Ocean Hill Houses are located in Brooklyn’s sub-neighborhood of Ocean Hill within the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. NYCHA’s 1971 complex consists of 8 low-mid-rise complexes with more than 1,100 residents. The Ocean Hill Houses were not as much of a deviation from the high high-rises of the previous public housing complexes as a less radical human-scaled design. These complexes were built as NYCHA attempted its hand at building less monumental, less austere, but more sympathetic buildings to its constituents.
All such planning notwithstanding, the Ocean Hill Houses are now a part of the same destiny as the majority of the NYCHA developments—physical decay, abandonment, and economic recession among residents. Like much of Brooklyn, Ocean Hill suffered through decades of late 20th-century disinvestment and the resultant escalation of crime and degrading living conditions. Yet the tenants of the Ocean Hill Houses never lost faith. Tenant associations and neighborhood activists have struggled to achieve cleaner, safer, and more respectable living conditions in the complex.
Ocean Hill has also been the site of some of the era’s most consequential movements and activists. It was the center of Black political activism and school reform during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and its legacy continues to shape the community today. There are not Ocean Hill Houses celebrities who came out of the Ocean Hill Houses like there have come out of other housing buildings, but the pride, determination, and activism that were placed to various waves of protest sustain it today.
In sum, the Ocean Hill Houses are a testament to public housing potential and struggle. Though they’ve been terrorized by hardship, they are a gem jewel of Brooklyn housing—where the people care for the community and change still happens because of its people’s determination and will.
