In New York City an area where diversity and culture diffusion is very common you would expect a better understanding and representation when it comes to supporting the people that live there. Well, that isn’t always the case. New York City’s demographic according to the 2021 census states that New York City consists of 42.7% White, 24.3% Black, 14.1% Asian, and 29.1% Hispanic or Latino residents, and yet people of color are still struggling with poverty, homelessness, resources, the list can go on.
The NYCHA program (New York City Housing) has helped give homes to many residents in New York City since 1934, considering many of those residents are 88% percent people of color. But remains to put those residents in apartments that aren’t pleasant to live in and never or rarely ever get renovated. Essentially putting families in danger. According to The $40 Billion Housing Headache Facing New York’s Next Mayor by Martin Z Braun (paragraph 1-5), “NYCHA needs $40 billion to renovate apartment buildings built mostly between 1945 and 1970 and now plagued by mold, lead paint, vermin and elevator, and heat outages”. During the 1970s when the NYCHA program was fairly still fresh, white flight migration (the migration of white people from an area) was common in The Bronx due to the financial burden the community was facing. Because of this the push and pull dynamic in urban and rural areas eventually negatively impacted people of color. While white people were migrating into urban areas people of color had to adjust and eventually find new places to afford to live, due to the new funding that they couldn’t obtain. Now that our society has found ways to allow people who can’t fully afford the “New York lifestyle” programs like NYCHA have supported the people who need it the most. Due to the increase in funding this program and finally repairing and renovating the homes that desperately need it. Joe Biden proposed a 1.7 trillion dollar plan “To help rebuild the country after the pandemic has $40 billion allotted for all U.S. public housing, not just New York, and its passage is far from certain. Putting off the repairs not only boosts the repairs not only boost their cost, but it also increases the chances that NYCHA apartments will be declared uninhabitable, potentially pushing thousands more residents onto the streets” says Martin.
Compared to a fieldwork’s question a journalist’s question on this matter would be if officials are giving so much why isn’t the work being done? what pockets is the money filling? And who is in charge? Information that the fieldworker would want to gather to answer their questions is to go to the situation. What I mean by “going to the situation” is, go where the problem is (the residents who live in NYCHA buildings) and interview or ask those residents, what situations have they faced living in their apartment? And what challenges have they faced in resolving their situation? When using the internet to solve or better understand the situation the fieldworker would want to, research the main cause of why New York City low-income residents get residential help from the NYCHA program but residents still face a rising rate of homelessness. Other sources of information that the fieldworker might use to penetrate the insider perspective are, databases so the situation can be broadcasted statewide/internationally so that others are aware of what’s going on and hopefully motivates officials to resolve it better, magazine articles to create a better visual representation of the issue, and newspaper so that locals can state up to date on the situation that is happening in their community. The cultural information the article includes is laws and social norms. But to sum up the situation as a fieldworker I would ask, why are New York state officials not doing enough and pretending to be doing more than there asking?
