What city do you live in, and how do you like it?

I've been living in NYC (Brooklyn) and it is HUGE. The people and culture vary depending on what neighborhood you're in (there are hundreds in all of NYC). I lived on the border of Bed Stuy and Crown Heights for a combined total for about a month, the black power movement is alive and well in the area. I remember in the mornings I'd pass a black-owned book store that would play Louis Farrakan sermons very loudly so that you could here his voice from blocks away.

I noticed that asian-owned businesses outnumber black owned businesses by a large margin, but the black owned businesses tend to have amazing food (they are usually restaurants or barber shops). Most are owned by West Indians. They are making us look very good.

I had one kind of bad experience in Baychester, Bronx (where I lived for about a month). Baychester was a working class neighborhood. All the black neighborhoods had a sense of community, very nice people, but at night it was a different story (in Baychester I heard something around 20 gunshots one night, and 15 consecutive gunshots -- by more than one gun -- another night).

Right now I live in Bay Ridge, a white and arab neighborhood. It's a nice area and people can be pretty racist here. It sometimes depends on what you're wearing. One night I was wearing flip flops, jeans, and a dark gray v neck walking back from a grocery store with bags in my hand, and noticed a cop was glaring at me with piercing eyes and talking into his walkie talkie, I believe he was giving a description to someone else. When we made eye contact I was visibly surprised to see him and I think he realized that I might live there so he visibly guiltily threw his walkie talkie on the dashboard.

Some cashiers won't acknowledge your existence in white neighborhoods. For example I went grocery shopping and said the usual "hi" "thankyou" and got nothing, but the white lady next in line was greeted enthusiastically.

Other days when I'm wearing light colors like a white dress shirt and fake glasses that I bought just to look less threatening people are neutral to positive towards you with outliers of people who are racist no matter what in this area. It's really racism + classism here. Even some of the black people are classist and pretentious, especially in Manhattan.

It's super expensive, I have an amazing deal right now paying $750/mo for a room on the 2nd floor of a 3 story house in Bay Ridge. If you don't want to pay more than 1k/mo in NYC you will have to live with roomates. And if you don't want to pay more than 2k/mo here you will have to live in a max 400sqft studio. And if you don't want to pay more than 3k/mo here you won't be able to live in Manhattan (without a roomate).

Music scene, dating scene, I've been working too much to be able to know right now, but one of my roomates brings home different tinder dates every couple weeks (he's actually a super racist arab guy (I'm talking /r/coontown racist) that only dates black chicks -- I want to let his dates know somehow but what can I do )

Job opportunities here are plentiful but competitive. Safety, again, depends on the neighborhood. I wouldn't walk around at night alone anywhere.

Transportation, you don't need a car here, more than half of people take the train. Local politics, no clue, don't know why I included this

/r/Blackfellas Thread