Broadway: the inequality line that divides Upper Manhattan
Upper Manhattan has been recognized as gentrification’s next target. The community fights for affordable housing but the results are not encouraging. Washington Heights and Inwood, known as the last real neighborhoods in Manhattan, have seen many changes in the last decade. The media has shown interest in real estate here due to low prices. The effect can be seen on the west side of Broadway where more white people are moving in, the income and education levels are higher, and unemployment and poverty are lower. On the east side of Broadway the conditions are not the same.
In Washington Heights and Inwood, two neighborhoods with a predominant Hispanic population, Broadway represents a dividing line. The line has existed for decades but the reasons for the division have changed with time. Crossing Broadway today from west to east draws the image of inequality in these two neighborhoods. On 181st street you have the only Starbucks in Washington Heights if you walk west of Broadway. On the east side you can easily find more than two or three different places to eat Mofongo, the traditional Dominican dish.
East of Broadway has a higher concentration of Hispanics and blacks. On this side unemployment is higher, so is the use of food stamps and the amount of people that live below the poverty level. “People come here hoping to make some money and go back to the Dominican Republic,” said local-church-organist Eddy Beato, “but then they realize how expensive everything is here and end up moving into a house they have to share with six other people.” Census data shows that east of Broadway house ownership barely reaches 5 per cent of the population. Meanwhile just west of the same street, ownership goes up to 25 per cent.
Gentrification has been crawling up on the west side for a while. “Realtors started using the term Hudson Heights in the 90s just so they could spike up the prices,” said former councilman Robert Jackson. When he first moved to Washington Heights, back in 1977, it was tough for him to get an apartment on the west side of Broadway. He said there weren’t any other black families; the neighborhood was mainly Greeks, Jews and Hispanics. “The buildings on this side are just nicer,” said Jackson, who has been living in the same apartment, west of Broadway, for almost 40 years. “If there’s a divide,” Jackson said, “it’s because of the housing stock east of Broadway. We’re talking about 5-story-walk-ups.”
“West of Broadway is way more quiet,” said Led Black, founder of local community blog, Uptown Collective. “I liked living there for a while. I just walked two blocks and I could be immersed again in Saint Nicholas Avenue.” When you walk from Broadway to Saint Nicholas Avenue, heading east, you hear more Spanish, you see street vendors everywhere and the food carts here have empanadas, not hot-dogs. Saint Nicholas Avenue itself is a whole other planet. The atmosphere here can be compared to most Latin-American noisy-and-crowded city centers.
Black grew up east of Broadway, he also lived in the Bronx for a while and then moved West of Broadway once he got a job and could afford it. Now he lives in New Jersey because prices have gone up in the neighborhood he always called home. “I don’t want Latinos to be pushed out,” Black said, “This place is going to end up like the Upper West Side.”
Robert Snyder, a history professor from Rutgers University, recently published a book called “Crossing Broadway”. The book, a historical recount of Washington Heights, highlights the achievements of the community in overcoming gang violence during the 50s and 60s, and getting rid of the crack problem in the 80s. But even with a positive outlook the book talks about a historical divide that was once physical and racial.
He recalls patrolling with police officers during the 90s: “one cop said that if I was going to the east side, I had to wear a bullet proof vest.” In July of 1992, when the drug problem in Washington Height was still going, a 23-year-old Dominican drug dealer was shot twice by a police officer. This sparked rage in the community and what began a protest led by councilman Guillermo Linares, then councilman, ended up in riots.
Black remembers the 1992 riots as a turning point that ended in the unification of the community in both neighborhoods. When crack hit Washington Heights, Black was a teenager. He recalls friends of his dealing drugs on the east side of Broadway, “if you did it on the west side it would have been too much of a stand out.” He said that today, the neighborhood is not the one that he grew up in “and it’s a good thing.”
The community now stands together without any social divide that may have existed in the past. “Maybe there was a line but I think it has disappeared,” Jackson said. “People are going to move wherever they can afford wherever they can afford,” said the ex-councilman after he mentioned that in the past decade, over 18,000 people have been forced to move out of Upper Manhattan because of the rise in rent. “It comes down to income, income, income.”
The American Community Survey shows that the income average in a family household for people living west of Broadway is more than double than what it is for people living on the east. On the east the average goes as low as $36,815 and rent prices are not dropping, if anything they are just going up.
Since the 70s, the ethnic differences have coexisted among sharp economic inequalities. As professor Snyder suggests, during the first half of the past century there were tensions even between white people but the friction was compensated by the fact that “they all enjoyed a fair standard of living.” “Washington Heights was pretty much the middle of the middle that became lopsided with a poor majority,” he said.
“If there’s tragedy in Washington Heights alongside the very real achievements it’s that economic inequality has persisted for a long time and it doesn’t show any sign of easing in the near future,” Professor Snyder said.