Wednesday Linkster

And you believed what a teenage girl said of the cell phne was literally true? NYC projects continued to be run much better than others throughout the country and indeed have a waiting list to get in. They represent a social investment which we could never replicate now. The economic segrergation suggested by 10:12 where s/he would relegate the poor to the periferies of the cities in privaely owned bantustans is precisely the situation the projects were built to rememdy. Also segregating the poor hasn’t worked all that well in Paris, has it? A more perfect system would have been smaller buildings scattered throughout middle class neighhborhoods, but methinks that he first poster wouldn’t really like that either. Also if the majority of project residents are precisely the kind of people we want as neighbors – hardworking, etc, then why shouldn’t they be punished to satisfy the poster’s Fort Apache the Bronx fantasies? I do hear that there exists a place where zoning laws are devised to create a mono-class housing stock. It is called the suburbs (and even those have been under attack by court rulings which suggerst that all communities have to provide opportunities for housing for different economic classes).

Somebody had their Wheaties this morning. On a more practical level, there has been a turf war going on in the neighborhood ever since one of the resident kingpins went down in a hail of police bullets sometime last year. The precints have also lost some human intelligence capability with the recent retirement of some 20 year veterans who knew the neighborhood (and its miscreants) well. Although there has been more police presence, they appear to be very green (fresh out of the academy) and unwise to the nuances of the project blocks. They also seem to be relying on “presence” as a deterrent instead of attempting to ferret out illegal activity. This thing is cyclical. I remember intense activity between 1992 and 1996. I guess there is a new crop of teenagers with nothing constructive to do that will eventually be incarcerated or gunned down by a contemporary. I was walking down Hoyt Street near Warren last weekend and I overheard a young girl talking on her cell phone. She was saying “I don’t care about him anymore. He’s dead. He is going to be killed.”

With respect to the Warren Street issue and others of the same sort, the only REAL solution is to raze every single housing project in Downtown/Brownstone Brooklyn. Given the strong demographic trends occurring in gentrified Brooklyn, the demarcation between the “haves” and “have nots” could not be any wider. I personally do not think that the two can co-exist. Housing project residents are for the most part solid hard working people but a growing minority of this population segment is lawless, ruthless and very violent. Unfortunately, it is this anti-social/pathological culture that is taking over public housing communities to the point where they cannot be saved. As the past 50 years have proven, public housing does not work. It traps families into a vicious cycle of poverty, hopelessness and despair. In a form of negative selection, the most ambitious and law abiding members of this community (the best) leave at the first given opportunity leaving behind the bottom of the barrel (the worst), i.e., the unmotivated, poorly educated and condemned. No form of federal or state legislation can save these people and end the self-mutilation. The only hope of saving them is to save them from themselves and shut down public housing in NYC. Where will they live? They’ll figure it out like everyone else. Without the safety net of public housing perhaps these people will become more motivated and work harder to carve out a better future for themselves.