Marcy Houses is a massive social housing block in Brooklyn, New York that is mostly inhabited by African Americans. Such blocks are called Projects or Project Houses. This area can be called a ghetto since it’s a place that non-residents prefer to avoid. The BedStuy (Bedford-Stuyvesant) area is a beautiful historic site where wealthy New Yorkers built their homes over a hundred years ago. But in the second half of the 20th century, they started building social housing complexes and resettle the black population of the city here. As a result, BedStuy became inhabited exclusively by African Americans and this went on for several decades. Only in the early 2010s, the reverse process began - gentrification - when new residents began to arrive in the area with cheap real estate, open businesses, so the cost of rent began to grow rapidly, and the social and ethnic composition of the population changed dramatically.
Marcy Houses are famous for being the birthplace of rapper Jay-Z, several other famous musicians and athletes. But for residents of Brooklyn and New York, Projects or Project Houses are now primarily associated with insecurity and poverty.
Are things really so bad in the black quarters of New York, is it really a ghetto, is it poor and dangerous there? Leo Pashkovsky and Culture Shock will find out and tell you all about it.
I will interact with local residents at Projects or Project Houses, talk to them about their lives, culture, hip-hop music, problems and dreams, so that you get the most complete picture of what kind of life these people live.
And, you’ll be surprised, but we might have a lot in common with them.