Jennifer Lisbelo described it as nice and quiet when talking about Howard Beach on Tuesday morning, June 23. Lisbel lives a few blocks outside the “Welcome to Howard Beach,” sign but that doesn’t stop her from frequenting the area; especially for its Coldstone Creamery.
Lisbelo was happy to give us her name, unlike many of the other people we spoke to on Cross Bay Boulevard. What were they afraid of?
“My neighbors might disagree with me,” one gentleman, who asked to be identified by his first name, Fred, said.
Fred is a long time resident of Howard Beach, having lived in the area for “over 50 years.” He lives alone and is “lucky enough to have good neighbors,” that is, neighbors who don’t cause trouble. “People are nice, most of them. You know, you still have some bad apples.”
Regarding crime, Fred hasn’t noticed any, well not that much.
“I did have trouble one time,” he said. “One of my nephews from Virginia [was in town], someone tried to steal his car from my driveway. But I caught him…According to the papers, there’s an increase. I don’t see it.” Still, that doesn’t stop him from finding ways to keep himself safe. “I have a pistol to protect me,” he said, trailing off.
Inside a Getty gas station, the proprietor continually mentioned how safe he felt, working there for seven years. “I never get a problem or anything over here.” As for the local police precinct, the 106, “it’s good,” he said. The neighborhood is “safer now than it was.”
But a portly fellow who declined to be named very much disagreed. “It [the neighborhood] ain’t the same,” he said, talking in retrospect from when he first moved in 28 years ago. “You didn’t have to worry about keeping your doors locked. I used to be able to keep the front door open. I never locked the door every night like I gotta worry about now.”
He mentioned that kids get robbed and beaten up for their cell phones early in the evening; people are “stripping cars,” and that tire rims are stolen off the fancy “foreign cars.”
The police precinct is doing what they can, “but it can’t be run twenty-four hours a day.”
Still, crime has sharply decreased from1990, when there were 1,348 burglaries and 715 grand larcenies, according to the New York City Police Department’s CompStat service. Thus far in 2009, there have only been 137 burglaries and 157 grand larcenies. Murders and rapes have also decreased sharply.
The portly gentleman believes that the economic downturn is the cause for a number of the problems. “The money situation is bad…everybody’s out of work…You’re gonna see the situation get worse before it gets better.”
The statistics echo this. According to the website www.BestPlaces.net, the unemployment rate in Howard Beach is 7.60 percent (the U.S. average is 8.50 percent), and there is no job growth. In fact, jobs have decreased by 0.2 percent, a seemingly small number, but not in these tough times.
Property taxes, asserted one woman, “are very high,” and that people who live in condos “don’t even have a backyard.”
According to Best Places, the cost of living in Howard Beach is 74.28 percent higher than the U.S. average.
The portly gentleman used the example of a recent would-be convenience store robbery. The store’s owner gave the baseball bat-wielding robber $40 and a loaf of bread because the robber, when confronted by the owner with a shotgun, begged that he had to feed his family.
“People can’t eat, people can’t feed their families, everybody’s out of work. You go home, your kid’s hungry, what are you gonna do? Gotta find a way to get ‘em food. That’s the bottom line.”
Another topic of discussion he brought up was a lack of parking.
In the neighboring community of Lindenwood, he said that police give “40 tickets every night for the third lane parking, because there’s no parking for the people in the three-family homes.”
A woman (who also declined to be named) entering the Waldbaum’s supermarket agreed. “There’s hardly no parking here,” she said. It was easy for us to find parking, though we were glad to drop a few quarters into one of the metered spots along Cross Bay Boulevard.
Beyond them, there were ultimately very few people willing to express doubts and concerns about their community. “It’s a very safe place, not a lot going on,” said “Captain Ray” of Ladder 173 of the New York Fire Department. He’s been in Howard Beach for 9 months now.
“It’s definitely not Brooklyn or the Bronx.”
