a farewell and some thoughts on faithful presence

I've heard a few sermons on Christian duty to the city. Tim Keller is big on this, people trying to build churches here are big on this. But even apart from religious duty I think there's a compelling point to be made about it--people do use cities for what they need them for and then leave them. Urban communities are disjointed because most of their members are transient. And this is part of what makes gentrification so poignant--the percentage of people living here that are planning to stay longterm is a lot lower than it was pre-gentrification. People are moving in, accidentally forcing other people out, and then those people are going to leave in a few years. My native-Crown Heights neighbors were born here and wanted to die here. My transplant neighbors were born in suburbia and probably don't want to die there, but probably will. 

The city serves as a stepping stone--school going, early career building, single years enjoying--before real life begins. Family life and the longing for a bathroom with two sinks calls us out into the great beyond. And neighborhoods like mine serve as a stepping stone as well. People come here to chase low rent, new bars, the next hip thing. But when they graduate, get promoted, start their startup, payoff their student loans--it's off to Manhattan or California or Montana. 

Sometimes I get weird looks when I talk to my Crown Heights native neighbors at length. Their friends don't expect it, and then they're either annoyed or intrigued. Sometimes they ask--What do you do? I tell them I'm in school. They say, Oh, you're going to be a doctor? A lawyer? What you going to be? I tell them I'm studying the arts (ugh, so disappointing). And they say think a moment then come up with something like, Oh you're gonna write a book. You're gonna be successful, and then you're gonna get the hell out of here. Always, they end with, success and the hell out of here.

And they're right. That's what we do with places like Crown Heights, like New York. There's no better place to study the arts than in New York, but there are a hell of a lot of other places to settle down and raise a family. Places without graffiti and urine everywhere, places without flu-friendly subway poles and buildings-wide lingerie ads. 

When I hear those sermons about a calling to the city--to cities in general, not just New York--I've always known it wasn't directed at me. I never imagined I'd live here longterm. I never imagined I'd live here at all until I was practically packing my bags. 

I'm moving away on Friday. It's likely that I'll never live here again--not in Crown Heights, not in New York. While I lived here, I saved a lot of rent money and cost of living money. I experienced new things. I drank locally roasted coffee and locally brewed beer. But I'm really glad that's not all I did.

As I pack my bags again to leave, to really leave, I feel a sense of guilt from the responsibility I feel to my community here. I feel like I'm being that kind of person: the person that drains the city of its resources and then packs them in my luggage and smuggles them out the Lincoln Tunnel. But at the same time I'm grateful for that guilt, specifically for the element of it that comes from the opportunity Crown Heights gave me to care. Living amid gentrification, poverty, and racial tension has lent me a sensitivity I didn't know before, to the importance of everyday actions--a hello on the street, a smile at the register, a name added to a familiar face--and the ability those actions have to build unity within a group of people who don't necessarily have to speak to one another. That sensitivity has allowed me to become attached to this place, and to the energy in the streets, rather than the coolness of the latest new shop. 

crown heights mural

Street art in Crown Heights is big--it's everywhere, it's overtly opinionated, it's impossible to ignore. This is (half of) one of my favorite murals. The multi-ethnic Brooklyn bridge, the airplane banner that reads: THE PEACE ZONE FRONTIER // CROWN HEIGHTS // One Love Supreme. I wrote about this mural for a class after seeing only this portion of it (the bottom half was covered by a community garden). It seemed to communicate a hopefulness, by way of movement within multi-ethnic unity, from the globe to the neighborhood.

**The bottom half opens up a new can of worms, a can left by the artist himself of course, but there's a part of me that still holds my initial interpretation dear when I walk by.

as i gentrify

I talked to a woman last spring who, after only a few minutes, began talking about those gentrifiers and how she wouldn't want to go to the same birth classes as them. I felt naked when she said that--I'm a gentrifier in that sense, if I were pregnant, I would be the woman she'd be avoiding. We met at  my church. It was Easter Sunday. She invited me to her house for lunch. When I declined out of uncomfortability, I felt like she wasn't surprised. I was just a gentrifier after all. Or a white girl. Or whatever. I spent the rest of that afternoon alone, cleaning my apartment, probably eating rice or a kale salad out of a tupperware container.

***

I talked to a friend of mine a couple of months ago, on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. It was the time of sukkot, and many Jewish men were carrying around the branches to hold and ask Jewish people to pray with them. During this time, they approach as many people as possible asking Are you Jewish? My friend and I had been standing together for a while, when two young Jewish men walked up and asked me, only me, directly: Are you Jewish? I'm not Jewish, I told them that, and then Mary looked at me and said, Now why didn't they ask me? She laughed almost immediately, made a joke about there being no black Jews in the world, and then turned a little grim: They're just coming in here to buy up our buildings buildings and gentrify everything. She paused for a second and then: Oh, you're not like them though, you're different, you see us. You're not like the rest of them people moving in around here. 

