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I'm not particularly interested in your statistical analysis or comparisons to abject hellholes. You can't say a place isn't ghetto just because it isn't Trenton, or New Orleans, or inner-city Baltimore. Take a drive around North Bellport and try telling me it isn't "the hood"
Those aren't neighborhoods in South Camden or the West Ward of Newark, but you do need to have some common sense to be in those areas, but the point is that there are people who may consider it "the hood" and others who don't.
The areas that many ppl on Long Island would consider "ghetto" actually have much low poverty rates COMPARED to actual ghettoes throughout the US (and even to the US average):
Poverty rates of the "lesser-regarded" LI communities:
Brentwood: 8.7%
Riverhead: 14.1%
Central Islip: 10.1%
Wyandanch: 15.3%
Uniondale: 8.7%
Hempstead: 16.2%
New Cassel: 17.5%
North Amityville: 12.0%
Freeport: 12.7%
North Bellport: 14.1%
Roosevelt: 14.0%
Huntington Station: 10.1%
United States Overall Poverty Rate: 14.3%
New York City Overall Poverty Rate: 19.4%
Nassau County(Long Island) Overall Poverty Rate: 5.2%
Suffolk County(Long Island) Overall Poverty Rate: 5.7%
Poverty rates of ACTUAL ghettoes throughout the country:
Camden, NJ: 38.4%
Detroit, MI: 36.2%
Paterson, NJ: 27.1%
Gary, IN: 35.9%
Cleveland, OH: 32.6%
Atlantic City, NJ: 29.3%
Brownsville, TX: 35.4%
Newark, NJ: 26.1%
East St. Louis, MO: 26.0%
Buffalo, NY: 29.9%
Miami, FL: 27.7%
Flint, MI: 38.2%
I agree. The appearance of a community says alot. If there's guys hanging around getting drunk, grafitti, boarded up buildings, and garbage everywhere it is a ghetto. Even if you don't hear alot about crime, much goes unreported. Also a ghetto may not make up an entire town but just a street or two. Some of LI's ugliest areas are places like Straight Path by the tracks, Depot Road in Huntington, Route 112 in the vicinity of the Port Jeff LIRR, Railroad Ave Riverhead, Union Avenue in New Cassel, and I'm sure there's worse. I'm baffled as to why areas around LIRR stations are worse parts, since being close to the station should be desirable, but I guess it is, to the thugs and loiterers. What gets me is that it doesn't have to be this way. Many ghettos exist due to illegal rental housing. Illegal aliens, drug addicts, gang members are often drawn in to renting in these flophouses. This has been a problem in New Cassel, and the Town of North Hempstead does nothing about it. They fixed up Prospect but you go just a block south and there are boarding houses with garbage and run down cars all over the place. If the rooming houses were shut down, the criminals wouldn't be able to live there. Generally families and couples don't commit crime, so owner occupied homes would mean lower crime and the incentive to make the property look appealing, making the area more desirable. Why is that such a difficult concept? But that's right, the elected officials who swear to uphold laws are paid off to look the other way. Perhaps if they were forced to "live in the ghetto" they'd be motivated to do something about it.
Last edited by nancy thereader; 07-01-2013 at 12:45 PM..
I agree. The appearance of a community says alot. If there's guys hanging around getting drunk, grafitti, boarded up buildings, and garbage everywhere it is a ghetto. Even if you don't hear alot about crime, much goes unreported. Also a ghetto may not make up an entire town but just a street or two. Some of LI's ugliest areas are places like Straight Path by the tracks, Depot Road in Huntington, Route 112 in the vicinity of the Port Jeff LIRR, Railroad Ave Riverhead, Union Avenue in New Cassel, and I'm sure there's worse. I'm baffled as to why areas around LIRR stations are worse parts, since being close to the station should be desirable, but I guess it is, to the thugs and loiterers. What gets me is that it doesn't have to be this way. Many ghettos exist due to illegal rental housing. Illegal aliens, drug addicts, gang members are often drawn in to renting in these flophouses. This has been a problem in New Cassel, and the Town of North Hempstead does nothing about it. They fixed up Prospect but you go just a block south and there are boarding houses with garbage and run down cars all over the place. If the rooming houses were shut down, the criminals wouldn't be able to live there. Generally families and couples don't commit crime, so owner occupied homes would mean lower crime and the incentive to make the property look appealing, making the area more desirable. Why is that such a difficult concept? But that's right, the elected officials who swear to uphold laws are paid off to look the other way. Perhaps if they were forced to "live in the ghetto" they'd be motivated to do something about it.
Believe it or not, there are community reinvestment act dollars flowing to New Cassel, but even those "brave folks" who go there say it's difficult to commit dollars to a town where all of what you described resides down the next block or one avenue over. You also need to attract working people there as opposed to street entreprenaurs. The railroad stations are magnets for loiterers, because for the price of an LIRR ticket or some panhandling you can be mobile and take the train from one bad town to the next. You find that in LI, NYC, NJ, CT - rail and bus stations are magnets for transient type people.
