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Muddled Alphabet
By Jeremy | November 2, 2006
IN the bad old days, people said of Alphabet City that if you were hanging around on Avenue A, you were all right. If you were on Avenue B, you were brave. If you ventured to Avenue C, you were crazy. And if you made it as far as Avenue D, you were dead. ...I remember those days. That's when I fell in love with the community as an eight-year-old ministering alongside mom and dad.
Barker recently bought a new 800-square-foot one-bedroom on East Second Street, between avenues C and D, for $699,000. In the middle of the deal, her broker reminded her that she could always rent out her condo at market rate. "She said that a couple of blocks away they're renting one-bedrooms for $3,500!" ...Back in 1982, the NYPD identified a corner around the block from Ms. Barker's new luxury digs -- Avenue D and 3rd Street -- as being one of two in the neighborhood that were statistically the worst for drug and related criminal activity in the city. That's how Abounding Grace came to settle there.
A 426-square-foot studio goes for $525,000, - or, $1,232 per square foot.What does half a million buy anywhere else in the country? Certainly not a 426-foot studio around the corner from public housing projects. Two of the young people from Xcel recently chatted on Chris's myspace blog, where Emily wrote:
families like mine are being forced to move out to worse neighborhoods beacuse they can't afford their rent any longer. as a young woman whose grown up in the ghetto all her life, i also wonder what is there left to strive for?...be able to maintain paying the over priced rent to live in the same run down neighborhood i've always lived in? or just move to the suburbs that the white folks left behind?llc 180 tramadolamoxicillin viagra required no prescription zyrtecfollowup 2006 viagra post januaryviagra medical breakthrough 1998xhtml cialis allowed tag viagraviagra inhibiters ace andviagra meltabs 12 generic0.25 mg xanax Map
Topics: lower east side, new york | 1 Comment »
November 3rd, 2006 at 11:19 am
Man, do I ‘feel’ you. Like the L.E.S., East Palo Alto was one a forbidden land. We were given the dubious distinction of being the ‘murder capital’ (per capita) of the US in 1993. Now, post dot com and California real estate boom, I can’t even afford a house in the very community where I serve the poor! Here, like NYC, one bedroom condos go for over 400k and houses for 650k and up. It’s crazy… We have a community with no downtown, no local grocery store, only one bank, a failing school district evidenced by the lack of a local high school, brisk drug traffic and gang activity – and out of reach home prices! We live in crazy times. It appears to fulfill my passion and call to minister to the poor, I’m going to have to go to the suburbs!
So – how do we, as Bob Lupton would say, bring justice to gentrification? We’re struggling to know our role in this new society…