from the archives

Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 11

ALEX WELSH

The stories Alex Welsh features in this issue of OSMOS emerged from his early work as a student of photojournalism in San Francisco, when he embarked on a six- month-long project about homelessness in the Tenderloin district. He eventually found himself in the Bayview- Hunters Point neighborhood, where he first got to know the subjects and situations that have occupied his personal documentary work since.

The problems in Hunters Point and other communities Welsh has documented are rooted in systemic inequalities which are pervasive throughout the United States: the young men and women in marginalized neighborhoods that Welsh met and recorded “face seemingly identical and intractable obstacles such as violence, poverty and criminalization in their day-to-day lives.”

Welsh’s early work in the Bay Area introduced him to some of the community leaders who later organized Black Lives Matter. While many people—understandably— associate the BLM movement with the 2014 events in Ferguson, Missouri, when Mike Brown was killed by police, and the killing two years earlier of seventeen-year- old Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, the movement evolved more fundamentally in response to the oppressive racism that permeates our society. It was particularly focused on the prevalence in certain urban communities of failed public housing, lack of viable public transportation options, and institutionalized brutality.

While the movement is now largely—and justifiably— about building awareness of police brutality in the consciousness of a wider public, for activists and observers like Welsh the story is still about housing, poverty, gentrification, and the children in these communities being raised by a damaged system.

In east and west coast cities alike the constantly changing urban and economic landscapes caused by gentrification turns day-to-day life into a series of pre- carious balancing acts for many residents. Hunters Point, a neighborhood once anchored and unified by an active naval shipyard, is now an EPA Superfund site, and cancer rates and the occurrence of asthma are disproportionately high compared to the rest of the city. In one of the wealthiest cities in the country, Welsh says, “public housing conditions remain some of the worst in the nation, and with the concentration of toxins and pollutants, the environmental racism was particularly stark.” But Welsh also realized that “the issue of pending redevelopment seemed to have a bit more urgency to it. The larger picture is that San Francisco had (and has) the fastest out-migration of African Americans of any major city in the US, and many in the community felt the redevelopment would exasperate that problem.”

When Welsh moved to New York, he turned his attention to the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Once largely Jewish and paved with tenements, today it has the largest concentration of public housing in the country, administered by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).

Cursed by geography—it’s too far from Manhattan to be a “convenient” commute—Brownsville and much of East New York have gone largely untouched by the march of redevelopment. Gun violence and poverty imply that, for many, as soon as you have the means to do so, you leave the neighborhood. In some cases, the “means” to get out of the projects comes in the form of a Section 8 housing voucher, which allows residents to seek rentals from private landlords using subsidization provided by HUD, but over time—with funding problems and discrimination—this option has become yet another stigma in a long line of indecencies perpetrated against those who need the help most.

From South San Francisco to East New York, the parallels Welsh uncovered revolve around the persistent crises of environmental racism, aggressive urban redevelopment, and institutionalized poverty.