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Next Door, Yet Worlds Apart

Andre T. Mitchell drove down Sutter Avenue in East New York and pointed to some of the landmarks of the Brooklyn neighborhood: housing projects, a police station and an intersection named for an 8-year-old boy killed by a stray bullet.

The community activist then crossed Conduit Boulevard into the Queens neighborhood of Ozone Park and emerged on a quiet block lined by manicured lawns and single-family homes.

“So close, yet so far,” said Mr. Mitchell.

On a map, East New York and Ozone Park are joined at the hip. On the ground, the neighborhoods are a world apart. Conduit, their border, separates the deadliest police precinct in New York City from one of the safest.

“The Conduit is almost a…man-made boundary,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens. “The intentions may not have been to separate the communities but in reality, it is.”

In the 75th Precinct, which includes East New York and Cypress Hills in Brooklyn, there have been 16 murders this year through Aug. 28, the most in the city, and more than 2,100 incidents of what the New York Police Department classifies as major crimes. The 106th Precinct, which includes Ozone Park and Howard Beach in Queens, has seven murders and 889 major crimes in the same period. Last year, the precinct had three murders.

Tale of two precincts

East New York and the neighboring Queens sections of Ozone Park and Howard Beach are a world apart in terms of income and violent crime.

The Queens neighborhoods’ reputation took a hit in August when a jogger was killed in Howard Beach and an imam and his friend were shot to death in Ozone Park. Yet for some East New York residents, the murders next door only underscored the gap in crime and circumstances—a GoFundMe account to increase the reward for information in the jogger’s slaying has raised more than $250,000.

At a time when politicians and law-enforcement officials are touting crime numbers near historic lows across the city, the contrast between the two neighbors is a reminder that the reality on the ground can change dramatically from block to block.
This particular divide is a product of demographic, political and economic shifts over the past century that have set these communities on opposite courses.

Both areas were once populated mostly by European immigrants. When the economy rebounded after World War II, many working-class white residents moved to more suburban areas in Ozone Park and Howard Beach as low-income African-Americans looked to East New York for housing, said Jerome Krase, a Brooklyn College professor who specializes in urban society.

Construction of the Belt Parkway in the 1950s fortified the divide, cutting off East New York from Howard Beach.

Those developments set the stage for a widening of the separation in the 1970s when the Federal Housing Administration began providing mortgage insurance for developments in locations with favorable conditions and economic stability—conditions East New York couldn’t meet, said Patrice Derrington, a professor of real-estate development at Columbia University.

“You don’t get market-rate rental housing in the 75th Precinct so you don’t have housing, so people don’t go there,” she said. “You end up with public housing.”

Defaults and vacancies spread, creating two communities with starkly different economic profiles. The median household income for East New York is about $34,500, roughly half the amount for Ozone Park, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The Brooklyn precinct has twice as many residents living below the poverty line.

“It just seems like there’s two different atmospheres,” said Steve, a 56-year-old who lives on the Ozone Park side of Sutter Avenue; he declined to give his last name. “It’s like the other side of the tracks.”

Today, residents of East New York say the relative peace and prosperity next door is a constant reminder of what they don’t have.

Johnny Diaz, a 28-year-old former gang member who grew up in East New York and now lives in Ozone Park, said driving to Howard Beach from East New York gave him a sense of being “forgotten”—Howard Beach with its luxury condominiums and East New York with its liquor stores.
“You get the visual and the feeling as you’re walking past this is of defeat,” said Mr. Diaz, a musician. “It is morally defeating.”

Police say they recognize the gap and are putting a greater emphasis on community outreach to bridge it.

Deputy Inspector Rafael Mascol, the NYPD Housing Bureau commanding officer of Police Service Area 2, said he has encouraged officers to interact with residents and officers are cracking down on gang members “that cause all the havoc in the neighborhood.”

As he wound his way through Ozone Park and Howard Beach and back to East New York, the 49-year-old Mr. Mitchell, the community activist, spoke of his own story and said he sees potential.

When he was 18, Mr. Mitchell got involved with a bad crowd. He was convicted of manslaughter in connection with a fatal shooting. He spent five years in prison but maintains his innocence.

Today, Mr. Mitchell is chairman of Brooklyn Community Board 5, which oversees East New York, and his nonprofit Man Up! Inc. provides youth services.
As he pulled up to a basketball court, Mr. Mitchell was greeted by a teenager who two years ago was skipping classes to hang out at the Pink Houses with the Bloods gang. Now, he excels in school, Mr. Mitchell said.

“At first, it’s like, why can’t we have this?” Mr. Mitchell said of the neighborhoods in the 106th Precinct. “At the same time, it gives a blueprint of what can be done. This is what I think can happen on the other side.”

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