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.
"There is really very little difference between these middle-class Blacks and middle-class Whites who are integrating Black neighborhoods in the city," says historian William Cummings, who is working on a book about gentrification in New York City. "We call the Whites 'yuppies' and the Blacks 'Buppies,' but both groups are changing the economic dynamic of the neighborhoods they're moving in," he added.
When William Etheridge graduated from Georgetown University's prestigious business school, he could have lived anywhere. While working on Wall Street as an investment banker, he chose to return to the Black section of Flushing where he grew up as a child. In fact, he moved back in with his family.
After making a decent salary crunching numbers on Wall Street, Etheridge quit his job and took a lower-paying job in Harlem working for the Empowerment Zone. Since he was working in Harlem, he thought it made sense to live there, too.
"It was very important for me to move to Harlem," says Etheridge, who left the Empowerment Zone last year to get a masters degree from Columbia University in real estate development. He now works in corporate real estate.
"I felt that I could do a better job if I lived in the community. I also had a better idea of what was needed in Harlem if I was living there. It was like, 'Practice what you preach,'" he said.
In the renovated Hamilton Heights apartment where he lives, Etheridge's neighbors are a rainbow of diversity-Asians, Blacks and Whites-but especially young White women. He has watched as the neighborhood has drastically changed.
"I saw Harlem when it was in heavy, heavy transition," he says. "You would have these beautiful immaculate brownstones and on the same block you would see heavy, heavy drug activity."
Etheridge, like so many others, is worried when any middle-class or upper-middle-class group-be they Blacks, Whites or immigrants-move into a neighborhood and fail to acknowledge the issues that face the working-class residents that have resided there for decades.
"It's not only the Whites who sometimes thumb their noses up at us, but middle-class Black folks who move into this neighborhood do it, too, and that's sometimes the hardest thing to take," says Gloria Morris, 62, who lives in Brooklyn's Clinton Hill neighborhood. "Sometimes when you have money it changes you, and that's not right."
As neighborhoods are becoming more economically diverse, with low-income people living down the street or a few blocks away from the middle-class, community residents suspect that relationships between residents of the various economic groups will eventually tighten.
Frank Braconi, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a New York City policy research group, says that as more African-Americans move into the middle class, the cases of Black gentrification of minority neighborhoods will likely increase.
"As more Blacks enter the professional class, their residential decisions will mirror their White counterparts'," says Braconi, who co-wrote a report released last year that examined gentrification and displacement in New York City.
Realtors like Belinda Hardin of Harlem Homes can already see the trend of middle-class Blacks choosing Black neighborhoods like Harlem as a place to rent and own. But Bob Pollock, owner of Uptown Homes Real Estate, says that there are still "not enough" Blacks moving into these neighborhoods.
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