Murder capital of NYC. 40% of our tenants live under the poverty line, 30+ years serving as Brooklyn’s lead example of an active urban war zone, an inevitably steady barrage of violence that punctuates all idle hours, and a constant over abundance of police officers, cars and helicopters that are flat out disturbing..in 2016.
There’s no coincidence many Nas, Jay Z, and even Mobb Deep classics are still audibly relevant in content as you casually dodge 10 year sentence trouble living your life surrounded by failure. (Listen to Purple by Nas, Soon You’ll Understand by Jay Z and Hell On Earth by Mobb Deep just in case you disagree). Having been born and raised here in the highest concentration of public housing …show more content…
Snapchat’s unique platform of allowing its users to submit community geofilters became my perfect opportunity to make things happen.
After months of submitting designs and aggressively asserting myself that I’ll get approved as it sat #4 on my to-do list sometime this year, I was finally approved just over three weeks ago in a surprise evening email with warm news that it will go live within “several hours” (which was really about four).
So how and why is this possibly “huge”? For Brownsville this is a major artistic and communal win. Quite frankly, if you don’t have an eye for social media, the arts, or basic understanding of how creativity can bring groups of people together who are socially stratified, I did a damn good job reeling you in.
In all seriousness, 73% of active Snapchat users are millennials with about 8 billion daily video views. Although the percentage of those 8B views watched with my designed geofilter layered on top of content are atomically thin, there’s so much hope for the …show more content…
We are finally showing honest signs of state attention with impressive funding to repairs, the ongoing mural art grants that have completely revived business accursed streets like Belmont Ave, a burst of “affordable housing” construction foreshadowing a new population soon to experience it all, and even an emergence of entrepreneurial opportunities courtesy of Lupe Fiasco as well as Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams with The Campus.
Although crime still exemplifies exactly what Brownsville needs serious areas of help and improvement on, I hope this post was enough to inspire anyone to try what I call the golden millennial equation: bridging the gap connecting innate creativity with the infinitely evolving technology in our pockets in any way possible that affects a personal and particular community of choice positively for the people.
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