"

Last Thursday, New York City Council Member Jumaane Williams joined other community members in East Flatbush to announce a push to get New York City landmark status for 5224 Tilden Ave.: the house that Jackie Robinson lived in.

Joined by the current owners of the property and by a class of fifth-grade students from nearby P.S. 244, Williams spoke on Robinson’s legacy and what it would mean to the neighborhood for the city to recognize it as a landmark.

“Heroes like Jackie Robinson come from East Flatbush, and we need to treasure and preserve that history,” said Williams. “This house is proof of the rich culture that exists south of Eastern Parkway. Jackie had an impact on the lives of every member of this community through his bravery on and off the field. We must protect that legacy for future generations to learn from and appreciate.”

Robinson lived at the address in East Flatbush from 1947 to 1949. During that time, he won the Rookie of the Year Award and the Most Valuable Player Award while breaking Major League Baseball’s color barrier as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Williams believes that achieving city landmark status for the property would help keep the house’s historic, aesthetic and cultural heritage and increase local pride in a neighborhood still reeling from the shooting death of Kimani Gray.

"

"

Prince George’s County became emblematic of a long-delayed advance toward equality: the growth of black wealth in America. For three centuries, structural racism had prevented black families from building wealth. School systems, hiring practices, red-lining, and discriminatory lending practices all combined to deny the opportunities that white Americans, whether immigrant or native born, saw as their birthright. In the South, especially, there were more direct means of holding back black economic advancement: Violence was often directed toward black men and women who owned businesses or farms and toward those who fought for their right to work for fair wages. But in the 1980s, helped by laws that encouraged homeownership among minorities, African American families were at last able not only to earn higher incomes but to buy homes and build wealth.

Just from 1995 to 2004, black homeownership rates nationwide rose 6.5 percentage points, reaching a height of 49 percent in 2005. But those gains were almost entirely erased as the Great Recession began in 2008, with black homeownership rates dipping to 45 percent last year and continuing to fall. Nowhere is that more dramatically illustrated than in the stretch of suburbia that straddles the Beltway. At the height of the crisis, in 2009, the foreclosure rate in Prince George’s County was 4.19 percent, compared to 1.87 percent in Maryland and 2.21 percent in the nation as a whole.

Even families who aren’t losing their homes have seen values drop, making it more difficult to get loans to finance their children’s education or their retirement. Mosi Harrington, the former executive director of the Housing Initiative Partnership, a Maryland nonprofit that helps people hold on to their homes, says declining home prices are particularly problematic for African Americans because they have inherited less than their white counterparts. “In your minority communities, wealth is not very deep,” she says. “There’s no family wealth to fall back on in hard times.” Most middle-class families hold all of their wealth in their homes, and that’s especially true for the median black family—the amount they hold in stocks is zero. That means the housing crisis has wiped out an entire generation of black wealth.

In general, African American families have few resources to tap for big-ticket items like college that are necessary for their children to remain middle-class. The gap between middle—class families and the top 1 percent is huge regardless of race, but the racial gaps are even larger. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s State of Working America report, black households had a median net wealth of just $4,900 in 2010, compared with $97,000 for white households. A third of black households had zero or negative wealth.

“There’s been a lot of attention brought to how much income inequality we’ve seen in this country, thanks to Occupy Wall Street,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “I think people kind of have a handle on the dramatic income inequality we have. But wealth inequality swamps anything we see in income equality.”

The story of Prince George’s County is, in many ways, the economic history of black Americans writ large. While its post–civil rights boom was a heartening sign of the slow but hopeful rise of a durable black middle class, its sharp downturn during the Great Recession is one more sign that the arc of history has yet to bend in the direction of economic equality or justice.

"

"As David Freund shows in his carefully documented history of state policy and white racial politics in the suburbs, whites benefited tremendously from the privileged access they enjoyed to the expressly discriminatory government-supported mortgages that enabled them to move to white suburbs in the 1940s and 1950s. Blacks shut out of the housing market by private and public discrimination were left with access only to inadequate and substandard means-tested public housing that deprived them of the assets that whites secured from homeownership. yet instead of recognizing themselves accurately as recipients of collective public largesse, whites came to see themselves as individuals whose wealth grew out of their personal and individual success in acquiring property on the “free market.” At the same time, whites viewed inner-city residents not as fellow citizens denied the subsidies freely offered to whites, but as people whose alleged failures to save, invest, and take care of their homes forced the government to intervene on their behalf, to build housing projects that were then ruined by alleged Black neglect.

White suburbanites ignored how the artificially constricted housing market available to Blacks deflated home values, stripped homeowners of equity, reduced tax revenue for city services, created, unhealthy conditions, led to overcrowding, and promoted crime. They did not acknowledge how federal funding formulas deprived housing projects of the capital reserves needed for maintenance and upkeep or how discrimination in the private sector made housing projects dwellings of last resort for the poor rather than the mixed-income communities they were initially designed to be. instead, as Freund demonstrates, whites attributed urban decay and poverty to the behavior of Black people, not to discrimination and ill-conceived public policy. At the same time, they viewed the relative prosperity of the suburb as a reflection of the moral worth of white people."

"

Funny how things work out, my friend said, as she changed the channel on her flat-screen TV. “The other day at the bodega I ran into these four white girls. I started talking to them. They said they were living right across the street in this dumpy building paying $800. I thought, Well, that’s all right. Then they say they’re paying $800 apiece! One of them is sleeping on the couch. Sleeping on the couch in their own house! I went back to my apartment, looked at my view, and thought, Maybe my elevator is pissy, but if that’s gentrification, who’s the joke on now?”

“I’ll know the projects are changing when the first hipster applies for admission,” said April Simpson-Taylor, as we sat together on a bench at the Queensbridge projects, where she has lived most of her life.

We got to talking about the future of the projects. I mentioned Howard Husock’s plan. Simpson-Taylor frowned. “They’re always talking about selling the projects. I don’t listen to it,” she said.

“But, if they did, how much do you think you could get for this place?”

“Queensbridge?”

“Yeah. How much do you think it’s worth?”

The idea had been roiling around for a couple of weeks. Husock mentioned selling the Ingersoll Houses, a twenty-­building development tucked under the BQE in Fort Greene. But Queensbridge, 50 acres with all that river frontage, had to be way more valuable. Queensbridge Park, right by the water, was a beauty. The renovated F-train station right on the corner was a mere two stops from Manhattan.

A couple of phone calls to property assessors returned the following information: Despite the image of the teeming projects, the leafy QB is severely underbuilt. The buildings themselves take in 1.6 million square feet, but the area was zoned for a “buildable” total of 3.6 million square feet. With that 3.6 million feet currently going for $80 per, the site could be worth close to $300 million. “Selling Queensbridge,” Simpson-Taylor said mournfully. “You know how many times I’ve thought about moving away from here? Who wants to live their whole life in a project? But I keep coming back. You don’t always get to choose your home, but it is still home, and not just because I grew up here. It’s home because everybody’s here. What happens to everyone then?”

That was the question, the one Howard Husock’s modest proposals didn’t quite cover. He said the best way to pry the people out of the projects was “with carrots, not sticks.” The residents could be “bought out,” in the way landlords in the private sector give tenants money to empty a building. That way, the former residents would be free to move anywhere, Husock said.

Somehow I didn’t think it was going to work that way.

"