In Five Points, Anbinder writes that even after new plans were made for housing, the conditions of the residents of Five Points did not improve that much. I remember reading that the stairs were one of the more treacherous parts of the tenements, mainly because they were so dark. But now, after reading that they did not have banisters, it makes me see how dangerous the stairs really were. I would feel so nervous if I had to walk up stairs everyday without something to hold on to just to get to my apartment. And the creation of the window shafts doesn’t seem like it would help much. It really is sad when there aren’t many improvements even after so much time.
I agree with Alex that housing does parallel race. But as we learned in the video we watched last week, race is a social construction, housing really parallels with perceived race. In Five Points, Italians lived in decrepit housing after the Irish, and back then, they weren’t perceived as white. Just like the Irish and the Jewish, the Italians turned “white” overtime, and people nowadays wouldn’t associate Italians with bad housing. In Brownsville, the creation of public housing soon became associated with minorities. This led to the problem of integration and class diversity, and controversy regarding the creation of middle-class public housing. In Brownsville, there was a quote where it said that people were naturally segregated in terms of upward mobility.
I think the idea with that quote was that as those minorities achieved more financial success, they would also move out of the neighborhood. But as we have been learning, there are differences between what has happened with the migration in the 1800s and the more recent migration. The more recent immigrants come from more countries than the earlier immigrants, and in terms of skin color, there are just as much variations. Thus, it might not be as easy for recent immigrants to become “white”. Upward mobility is harder to achieve for those who aren’t perceived as “white”, so many minorities might not be able to move out of the neighborhood even if they wanted to. There are other limiting factors such as real estate values and such. In answer to Alex’s question, I think that “white” might still be the default race now, but I think it is in the process of changing, but perhaps only in New York. I think in many neighborhoods in the rest of America, whites are still the majority.
