In a multi-ethnic and immigrant neighborhood like Sunnyside, affordable and good quality housing is necessary to accommodate and to ensure the settlement and survival of Sunnyside’s diverse immigrant community. Sunnyside Gardens is a particularly important microcosm to look at in studying the intersection of the housing issue with immigrant lives. Sunnyside Gardens, a major residential development in the neighborhood, was a planned residential development built in the 1920s that sought to address the problems of lack of housing and housing inequality for working-class individuals, of which many were immigrants such as the Irish. The area consisted of a combination of well-constructed renter- and owner- occupied housing that was built cheaply and closely together to attain affordable prices and the creation of large shared courtyard gardens that would promote a strong sense of community. The social vision of Sunnyside Gardens allowed Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants and later, their descendents, to move from miserable conditions in crowded and expensive Manhattan to cheaper, larger, and better housing. Although Sunnyside Gardens was unfortunately unable to reach the lowest-income earners, it did gather the working-class and the middle-class in the same area.
Through living in Sunnyside Gardens, immigrant residents partook in community-building activities in a nearly suburban environment. However, Sunnyside Gardens’ recent landmark designation might compromise the development’s traditional working- and middle-class roots, as costs of living tend to increase in landmarked areas. Current immigrant or immigrant-descended residents might not be able to continue living in Sunnyside Gardens while future immigrant home-buyers or renters will be deterred by the area’s high prices and move elsewhere. Should this occur, Sunnyside Gardens would not only lose the distinctiveness and vision with which its designers imbued but Sunnyside as a whole would also risk losing a good portion of present and future immigrants and therefore its diversity. The loss of diversity in its population would represent huge losses in Sunnyside’s cultural capital – there is far less enrichment to be gained through regular contact with different peoples and people become all the less enlightened for it. Without good affordable housing, immigrants cannot live and thrive, and neighborhoods only lose from their departure.
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