There is a homegrown effort underway in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to improve the neighborhood by building on what residents cite as key strengths: people's sense of service to others and a neighborhood pride despite the struggles many of them face.

The work comes in the form of remaking public spaces and focusing on healthy living. More residents are advocating for better job opportunities and housing conditions. They are showing up to meetings to ask for safer streets and more public services, particularly after what many residents view as years of disinvestment by the city.

WNYC set out to learn more about these initiatives and to hear from residents about the positive but under-reported aspects of Brownsville. Our goal was to hear how Brownsville residents view their neighborhood and what they want outsiders to know.

The spirit of the community is best captured in the credo, "Never Ran, Never Will," according to Dionne Grayman, who was born and raised in the neighborhood and is a founder of the group We Run Brownsville.

The motto describes not giving up in an area with a poverty rate twice as high as New York City's, where more than half of Brownsville families live in public housing and health issues are so profound that the community has the lowest life expectancy in the city, at 74-years-old, according to a report published last year by the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York.

Grayman said "Never Ran, Never Will" describes how the people of Brownsville remain unashamed and unbroken: "Still believing in the possibility and the potential even when faced with the horrible and the heartbreaking. And that there’s still something to fight for, something to celebrate, something to be excited about, something to look forward to."

Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn. (Clarissa Sosin)

The Citizens' Committee report, which focused on the barriers to well-being for children and families, in part inspired WNYC to get a better understanding of the neighborhood behind the numbers.  

The first step in the reporting project was simply meeting with people who lived and worked in Brownsville. We took in the landscape of neighborhood streets, the murals splashed across the sides of buildings and vegetable gardens bursting with inexplicably tall kale. 

Frequently, the refrain from those we met was that outsiders looking in give undue focus to the neighborhood's struggles, specifically crime, without focusing on the strength of Brownsville's people. 

"Nobody talks about how amazing people are from our community," said Lytheia Smith, who grew up in the neighborhood and chose to raise her children there.

"All we hear about is the gunfire the gunshots and the robbery and the gang-related incidents," she said. "And I can't lie that that happens. It does. But you know what else happens? People fight for our community."

Lytheia Smith at her home in Brownsville. (Amy Pearl)

WNYC followed Smith to view a changing Brownsville from her eyes. The positive changes around her mirror a transformation she has been undergoing personally, too, which she described as a shift in mindset. When enough people shift, there can be wider, collective change, she said.

"We’re changing the face of Brownsville, because somebody in Brownsville began to change their mind," Smith said. "No one is coming from outside and bringing that in. We're doing it from the inside out."  

Our reporting also took us to the Brownsville Community Justice Center, an organization that works with youth in the neighborhood. There, a squad of late-teens and 20-somethings have put their minds to the ambitious task of easing neighborhood tensions by creating a virtual reality video game. They are digitally replicating Brownsville, with a few twists.

Adrian Richardson is helping design a virtual reality video game about Brownsville. (Amy Pearl)

They wanted residents, and outsiders, to explore Brownsville by crossing neighborhood divides that, in real life, keep people apart, because of lingering tensions between housing developments or between residents and police. The team has aimed to unite people's stories and call out the systems in place that confine people to poverty and powerlessness. 

WNYC also dove into a persistent problem in the neighborhood: garbage. The city recently declared Brownsville the first "neighborhood innovation lab," a concept of using new tech to target quality of life issues. Up first, a $7,225 "smart waste bin," an innovation that was both welcome but also viewed with skepticism in a neighborhood where residents expressed receiving short shrift for decades when it came to waste management.    

Finally, in the fall, as the school year revved up, we looked at early childhood programs in the neighborhood. In the first year of the city's expansion of pre-k, the number of children enrolled in full-day programs increased by 70 percent in District 23, which encompasses Brownsville.

The city is just beginning an expansion of preschool for even younger children, 3-year-olds, and Brownsville was one of the first neighborhoods where programs began taking root this year in public schools and community organizations. 

