Clifton, Staten Island

By the late 1960s, however, people realized that it was relatively inexpensive to move to Staten Island and purchase a home or rent an apartment in smaller buildings, which resulted in a loss of the emerging middle-class population it initially attracted.

Park Hill remained privately owned but became federally subsidized low-income housing complex, and became the site of steadily increasing crime and drug abuse beginning in the early-1970s.

Hundreds of local jobs in the health care and social assistance fields were lost in the downsizing of Bayley Seton Hospital, which had been a major employer of neighborhood residents.

Park Hill/Clifton (along with nearby Stapleton) has the largest Liberian population of any city outside Africa,[2] with an estimated 6,000 – 8,000 strong community of direct immigrants in 2007.

[3] Beginning in the late 1970s, a small number of Liberians, whose nation was founded by freed American slaves in the 1840s, settled in Staten Island.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Liberian immigrants in huge numbers fled Liberia, mostly trapped in the limbo of refugee camps on the borders of Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire.

[5] This new wave of immigration settled near the first small handful of Staten Island Liberians in the Park Hill Projects (now private apartments).

The wife of soccer star (and former Liberian presidential candidate) George Weah owns a business in Brooklyn and lives in Staten Island.

Local Liberian civic groups organize Liberian-American involvement in their homeland, and promote a variety of charitable missions in West Africa.

[6] While there are successful business leaders in the community, the vast majority of Staten Island's Liberian immigrants are employed in low-wage service or medical fields.

While crime in the area has improved over the last 20 years, the reputation of Park Hill for gang and drug violence has afflicted some Liberian youth, already victimized by the Civil War.

The community's public school system plays a large role in environmental protection including park cleanup, lake maintenance, and litter removal.

Eibs Pond, part of a 17-acre (69,000 m2) wetland adjacent to the Park Hill community, was recently restored by the current students of PS 57.

[8] Due to increased traffic congestion in Clifton, the Staten Island Transportation Task Force and Co-Chairs New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Iris Weinshall and Department of City Planning (DCP) Director Amanda Burden have acted to relieve the congestion in the area.