Author Archives: michellecherian95

Neighborhood Observations: Red Hook

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I never really knew much about Red Hook before travelling there, so I didn’t particularly have many expectations or conceived notions about the area. Perhaps my first surprise was learning how difficult it was to actually reach Red Hook. The most common way to get to Red Hook is by taking the bus and walking further into the area. I decided to take the shuttle bus from Borough Hall to the IKEA and begin my observations around and within the building itself.

I reached the IKEA at around 5pm on February 18th. The streets themselves were pretty void of people except for those lining up to get on the bus or those who were walking into the store. I feel like this probably had a lot to do with the fact that it was freezing cold outside. Across from IKEA was a patch of green space in front of another building as well as a lot full of buses. Many of the lots that I could see from the distance had graffiti on the gates. IKEA actually seemed to contrast its surroundings quite a lot. It seemed to be a huge reason that people were coming to Red Hook in the first place. Most of the buildings that were within spotting distance from IKEA had “For Rent” signs and generally seemed like older buildings.

Since there weren’t many people outside, I decided to go inside of the store to see the different individuals that possibly lived around the area. I noticed there were a lot of families with young children in the stores, many Hispanic and Caucasian. There were also many couples in their twenties looking around. I don’t know how clearly these observations represent the population of the area since the main public transportation routes to Red Hook stopped right in front of the store. Many of the visitors of the store might possibly be from other areas.

By around 6pm, I decided to start walking further down Bread St. Most of the contents of the street confirmed the images that I saw from afar. The streets were mostly covered with older buildings in between large lots that were filled with buses, cars and the like. Again, I feel like the lack of individuals I saw wandering about most likely had to do with the fiercely cold weather. Although the area that I was walking through seemed slightly barren, I feel like there would be more people roaming about during summer or perhaps earlier in the day.

As I was taking the shuttle bus back to Borough Hall around 7pm, I saw a lot of apartment buildings clustered together, but I couldn’t clearly get the street names. The apartment buildings seemed to be in the same condition as most of the other buildings.

However, I feel like the most surprising thing about Red Hook, is the view. When you look far out into the distance, you can clearly see the Statue of Liberty and a really beautiful glimpse of the Verrazano Bridge.

Reading Response 3

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Mayor de Blasio’s new housing plan is merely building on Bloomberg’s plan of inclusionary zoning. Mayor de Blasio is setting up a plan that basically slightly addresses the major criticisms of the plan before it, by making more developers build inclusionary housing and creating better income targets. But how successful will his plan be? In his article “De Blasio’s Doomed Housing Plan,” Samuel Stein makes it clear that inclusionary zoning is not the best way to create affordable housing in the city. Instead of truly making a change to benefit those who need more affordable housing, de Blasio’s plan seems to focus more on keeping the capitalists happy while performing little improvements. Stein offers alternatives to inclusionary housing, such as building or obtaining public housing and maintaining it, making rent controlled apartments, or even community land trusts. Yet, Stein feels like these ideas are being pushed aside for the sake of politics.

Ritchie Torres and David R. Jones also bring up problems that already exist within the system, such as how the federal budget has been decreasing because of decisions made in Washington, how the NYCHA does not have to comply with the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, which allows for the community to take part in development decisions and how the NYCHA is exempt from any of the listings of local housing and building code violates.

Yes, the plan tries to answer the question of what to do about affordable housing, but there should be more of an emphasis on finding the best solution and not merely one that works.

Reading Response 2

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The real problem with how society deals with the homeless, I believe, is the social system itself. America has always been a place where society in general believed that we put ourselves in our own predicaments. So instead of helping the homeless, we have a school of thought that believes that the reason that people are homeless is their own behavior. As “Hidden City” explains that there is one philosophy that believes that homelessness is  caused by the attitude and the lack of character of the homeless, while others believe that the true problem is a lack of affordable places to live and a lack jobs with wages that support that rent. The bottom line is that we need to stop just thinking about personal choice being the only cause of homelessness and consider other factors such as: the presence of mental illness, a lack of family ties, the gap between the cost of living and the lack of jobs to meet those needs, just plain bad luck or just a combination of these things (Kleniewski 233). And as society’s thoughts on homelessness and its causes change, perhaps it would be easier to create policies that attack the causes of homelessness and not the individuals who are homeless.

Question: If we change society’s view of the causes of homelessness, would it be easier to enact policies that try to aid those who are homeless instead of enacting policies that try to hide the appearance of homelessness in every day urban life?

Reading Response 1

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Both readings “Theoretical Perspectives on the City” and Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community highlight the importance of perspective on urban sociology. In “Theoretical Perspectives on the City”, we see how researchers go through different paradigms, from urban ecology to urban political economy to postmodernism, when they “[ran] out of questions that they could answer using their theoretical framework” (32). Similarly, Gregory states the different theories that come across when trying to explain what cultivates the subculture that exists in the African-American inner-city community including Wilson’s thesis that this concentration of poor was created because of a restructuring of the US economy and the out migration of “nonpoor blacks from ghetto communities” and Gregory’s own theory that addresses state activism and the role that politics play in the formation of the black identity in relation to the creation of this subculture (6).

I feel as if the constant change in theories is only natural in research because as we learn more, our theories evolve to fit our new perspectives. But I also feel that just as conservatives in the Reagan and Bush administration contributed the perception that the subculture in the inner-city community was caused by single mother households, other theories are driven to popularity based on the culture they were created in.