People Renewal
New People in Old Neighborhoods.
by Louis Winnick.
Russell Sage Foundation. 287 pp. $29.95.
After the defeat of Edward I. Koch, New York no longer has a mayor who regularly asks the populace, “How’m I doing?” But the city’s residents do a great deal of temperature-taking of their own. Those with homes in the city, or careers tied to New York businesses, worry whether they will be forced to give up and leave. As City Hall flirts with fiscal insolvency, the city’s major private-sector employers—primarily Wall Street brokerage houses—shift their back-office operations out of state, insinuating ever so gently that it is easier to find clerical workers who are numerate and literate in places like Tampa, Florida.
Beyond the fiscal crisis are a number of “structural” problems—bridges that are old and ill-repaired, prisons filled beyond capacity. And there is crime: in the last week of February more Americans were killed on the streets of New York than in the ground war against Iraq. And, as in the rest of urban America, there is a substantial underclass permanently on welfare and tempted by every vice, people whom the city cannot afford to sustain, much less uplift.
Needless to say, virtually all of these issues have a racial cast. Most of the underclass is black or Puerto Rican; most taxpayers and public worriers are white. And in racial terms the trends are clear: the city’s white population, aging and comparatively infertile, has been declining steadily since the 1960’s. In the 1990 census, widely thought to undercount minorities, the number of whites came up to little more than 43 percent of the population—a drop of 10 percent since the previous census.
But this is not the whole story, either. Of possibly greater and certainly more hopeful consequence to New York is the substantial immigration in recent years of Asians and non-Puerto Rican Hispanics. These immigrants have been on the periphery of the city’s consciousness since at least a decade ago when they began to establish themselves in such highly visible jobs as greengrocers, cab drivers, and newsstand managers. Now that a sense of siege has descended on the city—dating roughly from the onset of the crack epidemic—conversations about them have assumed a new tone. The newcomers, it is hoped and believed, are going to save New York. It is they who will revive the dying neighborhoods, win the top academic prizes, restore social discipline to a dissolute environment. While some New Yorkers may resent the new immigrants, the more general view, particularly among the city’s elites, is that they constitute a foreign army of liberation.
Louis Winnick would probably not use such a stark formula in describing the effects of the new immigration on the city, but the thought is very much present in his tightly focused study, New People in Old Neighborhoods. Winnick, formerly an executive officer with the Ford Foundation, is a well-known proponent of the optimistic view that the city’s demographic trends point toward a genuine multiracial cosmopolitanism that will spare New York the more pronounced black-white splits of other American cities.
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Winnick makes clear his enthusiasm for the new immigrants in his opening chapter, where he asserts that much of urban America’s decline during the 1950’s and 1960’s can be traced to the restrictive immigration laws enacted as long ago as the 1920’s. By contrast, the more expansive bill of 1965 opened the United States to large streams of Asian and Caribbean-basin immigrants who, he claims, have brought about a moral replenishment of our cities. In Winnick’s judgment, what we need in America is not so much urban renewal as “people” renewal, and this we have gotten through an infusion of individuals committed to strong family values and a work ethic so intense that it “shrinks the hallowed Protestant ethic to apathy.”
These rather sharp assertions appear early in the book’s introductory chapters. Instead of amplifying his arguments in the main text, Winnick tries to illustrate them by means of a historical and demographic study of a single neighborhood, Sunset Park.
A working-class area on the southeast edge of Brooklyn, Sunset Park has a history as a home to immigrants—the first stop in America for Poles and Irish, Finns and Norwegians and Italians. In the old days it was a community built around its churches and the Brooklyn docks, which provided employment. The neighborhood experienced its first shock of contraction during the Depression, but then rebounded with the war and its aftermath. By the 1950’s, however, decline had once again set in, as the children and grandchildren of the European founders moved elsewhere. They were replaced by Puerto Ricans, but the industries which could best provide work for these new settlers were themselves in full decline. By the mid-1960’s, Sunset Park was largely impoverished; it was badly looted during the 1977 blackout, and seemed terminally moribund.
But then about 1980 an unanticipated rebound began with an infusion of “new people.” Some of these were yuppies who could not afford the higher prices of nearby Park Slope or Manhattan, but most were Asians and Hispanics from Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Over the following seven years crime fell, housing prices rose, much renovation was accomplished, new stores opened.
Winnick extrapolates, probably correctly, from Sunset Park to the city as a whole: the immigrant surge since the 1970’s has indeed had a reviving effect on New York, and this is a story which can be told one neighborhood at a time. Yet as a social historian Winnick largely limits himself to matters which can be quantified—real-estate prices, the evolution of names in the telephone directory, the condition of housing stock. New People in Old Neighborhoods is thus, in a way, contemporary history with the politics and the culture left out, and that can be a lot to leave out.
Winnick notes, for instance, that at community-board meetings in today’s Sunset Park, the concerns are the same as they have always been—the quality of the schools, street repair, crime. There is no major, festering conflict between the aging, property-owning white ethnics and the newcomers, or any deep tension between either group and long-time welfare recipients. But one wonders whether this reassuringly orderly and highly functional mix of people in fact represents the future of multiethnic New York.
Shortly before the publication of New People in Old Neighborhoods a highly explosive interethnic conflict broke out in Flatbush, one of the communities adjoining Sunset Park. The conflict, which involved Korean shopowners and various groups of picketing black radicals, was a variant of battles that had taken place elsewhere in Brooklyn, and in Harlem, throughout the 1980’s. But the difference in this case was that there were immigrants on both sides. The woman who claimed to have been assaulted by a Korean storeowner was Haitian, and radical Haitian activists played at least a secondary role in organizing the picketing against two of the targeted Korean stores. New York’s homegrown black activists used this and other episodes in their efforts to draw the Haitians and other Caribbean immigrants into their political networks, hoping, not entirely in vain, to ensure their radicalization.
Such episodes suggest that it would be unwise to conclude that all recent immigrants are Win-nick’s sort of hard-working, pious, family-oriented people, with aspirations to join the bourgeois American mainstream. Clearly some of them—as was true of immigrants eighty years ago—have different plans altogether. And whatever the particular cultural baggage new immigrants may bring with them, they are all prey to a variety of new influences and temptations which did not exist during America’s previous waves of immigration. There is now, for example, the always welcoming welfare system; there is a school system which often sets out to undermine the patriotism and sense of common allegiance most new immigrants share with other Americans; and there are the previously mentioned efforts of domestic activists to integrate new immigrants into the culture of opposition.
What do the immigrant parents of children now streaming into the public schools think about the city proposal to hand out condoms in the classroom? Are they offended, inspired, bemused by, or indifferent to the more egregious manifestations of “gay pride” that make their way by television from Manhattan to the living rooms of Sunset Park? Has New York’s local recession discouraged the more skilled and dynamic from settling in the city altogether?
In short, a great deal remains to be written about the new immigrants and their effect upon America. Still, New People in Old Neighborhoods tells an important part of the story—and its well-argued optimism is refreshing at this difficult moment in New York’s history.
