The New York Times has a lot to say about Brooklyn, the place I’ve called home nearly all my life. According to a recent article, my neighborhood in Brooklyn is the last of the affordable ones, even as those looking to plop down over half a million dollars on an apartment are priced out of the “hippest neighborhoods”.



Let’s get one thing out of the way: Brooklyn has long been expensive for most of those who live there, like most of New York. But there’s a big rift between the affluent professionals piling millions into the brownstone neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens, Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights – and the rest of Brooklyn, a middle-to-working class haven for low pretension and inexpensive food.

Despite what most trend pieces would have you believe, there’s more to Brooklyn than Williamsburg or Park Slope. Brooklyn has a population of over 2.5m people. It’s a mixture of new and old – families who have lived here for generations and migrants who have just arrived.

The tale of two cities that helped Bill de Blasio get elected as the mayor of New York could easily be renamed the tale of two Brooklyns. I wish more people would write about the Brooklyn I know. The poor neighborhoods where I spent my teens, where my friends and I grew up, are much different from the well-coiffed Brooklyn – just like Marrakech! – I see depicted in newspapers and magazines. There’s more to this borough than millennials and their taste in coffee or their love of bikes.

I wish the media would give brownstone Brooklyn a break and tell the tale of the other Brooklyn – not just the one of expensive house hunting, multiple movie shoots and Girls. There is a dichotomy between the rich and privileged, and those who are barely hanging on. It’s not that the media hasn’t covered Brooklyn’s poor, but the coverage tends to be of the dutiful police-blotter variety.

There’s more to poor neighborhoods like Brownsville than just their crime rates, guns and violence. There are neighborhoods where money is too precious to spend on specialty yogurt and organic vegetables at the Park Slope Food Co-Op. There are neighborhoods where kids know their family’s dim financial situation keeps them from pursuing a better future. It’s a working class, ethnic Brooklyn, closer to Saturday Night Fever than 2 Broke Girls.

It’s “affordable,” in New York Times real-estate terms, but just barely for most of the people who live there, and real estate bidding is not what matters about it anyway. What matters is that it exists and is ignored: an entire branch of New York silenced by the scrum over Williamsburg condos. These migrants and unglamorous workers are the Brooklynites I wish people knew. This is the Brooklyn I know.

Many Brooklyn families live from paycheck to paycheck. A few years back, they clipped coupons for stores like CVS, Rite Aid and Duane Reade. Today, they have memberships cards and watch out for weekly deals in the stores’ circulars. They don’t shop at Whole Foods or Union Market. They don’t shop for the freshest in-season blueberries; instead they glance over the discount boxes at the corner grocery – bins full of vegetables that are invariably about to go bad or are too banged up to be sold at regular prices.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In 2011, more than a quarter of Brooklyn households earned on average $18,689 in income. Photograph: Neville Elder /Corbis Sygma

I wish the people writing trend pieces about Brooklyn would ride the B35 bus, which stops under my window on its way from Sunset Park to Brownsville. En route to Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhood, you can catch a glimpse of discount stores and check-cashing places, because banks don’t really want customers like the people who live there. The passengers are the true residents of Brooklyn. The elderly lady who has a reduced-fare metro card and still finds her reduced fare to be too high. Moms with children, carrying bags and bags of groceries to tide them over at least a week. No Uber for them – they can’t spare the extra money to cab their purchases home.

These passengers are not an anomaly for most Brooklyn neighborhoods. They are the standard. That hipster Brooklynite, who makes an appearance in every trend piece, wearing a lumberjack shirt, shaggy beard, drinking an overpriced cup of organic coffee – that is an anomaly for most Brooklyn neighborhoods. He roams a small, exclusive territory.



In 2011, at 25.5%, more than a quarter of Brooklyn households earned on average $18,689 in income, according to the New York University’s Furman Center. Another 20.9% earned between $18,690 and $39,246. The national household income is $53,046. The median household income in Brownsville is $28,838. The neighborhood, which is further divided into census tracts, is also a home to two of the poorest tracts in New York. Tracts are usually made up of about 4,000 people, according to the census. This means that larger neighborhoods such as those in Brooklyn, might be divided into multiple tracts.

