This study will describe both the micro and macro aspects of life in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, focusing on five topics covered in Ida Susser's Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood. The topics to be covered are the welfare system and its regulations, landlords and tenants, the block association and its role in "making things work," kinship and friendship, and racial conflict.
The basic argument of Susser's book is that the micro aspects of life in this neighborhood are profoundly affected by the macro forces of New York City, the state and the nation. As Susser writes,
In the face of the deterioration of city services, budgetary cutbacks, and the 1975 fiscal crisis in New York City, this book documents the implications of broad political and economic changes for the lives of working-class people. . . . The combined disasters of industrial decline and fiscal policies leading to service reductions have assaulted this beleaguered population (vii).
Just as New York City was pinched financially by federal and state cutbacks, so is the neighborhood under study hit by all those cutbacks. The examination of the specific topics in this study will elaborate on those effects.
Susser is not saying, however, that the economic pinch at all these macro and micro levels produces nothing but negative results. One positive impact is the increase in political involvement on the part of people who in less economically stringent times would not be involved, even though that political activity cannot be said to have resulted in great success:
Far from being apathetic, these residents have responded to their plight with energy and anger, fighting political holding actions for the survival of their neighborhood in the face of almost certain defeat (vii).
The question of the welfare system and its regulations is an important one for this community, because it is a working class neighborh...