How East New York became a ghetto.
In the 1960s, Walter Thabit became a witness to something terrible, which was the transformation of a vibrant inner-city neighborhood into a ghetto. As an urban planner, Thabit spent a decade working in the neighborhood of East New York, and the subsequent 20 years watching, in spite of his own best efforts and the best efforts of many citizens around him, as investment and hope flowed out of the community, leaving behind a hostile landscape of crime and vacant buildings, an apparition of the city where once the city itself had been.
This odyssey is recounted in the plainly titled and highly imperfect How East New York Became a Ghetto. As a writer, Thabit is not very gifted, and his narrative is choppy and frequently less than compelling. He is also, sadly, prone to broad generalizations rather than studied insights, and his tendency to generalize?often wildly?makes his analysis suspect. He frequently assails "real estate interests," "racist real estate speculators" and indeed the entire structure of white society, but rarely does he name names. Who exactly are these speculators? In all of the book, there is the name of only one. At the very least, the author should have weighed the competing explanations for what he saw happen. The descent into poverty is a complicated process, and does not follow a simple path.
Thabit also fails to explore the distinction between real estate "interests" (a wonderfully vague and meaningless term) who are in fact racist, and those who are simply capitalists going about their business within a racist economic structure. This may seem an empty gradation, but it makes all the difference in the world when one is hunting for solutions: A racist person cannot be changed, but a system can be altered so that those who wish to make money can do so without contributing to the misery of the poor.
Nuance is not Thabit's strong suit, however, and nor, it seems, is academic research. To give but one example: Early on he attacks the "tipping point" theory, which holds that whites tend to leave a neighborhood when a certain proportion of blacks enter it. Although this is a generally accepted concept, Thabit asserts that "several studies" have shown it to be "mythical" and "valueless." But when one flips to the endnotes to read his evidence, it turns out he has cited a single study from 1957, years before most integration efforts even began. Moreover, 10 pages later, Thabit himself describes a situation in which a black family moves in to East New York and whites begin "moving out left and right."
The great tragedy of such sloppiness is that it obscures some of the fundamental truths behind Thabit's arguments. America owes a heavy debt to its inner cities, and neither the ghettos nor the profession of urban planning has yet recovered from planners' misguided efforts to "renew" our urban areas. But the story of the Great Society and its destruction is as much about hubris as malice; it is the story of an arrogant, technocratic breed of liberalism that thought it could go to war against poverty?just as it thought it could go to war against Vietnam?without bothering to learn what poverty was. Racism played an enormous role, and there was no shortage of corruption and hate, but there was also no shortage of a desire to help cities, a desire so ignorant and pollyannish that it was easily hijacked by men of ignoble intentions.
One wishes that Thabit had confined himself to a more journalistic recounting of what he saw and did, and exercised a bit more restraint in his attempts at analysis. To be fair, anyone who saw what he saw can be forgiven a few rhetorical outbursts. This is the book's value, for the story of East New York is not history in any sense. What went so wrong 30 years ago is still wrong. Nothing has repaired itself; the city still suffers and our debt remains unpaid.