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Its pretty well known for most readers of this board in terms of where the blighted areas in your MSA's central city are located. However, many suburban areas also present the same problems with vacant land, poverty, and more crime than what was originally planned. These places may include abandoned strip centers/office buildings that are all or mostly vacant, "dead malls", closed/abandoned businesses, run-down parks, ugly landscapes, and roads in lousy condition. So, please indentify which suburban locales in your metro area meet the most of the criteria listed above, and indicate how it compares/contrast to the blight inside city limits.
--Around NYC the worst ones I know of are in Essex county NJ, near Newark. Places like Irvington, Orange, and E. Orange are pretty run down and poor.
--Just north of the city Yonkers has its problems too, though it also has some very nice areas.
--Out in Long Island, Wyandanch, in Nassau County, is also a small low-income suburb. Though I haven't been there in years I understand its still pretty beat up.
East st.louis is the most blighted suburb in all of america. Look at the statistics for crime. its insane.
The suburbs that border st.louis's north side tend to be filled with crime but not abandonment. East st.louis is just crime and abandonment.
Most of the really blighted and problematic areas outside of the NYC limits are located within New Jersey:
- Almost all of Newark
- Almost all of East Orange
- City of Orange, NJ (excluding southern part)
- Almost all Irvington
- Plainfield (central)
- Parts of Asbury Park
- Greenville, Communipaw and Bergen-Lafayette areas of Jersey City
- Most of Paterson
- Union City
These are the more blighted neighborhoods of Long Island (but they're like babyfood compared to the other struggling areas of the NYC Metro):
- Most of Wyandanch (but there is a revitalization program in effect), much of Mastic Beach, the central neighborhood of North Bellport, the Central-North part of Hempstead Village and the lower number streets of Huntington Station.
There are some other Long Island suburbs incorrectly called "ghetto" by ppl of neighboring communities but when you drive through SOME of them then you would have ZERO clue that you were even in a [supposedly] rougher area since they have adequately maintained suburban homes and well-manicured lawns (Uniondale is the perfect example).
As for the Lower Hudson Valley and SW Connecticut. I know these places can be blighted:
- Parts of Stamford
- Parts of Bridgeport
- Poughkeepsie
- Newburgh (very dangerous little city)
(There might be more but i'm not too familiar with up there)
So to sum it up, the NYC area actually has VERY little issues with blight (due to high desirability) but the above areas have a higher frequency of that compared to all of the other areas in the region.
Last edited by LongIslandPerson; 06-26-2013 at 10:27 AM..
I can't think of any suburbs here in the Atlanta metro with alot of blight. We do have some hood suburbs though but I think most of our blight is just contained to a couple of neighborhoods just west and south of downtown.
Even the places mentioned above aren't blighted. True, these places have high crime, and many of the buildings are old and probably not well maintained. But that's not the same as blight. Blight is when you have large-scale abandonment of a city or neighborhood, where you can go block after block and see boarded up, vacant, crumbling buildings. Newark, the Oranges, Paterson, Greenville, etc. aren't like that. People live there, their populations are (for the most part) growing.
Whereas in East Orange, this residential block probably isn't "beautiful" and leafy green like most suburbs, but people live here. It's not abandoned and crumbling, and I can't think of (or find on street view) an area that is. https://maps.google.com/maps?q=East+...124.83,,0,2.46
I can think of small areas (maybe several areas of a block or two each) in Newark and Bridgeport where you have abandoned structures, but I can't think of anywhere in the metro area where you have whole neighborhoods that are vacant and crumbling.
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