Original sentence: " At the same time, landlords were taking advantage of new residents by charging them high down payments and gouging them on rent payments.East New York is a primarily low-income neighborhood in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City.He argues that the city government largely ignored the community, when it could have helped turn it around.Once blacks and Puerto Ricans moved into the neighborhood, landlords and real estate agents used scare tactics to encourage Italians and Jews to leave, citing that the "time to sell is now.Puerto Ricans were moving en masse to New York City in the late 1950s, at a time when umemployment rates on the island soared to 25 percent, and unfair import-export rates favouring the United States left Puerto Rico on the brink of poverty.Roughly coterminous with the New York Police Department's 75th Precinct, East New York has the highest crime rate in Brooklyn.Similarly, many African-Americans were migrating northward in the 1960s, after massive layoffs of cotton planters in the South.Thabit also describes how the construction of public housing projects in East New York further contributed to its decline, noting that many of the developments were built by corrupt managers and contractors.Thabit argues that landlords and real estate agents played a significant role in the downturn of the area.They would then evict tenants at the first possible opportunity, keeping the down payment to themselves.Walter Thabit, a city planner for East New York, chronicled in his book, How East New York Became a Ghetto, the change in population from mostly working-class Italians and Jewish residents to impoverished residents, 86% of which are of Puerto Rican and African-American descent
Edited sentence: East New York and the neighboring community of Brownsville are  essentially Brooklyn's counterpart to the South Bronx.East New York is a neighborhood in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City that  is populated almost exclusively by African Americans and Hispanics.It can be an incredibly frightening locale for lost suburbanites: the run-down, desolate quality of the neighborhood evokes the feel of cities such as Newark, New Jersey more than it does the feel of much of the rest of New York City, including now-gentrified Manhattan.Roughly coterminous with the New York Police Department's 75th Precinct, East New York has the highest crime rate in Brooklyn and perhaps in the entire city.Violence is still a problem in East New York, and most residents of the neighborhood are low-income families and individuals