Thirty-five years ago this month, 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins hopped off the 20th Avenue subway in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, to view a used car for sale. He would never make it back home.
At the time, the neighborhood was primarily Italian and known for being a place where Black people were not welcomed. Shortly after Hawkins and the three other young Black teens and men that he came with entered the neighborhood, a group of as many as 30 teens and adults surrounded them, wielding weapons. One of them, armed with a handgun, shot Hawkins twice in the chest, killing him.
His death was the third killing of a Black person by white mobs in New York City during the 1980s. The highly public killing helped spur the election of David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor. It underscored a shifting dynamic of race and power, one that persists today as the nation’s largest city experiences exorbitant housing costs, gentrification, and the loss of Black residents.
In the decades since Hawkins’ murder, Bensonhurst has become home to the city’s large Chinese population. And once again, it serves as a flash point for the ways that city officials and everyday citizens have stunted New York’s ability to address the ills that have suffocated Black life there, advocates told Capital B.
After it was announced earlier this year that a homeless shelter would be built in the community for primarily Black and Latino single men, the neighborhood quickly mobilized efforts to block it.
The movement against the shelter has pushed tropes and fears against Black men that date back generations and illustrates a growing reality in the aftermath of 2020 as some elements of racial solidarity with Black Americans have waned and other ethnic groups have shifted increasingly to the right over issues of crime, homelessness, and education.
Like other neighborhoods across the city, Bensonhurst is gentrifying, and some residents are afraid the shelter may contribute to another racial rift. The community’s opposition, one comment read, is “about keeping things safe, comfy, and familiar,” which some activists have read to mean “not Black.”
An online petition with 32,000 signees is riddled with loaded comments elevating some of these anti-Black sentiments and dehumanizing language against unhoused people. “It’s not fair for the good citizens,” one comment reads. “They are lazy and will commit crimes,” another one says. (A 2023 study found that more than half of adults in homeless shelters have jobs and about 40% of people sleeping on the street are employed.)
You’d be “surprised” that even with a strong presence of Black political power in New York City, “how much people are willing to be explicitly anti-Black in their rhetoric and openly anti-Black around issues around housing and homelessness,” says Barika Williams, the executive director of the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development in New York.
New York vs. California
But most significantly, the fight underscores the city and nation’s inability to offer transformative solutions to the homelessness crisis.
Last year, homelessness rose by over 12%, reaching a record high of more than 650,000 unhoused people nationwide. The situation is expected to get worse after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this summer granted cities the ability to detain or cite people for sleeping on the streets, even if the city does not offer them supportive housing options. Several cities across the country have begun doing so.
In California, where the most unhoused people live, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an order for “hazardous” encampments to be dismantled statewide and several cities followed suit, most notably San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has declared that she will launch “aggressive” homeless sweeps with criminal penalties.
Portland, Oregon, another top-10 city for homelessness, also followed suit with eradicating encampments, and Des Moines, Iowa, passed a ban that includes a $50 fine for sleeping on the street. In both cities, Black people make up less than 10% of the population but more than 20% of those sleeping on the street.
The sudden acceleration of threats against unhoused people has pushed the nation’s shelter system to the brink and led to advocates calling for more federal funding for affordable housing. This week, the Biden administration outlined $100 million to speed up housing construction nationwide, but there are little incentives for the properties to be built for the country’s poorest.
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Before the housing market crash of the mid-2000s, New York City’s playbook for homelessness was widely celebrated as a model for the nation. A 1979 law guarantees that anyone needing emergency housing in New York City must be provided with shelter, a requirement that is rare nationally even today. Today, as the city’s houseless population straddles the 90,000 mark, the city has 88,000 shelter beds. In comparison, in Los Angeles, where such a law doesn’t exist, there are about 75,000 unhoused people, but just around 17,000 beds.
However, experts say New York has depended on this law as a band-aid solution rather than addressing the lack of affordable housing. And now, the shelter system is bursting at the seams because Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is bussing a growing number of migrants to the city.
Since 2022, NYC rents have surged while the demand for housing has outpaced supply, and the city recently introduced a budget that would gut provisions for affordable housing. As it stands, the city will only produce 10,000 new affordable housing units next year, despite estimates showing a need of 500,000 over the next decade.
It’s clear that “building tons of homeless shelters is not the ideal solution. A lot of us consider it the same as building a whole bunch of jails and thinking that is the solution to crime,” explains Leah Goodridge, a tenants’ rights attorney in New York. “At the end of the day, it just creates a different system, and it doesn’t alleviate the problem of a lack of permanent affordable housing.”