***

Before I moved here, a friend of mine told me of the day he moved into the neighborhood three years prior. He and his roommates moved in on Labor Day, which in Crown Heights means the West Indian Day Parade. They moved in all their stuff, set up their apartment a bit and set out to look for their new neighborhood bar. They walked out of their building and found that their whole block was within police lines because three people had been shot--gang violence started it, police weaponry ended it, and a ricocheted bullet left one uninvolved woman dead on her stoop. A year after I moved a girl my age was mugged and robbed of her cell phone and empty wallet. The Upper East Side woman I worked for at the time warned me about Brooklyn.

***

Gentrification really refers to the process of purchasing property and renovating it in order to make more money. Technically speaking, I'm not a gentrifier. But I am the demand to which the gentrifiers respond, and when I walk down the street, strangers see me as synonymous with it.

When I moved into Crown Heights, I had never heard of gentrification before. All I knew was that campus housing was too expensive, and that Crown Heights was off of the train lines that led straight to my school and my work. I don't remember at this point the first time I learned the word, but I do know that it gave me mixed feelings:

Gentrification means new bars and coffee shops opening for me. It means old shops closing for others. It means rising rents for others, lower rents for me. It means loss of local history to those who have been here for years. For me, it means new beginnings. It means a cultural experience for me, who grew up in the segregated suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. But it means whitewashing to my neighbors.

So where do I put my guilt? Where do I put my gratitude? Where do others put their frustration? To whom do they point their righteously, sadly angry fingers?

crown heights in numbers

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote for The Empire State Tribune about NYC's Department of Health's recent community health profiles release. Every few years, the DOH releases information about each NYC neighborhood's community health--life expectancy, pollution levels, causes of death, demographics.

They organize the stats in really nice infographics, each area with it's own PDF, and each stat is compared to borough-wide and city-wide averages. This year, Crown Heights was grouped together with Prospect Heights, which is the area that lies on the other side of Franklin Avenue from where I've been writing this blog. This is interesting in the sense that Prospect Heights is a good representation of what Crown Heights is looking like more and more everyday. So the stats are almost weighted back a few years for Prospect and forward a few years for Crown Heights. But in the sense that the two neighborhoods are vastly different places at this point, with a distinct shift in overall feeling as soon as you cross from one into the other, these numbers might be a little misleading.

Nonetheless, here were are:

Nearly 98,000 people live in Crown Heights. Sixty-four percent of us are black, eighteen percent are white, twelve percent are hispanic, three percent asian, three percent other. Most of us are between ages 25 and 44, our air pollution is slightly higher than the city's average, and we have significantly less supermarket square-footage per 100 people. Twenty percent of us didn't graduate from high school (which is very near the city-wide average). Twenty-seven percent of us live below the poverty line (which is six percent more than the city-wide average). Our rates of teen-pregnancy are notably higher than the average, as are our rates of elementary absenteeism. Our incarceration rates are high. One-third of us are obese, which isn't that different from averages. An alarmingly high number of us are hospitalized for alcohol-related care each year.


The point that the DOH Commissioner Mary Basset made from the data was that people living in low-income areas, such like our nearby neighborhood Brownsville, are dying a lot sooner, but from the same causes as everyone else. She used the data to argue that we should take responsibility for the general health of our communities and work hard to encourage each other to live healthfully, in whatever capacity we can.

But the studies also provide us with a numerical picture of gentrification, at the most basic level. The last time the DOH released community health profiles was in 2006--the area Crown Heights was grouped into was called "Central Brooklyn." It covered an area more than twice the size of the 2015 report's grouping, and according to it, Crown Heights looked a lot different than it does nine years' worth of gentrification later: the neighborhood was 80% black, 11% hispanic, 5% white, 3% other, 1% asian. The shifts in demographics alone attest to the huge, rapid shift in the culture here. (Of course, gentrification is not just a racial shift, but in a country and city that are still incredibly segregated, the process of gentrification tends to be color-coded.) The rest of the shifts--dropping unemployment rate, dropping violent crime rate, dropping premature death rate, etc--also can be traced back to gentrification. And those shifts are what make the whole thing so messy.

The 2006 report repeats on nearly every page the tagline Take Care New York or Take Care Brooklyn. They organized the information by goals for taking care: have a regular doctor, be tobacco-free, make your home safe and healthy. By statistics alone, it looks as though we've improved in some of these areas. That's why when I talk to Crown Heights natives about the changes, their first responses might be, Things are getting better, it's a lot safer around here. But in reality,  the poverty and tobacco use and unemployment and crime hasn't actually decreased. It's just moved: further into Brooklyn or further into prison.

