The working-class struggles that helped Ocasio-Cortez win
NEW YORK >> When Ali Ahmed is not running the convenience store he owns in Queens, he is crisscrossing the city as an Uber driver.
The side job helps him to afford the mortgage and other bills on the house he bought two years ago in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx. Ahmed happens to work and live in New York’s 14th Congressional District, which could soon elect the youngest woman to Congress: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Ahmed said he works hard to get his bills paid and try to create a better financial foundation for his children. It’s a struggle that resonates strongly among voters here who propelled Ocasio-Cortez, 28, to victory last week in the Democratic primary over incumbent Joseph Crowley.
Their constituents are a mass of working-class families who hustle to make a good life in the shadow of the extreme prosperity in Manhattan. In Parkchester, New York natives with Italian or Puerto Rican roots live alongside people who have immigrated in past decades from Ecuador, Mexico, Bangladesh and other parts of the globe. Neighborhoods in Queens, including Jackson Heights, Astoria and Sunnyside, are equally diverse.
The district offers a window into the modern economy. The financial recovery of the past decade has buoyed some Americans who feel flush from rising home values and a steady march up in the stock market. Yet despite record-low unemployment across the nation, those who live on the fringes of a strong economy find they are working double time just to keep up.
Ahmed, 41, moved his family to the Bronx after
more than 20 years in Queens because the rent on his apartment in Astoria, an increasingly trendy neighborhood, was becoming too expensive.
The move made some things better and other things more complicated. He used to be a few minutes from his store. Now it takes up to an hour to drive there. His bills are larger as a homeowner. But his family has more space. There is a yard. And his kids, a 4-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son, are happier.
“My family is comfortable here,” he said, adding he thinks it will be better for his children in the long run. “I want to make my kids educated, I try to do my best.
“My hope is that I make
something better for them. So they can have a good career.”
The congressional district that Ocasio-Cortez would represent if elected in November has gone from being predominantly white in 1980 to being nearly 50 percent Hispanic, 17 percent Asian and 23 percent white in 2016, according to census figures.
In Parkchester, which is a roughly 35-minute train ride north of Grand Central Terminal, people converse and do business in a mix of languages, including English, Spanish and Bengali.
On Starling Avenue, which was renamed Bangla Bazaar, a long-standing pizza place shares the street with a Bangladeshi restaurant and a halal meat shop.
Within a few blocks of
the busy Parkchester train station, residents can find a Starbucks, a hair-braiding salon, a barbershop and Latino restaurants.
George Penn, who owns the Phase One barbershop on Westchester Avenue, said the neighborhood has changed a lot since he moved there from Harlem as a kid. It used to be much whiter.
“There was a lot of racism,” he said.
But that faded as more black and Hispanic people moved into the neighborhood, creating a more welcoming environment for his wife and children, who are black and Puerto Rican.
Affordability has been a major theme of OcasioCortez’s platform. In an interview with Vogue this month, Ocasio-Cortez said
that the median price of a two-bedroom in New York has increased by 80 percent in the past three years.
“Our incomes certainly aren’t going up 80 percent to compensate for that, and what that is doing is a wave of aggressive economic displacement of the communities that have always been here,” she told the magazine.
After her father died from cancer during the financial crisis, Ocasio-Cortez took on three jobs to help her family fight off foreclosure.
“In a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live,” she said on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Thursday night.
People in her neighborhood know all too well.