"From South to East Williamsburg, Puerto Rican-owned small businesses saturated the neighborhood in Brooklyn during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1980s, Latinx people constituted 64.6 percent of the neighborhood's residents, most of them of Puerto Rican heritage. These residents owned bodegas, clothing stores, restaurants, social clubs, music stores, and other small shops that not only contributed to community wellbeing but served as social hubs."
"When the neighborhood's Puerto Rican population began to fall in the 1990s due to gentrification, many Puerto Ricans became displaced and their businesses shuttered, along with their social networks. By the year 2000, the Puerto Rican population had fallen to 46.8 percent. And by 2020, New York City's government estimated that only 8.9 percent of residents in Williamsburg were Latinx, 4.4 percent were Black, and 85.7 percent were White."
Williamsburg hosted a strong Puerto Rican presence and dense network of small businesses in the 1970s and 1980s, with Latinx residents comprising 64.6 percent in the 1980s. Puerto Rican-owned bodegas, clothing stores, restaurants, social clubs, and music stores functioned as social and economic hubs. Gentrification in the 1990s produced displacement, business closures, and weakened social networks, reducing Puerto Rican population to 46.8 percent by 2000 and shifting demographics to about 8.9 percent Latinx by 2020. Rising commercial rents excluded Puerto Rican millennials from entrepreneurship, creating cultural and social gaps, yet small businesses continued to sustain elements of the Puerto Rican legacy.
Read at Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]