avoid infestations.

New York City Councilman Tony Avella hearts parking lots.

New Yorkers never fail to set my eyes rolling. Their reverse-provincial, insulated expectations of what life is and more importantly, what the government should do for them, just keeps on amusing. Take this Queens Ledger (or is it the Brooklyn Downtown Star?) article about Graham Avenue business owners complaining that the City is getting rid of a public parking lot so that affordable housing can be built on it. Mind you, there will still be parking, there will just be less of it and it won’t be damn near free.

Ahmed Khan, owner of Sneaker Spot, said customers will not come if they have to park ten blocks away. “If you don’t give [them] parking in front of [or] behind the store, nobody shops.”

The Sneaker Spot? We’re quickly disabused of the idea that this might be a strip of bafflingly expensive vintage clothing boutiques and raw vegan restaurants. Graham Avenue isn’t luxurious, it’s a dump — so it’s not the wealthy driving these cars. No, in North Brooklyn, it’s the so-called poor who drive. Consider that they are the ones who will (supposedly) benefit from this affordable housing development, and this starts to become a real head-scratcher. Just a thought, but, maybe if these families got rid of their 2 or 3 cars per household, they could afford market rent like the rest of us. Ever taken a walk or a bike ride through the projects? The parking lots and side streets are full of shiny new cars. For the record, the very few “hipster” “trustfunders” (derogatory terms for stylish, employed young white people) I know who have cars drive shitbox beaters. But I digress.

Apparently, affordable housing isn’t enough, this city now needs affordable parking for the minority of residents who drive. And allegedly, these doubtlessly fat, lazy ass people who won’t walk a few blocks are who keep the merchants of Graham Avenue in business.

[City] councilman [Tony Avella] remarked that if a commercial area becomes blighted, it affects the rest of the neighborhood. “If stores can’t make it and you start to close, residential areas are affected because now there’s no place to shop.”

His argument is that Graham Avenue will, uh, become blighted, and presumably that this will make the surrounding, uh, pristine residential areas less desireable. Hey Councilman, you ever heard of gentrification? There aren’t exactly a lot of downward pressures on Brooklyn real estate these days. Remember the affordable housing scheme that was the excuse for you coming to East Williamsburg to pander to voters and make it look like you’re doing something valuable? After all, it’s the only reason you care about — and likely even know the existence of — some scrap of city-owned asphalt. Get your head out of the 1970s. What’s next, tax breaks for fried chicken joints and stores that sell $8 pairs of jeans on the sidewalk?

Every other thriving retail strip in Brooklyn, no matter what economic segment it serves, does just fine without city-owned parking lots, and in some cases without any parking at all. What’s so special about Graham Avenue?

Last Saturday, I had the good fortune to attend the walking tour of Bushwick that Jeremy advertised in an earlier posting. Led by Adam Schwartz, curator of the Up From Flames exhibition at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the tour also featured fascinating commentary by John A. Dereszewski, who was a community leader in Bushwick during the worst of the arson and looting of ‘77.

Some walking tours have the feel of a not-particularly-exciting history dissertation, but this was not one of them. Schwartz and Co. mainly focused on the turbulent history of the neighborhood, from the slow decline of the late 60s and early 70s to the rejuvenation that followed in the wake of the crack epidemic and the inevitable gentrification that seems to be the fate of many a Brooklyn neighborhood.

Though we did not visit some fairly notable sites like St. Barbara’s Church (one of New York’s greatest houses of worship, in my opinion), the tour explored neighborhood stalwarts like the Hope Gardens housing project, described as “highly successful,” and the reorganized Bushwick High School, both of which point to better things for the residents of Bushwick. At the same time, the hideous condo development on Grove St., which was another stop on the tour, suggests that many of these residents won’t be around to enjoy the improving quality of life.

I am not a resident of Bushwick, but I do work here, and I am very curious about what readers think the future holds in store. Will the new residents and those who survived Bushwick’s lowest points find a balance, as has been the case in Fort Greene (where I reside) and Ditmas Park (where I used to teach)? Or will the tide of new development simply erase the past — as it has in Puerto Rican pockets of Park Slope or countless ethnic neighborhoods in Manhattan?
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Borinquen Plaza, East Williamsburg

Have to admire the New York Sun’s ability to spin an editorial into a news story. On May 15, they made decent arguments (I disagree with a few items not worth getting into) for a wholesale give-away of New York’s public housing units to the people who live in them. Then this morning, after a week of poking around town searching for quotes from economists and social workers, the Sun published an article demonstrating support for last week’s editorial’s demands and assertions.

It’s fun to see this because I have been saying this for a while. The projects, built in the wake of the city’s program of “slum clearance” from the 30s to the 50s, and then with some built after parts of the city, including Bushwick, burned down in the 60s and 70s, have ironically remained the only slums left in this entire city of 8 million. Slum-like properties that are not city-owned are always directly adjacent to those that are. I advocate just handing the current residents a deed to their unit, and having the city withdraw from providing housing altogether. The article goes into the pros and cons, so I won’t restate them here. I do have one addition to the “pro” camp that nobody seems to be addressing: future affordable housing stock once the current inventory is converted to market-rate property.

