They would interrupt public meetings, shouting and chanting and marching around. Not a week went by without his Association putting on some kind of protest or parade. Galvanizing his fellow middle class, tax paying neighbors, Birbach headed the Forest Hills Residents Association. He says that he is thereby helping to improve the city's housing stock.' His enemies called him a 'slumlord.' One journalist back in the day described his business like this: 'He buys old tenement buildings, evicts the tenants, renovates the buildings and rents them at a higher rate. At the forefront of the opposition was a man named Jerry Birbach.īirbach worked in real estate. Once word got out, the resistance started. The initial plan for Forest Hills was that NYCHA would build 840 apartments, with 40 percent of them reserved for the elderly. The landlord takes on the champion of public housing One of them would be in Forest Hills.Īlthough the program had good intentions, to break down the walls of racial and social segregation in the city through housing, it wasn't very popular with the neighbors. In his first year in office, Lindsay announced his intention to build 11 'scatter-site' housing projects – essentially build projects in neighborhoods scattered throughout the city, which didn't yet have public housing. However, when John Lindsay became the mayor in 1966, he wanted to change things up. Previously, the New York City Housing Authority had gotten into a pattern of building almost exclusively in neighborhoods that were in the throes of white flight and disinvestment, places like South Jamaica. This put Forest Hills on the city's radar when they went looking for places to build new public housing. It's not that all Jews were like the anarchists and labor organizers who moved to Rochdale Village (as described in episode two), but there was a connotation of liberalism associated with American Jews at the time. By 1970, the neighborhood was estimated to be two-thirds Jewish and 97 percent white. And for many Jews, that meant Forest Hills. If you couldn't yet afford the suburbs, you moved to Queens. Like other groups of so-called 'ethnic whites,' many Jewish New Yorkers saw higher incomes after World War II and started to leave their old neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx. A treelined street in Forest Hills Gardens, Queens.

Forest hills