Kozol

For this week’s blog post, I chose the hyperlinks option.

When I looked up recent news in Mott Haven, I expected to find more of what was depicted in Kozol’s piece, “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.” In his writing, he describes an extremely worn-down, diseased neighborhood with no hope, and with a focus on the most immediate threats creating short-term solutions to complex problems, and in most ways this cycle has continued. What I found, though, was even more complicated.

When I searched for “Mott Haven crime,” it was not hard to find a recent article about these cycles, and the one I chose was from the New York Times, a newspaper that Mrs. Washington said was hard to come by in the neighborhood this featured article describes. The piece, “A Bronx Precinct Where Killing Persists” by Benjamin Mueller and Al Baker, is about a gruesome murder in the Mott Haven houses. The authors try to dissect some of the root causes of the high crime rates in the precinct that run generations deep, citing “entrenched violence in housing projects and uneven, ineffective services for mentally ill poor people” (Mueller & Baker).

The sign at a housing complex where a woman's body was found in a hallway after she was stabbed to death with a machete.

Another article, however, offered an entirely different picture of Mott Haven, this one by Miriam Kreinin Souccar,with its title loudly declaring, “Bye Bye Bushwick: The Bronx is the City’s next new arts scene.” The article explains how trendy it is for Columbia MFA students to move to areas like Mott Haven, describing transitioning neighborhoods, commuter accessibility, and “cheap rent.” At first glance, this may seem like wonderful news for residents of the Bronx, since their neighborhoods are improving around them, but the truth is more complicated. The article cites that the percentage of college-educated residents in Mott Haven has risen from 4.8 to 9.2% in the past fourteen years, but are residents being empowered or replaced? The article also states that rents in Mott Haven have risen a whopping 32 percent in the same time period. How can someone like Mrs. Washington, or Cliffie, ever afford to move out of city-owned housing “Where Killing Persists” when they have to compete with Ivy-League graduates and prices keep rising?

Bar and Grill Mott Haven- part restaurant, part art exhibit, part karaoke house- is one of the new installments catering to new residents of the neighborhood.

Protests against gentrification in the South Bronx saying "The Bronx isn't for sale"

This relates perfectly to the “All Lives Matter” piece by Kevin Roose. Sure, the neighborhood is “ transitioning,” but to what, and for whom? The Mott Haven Houses, the scene of gruesome murder and other crime, are neglected and given band-aids, but the city can proudly boast about their transforming neighborhoods because privileged youth are gentrifying the district. On a related note, Columbia’s page detailing its diversity claims 28% minority students in the MFA program. By contrast, 96% of residents in properties owned by the city of New York do not identify as white.