Tenants and Foreclosures in Bushwick: The Underside of Neighborhood Hotness

Mark Winston Griffith

Tenants and Foreclosures in Bushwick: The Underside of Neighborhood Hotness

I wish Robert Sullivan, the author of a recent article in the New York Times Magazine about real estate in New York, could have been in the basement of the Hope Gardens Senior Citizens Center in Bushwick last night. There he would have heard the conversation on predatory lending and its devastating effect on the lives of people in Bushwick, the community deemed by Sullivan as the "next cool NYC neighborhood".

Bushwick has the highest rate of foreclosure among multi-family buildings (5 units and above) in the entire city. Period. Much of this has been as a result of elaborate property flipping and deed theft scams that have left tenants, at best, scratching their heads and wondering to whom they should pay their rent, or at worst, unfairly evicted. While there has been a lot written about predatory lending over the last ten years or so, most of the attention has been on homeowners. What is lost in the story is the toll taken on the people unfortunate enough to live in the apartment buildings with property titles that are shuffled around like a game of Three Card Monte. What is also often lost is how this inflates property prices and makes the area ripe for the moving out of low income people of color and the moving in of artists, then yuppies, looking for a "cool" place to live.

Sullivan makes an honest attempt at laying bare the mechanics of gentrification and does in fact talk about Bushwick's current poverty and high foreclosure rates, but the descriptions and quotes he compiles unwittingly help to create what is the pretext for displacement: This place is a shithole and the social bulldozing of this place will do us all a favor. He even admits that the article will contribute to gentrification.

No one, no matter what race, income level or profession, should be blamed for moving into an area that meets their social and cultural tastes. But to the extent that Sullivan gives voice to the experience of people living in Bushwick, it is mostly to artists who have already lent there coolness to the neighborhood. Quoting one of the survivors of predatory lending at the meeting last night, for instance, would have served the article well and painted a broader picture of whose interests are at stake when people are moved through neighborhoods like pieces on a chessboard.

One of the worst offenders of predatory lending in Bushwick is a scammer who at one time imperiled and destabilized the lives of tenants living in 65 buildings throughout Bushwick. He is still walking the streets. What is needed are a set of laws that will vigorously prosecute real estate pimps like this. Maybe this will have the effect of valuing the lives of the invisible people who lose their homes to make way for the next hot neighborhood.