A couple of weeks ago, I wrote for The Empire State Tribune about NYC's Department of Health's recent community health profiles release. Every few years, the DOH releases information about each NYC neighborhood's community health--life expectancy, pollution levels, causes of death, demographics.
They organize the stats in really nice infographics, each area with it's own PDF, and each stat is compared to borough-wide and city-wide averages. This year, Crown Heights was grouped together with Prospect Heights, which is the area that lies on the other side of Franklin Avenue from where I've been writing this blog. This is interesting in the sense that Prospect Heights is a good representation of what Crown Heights is looking like more and more everyday. So the stats are almost weighted back a few years for Prospect and forward a few years for Crown Heights. But in the sense that the two neighborhoods are vastly different places at this point, with a distinct shift in overall feeling as soon as you cross from one into the other, these numbers might be a little misleading.
Nonetheless, here were are:
Nearly 98,000 people live in Crown Heights. Sixty-four percent of us are black, eighteen percent are white, twelve percent are hispanic, three percent asian, three percent other. Most of us are between ages 25 and 44, our air pollution is slightly higher than the city's average, and we have significantly less supermarket square-footage per 100 people. Twenty percent of us didn't graduate from high school (which is very near the city-wide average). Twenty-seven percent of us live below the poverty line (which is six percent more than the city-wide average). Our rates of teen-pregnancy are notably higher than the average, as are our rates of elementary absenteeism. Our incarceration rates are high. One-third of us are obese, which isn't that different from averages. An alarmingly high number of us are hospitalized for alcohol-related care each year.
The point that the DOH Commissioner Mary Basset made from the data was that people living in low-income areas, such like our nearby neighborhood Brownsville, are dying a lot sooner, but from the same causes as everyone else. She used the data to argue that we should take responsibility for the general health of our communities and work hard to encourage each other to live healthfully, in whatever capacity we can.
But the studies also provide us with a numerical picture of gentrification, at the most basic level. The last time the DOH released community health profiles was in 2006--the area Crown Heights was grouped into was called "Central Brooklyn." It covered an area more than twice the size of the 2015 report's grouping, and according to it, Crown Heights looked a lot different than it does nine years' worth of gentrification later: the neighborhood was 80% black, 11% hispanic, 5% white, 3% other, 1% asian. The shifts in demographics alone attest to the huge, rapid shift in the culture here. (Of course, gentrification is not just a racial shift, but in a country and city that are still incredibly segregated, the process of gentrification tends to be color-coded.) The rest of the shifts--dropping unemployment rate, dropping violent crime rate, dropping premature death rate, etc--also can be traced back to gentrification. And those shifts are what make the whole thing so messy.
The 2006 report repeats on nearly every page the tagline Take Care New York or Take Care Brooklyn. They organized the information by goals for taking care: have a regular doctor, be tobacco-free, make your home safe and healthy. By statistics alone, it looks as though we've improved in some of these areas. That's why when I talk to Crown Heights natives about the changes, their first responses might be, Things are getting better, it's a lot safer around here. But in reality, the poverty and tobacco use and unemployment and crime hasn't actually decreased. It's just moved: further into Brooklyn or further into prison.
Gentrification is bittersweet because of the loss of familiarity, the loss of what home has meant to so many for so long. But it's also bittersweet because what looks like progress is actually just a sweeping-under-the-rug solution and a regrouping of neighborhood areas for our community health profiles.
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