East Flatbush’s commercial landscape is desolate despite heavy immigrant entrepreneurship

Evidence

East Flatbush is a mostly Caribbean neighborhood that has become a monotonous geography of faith and fast food. It’s about eight miles and a world away from New York City’s empire of luxury, where the apples are hand-polished and the buildings stretch out into sky. Skyscrapers colonize air and land mountain-size shadows on the ground there, but in East Flatbush the buildings are low and simple, so the sun shines brightly on beaches of concrete. It’s a commercially desolate landscape, a neighborhood of hardworking regular folk who depend heavily on the entrepreneurial immigrant’s grocery store. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 461