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SCHENECTADY
Not what it was, but loved as it is
Longtime residents bemoan changes; newcomers happy
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

    Not too many decades ago, Bellevue was a neighborhood of families, where the younger generation often lived upstairs from their elderly parents.
    Now, those two-family houses have become the bane of the neighborhood because they bring in strangers — people who may be perfectly nice but moved in as full-fledged adults instead of growing up under the watchful eye of the neighbors.
    On streets with many two-family houses, longtime residents say they now know only a handful of their neighbors. It’s not the way it used to be, they say.
    “My neighborhood has changed too much in the last few years. There’s only a few neighbors left,” said Bev Mace, who still lives upstairs from her 90-year-old mother.
    “It was all family, years ago,” she said. “Now, I actually don’t know who lives up and who lives down anymore.”
    But for those who’ve moved in recently, it’s hard to believe it was once a better place than it is now.
    “It’s very quiet. Where I used to live, it’s very noisy,” said Anne Goyette, who moved from the Yates Village public housing project with her children this April.
    The cleanliness is what fi rst caught her eye when she went looking for an apartment.
    Bellevue has many of the city’s classic two-family homes, with shared porches, driveway and backyard. There is a sizeable selection of one-family homes as well, but they are in the minority.
    Since Bellevue is a relatively new part of the city, the roads are wide enough for cars and every street has concrete sidewalks. Many neighbors are active volunteers with ReTree Schenectady, and it shows — the streets are lined with trees.
    It feels like a suburb; there are few pedestrians and little of the litter that comes with large groups meandering down the sidewalk.
    But Goyette fell in love when she noticed what the neighborhood does not have.
    “Walking down the street, people say hi to you. You don’t hear the gunshots or the fighting or the cursing,” she said.
    Nijae Boyd, 14, who moved from “the ghetto” in downtown Albany a year ago, said Bellevue was better than anywhere he’d ever lived.
    He and his friends appreciate the quiet neighborhood because they’ve all moved here from noisier places in the past few years, part of a migration documented in the 2010 Census of younger people of many ethnicities.
CRIME CONCERNS
    They moved to Bellevue expecting a place that was free even of the most minor crimes. So they were disgusted to recently fi nd graffiti — crude penises drawn by younger children — on the Hillhurst Park tennis courts.
    Jim Weaver, one of the city’s many active neighborhood watch members, said there are reasons to worry. A stabbing and a recent store robbery are just the tip of the iceberg, he said. He’s seen a few prostitutes openly looking for johns on Broadway and a renter who smoked marijuana on his porch.
    “It’s gotten to the point, I bought another house,” he said.
    He just moved his family to Rotterdam, although he continues to patrol with Bellevue’s neighborhood watch.
    “It’s a shame because it was a good neighborhood,” he said. “Quality of life has gone down, it really has.”
    But he and others agreed that the city made a signifi cant improvement this summer by hir- ing the Boys and Girls Club of Schenectady to manage Hillhurst Pool, which had previously been supervised by the city.
    “That’s been a big improvement. The Boys and Girls Club has been doing a terrific job,” Weaver said.
    Others said that last year, the park was overrun with teenagers who misbehaved, started fi ghts and vandalized property. This year, the problems are gone.
    And despite the crime, teenagers said they feel safe and lucky to be in Bellevue.
    “It’s better than it would be in regular Schenectady,” said Mileena Winchip, 15. “It’s cleaner than Schenectady. You meet better people here than in other places. At Schenectady High School, people want to fight you. Here, they’re funny and joking around.”
PLENTY OF VACANCIES
    Despite the predominance of two-family houses, which put residents in close proximity to each other, the neighborhood doesn’t have the same level of quality-oflife problems that face the inner city. While residents in the Eastern Avenue neighborhood said noise and litter were major problems, new renters in Bellevue said they’d managed to escape all that.
    “You drive past it and you see it is a better neighborhood. You don’t see people outside their house arguing,” explained Sheryse LaDuke, who moved from Mont Pleasant in search of a better place to raise her son.
    Despite the influx, the number of newcomers is not balancing out the number of older residents who are dying or moving away. Nine percent of the housing stock is now empty, according to the Census, twice as high as it has been in the past. And although the neighborhood has maintained its balance of half-renters, half-owners, the renters are now more likely to be strangers rather than adults who grew up in the neighborhood. .........................>>>>................................>>>>...................................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r00100&AppName=1

Where's the comments from Vince Riggi-longtime Bellevue leader? It's better than Yates Village or Mt Pleasant? 9% vacancy rate-well that's better than the Citywide rate of 11.5%.

     Over one house in 10 in the City abandoned/on the tax foreclosure list. And the DEM morons are pushing for housing at ALCO. They are working together towards a 20% City vacancy rate with resale values tanking towards zero. Not until City Hall is flushed, property taxes slashed, will Bellevue or any City neighborhood experience "renaissance"..

They didn't mention Hegamen St. AKA "Hegamen Hill" in the article.  From what I am told, it's know as "Hegamen Hill" because the know crack houses on the street.

Quoted from GrahamBonnet

You did exactly what you really wanted to do- destroy the city so you could rule over it.

GB, this is one of the most profound statements yet. Decimating the neighborhoods, destroying the taxbase, taking millions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to connected developers (and lame business attempts) are all tactics which have been used to destroy Schenectady. This couldn't have been said any better!

