THE KILLING FIELDS OF EAST NEW YORK

The hidden story behind one of the toughest neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

The “Killing Fields’’ of the title may sound melodramatic, but it was the longtime nickname of East New York, where redlining and blockbusting fostered white flight and subprime subterfuges cheated residents out of their homes and safety. It’s a badly needed look at a societal problem that goes largely unaddressed while politicians outdo each other with tough-on-crime rhetoric. Author and journalist Horn sets the stage with the violent death in 1991 of Julia Parker, a 17-year-old girl suspected of talking to the police about the death of a friend. The author jumps back to 1966 to describe the simmering racial tensions fueled by a group called SPONGE (Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything), described as “the Proud Boys of their day.” Ultimately, Mayor John Lindsay’s office had to reach out to Brooklyn mobsters associated with the Genovese problem to negotiate a temporary truce. Horn guides readers through a subprime Ponzi scheme scandal that predated the Bush-era crisis. Landlords and mortgage banks swindled the community, offering loans for substandard housing with minimal background checks. “If the homeowners defaulted, the FHA [Federal Housing Authority] would repay the loan,’’ she writes. Many FHA officials were themselves corrupt, taking payoffs, ultimately resulting in indictments—and convictions—when investigators in the U.S. Attorney’s office caught on to the scam. But Julia Parker, like countless others, was caught in the crossfire. More recently, life in East New York is improving, with fewer food “ghettos” and more community gardens than anywhere else in the city. But Horn provides an invaluable roadmap to how, and why, urban “renewal’’ can go tragically wrong.

Solid in-depth reporting with a polemical kick.