In the final semester of focus groups, community was the main theme, in both good and problematic ways.

On the good side, participants with Caribbean roots talked about the music, food, and gatherings that brought people together. A resident of Crown Heights, Brooklyn with family from Trinidad & Tobago said that her mother invited everyone to their parties, and non-Caribbean neighbors would come and be “amazed by the culture and the different types of dishes… especially the curry goat.” Another student with Jamaican roots talked about carnival and its importance to community culture.

On the more problematic side of the discussion, the community at JJAY prompted lively discussions, and people expressed unhappiness about the institution’s handling of current events. One student suggested that John Jay offered a “false sense of community” while others said it was a “lie” when JJAY talked about justice because of the way the institution reacted to the situation in Israel/Palestine.

Finally, there were ongoing concerns about safety and unreliable transportation. As one participant from Bed-Stuy put it, “if [the trains] didn’t stink and weren’t 30 minutes apart from each other, like, that’d be great.”

In Spring 2023, many participants discussed concerns about public safety, which reflects media focus during this time. People had mixed feelings about police presence, since they didn't necessarily feel that more police meant more safety. This was particularly true on the trains, since many participants felt police officers were more interested in catching turnstile jumpers than addressing criminal activity.

One common theme that emerged was the importance of social network within neighborhoods when it came to people feeling safe or part of the community. The social network related to how long someone had lived in a place, but it was also related to shifting demographics associated with gentrification.

As a resident of Crown Heights, Brooklyn put it: "when my daughter comes home from school... she's able to go to like three different neighbors houses that she's comfortable going to, and without a question or thought, and they'll feed her and treat her like their own.... [you] have this sense of people looking out for people when you're in a neighborhood, because they're familiar with you"

The focus groups in Fall 2022 included discussions of safety and crime that were quite nuanced — many participants who described problems and feeling unsafe in their neighborhood also answered that they felt at home. For example, one participant felt that Flatbush would always be his home (even after moving away) despite the violent crime and gang/gun violence he was exposed to there.

Across the board, people talked about the way safety concerns related to their daily experiences and interactions with others, whether it was a woman being catcalled, a wheelchair-bound student feeling unsafe in places with a lack of disability access, or tolerance of Islamophobic comments within public schools (“it was just like the Muslim kids kind of like just sticking together and like just dealing with it,” one person said).

Related to the question of safety was the question of trust in people with authority, whether it was school officials, the police, government officials, or landlords. Many people felt like these officials are not showing up unless something terrible has taken place, and even then they might not show up at all. As a resident of Inwood explained, “I've had encounters where I would have to report certain things, but have they ever done stuff about it? Not really. And that's why I don't really trust the system… that's why I feel like I would also want to stay quiet.”

Participants in Spring 2022 focus groups discussed everything from the sense of community created through shared Hispanic culture from various nationalities to the relationship between Covid-related unemployment and rising crime rates.

People defined their sense of community differently across ethnic, socio-economic, and geographic trajectories, demonstrating complex relationships between community membership and feelings of being an insider or outsider. For some people, a feeling of acceptance was related to the type of clothes you wore, like one resident of Long Island who said, “‘yo, you got that drop and they're, yeah for sure’, so it's as I said again, it's a community,” referencing the importance of wearing a particular brand of clothing when it came to being an insider within the community.

For others, a sense of community emerged from a shared diasporic Hispanic community, which reflects the global nature of the participants more broadly. A resident of Corona, Queens, put it this way: “I feel at home in my– in my neighborhood because of the community and how [everyone] knows each other, familiar each other. Like we could just walk down the street, and someone can just come up to us and talk to us like nothing, be like ‘Primo’ because we're Hispanic.”

Sometimes, the same global ties made people feel like outsiders, whether it was in their home community or in their own families. A participant with a mixed family background commented that it felt like “one side of the family, they only see you as the other ethnicity,” and a resident of Nassau County, Long Island said she felt like an outsider because her food choices were not the same as her schoolmates. She said, “you’re going to bring like a sandwich for lunch,” instead of curry because “you want to look white,” and that people in the city were “blessed” to bring oxtail to lunch instead.