  

I see the buildings are to blame in Bellvue. It looks like someone is swallowing the baloney in that stupid report the city council came up with to justify their forays into "planning" and "development".
Notice how those who "moved here in search of a better life" (euphemism for dumped by social services, courts, or rehab industry) freely disparage the city neighborhoods and high school they helped ruin. If you take your anti-social ways with you, moving won't improve your life .Nobody explains this to them, of course, they don't understand that they are pawns in the poverty industry.
I notice that many are starting to "search for a better life" in Rotterdam, and have been for awhile. Better pay for a report to tell us what is wrong with the housing.

Quoted from GrahamBonnet

Another gun to the head headline. Another slummy section of the city that was once and not too long ago pristine. Thanks for all the abundant welfare for lowlifes that you have and continue to provide, democraps. You did exactly what you really wanted to do- destroy the city so you could rule over it.

Smells like "renaissance"? Can't give property away, only can rent to Section 8, crime up, no one at City Hall gives a hot damn but part of the good news review. The Gazetto has totally lost it. First Eastern Avenue and now this joke. Every neighborhood in the City is in free fall from 35 straight years of DEM "leadership". Thank God there is an opponent to every one of these idiots in November.

If you move there from the "ghetto", yeah, it is a better place.  Not much better though.  I just left that area because of the crime and the drug houses.  A friend of mine used to live in a apartment off Helderberg Ave.  I visited there quite often.  I myself lived on Cheltingham for a while before moving to Delmar.  The upstairs tenants were horrible for her so they were evicted and we moved in.  We cleaned the place up and did a lot of repairs there.  For the first 5 years or so that we lived there, it was quiet.  No one bothered you.  The neighbors were friendly.  Then it seemed like all he!! let loose.  The party houses, cars racing up and down the street, drug houses, and even a Level 3 sex offender.  It was quite interesting living there with damage to cars, flat tires, break ins to the cars and houses.  It was insane.  I got out as fast as I could.  I wouldnt recommend living there.  My friend moved out years ago.  The current downstairs tenant says that the new people that moved in where I was living throws parties and thumps and makes a lot of noise all night.  Seems right for the neighborhood now.  

When you come from Fort Apache the Bronx, yeah- sure it is all a heaven on earth. Anything would be. Sad to say that we now have democrap-liberal standards for everything which equals no standards. Schenectady is the laughing stock of the state, maybe country. I hear it every day, sad sad sad.

This was one of the biggest pieces of fluff the gazette has ever put in print!!! Even Moore can't make the sh!t in schenectady shine. Did Moore think for one minute that a drug dealer was going to come flying out of their house to give her an update on where he gets and sells his 'stash'? Or did she think that folks were gonna run out of their 'apt' and show her their 'illegal guns'!!!!

There are some nice folks who live in bellevue...moore just left out the 'element' that plagues that neighborhood!!

mutts and woodchucks just like everywhere else you turn in the Schitty of Schitnecktitty.

Gemeni, I don't know when it was that you experienced it that "all hell broke loose" but to me it seems that it goes back, almost to the day, to when taxes were raised almost 25% at once. It seemed like since then many officials also gave up any pretense of doing the job they are supposed to do for the people also. It's kind of like a flock of hungry pigeons when a trash can tips over. Getting what they can before it's gone.
Top city officials don't live here, they commute in taxpayer provided vehicles? That's insane, it's untenable, but it is going on. They can just cut servicesto the people to pay for it.

We moved out of there a year ago next month.  My car and a couple of other cars were broken into and car tires slashed.  All within a couple of weeks.  We filed police reports and were told that they were "checking into it".  I wasnt going to wait around.  About 6 months before that, my husbands truck and the van across the street were keyed down the side.  The fence in the back yard was being pulled apart.  The house next door was abandoned and there were people holding parties in the basement before they got caught.  It was once a decent neighborhood where the older people would sit out on the porches and say hello to you every day.  Then it turned into a place where you had to park the car way back in the driveways and hope nothing happened to them.  At all hours of the day and night you could hear the thumping of car radios and then hear them racing up the street.  It was like a constant party.  I couldnt tell you how many times we would come home from work and the street would be full of cars.  

There needs to be constructive change yet negativity is not the way to go, and I would call people with special needs i.e. poverty and discrimination in the worrkforce the problem but as a society we need to work as one to end the poverty and economic injustice that caused this decline. Now our political leaders have the chance to come together and fix these problems but they need to be moderate about it and not spend us into debt. Right now we have a surplus of wealth in the rich and once it is more equally spread out we can accomplish miracles with strong political leaders of both parties.

Quoted from 1630

but as a society we need to work as one to end the poverty and economic injustice that caused this decline. Now our political leaders have the chance to come together and fix these problems

Third world countries would love to live in 'poverty' in the united states!! Free cell phones, food, shelter, heat/air conditioning, clothing, medical,  education, computers, flat screen tv's....and those are just the 'basic necessities' according to our standards!!! I think we can all agree that 'economic injustice' is not  the cause of the decline of the Bellevue area. If that were true, and since this country has 'always' functioned under a  capitalistic system, it would have ALWAYS been a less than desirable place to live.

What happened? GE closed up shop!! JOBS! Then our generous government leaders, offered a lucrative welfare package that surpasses any in the state!! First the decline hit the city, then Mt.Pleasant, now rotterdam.....next Nisky!!