Is the “New” Brooklyn Economy For Real?
Nikil Saval
n+1
Some better-off residents of Fort Greene may be surprised to hear that they live near the second-poorest census tract in New York, the one that covers the Ingersoll and Whitman housing projects. The average income there is $9,001—more than a thousand dollars below the federal poverty line for a single person. A mere two tracts away, in the same neighborhood, the average income rises to $83,105. Sustainable or not, this fact of the “new” Brooklyn economy is grotesque. The question for white-collar Brooklynites, as for white-collar workers in cities everywhere—severely battered by the crisis some of us helped engineer—is whether we persist in aiding the gentrification that allows such disparities to fester and grow, or whether we fashion a politics that levels the distance between the poor and ourselves—the very distance that allows us to feel so creative and new.