I agree with Alex in that there is definitely a link between public housing and race, which was pretty obvious in this week’s readings. Pritchett discussed how the public housing projects became increasingly identified with minorities, and he called this process “self-reinforcing” (116). Although many Whites in the beginning lived in projects, many were already leaving because of increase in income or they did not feel safe anymore and instead moved either to the suburbs and in neighborhoods close by. Towards the end of the 1960s, the majority of the residents in Brownsville were Blacks and Latinos. The community wanted public housing built for middle-class residents for diversity in the neighborhood and to bring the Whites back, but the plan was not successful in the end.
Issues with schools was also an issue Pritchett brought up.The schools in Brownsville were falling apart and many classrooms could not support the large amount of children in the neighborhood. When the community wanted to build new schools, especially a middle school on the borders of the neighborhood to combine with other ones, such as Canarsie, to integrate the children, the idea was not accepted by the other areas. I think that Praveena’s idea of fear also plays a role in this reading. The fear of the “other” may have made the notion of integration more undesirable.
For immigrants in Five Points, there were some attempts to improve the conditions of the tenements that they lived in. For example, Anbinder writes that the city established building codes that required windows and ventilation in each room to improve the living condition of the immigrants. However, many things did not change in the buildings, such as Bottle Alley which Jacob Riis talked about.
Gentrification, which Sharman mentioned in his chapter, really brings together how it affects the neighborhood as a whole. He mentioned how it is used to describe urban renewal and the change it brought to a neighborhood. While Brownsville seemed to embrace this idea, Sharman said that East Harlem seemed to not feel the same way about it. There are complicated relationships between people because of race, and this affects housing as a whole.
