Abstract
For about 18 months I have lived in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The other 15 units in my building were mostly inhabited by Pakistani-Americans, while most of the other neighbours on the block were Latinos, predominantly Puerto Ricans but also Dominicans, Mexicans and others. A few Chinese- and white Americans also lived on the block, where my building was known as ‘The Indian Building’. Approximately 30 m from our front door was Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue, which in Sunset Park is known as the Latino – or, sometimes, Mexican – Main Street. Three blocks to the east is Eighth Avenue, the heart of Brooklyn’s Chinatown, although also inhabited by other East Asians. Sunset Park was once the centre of Scandinavian and Finnish New York. Many buildings around the namesake park still bear Finnish names, and it was here that Finnish migrants built the first housing cooperatives in the USA. What is now the Chinese-American Main Street was once a centre of Norwegian commerce. (A few Norwegian-American stores remain in Bay Ridge, the neighbourhood directly south of Sunset Park.) The Poles, the Irish, the Italians and other groups once also inhabited Sunset Park – and some still do. In 1960, 91% of the residents were ‘non-Hispanic white’; in 2010 this was only 11%. Latinos, originally mostly Puerto Ricans, quickly filled the vacant houses and shops along Fourth and Fifth Avenues. Since the late 1970s they have made up around half of Sunset Park’s population. This apparent Latino population stability, however, hides the fact that the number of Puerto Ricans has steadily declined since 1990 and is matched by a spectacular and on-going growth in the number of Mexicans. From the mid 1970s onwards, Chinese and other Asians have started to move into Sunset Park, in particular its eastern parts. Asian-Americans now make up almost 40% of the district. This is surely an undercount, not only because of undocumented migrants but also because the statistical border of Sunset Park does not match the inhabitants’ sense of the district and many of Sunset’s Asians technically live just east of Sunset Park, in neighbouring Borough Park.
Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, as the subtitle goes, is the focus of Tarry Hum’s book. Hum’s family moved to Sunset Park in 1974 and as a teenager and adult she saw the neighbourhood change. Years of research have poured into this rich book that presents a true neighbourhood case study with topics as diverse (yet related) as street vendors, ethnic banks, gentrification, migrant civil society and environmental injustice. Since Hum is mostly interested in how post-1965 migrants have changed the neighbourhood, a slightly more apt title would have been Remaking a Global Immigrant Neighborhood as this is exactly what she discusses. In the first chapter Hum presents how both immigration policies and migrants themselves were remaking and continue to remake New York City neighbourhoods. In the subsequent chapter, she provides an overview of the history and changes of Sunset Park. Oddly, the first chapter is titled ‘Towards a Theory of Global Neighborhoods’ even though the chapter is very light on theory. Hum is very critical of concepts such as ‘enclaves, barrios, slums, or ghettos’ (p. 18) although she continues to occasionally use ‘barrios’ and also ‘colonias’ (e.g. p. 53) herself. Her preferred alternative appears to be the ‘global immigrant neighborhood’ from the book’s title, although the argument in favour of this concept is mostly implicit.
Chapters 3–6 present the core of the book. Chapters 3 and 6 loosely focus on Sunset Park’s industrial restructuring, environmental pollution of different kinds, local and ethnic labour market segmentation, street vendors, sex work, the working poor and finally the post-industrial remaking of the waterfront and of work spaces. Here as well as elsewhere in the book, she is critical of former Mayor Bloomberg’s agenda to support ‘innovative’ and immigrant entrepreneurs, industrial infrastructure and manufacturing, real estate development and the green economy, while not delivering on several accounts. For example, Hum considers the mayor’s industrial policy a sham that does more harm than good and continues to displace manufacturing firms that employ working-class New Yorkers. The mayor’s rezoning efforts are equally criticised for favouring real estate developers and gentrifiers at the expense of working class and poor migrants.
Chapters 4 and 5, then, discuss the gentrification of Sunset Park with special attention to the role of the local community board and local branches of national and international ethnic, mostly Chinese, banks. Hum describes how a migrant civil society develops, partly in response to the mayor’s and the community board’s plans as well as the practices of several developers and landlords. Hum shows how multi-ethnic cooperation is not always easy and sometimes racialied discourses dominate the debate, but at other times local movements are able to find common, multi-racial, ground. Unfortunately – but probably hard to avoid – she sometimes speaks of the different racial, ethnic and migrant groups as if they are, by definition, groups-in-themselves and in-group differences are downplayed at the expense of between-group differences, thereby feeding racialised readings of events. Non-Hispanic whites, for example, are often portrayed as either ‘longtime white homeowners’ or ‘white gentrifiers’ who buy-up beautiful brownstone family homes, even though plenty of the non-Hispanic whites in the neighbourhood are working-class New Yorkers and often tenants as well. Moreover, these days Chinese-Americans buy many of Sunset’s family homes, typically priced between US$600,000 and US$1,000,000. Hum criticises others for their ‘redistributive populism [that] tends to suppress non-class differences such as race’ (p. 159), but she sometimes seems to forget that not all whites are homeowners and some Chinese are, in fact, gentrifiers.
On the other hand, I especially enjoyed Hum’s debunking of what I’d like to call ‘the myth of ethnic banks’. The literature on ethnic banks, Hum explains, suggest that they ‘rely on social capital and cultural understanding rather than “balance-sheet criteria” to make lending decisions’ in order to accomplish their ‘mission of community service’ and ‘capture the largely unbanked immigrant market’ (p. 108). Countering this myth, Hum demonstrates how ethnic banks, by-and-large, are not agents of immigrant asset building, are risk-averse in the face of residential mortgage lending (witnessed by high-denial among Asian loan applicants, thereby hardly supporting immigrant homeownership), and not addressing local needs as required by the Community Reinvestment Act (1977). Instead, ethnic banks support what Hum labels ‘immigrant growth machines’ by heavily funding commercial real estate, construction and land development. The immigrant growth machine seems to work in cohesion with the community board’s rezoning and Mayor Bloomberg’s corporatist pro-growth and in particular pro-development agenda.
Even after having lived in Sunset Park and having read other works on the neighbourhood, I learned a great deal from Hum’s Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood. The manner in which Hum connects topics not typically discussed together is commendable and a good illustration of the added value of rich neighbourhood case studies. Considering both the focus of the book and Hum’s training as an urban planner, I had expected more maps, showing the location of Sunset Park in relation to other neighbourhoods, infrastructure, etc. as well as maps related to population distribution and racial concentrations; commercial corridors, industrial zones, brownfields and parks; ethnic and other banks and key institutions; zoning, rezoning and new residential and commercial real estate developments; and so forth. Notwithstanding the lack of maps and other shortcomings, Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood is recommended reading for all those interested in the intersection of urban and ethnic/racial studies and in particular those interested in migrant civil society, ethnic banks and immigrant growth coalitions.