Carine Bruney leads a class of 3-year-olds in song at P.S. 323 in Brownsville. (Yasmeen Khan)

Brownsville's Hard Numbers

According to how the Citizens' Committee defined neighborhood boundaries and population totals, Brownsville's population of more than 61,000 people has a significant number of children. More than 30 percent of residents are kids under 18. The large majority of Brownsville residents, about 75 percent, are black.

While the overall poverty rate for Brownsville is high, at 40 percent, it is worse for children, at 54 percent. The median household income for the neighborhood just surpasses $25,000, compared to nearly $47,000 for Brooklyn as a whole and $53,000 citywide.

As is the case for low-income families across the city, housing stability is a problem in Brownsville. A significant number of families utilize the shelter system each year, while others rely on public housing as the sole affordable option for renting in the neighborhood. Brownsville has the highest concentration of public housing in New York City (many contend in the country), given the number of large housing complexes and other properties operated by the New York City Public Housing authority in just a 1.1 square mile area.

The view of the Langston Hughes Apartments from the roof of 315 Sutter Avenue. (Clarissa Sosin)

While crime, including violent crime, is still a problem in Brownsville — the issue of public safety is indeed one flagged by neighborhood residents as a priority for improvement — it has dropped significantly over more than two decades, as in New York City as a whole. But the effect of crime on the psyche of the neighborhood includes the number of people sent to prison: the rate of incarcerated adults from Brownsville and neighboring Ocean Hill is more than three times that of the city's overall rate. 

These difficult numbers are part of Brownsville's reality, even if they do not define the neighborhood's core qualities. And in order to put them in context it's critical to understand how residents themselves viewed these figures.

The young people at the Brownsville Community Justice Center wrote about these challenges as consequences of policies, and urban experiments, outside of their control in an opening poem to the virtual reality game they are creating. This excerpt stood out:

New Energy, and Investments, Are Now Shaping the Neighborhood

Quardean Lewis-Allen, an architect and urbanist, has a lot to say about how people are both shaped by their environment and, in turn, what prevents people from being able to shape the space around them.

He grew up in Brownsville, and returned recently to form the youth creative agency Made in Brownsville. 

"Authority over space is the thing that allows people to have that sense of equity that encourages or discourages certain activities in space," said Lewis-Allen, such as discouraging crime or encouraging cultural activity or even just socializing. 

He added that the high concentration of public housing in the neighborhood, and the fact that many renters have landlords that reside outside of the neighborhood, doesn't help people feel that they have a stake in their surroundings.

"So, when people don’t have a relationship to the space — particularly ownership, or 'I made this' or 'I know somebody who works here' and 'We have positive memories here' — when people don’t have that type of relationship with spaces they themselves neglect it."

Quardean Lewis-Allen (right) helps Daren Duffie screen print a t-shirt at Made in Brownsville. (Clarissa Sosin)

But Brownsville residents are breathing new life into their public spaces and the already vibrant culture of the neighborhood. That's not to say that there hasn't always been grassroots advocacy around neighborhood improvements. But there is a growing energy around this advocacy now.

The Brownsville Community Justice Center has focused on remaking spaces as a cornerstone to its work in the neighborhood. A good case study is a pedestrian plaza transformed just a few years ago by young people from the Justice Center. That's where the city placed its smart waste bin.

The space, once called Osborn Street, had been problematic: it was a dark, dead-end road that invited crime and provided a stage for social tensions to play out between two nearby public housing complexes. Volunteers and staff of the Justice Center applied for a grant from the city's Department of Transportation to remake the space. They enlisted design help from Made in Brownsville.

Now Osborn Plaza, as it is called, houses tables and chairs, large planters and is covered by a street mural of two clasped hands with the words "Brownsville Stronger Together."

