Brownsville Community Justice Center

The Brownsville Community Justice Center opened in 2010 as an operating program of the Center for Justice Innovation. The Center works on criminal-justice alternatives, court-based youth diversion, reentry programs, and commercial-corridor revitalization along Belmont and Pitkin Avenues, the historic commercial spines of the neighborhood.

The Justice Center’s neighborhood-scale programming emerged from the cumulative housing, policing, and school-policy pressures the community has absorbed across the century. Brownsville held the eighteen NYCHA complexes the city built between 1945 and 1974 to receive families displaced from Manhattan and the Bronx. The 1970s burn-down destroyed much of the walk-up housing stock outside the projects. The 2002 Prospect Plaza demolition displaced approximately fifteen hundred residents with a right-of-return promise that produced a thin return.

The Justice Center works alongside the Brownsville Heritage House, Community Board 16, and the tenant associations that pressed HPD toward the 2017 At Home in Brownsville plan. The plan rejected demolition-and-replacement as the default NYCHA redevelopment framework and proposed capital reinvestment in occupied buildings plus infill on underused parcels. The Justice Center’s organizing work ties the planning fight to the criminal-justice and youth-development record that public-housing concentration produced.