Photo Caption: Bedford-Stuyvesant mom Eliana Luciano, 29, with her daughter Katherine, 6.
New York City neighborhoods attracting affluent new residents are also home to a more troubling trend - increasing child poverty.
East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant scored high on the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York’s new ranking of the Big Apple’s poorest communities.
“Pockets of extreme poverty persist in the city, even in neighborhoods that are often thought to be improving economically,” said CCC executive director Jennifer March-Joly.
Along strips like Bedford Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Lexington Ave. in East Harlem, wine bars, restaurants and chic boutiques have sprung up in recent years.
But the neighborhoods also have pockets of growing poverty, CCC found.
Since the recession began in 2008, the numbers of children living in poverty in East Harlem jumped from 31.6 percent to 44.2 percent in 2010.
In Bedford Stuyvestant, where the white population jumped 600% since 2000, the number of kids living in poverty increased from 39.6 percent in 2008 to 47 percent.
Median income for both neighborhoods was also surpringly low : Families with children under 18 in both East Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant earned about $28,000 in 2010 - compared to the citywide average of about $61,000.
“You have young whites moving in,and minorities moving out. What is left behind are people who can’t afford to move out,” said CUNY graduate center sociologist Richard Alba.
Single parent Eliana Luciano, 29, is about to lose her $1,070 one-bedroom apartment she shares with her daughter Katherine, 6 and elderly mom.
“I can’t afford my rent,” said Luciano who makes $7.60 an hour working at CVS. “It’s hard. You can’t find a decent job.”
Richard Toxe, a father of four who works as a nursing assistant, lives in Metro Plaza Houses on First Avenue in East Harlem, sandwiched between two new pricy luxury buildings with amenities like a shuttle bus and a white-gloved doorman.
“These buildings affected everything,” said Toxe complaining he has to travel uptown to buy milk and meat because his local Associated supermarket raised its prices.
white people ruin lives.
![zuky:
thesmithian:
…[some] may not remember what made Iran-Contra such an extraordinary scandal. The Reagan administration “raised money privately” by selling weapons to a sworn enemy of the United States. Why? Because it wanted to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. And when I say “illegal war,” I mean that quite literally—Congress told the Reagan administration, in no uncertain terms, that Reagan could not send money to the Contras. Period. The Reagan administration, unrestrained by laws and the Constitution, did so anyway, and much of the president’s national security team ended up under indictment.
more.
Reagan knew everything. However, I bet this Time magazine piece doesn’t get into the juiciest part of Iran-Contra, which is that in the 1980s the CIA put into operation a crack cocaine pipeline to import narcotics from Central and South America and distribute it in US inner cities. This is not a “conspiracy theory”, this is a documented conspiracy, most rigorously researched and reported by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Gary Webb, whose series in the San Jose Mercury News and subsequent book “Dark Alliance” literally got him killed. To me, that’s the story of Iran-Contra: not that Reagan sold weapons to Iran, but that the US government imported and sold crack to Black America, as part of an arms and drugs trade which funded war in the Third World and which devastated lives and filled prisons in the USA.
Spit on that fucker’s grave.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/9745d96274c257550523597f049fc6dc/tumblr_mmugto6Erl1qcwnv4o1_500.jpg)
