It was in Brownsville where Smif-N-Wessun came to be. Life expectancy was (and still is) the lowest in the city. Children born into the one square mile of municipal tenements-the highest concentration of public housing in the US-were raised in poverty.

The Brownsville section of Brooklyn had long been New York’s most impoverished area and bore the brunt of its fiscal ruin. Life in the city’s poverty-stricken communities became infinitely more precarious. Within a few short years, New York had become the fulcrum of a conservative movement that would set the stage for national supply-side Reaganomics. Tens of thousands were laid off school budgets slashed hospitals, libraries, and firehouses closed and education now came with a price tag. New York’s public sector was systematically ravaged. Then, the Federal Government stepped in with a loan, conditional to draconian cuts-cuts that would ensure generational poverty.

First, a group of power brokers and financiers co-opted the city’s economy. The problem, according to the mayor and governor, was that the needy were using too many of the public services offered to them and had tanked the city’s economy. New York was in debt, crippling debt.Īs every respectable financial catastrophe necessitates, responsibility for the crisis rested firmly at the feet of the poor. But come the summer of 1975, all that was to change. There were 19 public hospitals, state-run daycares, and subsidized drug programs. New York boasted the only municipal university system in the US offering free higher education. The largest and richest city in the US had entered the 1970s with a fully functioning welfare system.

Smif n wessun dah shinin rar