In middle of Bed-Stuy, where blocks like Jefferson Avenue and Hancock Street proudly offer rows of aging brownstones that reflect the character of the neighborhood and its loyal residents, an investor turns a two-family home into a hostel.
The owner charges $95 a night to visitors from all around the world, lured from Asia, Europe and Australia by ads placed on the Internet. The ads also invite filmmakers to come to the house and shoot their movies on location.
Welcome to the Bed-Stuy of 2007, where the city allows investors to set up hostels even while city inspectors issue petty violations to old-time residents for the most minor of supposed sidewalk violations.
In a number of cases, homeowners, some of them in their 80s, are being ordered to pay thousands of dollars to private contractors to repair questionable violations.
And this takes place even as city inspectors refuse to issue violations on illegal hotels!
What's going on here?
Increasingly black homeowners -- who have lived there, in many cases, for more than half a century -- are voicing suspicions that the intention is to harass them and frustrate them so that they are more willing to sell to eager investors.
These are indeed critical times for Bed-Stuy as for many other parts of the borough. But in Bed-Stuy it seems to happen undercover.
In other parts of the city, of the Park Slope variety, New York's hometown paper, highlights the plight of a little girl who was fined for writing on her parents' stoop.
But who's going to raise a loud, page-one, voice for the beleagured homeowners and renters of goold old Bed-Stuy?
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