Osborn Plaza in Brownsville. (Clarissa Sosin)

The city came in last summer and installed the smart waste bin, along with benches that have solar powered mobile charging stations. Here's more about what a fancy trash can says about a place. 

There is a growing list of examples of how the neighborhood is revitalizing in homegrown ways. Grayman's organization, We Run Brownsville, works to bring women together to run, be healthy and support each other. The group encourages women to take ownership of their personal well-being, as well as the well-being of their community. 

A popular local cafe owned by three sisters from the neighborhood, called Three Black Cats, got help from the Dream Big Foundation. The Brownsville Community Culinary Center recently opened on Belmont Avenue, with corporate and foundation help.

And now city and state governments are stepping in with more resources directed toward the neighborhood.

"The Brownsville neighborhood has really historically been under-invested in from the city," said Leila Bozorg, Deputy Commissioner of Neighborhood Strategies at the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

“And members of the Brownsville community have been advocating for a long time, from our perspective, for the city to have a stronger seat at the table and to start bringing more and new investments to the community,” she said.

Last summer, after a series of community workshops, the Department of Housing Preservation released its Brownsville Plan. It laid out a strategy for creating more affordable housing, health facilities, cultural spaces and parks based on residents' feedback. A big part of the Brownsville Plan, and the collaboration with the community, Bozorg said, was to develop ideas for revitalizing four vacant lots in Brownsville owned by the city. 

“The city does control a lot of investments that go to different neighborhoods," Bozorg said. "This is an opportunity to say we want to make sure the city’s investments are shared equitably — that those investments bring new opportunities to existing residents and also bring new investments that enhance the experience of existing residents. “

The city is estimating spending about $150 million in quality-of-life improvements, plus more funding toward housing.

Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn. (Clarissa Sosin)

The state is also putting more money in the area. In early 2017, Gov. Andrew Cuomo pledged $1.4 billion in wellness initiatives for central Brooklyn, like building out green spaces, increasing access to health care and healthy foods and creating affordable housing. 

And while residents and community leaders welcome improvements, and the attention, they also are skeptical of them. As the stories in our project point out, there are frequently questions of, "Why now?"

"I see the changes, but for whom are the changes being made?" said Grayman, who sees gentrification on the horizon for Brownsville, just as — as she put it — people have witnessed gentrification "march across Brooklyn like Sherman's army."

"So it’s hard to have an appreciation for the changes on the one hand if on the other I know that the changes are not for the people who are here," said Grayman, "but for the people who are expected to come."

Change "From the Inside Out"

And while there is more outside attention on Brownsville, it's the innovation coming from the community that several leaders said signal a new era of change — like that shift in mindset that Lytheia Smith described. 

"I’m going to call it healing," said Grayman. "The healing is beginning. Because when you start to heal and you’re a little healthier, you think differently. You’re not thinking in pain, you’re not thinking in fear. You’re not thinking in shame and in guilt and in powerlessness."

There's no question that the desire for change, and the new ideas and community projects, are generated by an ethic that has long-defined the neighborhood. It's a care-taking spirit that we found in the work done by grassroots organizations and by the hospitality in those that we interviewed.

A mural at 1788 Pitkin Avenue. (Clarissa Sosin)

We found it when speaking with Gregory Jackson, Jr., the principal of Brooklyn Collaborative Middle School. He grew up in Brownsville and imparts a saying to his students that was handed down to him: "Who are you going to help today?"

Linda Harris, principal of P.S./I.S. 323, spoke of the need to create a warm and welcoming place for families in the neighborhood.

"It's a community that's living and changing," said Harris. "So as a school I have to create that oasis in the middle of what's going on. And I'm hoping that once we create this oasis here, it will spread out."

On the day that WNYC visited Harris's school, she showed off the school's vegetable garden. A passerby, an older woman who lived nearby, commented on the school's bounty. Harris told her to come pick vegetables anytime — "just ask for the principal." 

She then collected a bouquet of basil from a raised garden bed, and handed it to the woman through the fence.