Housing
To Rent or Buy, Brooklynites Dilemma
By Nayaba Arinde
Editor-at-Large
Brooklynites are wrestling with a housing dilemma. Not just the severe lack of affordable housing, and the growing ‘unhoused’ population, but also “ethnic cleansing,” via aggressive continued gentrification. In all of this Gen Zs are considering their next home choice. With an interest rate of 7.1%, student loans, rent prices going through the roof literally, are at odds with the “biggest purchasing decision of one’s life” in terms of buying a home.
The effects on rents and mortgages, and the housing marketplace is obvious. What was a one-bedroom apartment of $700 in the late 1990s in the same apartment building, has doubled, and tripled in the following years.
There are many factors why, but the relentless influx of European, and European-Americans into the Black neighborhoods is relentless. Black neighborhoods have changed dramatically.
The installed cultivated generational traditions and behavior maintains, but face a challenge determined to colonize if not obliterate the culture.
New stores with Manhattan-type flavors. Supermarkets have new products, not bad, but prices speak to catering to a community with greater spending power.
Areas that had a definite vibe – music, food, events and a detail have seen some of these set-your-watch-by traditions fall by the wayside, with impositions, complaints, and dilution.
Churches have lost congregations as their members have moved, priced out of long inhabited homes.
Small businesses have shuttered their doors. Boutique stores and cafes have replaced mom and pop stores which have served the community for decades.
Meanwhile renters are facing astronomical increases, and still facing fierce competition for even the smallest apartments. Renters have to show bank records, W2, 1099s, months of wage slips, credit reports, earn 40 times the rent, perhaps have a guarantor.
“People are not purchasing because the interest rates are phenomenal for one; for two that balloon mortgage crisis has impacted people in a way that has them afraid to move into the products that are available to them, when it comes to mortgages,” said a Brooklyn-based independent realtor.
“Our generation does not want to invest in buying a house because there are all these other financial burdens,” late twenty-something graduate Carol Brown told the paper.
“We have student loans, and we are still recovering from the financial impacts of Covid.
We don’t have the confidence that bonding ourselves to a 30-year loan is the best way to earn wealth and equity.”
But renting can almost be equal to paying a monthly amount as much as a mortgage. Then you have some landlords who advertise their Brooklyn apartments outside of the neighborhood, or displace and replace Black tenants for white ones with higher income.
The Black Homeownership Project released a Black Housing Policy Agenda to “advocate for systematic and structural change at the city, state, and federal levels to work to undo racist housing policies and invest in long-term housing stabilization programs for Black New Yorkers.”
BHP’S proposed a five-point advocacy agenda for Black New Yorkers that prioritizes: “Ending predatory and speculative activities that target Black communities and encourage gentrification and displacement.
-Stabilizing Black homeowners to keep them in their homes.
-Increasing the supply of social, public, and affordable homeownership housing models.
-Prioritizing healthy and resilient housing.
-Growing Black Community Wealth Networks.
Mortgage rates remain a problem. The people at Freddie Mac say. “We forecast mortgage rates to stay above 6.5% through this quarter and next.” However the Forbes Advisor notes, but it is “not low enough to coax potential buyers into purchasing a home or homeowners into refinancing their loan.”
While in the State Assembly Charles Barron assisted in the creation of Alafia Village with over 2000 of what he calls “housing affordable to us” rental units,” as part of over 20,000 mostly rental units, but some home ownership, built during his time in the City Council.
“Gentrification is ethnic cleansing,” former elected official. “When you remove a race based on income and replace it with another one able to afford to live in that neighborhood, where those who have lived there for years now can’t afford to live in a city where they were born. It is abominable.
Don’t let them sanitize it and say gentrification to make it sound sophisticated. In the 1960s when they called it Urban Renewal, we called it Black removal. Same game, same name, same fight.”
Barron said that as an elected official for two decades, “With local power representing East New York, we stopped ethnic cleansing/Black removal, we had an increase in the Black population and a decrease in the white population.
We demanded that the housing income requirement was based on the area median income of our neighborhood, and not that of the entire city.”