Discussions in Fall 2021 reflected the way issues like affordability, displacement, and racism are woven together in people’s daily lives. As one participant from Jamaica, Queens explained in relation to gentrification in her neighborhood, “not only are you kicking out like the people who used to live there, but you building all these new apartment complexes for people who don't even live in the neighborhood. One good thing, I guess, I could say there's more police presence there, but at the same time there's also a con… because the police presence there is just harassing anyone that doesn't fit… there is always police there, but always harassing like Hispanic people and African American people.”

People living in urban Black and Latino neighborhoods within New York City were outwardly disapproving of many aspects of their residential area (including crime and lack of resources), but they also discussed how people in the neighborhood often knew each other by name and looked out for each other, particularly in neighborhoods with strong ethnic concentrations. It was commonplace for locals to hang out on their neighborhood block or within local businesses, establishing a regular presence in the lives of those around them. In Black Placemaking: Celebration, Poetry and Play, the act of “placemaking” in Black neighborhoods is described as “the ability of residents to shift otherwise oppressive geographies of a city to provide sites of play, pleasure, celebration and politics” (Hunter el al 34). The neighborhoods many focus groups participants live in are typically underfunded and disinvested communities with little access to resources and a high presence of crime and policing. However, in the face of these systemic issues, the residents managed to assert their enduring presence and autonomy.

In Spring 2021, student research assistants shifted from a broad starting question (“what is the most important problem you, your family, or your community faces?”) to more directed questions about housing, displacement, placemaking, and gentrification. RAs chose these topics based on previous focus group data. The focus groups therefore began with three questions: “How would you describe your neighborhood?,” “Do you feel at home in your neighborhood?,” and “Have you seen any changes in your neighborhood in recent years?”.

Much of the discussion in Spring 2021 was focused on the Covid-19 pandemic, including how the pandemic had changed their lives, how it impacted their sense of community within John Jay specifically, and how it related to gentrification within their neighborhoods. Many people felt that the pandemic accelerated gentrification in New York City because of the increase in rent and unemployment. Participants felt like the pandemic had harmed their communities because it resulted in the closure of many establishments that people have gotten to know over the years.

The pandemic prompted people to support one another in their neighborhoods, forming these bonds in their communities. However, it also disrupted community relationships in unexpected ways. As one resident of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn put it, “I started realizing, I'm really going to miss these neighbors who had passed away because like, these were people I saw all the time and they became sort of like a fixture in my life in a way. And I would just start to remember them and, like have memories of talking to them and saying hi to them and like chatting in the laundry room… or stuff like that, and it started to make me realize that my neighbors were more important part of my life than I had originally thought, because I noticed their clear absence and how the pandemic sort of just took them away from their communities that they were a part of because it basically just started killing a lot of people.”

The Fall 2020 focus groups reflected the current events at the time, including Covid, Black Lives Matter, and the presidential election.

RAs were surprised by how much was discussed beyond the pandemic, including discrimination, gentrification, elections, college life, and LGBTQ rights. In many cases, these issues intersected with conversations about the pandemic.

Participants expressed anxiety and hopelessness around the rise of explicit racism and the depth of structural inequalities. As one person put it, “People are so emboldened to just act out, and to just hate for no reason. And of course you have capitalism, the rich will just keep getting richer, we’ll just have to make due with what we have.”

Another explained, “I personally don’t think there’s anything we can do at this point to fix systemic racism. A lot of people are saying the system is broken, but it’s not really broken because that’s the way it was built, that’s the way it was designed.”

The pre-Covid focus groups took place in person, and people were recruited through posters advertising free pizza instead of joining the focus group in a research methods class. Therefore, the conversations were with much smaller groups, but they also resulted in rich, in-depth conversations.

Many of the concerns mirrored later semesters: many students talked about affordability and financial struggle, along with the way the high cost of housing related to struggles across the board.

In one group, a woman who used to be homeless explained how paperwork and administrative requirements could make people homeless again, saying, "you have to make sure that all your paperwork is updated or else you get booted out of the programs... and if they’re not in a mental position to keep up with those things then they end up homeless again because they start to fall through the cracks."