In fact, there were some people in the neighborhood who supported the plan, but the opposition had stifled their voices. Jews were supposed to be synonymous with liberalism and Forest Hills was supposed to be a liberal neighborhood. You just can't separate all this talk about welfare and crime from race. That is, real estate agents were going around the neighborhood, trying to scare people into selling their property for cheap.Įven so, that doesn't fully explain the intensity of these protests. In late 1971, it was reported that "blockbusting" had already begun in Forest Hills. Just like in South Jamaica after World War II, there were vultures circling in the sky over Forest Hills, ready to profit off of people's fears. So-called "welfare people" move in, everybody else moves out. This was a constant theme: people talked about public housing like an infection. And I don't want to live here, so I'm moving." But I don't want to live with welfare recipients that are leeches that live from decent, hard working people. As one demonstrator put it, "I want to live with decent people, whether they be Black, white, yellow or what have you. It wasn't Black people they were afraid of it was poor people. If New York City gave into these protests, Forest Hills could become a template for other middle-class communities who wanted to stop any use of government housing for the purpose of integration.īirbach and his allies swore this had nothing to do with racism. This was a national story because it had national stakes. Mayor Lindsay called the demonstrators "deplorable." Forest Hills was now, officially, a national story. They blocked traffic in the streets and on the highway, armed with picket signs and flaming torches. That night, Birbach rallied hundreds of his followers in a march through the neighborhood. On November 18, 1971, the Housing Authority announced that construction of public housing in Forest Hills would begin. So it was up to Golar to take the heat from the press, counter all the misinformation flying around and try to make some friends in Forest Hills.īut Jerry Birbach and his constituents made things pretty difficult for Golar. The scatter-site housing program may have started with Mayor Lindsay, but Simeon Golar became its public face. When he took over the agency in 1970, there were 600,000 people living in public housing. If NYCHA had been its own city, it would have been bigger than Pittsburgh - and Golar was like the mayor. At the forefront of the opposition was a man named Jerry Birbach. Once word got out, the resistance started. The initial plan for Forest Hills was that NYCHA would build 840 apartments, with 40 percent of them reserved for the elderly. The landlord takes on the champion of public housing One of them would be in Forest Hills.Īlthough the program had good intentions, to break down the walls of racial and social segregation in the city through housing, it wasn't very popular with the neighbors. In his first year in office, Lindsay announced his intention to build 11 "scatter-site" housing projects – essentially build projects in neighborhoods scattered throughout the city, which didn't yet have public housing. However, when John Lindsay became the mayor in 1966, he wanted to change things up. Previously, the New York City Housing Authority had gotten into a pattern of building almost exclusively in neighborhoods that were in the throes of white flight and disinvestment, places like South Jamaica. This put Forest Hills on the city's radar when they went looking for places to build new public housing. It's not that all Jews were like the anarchists and labor organizers who moved to Rochdale Village (as described in episode two), but there was a connotation of liberalism associated with American Jews at the time. By 1970, the neighborhood was estimated to be two-thirds Jewish and 97 percent white. And for many Jews, that meant Forest Hills. If you couldn't yet afford the suburbs, you moved to Queens. Like other groups of so-called "ethnic whites," many Jewish New Yorkers saw higher incomes after World War II and started to leave their old neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx. A treelined street in Forest Hills Gardens, Queens.
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