It's Far Too Simple to Dismiss Staten Island for 'Being Staten Island'

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/12/its-too-simple-to-dismiss-staten-island-for-being-staten-island/383458/

First, you need to know that Staten Island is geographically and, arguably, culturally closer to New Jersey than the rest of New York City. There are three bridges that connect the borough to Chris Christie’s domain; only one, the Verrazano, spans the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn. It’s also important to note that the Brooklyn-Staten Island connector was built in 1964, a good 36 years after the first New Jersey bridge was completed, though the borough had already been part of the larger city for nearly 70 years. And Staten Island is still not connected to New York City’s sprawling subway system (though it does have a ferry).

Staten Island is also an island of homeowners in a city of renters, which undoubtedly affects its politics. Kramer and Flanagan, the historians, note that 71 percent of Staten Island’s housing is occupied by homeowners, leaving 29 percent to renters. In New York City at large, those ratios are almost completely reversed: 34 percent are homeowners, and 66 percent are renters. Staten Island is also dominated by families, with 56 percent of its households headed by married couples, compared to 36 percent in NYC.

The island’s development history explains some of these numbers. Its population, which exploded after the completion of the Verrazano, became increasingly composed of ex-Brooklynites in search of suburbia-lite: larger homes, green lawns, a garage. There was a racial component to the Staten Island exodus, too. The opening of the Verrazano coincided with a wave of violent civil disturbances. In July of 1964, the killing of a 15-year old black teenager by a white off-duty police officer sparked six days of riots in the majority black neighborhoods of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. These events had a deep and lasting impact on the racial geography of New York City, not least because many Irish and Italian Brooklynites decided to abandon their apartments for a newly accessible borough. As Kramer and Flanagan write, “‘White flight’ … is one of the primary causes of the population boom after the opening of the Verrazano Bridge in 1964.”

Does that story sound familiar? It should. The story of Staten Island mirrors the story of so many major American suburbs. It happened in New York City and Detroit and Minneapolis and Philadelphia and Los Angeles and in nearly every other major city in this country.

“Staten Island numbers, in terms of partisanship and ideology, match up pretty well with the rest of the country,” Flanagan told public radio host Brian Lehrer in 2012. “It looks pretty ordinary.”

“Staten Island being Staten Island” is an attractive thought, particularly to New Yorkers, because it allows them to imagine that what happened to Eric Garner occurred in a somewhat farther away, vaguely distant land. If Staten Island is truly just a little more racist than the rest of the city, then that at least offers an explanation in this case. But the data, of course, show that police brutality is a nationwide problem, one that's compounded by just how poorly the authorities keep track of how often they injure and kill. Staten Island isn't the New York exception; in all probability, it's the rule.