What will happen to the poorest of the workers in the city — those who do the most menial jobs which require no skills? How will they afford housing in the city if they’re making typical unskilled wages? As with any product, when demand for labor rises but supply of labor does not, labor prices rise. In New York, everyone can agree there is a high demand for maids, janitors, drivers, and other no- or low-skill jobs. Hourly wages here are already slightly higher than most areas of the country — much higher percentagewise than the federal minimum wage.

What would happen to these workers if their housing converted to market-rate? Would they all immediately leave the city workerless: floors unmopped, beds unmade, shelves unstocked? Of course not, the idea is ridiculous — their labor would simply also revert to market-rate, whatever that may be in a city where a normal apartment costs $2000. If you think the rich will go without their domestic help, you are living in a fantasy world. And that brings me to my final point — public housing is in part an indirect subsidy for the richest among us. Sure, we all rely on people working unskilled and hourly jobs to keep the city running at its most basic levels. But the wealthy simply use more labor than the middle class. Mandating cheaper-than-market housing makes it easier for the rich to continue to pay a pittance for labor, instead of what it truly costs to maintain a decent labor force in New York City.

We’ll all still ultimately pay in the wake of significantly higher wages, this is true, but we will pay only the exact amount we rely on the labor of the unskilled. There’s no doubt this is much more efficient than involving massive, expensive bureaucracies to do what the market does on its own: keep workforce housing in the city, like it does in every other city without public housing.

Incidentally, I’m well aware there are quite a few physically and mentally sound people in subsidized housing who don’t work at all. That should be ended even if the city stays in the housing business. And yeah, I know they will make out like the bandits they are if they are handed a piece of property that may be worth millions. Did they earn it? No. But then again, living in them for any length of time might be payment enough. Get rid of the projects. Everyone will be better off.

UPDATE: Haha, the Sun considers this post evidence of building momentum.

More support for the Sun’s plan to give public housing tenants their apartments comes from, of all places, Bushwick, Brooklyn…

BMT Myrtle Line: Central Avenue, 1952 — from nycsubway.org

Once upon a time, Bushwick was part of Brooklyn. Bushwickers could get to our own downtown on a train without going through Manhattan or Williamsburg. And then in 1969, it was over, and they knocked the Myrtle elevated down, save for a bit of ghost trusses for a few hundred feet west of Broadway. Of course now that most traffic-generating buildings on western Myrtle have been bulldozed for projects or burned down, the bus shoots down the road and you’re downtown in 15 minutes. Problem solved!

I can’t tell if Robert Moses had anything to do with the destruction of this particular line, but let’s just blame him, ok? I’m sure the evidence is out there, I just don’t have to time to look it up. Actually, it’s easy to blame one man — and Moses was a whopper of a man, no doubt — but he was working in a time and within an administration that thought lightly of moving hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings around like pawns in a civilizational chess match. The 20th Century was a time of previously unsurpassed totalitarianism, mostly abroad, but the philosophy reared its head here in the States, too. And so the majority of New York’s transportation and housing problems stem from the damage the philosophy of top-down urban planning did to our city. That was substantial damage, and we are still recovering.

Anyway, enjoy the photo and think back to a time when there was an entire rail line just to take people from Bushwick and Ridgewood to the beach!

This is the first I have heard of Habitat for Humanity building multifamily homes, and I have to say it’s pretty cool. Housing subsidies and projects only perpetuate the cycle of poverty — 70 years of public housing and are there any less people on assistance?…and for that matter, how many generations of the same family get assistance? Usually when something doesn’t work for seven decades, you try something else. Habitat homes can break this entitlement cycle and work people back into the economy as workers and property owners.

Let’s bring some of this into Bushwick!

Ownership Projects? May 1, 2007

Anything is better than rental housing projects, so I guess I should be thankful that that isn’t what’s going in at 99-105 Central Avenue — across the street from my house. According to online info, the buildings are owned by Ridgewood Bushwick Homesteading Assistance Housing and a developer that used HUD’s 203K program, of which I am only vaguely familiar (I have heard of it). I think they’re likely to be low-income coops…something I’m not thrilled about but like I said, it could be worse.

I much prefer the Habitat for Humanity model: the homeowners get a loan for a cheap house, and then they have to help build that house and promise to help build a house for others in the future. If they sell their house at a profit, they have to share the profits with Habitat. It’s a win-win-win for the homeowner, the organization, and the taxpayers/neighbors, who aren’t forced to pay for neighbors who attack them and ruin their property. In fact, people who live in Habitat homes are more likely to be the most self-driven and hard-working among the poor.

Let’s end public housing, once and for all. We have seen the ills it causes and harbors. It’s a poor alternative to private efforts. Besides, the City bulldozed tens of thousands of housing units to build…tens of thousands of housing units. It’s a bit ironic, though not unexpected, that in an effort to clear slums they have created pretty much the only slums left in New York.

Anyway, anybody know what the deal is here? And what’s going in the commercial spaces on the corner? Please be a good restaurant or coffee shop!