Background on Bushwick
Neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY

Bushwick, Brooklyn is a neighborhood in crisis.

Bushwick is located in the center of a neglected, low-income section of Brooklyn that is home to more than half a million people. Bushwick's housing, schools and infrastructure have been substandard for decades. Over 40 percent of Bushwick residents live below the poverty level, and almost 40 percent rely on means-tested government benefits. Median family income in Bushwick is less than half the national average while the official unemployment rate in Bushwick is over 10 percent, which is more than double the national rate.

The percentage of children born into poverty in Bushwick is 75.8 percent, the highest rate in Brooklyn. Births to teen mothers are 17.5 percent in Bushwick as compared to the Brooklyn average of 11.2 percent. Figures from the New York City Department of Education indicate that the high school dropout rate in Bushwick is close to 70 percent.

Recent welfare reform has resulted in a radical curtailment of federal support for poor people, particularly women and legal immigrants, in communities such as Bushwick. New York City's workfare program has forced many poor mothers to place their children in inadequate childcare arrangements, to become homeless or to lose subsistence benefits. As the city's welfare bureaucracy has become more hostile and difficult to navigate, non-English-speaking immigrant women and their children are frequently victimized by national origin discrimination and administrative errors they are poorly positioned to challenge. The consequences are constricted opportunity, humiliation, hunger and homelessness. Moreover, as a community of recent immigrants, Bushwick's economic disenfranchisement is compounded by its political marginalization. Sixty-five percent of the community is Latino and almost half of these Latinos are legal permanent residents who cannot vote.

Workers in the Bushwick community face drastic abuse in the workplace and routinely are denied their most basic rights. Laws regulating the minimum wage, overtime pay, workplace health and safety, and employment discrimination are violated rampantly and with impunity by local sweatshops. Workers who dare to speak out against such abuses are often threatened with discharge or with retaliation based on their immigration status. Residents working in our community face safety hazards at work every day.

Bushwick's housing stock comprises many old and deteriorated buildings, mainly tenements with absentee landlords or tax-foreclosed properties owned by the City. These buildings are contaminated with lead paint, and lead paint violations number 64.4 per thousand children, twice the Brooklyn average.