Special Report: Gentrification: Black and White Middle-class Blacks also Bring Change to the 'Hood
Issue date: 7/24/03 Section: COMMENTARY
NEW YORK (NNPA)-When Michelle Robinson left Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant more than a decade ago to attend the prestigious Brown University, she vowed that she would never return. "At the time, the neighborhood that I grew up in was very rough," Robinson, 33, remembers. "I would hear gunshots and see drug activity all the time. I knew I needed to get out."
For years, Robinson, who is Black, had dreamed of owning a picturesque home in the suburbs, with a spacious backyard and a white picket fence. "I saw so much craziness growing up in the hood that my first inclination was to go to a good college, make some money and never ever return back to the 'hood."
But after graduating from Brown University in Providence, R.I., Robinson, now a high school teacher, had a change of heart. Suddenly, she began to wonder about her old neighborhood and her conscience began to bother her.
"As a middle-class Black person, I realized that I needed to return back to the old neighborhood," she says. "I realized that if I and other middle-class Blacks didn't move back, Whites would come in and change the face of these historically Black neighborhoods, and I couldn't watch that happen."
So with that, Robinson did what droves of middle-class Blacks did all throughout the 1990s-she left the New York City's suburbs and moved back into the working class Black neighborhood that she grew up in, bringing with her a middle-class salary and a degree from one of the country's best universities.
"This is where I need to be," she says. "The goal is to continue to encourage middle-class Blacks to move back."
Throughout the city, educated middle-class Blacks are economically integrating neighborhoods that have long been considered poor and working-class. They are buying brownstones, joining community organizations and serving as role models to some of the neighborhood children, who according to city statistics, are trapped in cycles of poverty. After working in corporate settings and living in white neighborhoods, many of these Blacks are consciously making decisions to return to their "roots," opting to purchase homes and raise their children in the very neighborhoods that they once couldn't wait to flee. The revival of the city's Black middle class has helped stabilize these working-class neighborhoods, creating a form of gentrification that is not all that different from the recent trend of Whites who have integrated Black neighborhoods.
For years, Robinson, who is Black, had dreamed of owning a picturesque home in the suburbs, with a spacious backyard and a white picket fence. "I saw so much craziness growing up in the hood that my first inclination was to go to a good college, make some money and never ever return back to the 'hood."
But after graduating from Brown University in Providence, R.I., Robinson, now a high school teacher, had a change of heart. Suddenly, she began to wonder about her old neighborhood and her conscience began to bother her.
"As a middle-class Black person, I realized that I needed to return back to the old neighborhood," she says. "I realized that if I and other middle-class Blacks didn't move back, Whites would come in and change the face of these historically Black neighborhoods, and I couldn't watch that happen."
So with that, Robinson did what droves of middle-class Blacks did all throughout the 1990s-she left the New York City's suburbs and moved back into the working class Black neighborhood that she grew up in, bringing with her a middle-class salary and a degree from one of the country's best universities.
"This is where I need to be," she says. "The goal is to continue to encourage middle-class Blacks to move back."
Throughout the city, educated middle-class Blacks are economically integrating neighborhoods that have long been considered poor and working-class. They are buying brownstones, joining community organizations and serving as role models to some of the neighborhood children, who according to city statistics, are trapped in cycles of poverty. After working in corporate settings and living in white neighborhoods, many of these Blacks are consciously making decisions to return to their "roots," opting to purchase homes and raise their children in the very neighborhoods that they once couldn't wait to flee. The revival of the city's Black middle class has helped stabilize these working-class neighborhoods, creating a form of gentrification that is not all that different from the recent trend of Whites who have integrated Black neighborhoods.