Brooklyn

• Rising Rents Lead More to Bed-Stuy Soup Kitchen

  21 May 2017 by journalism / No Comments

  By ALAIN GAILLARD

  The soup kitchen starts serving food at 10:30 every morning. A few soup kitchen guests begin gathering outside the main entrance of St. John’s Bread and Life in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a half-hour before the doors open.

  After the doors open, the seats around the tables in the cafeteria start filling with guests who wait for their hot food in an atmosphere of familiarity. Everyone is engaged in a conversation; everyone seems to know one another.

  One impact of gentrification in Bedford-Stuyvesant is that rising rent has caused more residents to turn to St. John’s Bread and Life for food, said Anthony Butler, the soup kitchen’s executive director.

  The number of participants asking for hot meals has increased by about 5.5 percent over the last year, Butler said, while the number of participants in the food pantry and the grocery section has increased by 11 percent. “Folks are spending more and more money on rent and making choices between rent and food, so they are using our service because they don’t have enough money to make ends meet,” he said. “The cost of living, particularly housing, really squeezes everything, especially with the gentrification going on in Bed-Stuy.”

  With a current population of 153,000, Bedford-Stuyvesant was named for Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch director of the colony of New Netherland before it was renamed New York. Before the gentrification process began in the early 2000s, the neighborhood was mostly inhabited by African-American and Caribbean immigrants, groups that moved in from Harlem in the early 1930s.

  According to census data, the number of white residents increased from 2.4 percent in 2000 to 15 percent in 2010. Housing prices are also rising: for example, a tenant is paying $3,550 for three bedrooms in Bedford-Stuyvesant compared with $2,850 for three bedrooms in Flatbush.

  Kenneth Gould, professor of sociology and earth and environmental sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center, explained that the first big gentrification push in Brooklyn was so-called bridge and tunnel gentrification. “This happened in places such as Williamsburg, which had good transportation access to points of employment or more affluent neighborhoods, but were not valued as much as those neighborhoods,” said Gould, who is also director of the Urban Sustainability Program at Brooklyn College. “From Williamsburg, people could access Manhattan faster than other neighborhoods.”

  Sharon Zukin, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and at the CUNY Graduate Center, has conducted studies on the type of restaurants that do business in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She suggested that the neighborhood’s cultural diversity is seen in the offering of restaurants and the changes in the retail corridor of Fulton Street, which is one of the main streets.

  Zukin  explained that Bedford-Stuyvesant residents are very proud of their neighborhood, which is why low-income residents want to stay there despite rising costs. “The suffering of people who stay in Bed-Stuy is mitigated by their pride that the neighborhood is coming up,” she said. “Some benefits have been brought by gentrification, but these benefits may be outweighed by the e