Is this democratic?
After a report by New York City Comptroller Brad Lander showed that poor Black and Latino communities were disproportionately inundated with homeless shelters, the city instituted practices to close the gap by opening shelters in communities across the city.
In theory, the attempt would help place shelters in more resourced communities. Unhoused people would have access to resources that include mental health and physical health services, community institutions like recreation centers and libraries, and higher paying job opportunities.
“This would help us stop viewing the shelter system as a final destination versus the shortest stopping position. It should allow people to access mental health care and other supportive treatment options before going into sustainable affordable housing,” explains Williams with ANHD.
However, in practice, it has provoked and activated communities against the shelter system.
“It has kind of shown the city’s NIMBYism. Everyone has just straight up been like, ‘We don’t want to shelter these people,’” Goodridge says. (NIMBYism, which stands for ‘not in my backyard,’ is a term used to describe people who oppose new housing developments in their areas.)
But Goodridge has noticed how these elements of NIMBYism have racial undertones. Last year, residents in another majority-Asian community were able to successfully block two planned shelters from being built in their neighborhoods.
The demographics of those who are unhoused in America might suggest some of the racial animosity. Among major racial and ethnic groups, Asian people are by far the least likely to be unhoused and have also increasingly begun to live in communities where Asian people make up the largest share of residents, meaning they relatively rarely come across houseless people. In New York, Black people make up 45% of unhoused people, compared to 20% of the overall population. Comparatively, Asian people make up less than 1% of unhoused people living in shelters versus 15% of the total population.
Celina Su, a political science professor at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, says the situation in Brooklyn highlights some of the holes in the country’s current local democratic system and shows why “we need different sorts of democratic participation and participatory budgeting.” Su has spent years researching, organizing, and teaching about building racial solidarity through the participatory democratic process.
Under the current democratic process, voters elect an official they entrust to work in their best interests. However, in more participatory forms of democracy and budgeting, voters decide directly on policy, and elected officials are then responsible for implementing those policy decisions. This shifts more power toward the voter, which may have prevented the volatile situation around the shelter if residents had a say beforehand.
The current process, she says, “ends up really hurting everyone and making all these different historically marginalized communities fighting for crumbs and sort of pitted against each other instead of working together in solidarity.”
Su says that the nationwide protests of 2020 showed the strength of racial solidarity, but “since the uprisings, they [city governments] have found ways to fuel conversations around divisions, rather than just building electoral blocks.” She explicitly cites the ways that conversations around crime and the “migrant crisis” have been used to increase police budgets and stoke fears.
The results have been apparent: Last year, Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man, was killed by a vigilante on a New York subway train. His killer received public praise from across the country.
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But amongst the Asian community, feelings of fear have been undeniable. A recent survey of people of Asian descent in the city found that since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, most people have adopted at least one “avoidance behavior,” like not taking public transit out of fear of violence. Since 2020, about 1 in 3 Asian adults nationwide have reported knowing an Asian person who has been threatened or attacked. However, there is no statistical evidence to suggest that the largest group of perpetrators are Black, despite rampant online rhetoric stating such.
Still, there have been two high-profile cases of Black unhoused men attacking Asian women in New York City over recent years, including the 2022 killing of Christina Yuna Lee near one of the proposed shelter sites that was eventually blocked.
Community members in Bensonhurst, now known as New York’s fourth Chinatown, have used these examples in their regularly planned protests. In July, Bensonhurst’s Democratic council member Susan Zhuang allegedly bit a police officer after one of the protests turned hectic, which brought national attention to the shelter battle. The protests have been a bastion for the far-right, including several conspiracy theorists and 2020 election deniers.
New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, has spoken openly about what he believes is driving the protests. “This is not the deep South,” he said in July, but in “every community we go to, we hear the same thing, we will take any group but single, adult Black men.”
Williams and other experts understand the need to listen to community voices and that there are deep-seated differences amongst the city and country’s racial and ethnic groups, but the answer feels simple to her.
“The answer has always been more affordable housing. That is what everybody comes back to,” she says. “From the general public to folks living through this, especially for Black folks, the answer is, ‘it would be a lot easier for my health, my mental health, if I could go from being an unhoused person to finding stable, sustained housing, as opposed to my option being to live in a shelter in a community where I have no ties.'”