Gentrification, Income Inequality, and Crime
Today’s Metro New York reports on a scary crime wave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn:
Of Brooklyn’s police precincts, Williamsburg’s 90th, which encompasses the gentrifying South Side plus its central and east sections, has seen the greatest rise in crime over the past year — 13.49 percent — according to Compstat data. The neighboring 94th precinct, which includes Williamsburg’s tonier North Side and Greenpoint, has seen a 6.38 percent crime hike — the borough’s second-highest increase.
“Gang violence in the community [has] re-emerged into something we haven’t seen since the 1980s,” said William Orellana of community group El Puente.
Williamsburg (and neighboring Greenpoint and Bushwick) may have the highest density of artists of any neighborhood in the country. And although there was a vibrant Latino arts community there for decades, the Williamsburg of today is best known as a hipster haven, thanks in large part to the huge influx of (mostly White) artists who’ve come in droves since the mid-90s.
Reading about the sudden surge in gang violence made me think of a post I read on the Freakonomics blog yesterday:
The paradox of economic growth is that the same mechanisms that create great wealth –secure property rights and rule of law guaranteed by an independent judiciary — also give rise to great inequalities in its distribution. Private property provides a powerful incentive to produce wealth for oneself while simultaneously denying that same wealth to others. Wealth does trickle down to the rest of the population, but often not fast enough to avoid political strife and worse….
Economic libertarians argue that this growing inequality is unimportant: aren’t the poor of 2008 still far better off in terms of real income, health, life expectancy, and material comfort than even the richest citizen in 1900?
The fallacy of this argument is that human beings do not measure their well-being by absolute real income or longevity — but rather in relative terms. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, a wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s brother-in-law.
Further, a growing body of research reveals that the social and medical costs of inequality are high…. Among both American states and Canadian provinces, homicide rates closely track income inequality, even after the absolute level of income itself is carefully controlled for. That homicide is not driven by poverty alone is demonstrated by Canada, where, because of aggressive redistributive policies, the poorest provinces have the lowest inequalities and also the lowest number of violent deaths.
It’s impossible to say right now what exactly is or isn’t going on in Williamsburg. But I know for a fact that the extremely rapid gentrification of the past 10 years has created a lot of resentment and pent-up hostility towards the newcomers who are changing the face of the neighborhood. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that this is a contributing factor in the current crime wave. The irony is that artists tend to see themselves as victims of the gentrification process (since they can rarely afford to stick around in a neighborhood after it’s become hip), while to other neighborhood residents they look an awful lot like the perpetrators of that gentrification.
This all points to the importance of sustainable economic development built on a foundation of neighborhood self-determination. Rising real estate prices cannot be the only measure of urban economic progress. As with any ecological system, diversity creates strength. As a society, we desperately need to develop better strategies for urban economic sustainability. And as artists, we can’t continue to feign ignorance of our role in these processes.
