Seeing the urban jungle for the trees

A common thread runs through diversity, and that’s where the news product gets pegged.

A man rests outside a clothing store on 74th Street, Jackson Heights, circa 2012.

Every hyperlocalist needs a grip on her beat. The easy, albeit imperfect way to do that is to identify a neighborhood’s common denominators (income, age, language, whatever), then focus on common concerns. From there, one can lay the groundwork for a hyperlocal news product.

Jackson Heights, Queens, is not an easy-grip neighborhood. For a while, the only common denominator that I could discern was that everyone was different. So how did they coexist in such tight urban quarters? What was the glue that held this place together?

I figured that out in Year 5, Month 4 of my residency here, around February 2016. I don’t know what prompted me to seek this one last morsel of US Census data, but at long last I’d found it: a big, beautiful number representing the largest majority of my neighbors, a number that went beyond national origin, native language and religious belief.

• 62% of the people living in Jackson Heights in 2015 were born outside of the United States. They were immigrants.
• Furthermore, nearly two thirds of those immigrants were not naturalized citizens. Some had green cards on the path to US citizenship, others had work visas or status as permanent residents, and still others were undocumented.

I could see meaningful hyperlocal journalism take soft shape now, could almost make out its silhouette in the mental fog. Even if my neighbors came from different places and spoke different languages, most of them were subject to the same immigration system and the same pressures to assimilate. Therefore, a news product focused on immigration issues would be of greatest service to the community, I decided.

There was only one problem: every story in Jackson Heights had an immigration angle — housing, jobs, education, criminal justice, everything. At best, I had a tenuous pinky hold on an expansive, possibly unmanageable beat. What I needed was a white-knuckled lock on a narrower topic.

That’s when the New York state legislature came into the picture.