Bed-Stuy is a neighborhood in Brooklyn located just a few minutes from Manhattan in any form of transit. My family moved to Bed-Stuy in 2015 because the rent was cheaper and because there was a high percentage of Hispanics in this specific neighborhood. As we moved to this new neighborhood we were able to find more Hispanic businesses which my dad loved just because he was able to find every ingredient/condiments that he used to cook. The reason why we also moved was because everything was closer to us, my high school, work, family, and everything that we needed was around us.
As time went on, the percentage of Hispanics and blacks in the neighborhood started to decrease and gentrification started to increase, meaning that people couldn’t afford rent anymore because wealthier people were buying the properties and renting them to others with higher income. In the graph below you can see how from the 2000s to 2019, there were an estimated 144,306 people in Bedford Stuyvesant, of which 3.0% of the population identified as Asian, 45.6% as Black, 19.5% identified as Hispanic, and 29.4% identified as white.
Since the early 2000s, people with more wealth started buying properties and renting them to people with a higher income which made people with a lower income move from the neighborhood because they couldn’t afford rent anymore. In 2019, the household income group with the largest share (23.0%) of households was $100,001 – $250,000. In 2000, the household income group with the largest share (34.6%) of households was $20,000. This makes us think that wealthier people took over the neighborhood and people with lower incomes had to move out.
Since the 2000s, crime in Bed-Stuy has had a trend of increasing and decreasing every year. Years ago bed-stuy was considered one of the neighborhoods with a high crime rate in Brooklyn and that high crime rate had to do with the income of people that were living in the neighborhood at that time, people that couldn’t afford rent would get caught shoplifting which is still going in this neighborhood but not as frequent as before. In the year 2000, there were 1809 major felonies reported compared to this year 1295, which is a lot less if you look at the numbers closely. Crime has gone down a lot in the previous year and that has to do with Gentrification, which is one of the good thing that has come with it. More jobs/business are open which gives people the opportunity to have a job and make a living for themselves. In the year 2020, out of 173,842 residents that Bed-Stuy had during that year 766 people were arrested for crimes, which gave it an imprisonment rate of 440 per every 100,000 resident.