There are many things in local history that most are un-aware of, or they do not want you to know.
All of this takes place in the 1950's lasting until almost 1970's, and still have lasting effects to this day.
President LBJ's Top aides came to Riverhead and deemed that the Warner Duck Farm was among the worst slum conditions in the nation. Worse then what they had seen in Appalachia, DC or Harlem. There was 2 other Slum areas in riverhead and one in nearby Riverside (most of you know-not where this is).
The only other slum conditions in Suffolk county were located in Bridgehampton, Greenport, Center Moriches and Bay shore. I have the exact news links, locations of these area that no longer exist (urban renewal) if anyone wants to know.
Riverhead had the largest slums and most deplorable conditions. 900 families lived in 300 tar paper and corrugated metal shacks no bigger than a typical shed bunched together in rows with no street names at the Duck farm. Another 300 people lived in 2 other smaller slums in Riverhead. There was no running water, or bathrooms. Kerosene heaters supplied heat and many people died in slum fires.
DOES THAT COUNT ENOUGH AS A SLUM FOR YOU ALL?
Back in the past, Riverhead had the highest population of minorities in suffolk county. Migrant workers and run away slaves populated these labor camps and shanty-towns. Migrant workers still have a huge part in the Riverhead / Southampton border area (some call Flanders but Riverside really) who live in the cracks of society. There are still plenty of homeless laborers that are invisible to modern Long Islanders.
The Warner Duck Farm has been turned into Indian Island Park, a golf course and a county preserve. Another Riverhead Slum (named the Bottom) had the central school district built on top of them. The people from the slums were moved into 4 neighborhoods, 2 apartment complexes and houses in Brookhaven town especially North Bellport. Most of the Migrant workers were Duck farm employees or Potato camp employees and gunfire and murder incidents to this day in these sections total way over 100 incidents that i could rattle off the top of my head. All of them are researchable by local news reports.
No one likes to admit worse conditions East of the town there in. The common mentality is that the closer to NYC you are the more dangerous the hood you are in. I look at it as the further East, the less people know about the real struggles the extremely poor face.
Thanks for your time if you read this, and please look this stuff up!
Each level of the economic chain has a name for themselves.
Poor
Low Income
Middle Class
Wealth
Rich
Ghetto.
Slums
You can name a thousand more . People separate themselves by these names just so they can feel better. If there were only one income and race. We would somehow separate each other. The bottom line we are all equal with different life experiences.
Anyone who thinks there are any slums/ghettos on LI have never been to an actual slum/ghetto. The only parts of LI closely resembling it are housing project areas which are a mere few blocks and otherwise surrounded by middle class homes. Even LI's housing projects are nicer and safer than most urban housing projects and LI's worst schools still vastly outperform national averages.
Even the worst project building can not be compared to the the slums that once stood in the above mentioned locations in Eastern Suffolk. Called by top US aides "on par or worse then slums in Appalachia, DC, Baltimore, and Harlem" and that was about the Warner Duck Farm Slums. Newsday called it "the worst slum between here and Buffalo". So it is a recorded historical fact that there were extreme slum conditions in Suffolk counties history.
There were other small slum sections in other Suffolk townships, ALL SHACKS. All together in rows with no streets, lighting, plumbing, heat. NO police! No taxes, no food or money. No welfare - Just Death, Labor and cheap swill. Can you explain how those conditions do not qualify?
Granted i am not speaking about modern times - but lets not ignore our Suffolk county history. Nassau had very many slum pockets as well, and there is a map i will try to find, but i am only familiar with the few large ones in suffolk.
Were talking about corrugated metal walls, tar paper roofs, no running water, no bathrooms and no heat - only a kerosene heater that is likely to explode at some point. You basically live in an outdoor hovel. Suffolk's slum conditions were compared to the Slum condition in the South at the time. This is in the pre-civil rights era when blacks were not treated as equal human beings. Riverhead was a place were Black laborers could work and live - undetected by society. That is until the white people decided to bulldoze the slums and create housing for the occupants nearer to the 1970's. Government did not pay anyone assistance in these slums - Unlike today!
Could you actually name these areas that you think none of us have traveled to?
i'm just saying, allot of us have traveled around this country and have passed through some pretty bad areas. Also i am so used to hearing that 'you have never been to a ghetto'. tell us where these slums and ghettos are first - then we will tell you if we have been there and we can make up our own minds.
Lastly, statistics mean little when you can not attest for unreported persons, actions and properties. They are simply not recordable by conventional methods.
Are there any slum conditions on Long Island in modern times? The answer is maybe. But our common use of the term is used to describe a run down neighborhood with bullets flying and extreme poverty - not the above described Life in a shack amongst others in shacks, without a pot to **** in - literally.
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Real slums are rows of shacks
