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July 6, 2013Gentrifying Into the Shelters
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
This past week, The New York Post reported on the sale of a two-bedroom loft in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn to a couple in exodus from what they regarded as the oppressive trendiness of the Lower East Side. The loft, just under 1,600 square feet, sold for what the paper said was a record-setting $1 million, the highest price, apparently ever, for the sale of an apartment in a neighborhood that two decades ago could claim one of the highest murder rates in the city.
Several months earlier, the brisk sale of properties in the area had reached another high point, when an 1885 Queen Anne townhouse designed by the active turn-of-the-century Brooklyn architects the Parfitt Brothers sold for more than $2 million, making it the most expensive residential real-estate sale in Bedford-Stuyvesant’s history, according to the Web site Brownstoner. Chic bars and restaurants proliferate now, leaving Bedford-Stuyvesant as much a refuge from trendiness as the South is a refuge from college football.
Those unburdened by skepticism about gentrification argue that it is an ample elevator, lifting up everyone: with renovations come the need for those to lay the subway tiles; with enotecas come the need for those to serve the verdicchio. And yet how often does the waitress pouring the wine in a marginal neighborhood look like someone rescued from grim financial despair rather than a slightly younger, and often more fashionable, version of the person drinking it? What has happened in Bedford-Stuyvesant does not easily comply with an optimistic view of transformation. Since 2005, according to the Department of Homeless Services, it has ranked among the city’s top five communities sending families into the shelter system, representing approximately 5 percent of all family shelter entrants.
What causes some poor families to fall into homelessness and others to sustain themselves, however precariously, is a difficult question that has challenged social scientists and policy makers for a long time. The vexing inquiry - the inevitable multivariate answers - have made targeted prevention a relatively new endeavor, despite how logical a solution it might seem. It was not until 2004 that the city initiated a program called Homebase, which went into neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant that send the greatest number of people into homelessness, with the goal of reducing it. Homebase has sought to keep at-risk families out of the shelter system and in their communities with emergency rental assistance, landlord mediation and links to social services.
This is a good idea - with a federal funding stream, at a time when federal money for subsidized housing has been drastically curtailed - but it has had only negligible success. Recently, the city released the results of a study it had conducted, which looked at the outcomes for a sample of 295 families, 150 of them in receipt of Homebase services and a control group of 145 that was not. Between 2010 and 2012, the families receiving services spent about 22.6 fewer nights in shelters on average than those that were not part of Homebase. Though this is a statistically significant result, it is hardly an impressive one, especially in light of the fact that the average stay for a family in the shelter system is now 13 months, up from 9 months in 2011, and the city is experiencing record levels of homelessness with 50,000 people, including 21,000 children, in shelters every night.
Is the current understanding of prevention too narrow? Do neighborhoods need to be stabilized long before so many families find themselves so close to the precipice? Reason would seem to say yes. The city’s self-analysis, conducted by various academics, places little credence in the impact of the housing market on homelessness. But a report released last month by the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness, a research and policy group, presents a convincing set of facts to defend the notion of causality.
Examining demographic data from Bedford-Stuyvesant and neighboring Brownsville, the study illustrates how those living in poverty might lose their ability to exist on limited resources when the fortunes of a neighborhood dramatically change. Between 2005 and 2010, the median rent, adjusted for inflation, swelled in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville by more than 22 percent, while the median household income of renters over that same period did not remotely keep pace. (In Bedford-Stuyvesant, the figure rose only 4.7 percent and in Brownsville, income decreased.)
What happens in a scenario like this one is that the poor are not simply competing with wealthier newcomers for limited housing; the poor are competing with one another. Given the west to east progression of gentrification in northern Brooklyn, the study concluded some faction of low-income residents priced out of Bedford-Stuyvesant have presumably moved to Brownsville, an even more depressed neighborhood, thus creating intense competition in a housing market for those least able to engage in it. Brownsville continues to rank among the communities sending the greatest number of families into the shelter system; public housing, despite its high concentration in the neighborhood, only serves a minority of residents.
The Democratic candidates running for mayor all understand that the city needs more affordable housing, and some have proposed innovative ways of paying for it. Nearly everyone agrees that the city needs to create more economic opportunity for those who have the least access to it. But there has been less conversation about how important economic diversity is to the health of neighborhoods. It is not simply that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, as the aphorism goes. The poor are poorer in isolation - and islands can be scary places.
E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com
This is something I've been wondering about in DC ever since watching a bunch of public housing get razed in favor of much nicer townhouses, down by the Stadium. Also, more tags if warranted.
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