Another of Brooklyn’s poorest tracts is in Coney Island, where I lived for over eight years. The median household income in that neighborhood is $9,500. Overall, the median household income for Coney Island is $30,458, making it the second poorest neighborhood in Brooklyn. According to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, household income in Coney Island changed by 100% since 1980. The median gross rent, however, changed by over 300% during that same period.

Between 2000 and 2010, Brooklyn went from being a home to the four poorest tracts in New York to being a home to five.

Brooklyn is more than just Williamsburg. Just look at some of its poorest neighborhoods. Photograph: /The CEO Poverty Measure report/Office of the Mayor

Even as Brooklyn’s poor get poorer, the richer also get richer. Brooklyn went from having no richest census tracts in 2000 to having two – one in Dumbo and one in Brooklyn heights. According to New York’s Independent Budget Office, the income in those census tracts increased by 45%. “The median income in Brooklyn Heights grew to $166,346, while Dumbo’s reached $167,737,” reported the Daily News. That’s more than $150,000 difference in income between Brooklyn’s poorest and richest neighborhoods.

The increase of well-off Brooklynites in some neighborhoods has had adverse effects on the rents in Brooklyn. Earlier this year, the median rent in Brooklyn went up to $2,890, up 11.6% in just one year. Overall, just 8.6% of housing in Brooklyn is public housing and just 6.7% is subsidized, according to the Manhattan Institute. In Brownsville, those numbers are much higher, with public housing making up 23.5% of housing available and 12.5% of other housing being subsidized. In Coney Island, those numbers are 17.7% for public housing and 10.8% for subsidized housing.

It’s no surprise that a number of Brooklynites need help in order to afford their rent. After all, about 23% of them live in poverty.

The poverty rate in Brooklyn is 23.3%. Photograph: /The CEO Poverty Measure report/Office of the Mayor

While the national unemployment rate hovers near 6%, that of Brooklyn remains near 8%. About 27% of families living in Brooklyn are on food stamps. In Brownsville, that number is 46%. More than 55% of Brownsville’s population received some type of income support in 2012, according to the New York City government data. Thinking about the future for these families consists of worrying about next month’s bills, and those for the month after. On my five-block walk to the train, I pass two 99¢ and up stores. In the past few weeks, moms and kids have been frequent visitors to these discount stores.

Growing up in Brooklyn

In 2004 and 2005, my classmates peddled sweets, at $1 per candy bar or a pack of M&M’s, in order to afford prom tickets, yearbooks, and caps and gowns for graduation. For them, the price of a typical senior year was measured in boxes of candy, handed out by our school, even as America was having national debates about healthier school lunches. Such milestones become bittersweet when you can barely afford them.

Some didn’t talk about going to college at home – because they knew their parents couldn’t afford to help out. The cost of obtaining higher education begins long before the last day of high school. There are the SAT fees, the fees for college applications, many of which are waived if your family is on food stamps. Every step you take to better yourself comes with a reminder that you are living in poverty.

Children living in high-need districts, where large numbers of families rely on subsidies like food stamps, have lower graduation rates. In 2014, their graduation rate was about 66% compared to 94% for those living in better-off areas, according to the Wall Street Journal. One in four Brooklyn students needs more than four years to finish high school.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Less than one third of the 25-year-olds living in Brooklyn are college graduates. Photograph: Alamy

Despite all of that, higher education is within reach, thanks to the City University of New York (CUNY) – which consists of 11 senior colleges and seven community colleges serving about 269,000 students. According to CUNY, over 70% of first-time freshmen come from New York City public schools. Many, however, are unprepared for college. In 2011, 82% of 19,394 first-time freshmen needed remedial classes: 72% in math, 35% in writing and 26% in reading. By the time they are 25, only 31.3% of those living in Brooklyn are college graduates. For Brownsville, that number is 10.4%.

I am the product of New York’s public schools, one of those 31.3%. Even as I wish for all of these numbers to be much different, I am still a proud Brooklynite. We are resilient. We are more than just those stereotypes peddled through all trend pieces written about our home.

Next time you are temped to say “That is so Brooklyn” or “This is peak Brooklyn”, I ask you to reconsider. The Brooklyn I know is a vast socio-economic mix. It deserves to be more than just an adjective to describe the newest trends among millennials. The people who live here deserve more, too.