Gentrification is bittersweet because of the loss of familiarity, the loss of what home has meant to so many for so long. But it's also bittersweet because what looks like progress is actually just a sweeping-under-the-rug solution and a regrouping of neighborhood areas for our community health profiles.

Country, Part III: How He Became Homeless

As I got to know Country more and more, seeing him on my block everyday, I was repeatedly surprised by his kindness, intelligence and hardworking nature. I wondered, as we all do when we see people in harsh situations, how in the world he got to where he was.

Country's story, his journey to homelessness, emerged over many conversations--a recap of his thirties one day, his fifties another, a story from his time in the Marines, a reference to his time in the South. It took me a long time to get the timeline right, but I think I've finally filled in most of the gaps:

Country was born to two loving, hardworking parents in Tallahassee, Florida. His mother gave birth to twenty-one children, all by the same man. And his father was kind--last December I listened as Country told of his father's love for Christmas and gift giving and of how the holidays are mostly sad for him ever since he passed away.

Country's late teens and twenties were filled with activism and activity: he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery and met a woman along the way, he made that woman his wife (and she was white, which was significant in the South in the 1960's), and they had eleven children. He joined the Marines and describes the birth of his eleven children as surprises that he came home to after long stints at sea--I'd come home and see another one in the cradle and say, what the hell is that?

But when he was forty-five, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. Her death devastated him. He had poured his savings and his credit line into treatments that didn't work. And now he was a widower. He remained in Florida for a few years, until his youngest child, a son, was out of the house, but then he moved up to Brooklyn, to reconnect with friends and look for a new start. If my math is right, this was around 1991 or so, and Country was in his early fifties.

During the time in Florida after his wife's death, Country picked up some bad habits. He started drinking too much and hustling for extra money, committing minor crimes to make ends meet. So when he moved to Brooklyn, he wanted a new start, but he also needed a new start. And for a little while, he found it.

I'm going to stop here for a second and be honest--Country's love isn't always communicated with jokes and laughter. There's a side of him, a side that shines bright with the help of a little liquor, that communicates love through violence. When an apartment in my building was broken into, he slept on our stoop to prevent it from happening again, but he also said If I see that mother-expletive-er around here one more time, I'm gonna kill him dead right in the street. When his fiancee's brother gives her trouble, he threatens the old man's life, making reference to the skills he learned in the service. When the girl on Franklin Avenue got mugged, he kindly walked me to my door, but he also reminded me each time that he had my back and would break the neck of anyone who laid a hand on me. Especially when he's been drinking, the smallest conversational infraction can set him off against even one of his friends. Normally, it ends with the two men butting their chests against each other in loud, but harmless, competition, but the verbal threats are real-time and specific.

It's this kind of love, if we can keep calling it that, that brought Country to lay his head night after night in the space beneath my next door neighbor's front stairway.  Country had moved into a one-bedroom apartment about four blocks away from where I live now. He had begun working a construction job and lived here happily for four or five years. One day, while standing on Nostrand Avenue Country witnessed a young guy, around 18-years-old, run up to an elderly woman and grab her pocketbook out of her hand. The guy took off running, and Country followed. The guy turned corners, but Country outran him, tackled him, and got the pocketbook back. When he told me this story, Country's voice was solemn, and his tone was hushed. He wanted to tell it, but he didn't enjoy thinking about it. He described it something like this: When I stood back up, the guy's neck was broken. I had killed him. 

He was charged with manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was let out after seven or eight, and he's been homeless ever since. That was about ten years ago, and he's now 74 years old. His kids contact him by calling his friends' apartments that live nearby. They call to tell him when someone is getting married or when his youngest son passes away from a shooting or when his daughter passes away from a car accident or when his brother passes away from old age. They call to ask if he needs money or to try to convince him to move back to Florida and live with them. He tries to convince them that he's not homeless, that he's doing fine, that soon he'll be sending them money again.

About two months ago, Country proposed to the most angelic human being I've ever met. He saved up to buy her an engagement ring for $97 and sent in a request for copies of his birth certificate and social security card. Jerry is 65 years old, and she rolls her eyes at Country as he jokes and yells and laughs, but always concedes that she sure does love him anyway. They're planning to get married in the courthouse in December and move down to Georgia near her family sometime after that. Sometimes, when I come home late at night, they sit on my stoop as I walk by and don't even see me. They whisper sweet nothings to each other like this: It's just me and you, and nobody can't do nothing to change that. From here on out, it's me, and you, and I'm not gonna let anything happen to that. You hear that? It's just me and you, and we've gotta stick together.