The Mystery of Bed-Stuy's Missing Jobs

Three years into the Great Recession, and the dramatic rise in unemployment that began in 2008 shows little sign of abating. While the unemployment rate has eased slightly in recent weeks, much of that is the result of jobless who've given up even searching for work. In New York City, meanwhile, the employment news is not promising: The city's jobless rate of 9.0 percent is unchanged from last year, now ranking higher than the national rate, and more than double what it was at the end of 2006. And the pain is not shared equally among the boroughs: Where relatively few Manhattanites are seeking work, in patches of the outer boroughs unemployment rates are well into the double digits.

The neighborhood that's seen the greatest jump in unemployment since the onset of the Great Recession, according to figures compiled by the Fiscal Policy Institute, is central Brooklyn, an irregularly shaped polygon that includes most of Bedford-Stuyvesant and the northern slice of Crown Heights. Since 2008, when Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were still considered stalwart city employers, the unemployment rate in central Brooklyn has leapt from 6.0 percent to 15.3 percent, outpacing even the South Bronx.   

One obvious question, it would seem, is why businesses in a gentrifying neighborhood like Bedford-Stuyvesant aren't hiring the local unemployed, and what can be done to change that. But as with everything involving the tangled economics of job creation, it turns out that the answers are more complicated than they at first appear.

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Bedford-Stuyvesant has been the hub of Brooklyn's African-American community since the 1930s, and a shorthand for urban decline at least since Billy Joel declared walking there alone to be a sign of insanity in 1980. In reality, it's always been a mix: blocks of stately 19th-century brownstones (familiar to anyone who's seen "Do The Right Thing") shading into more rundown tenements, all housing a mix of middle-class, working-class, and poor families, mostly black.   

Bedford Avenue and Stuyvesant Street may have given the area its name, but much of its identity comes from two shopping strips: Fulton Street, which runs the length of the neighborhood from east to west, and Nostrand Avenue, ground zero for Brooklyn's proliferation of roti shops.

Ask shopkeepers near the junction of Nostrand and Fulton how business is since the onset of recession, and you get a lot of frowns and sadly shaken heads. "The foot traffic is okay - not like it used to be," says Adam Ibrahim, whose Stacy Adams fashion clothing stores stretch across three storefronts near the intersection. The boom years, he says, came in the 1990s, or as he calls it, "Clinton time": "If you don't make money in Clinton time, you're not going to make money." Now he relies mostly on two major city agencies that place orders with him, supplemented by the occasional European tourist.

"It has been a big change," agrees Tisha Glover, manager of the Danice discount clothing store on Fulton just west of Nostrand. "There's nobody coming in - it's really quiet." The problem, she says, is that so many of her usual customers are out of work. "It's right now a lot of unemployment here in just this neighborhood. It's making business bad, even at our prices."

Business is "okay," says Rimma Ammirati, manager of a family-owned hardware store on Fulton. Yet she finds hope in the new faces she increasingly sees on the streets, and in her store, as young people - mostly white — increasingly move into the stretch of western Bed-Stuy that borders already-gentrified Clinton Hill.   "I call them urban pioneers," says Ammirati. "Honestly, I have to say it's good for the neighborhood. We're having a lot of cafes popping up. We have a little winery on Nostrand Avenue. We have Applebee's." One sign of the changing times, she says: "The other day we had a Zuccotti Park protestor in here!"

Yet other shopkeepers say the influx of new residents doesn't necessarily benefit them. "The new that comes in the neighborhood don't shop at stores like this — it's more the bigger Macy's, Bloomingdales stores," says Glover.   

One sign of progress, Ibrahim says, is the number of 24-hour stores that have opened on the commercial strip, helping keep the streets active at night. Yet the underlying problem, longtime retailers say, remains that there's not enough money out there in the neighborhood: Unemployment, they say, begets more unemployment. During Clinton time, says Ibrahim, he employed separate managers at his three stores; now, he's forced to run them all himself, and has ramped down his own staffing dramatically as unemployment has increased among his customers. "If two or three customers come in, spend the money, that could be a chance for some person to work for us," he says. "If you fire some people, I'm going to fire some person here."

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Doug Jones, the head of the Bedford-Stuyvesant BID, is having none of it. A former city Economic Development Corporation staffer and Hunter College administrator, Jones says that Bed-Stuy's problem isn't too little spending money; it's too little money being spent in Bed-Stuy.

"There's about $785 million of retail leakage in Bedford-Stuyvesant," he says. "People in the neighborhood leaving the neighborhood to spend their money." The fastest-growing income segment in the neighborhood, he notes, is households earning $100,000 or more a year. "They drive to south Brooklyn or they drive to somewhere in Long Island or go up I-87 somewhere, and they take their dollars with them."