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The city did not become a slum by accident. It became a slum as part of a scam to milk the taxpayers for millions and move working class whites out of the city and to places like Leavitown. In the whites place moved even cheaper labor/taxpayer funded welfare recipients. With cheaper labor in place more wealth is shifted to the upper classes. Bankers like Harry Bernstein and his cabal made millions off the destruction of neighborhoods like Bushwick and left a 30 year trail of ashes, crime and corpses.
In a five-year period in the late 1960's and early 70's, the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn was transformed from a neatly maintained community of wood houses into what often approached a no man's land of abandoned buildings, empty lots, drugs and arson.
Its largely Italian and German working-class residents fled in droves, and under the most arduous conditions, a new population of black and Hispanic people took their place. Many stores, schools and churches closed. Little of widespread positive impact opened.
Broad economic and social conditions help explain the change that afflicted many neighborhoods. But in Bushwick and many of its sister communities in Brooklyn, there was also a more immediate cause - a $200 million Federal Housing Administration mortgage scandal.
I read it, and it was an excellent book. Detailed what has happened to our cities (and it talks about lots of different cities in the USA, not just NYC, where the same pattern of white flight to the suburbs and the resulting crumbling inner-city occurred). The author is Ray Suarez who is (was?) a radio host on NPR and a former resident of Bensonhurst.
Oh, yeah, read Jonathan Mahler's "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bronx is Burning". He goes into Bushwick in detail.
He also assigns part blame Robert Kennedy's Bed-Stuy Restoration program. Kennedy, according to him, used predominantly Black Bed Stuy as the model of community redevelopment. During the time of the funding, neighboring Bushwick badly needed similar funds. But since Bushwick was still predominanty white (Italian and German) at the time of the funding (mid sixties), the neighborhood was rejected. Bushwick, therefore, missed out! And when the neighborhood did became predominantly Black and Latino, it was too late!
I read it, and it was an excellent book. Detailed what has happened to our cities (and it talks about lots of different cities in the USA, not just NYC, where the same pattern of white flight to the suburbs and the resulting crumbling inner-city occurred). The author is Ray Suarez who is (was?) a radio host on NPR and a former resident of Bensonhurst.
well, if the man's from b-hurst, you know i just bought the book on amazon!
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