Walking Cortelyou to Learn About Income Inequality in Brooklyn

As any longtime resident can tell you, Cortelyou Road has changed drastically in recent years. As gentrification pushes onward, how exactly have the new residents and businesses changed one of the most important streets in our neighborhood? In a report on income inequality in the borough, the Brooklyn Bureau looked at Cortelyou’s past and present:

Once an overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean community and working-class neighborhood, there has been a 14 percent decline in the black population in Flatbush—a loss of more than 8,000 people—since 2000 according to the Center for Urban Research, a think tank at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

At Winston’s Dry Cleaners this seismic demographic shift has been devastating to business. “Most of my major customers have gone,” the owner, Winston Levy, says in a heavy Jamaican accent. Some dropped off their dry cleaning, but never returned to pick it up – even when the bill was $20. A staff of five several years ago is down to the owner and an occasional part-timer. Levy says he is close to shuttering his business after 25 years. The 65 year old says he does not expect enough in Social Security benefits to retire.

The article also examines several other struggling black-owned businesses on the street, comparing and contrasting the “predominately black side” to the east to the side described as wealthy, mostly-white newcomers.

If Flatbush’s newcomers shopped around more in the Afro-Caribbean end of Cortelyou Road, Levy’s future may not be so bleak. But, he says, “White people don’t come in here.”

The article takes care to point out larger driving trends in income equality in New York and the United States as a whole. Brooklyn ranks as the third polarized county in the state (behind Manhattan and Westchester) while New York state ranks as the most polarized in the country. The wage gap in the metropolitan area is well above national average and the gap is poised to grow in the future.

What do you think of the report? How should residents and politicians address income inequality on our streets, in our city and around the country?