Howard Schultz says that he grew up in a poor and difficult place. Those who lived there called it the "national club of projects".

BROOKLYN – When Howard Schultz explains to people why he should be president of the United States, the billionaire often tells the story of a poor child who escaped from the chaos and cacophony of a family. Real estate project in Brooklyn to become the architect of a global coffee giant.

The man who built the Starbucks empire and is now called a so-called "independent centrist" presidential candidate says his story is "a story of rags to riches" in which he began "literally from the bad side of the way "in" low-income "housing, where" we were all poor ", where" my best defense was a good attack "and where fighting" generally did not result in deadly violence, but they were hard in their way. "

But Schultz's portrayal of Bayview as a rough, low-income community runs counter to the city's definition of the project, the demands placed on tenants to enter buildings, and the experience of those who live there. .

"It was a brilliant and wonderful world," said Elyse Maltz, a former Bayview resident, who argues that Schultz, 65, has distorted the reality of where he grew up in the fifties and sixties. "Everything was brand new. "

Maltz, who knew Schultz in grade seven and now lives in New Jersey, told the Bayview that his family and Schultz have moved into "a middle class and not inferior. You have been interrogated to enter. My family was pretty well off. I know Howard wants to look rich, but we had a wonderful and abundant life. I mean, my mother had a maid. We did not miss anything. "

She called Schultz to "please, stop talking to us about poor or destitute, because it's insulting and we do not feel it at all."

Schultz refused to be interviewed for this report. Tucker Warren, spokesperson for his fledgling campaign, said, "The rent in Bayview was less than $ 100 a month and in some months the Schultz family was not able to pay the rent. Any insinuation that Howard did not grow up in an economically distressed environment is more a commentary on the state of our politics than on the economy of his family. "

Removals to Bayview apartments in the mid-1950s. (Carl Mamay / New York Daily News / Getty Images)

Schultz-era residents tell stories of children jumping rope and rollerblading, bands of unsupervised tweens going to the Canarsie Theater to watch movies on Saturday afternoons, Families going on the streets at the Kosher grocery store, the Viennese bakery or the toy shop. Miss Ricky's Dance School, a local ballet school, took a shuttle to Bayview to pick up children who would be attending classes after school.

Even as they question Schultz's description of Bayview, his former neighbors express the pride that one of them has achieved so much success: transforming the way the world drinks coffee and helping to create a new type of place American rally to become a billionaire.

"Bayview was for people who were going up, part of the old property trail while people were leaving the difficult life in the old streets of Brownsville and East New York to go to a place like Bayview" said Jonathan Rieder, a sociologist at Barnard College, who spent years studying the Bayview area, the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. "Bayview was a highly Jewish and middle-income country. It was an oasis, a sanctuary. "

Rieder said Schultz's description of Bayview as harsh and poor "is a story impossible for me to understand. Life was beautiful in Bayview. The tenants had this sense of respectability of the middle class.

A flagpole was painted at the Bayview complex in the mid-1960s. (Sheldon Goldstein)

In 1956, the New York City Authority opened Bayview as a "moderate-income" complex. She built a block away near Jamaica Bay, on a site where the army had erected 535 Quonset metal huts destined to serve as emergency barracks for duty overseas during World War II. .

At first glance, Bayview looked a lot like any other urban home, with a collection of brick towers with stainless steel balky elevators and corridors with green linoleum floors and walls tiled with aquatic tiles. But Bayview, in which Schultz's family moved into his first year, was built as a "no cash grant" project, according to the city's archives.

"There was a massive shortage of housing in New York after the war," said Nicholas Bloom, urban historian at the New York Institute of Technology and editor of the history affordable housing. "Many people needed housing and they were not all poor. The city had a program to build high-quality facilities for middle-class tenants, people who could afford to pay enough rent for rents to cover the operating costs of buildings and buildings. depreciation of the mortgage.

Residents gather on benches outside Bayview Apartments around 1967. (Sheldon Goldstein)

Unlike low-income buildings, Bayview's buildings included an outdoor deck on each floor and were well spaced, with playgrounds, lawns, ball fields, and a primary school on the property.

A 1965 city report indicated that Bayview had only four "problem families" – defined by factors such as "unstable family situations" or "disordered housework" – among its 1,608 families.

Many of Bayview's Schultz neighbors expressed dismay at the portrait of their home presented by long-time Bayview resident and retired postwoman Shelly Blank, who runs a Facebook group for people who grew up in development.

"It was the projects country club," Blank said, using a phrase used by several former residents of Bayview. "Howard Schultz gives the impression that it looks like a slum, but you can not be poor to live there. Do not let Howard fool you: it was brand new, a beautiful new place with new kitchens, new plumbing. We're glad he's running, but I screamed on TV when he said that.

The streets are getting meaner

Bayview is an essential part of Schultz's account of his identity. This is the first fact of his candidate's biography in his campaign: "Schultz grew up in social housing in Brooklyn and inherited his mother's belief that he could create a better life."

In recent years, his stories about his poor education have described a harder and poorer environment.

According to a 2004 Fortune profile, Schultz "grew up in some of the most winding streets in Brooklyn" and says that Bayview in Schultz's youth was "not terrifying, but difficult in the way of West Side Story".

"That shaped my character," Schultz said in this article. "But I've always wanted to escape."

"There was no way out," he told CNNMoney in 2017. "I do not think I would have had the motivation, the curiosity and the fear of it." Failure if I did not come from my past. "

Birds fly over a Bayview public housing building last month in Brooklyn. (Timothy Fadek for the Washington Post)

In fact, almost none of Schultz's peers remain in Canarsie. According to many records, many wealthy professionals live in big houses in New Jersey, Long Island and Florida. And many are intrigued or upset by their friend's version of the place they remember so fondly.

"Howie is already a politician because he's lying about Bayview," Debra Gherman wrote in Bayview's Facebook group. "You were not poor if you lived in Bayview. You had an average income. . . . Rags to riches. Give me a break, Howie. "

The evolution of his life in Schultz's history has also involved a changing representation of the role his parents played in his formation. His father, Fred, an army veteran, was driving a diaper delivery truck until an injury made him lose his job. Her mother, Elaine, stayed at home to raise her children and then worked as a receptionist.

In a 1994 New York Times profile, Schultz stated that his parents "gave me a high regard for myself and an idea of ​​what was possible."

But in his autobiography of 2019, Schultz says that he must "escape." . . Far from a "full of chaos" childhood and parents who left him anxious and uncertain: "Growing up, I never felt confident that they had my back. "

The door of the Bayview apartment where Howard Schultz lived with his family during his childhood. (Timothy Fadek for the Washington Post)

"My father chose to stay without education and without qualifications," writes Schultz in the new book. His father, he said, was suffering from a "desire to cut corners, [a] lack of work ethic "and" a violent temper "which has already led him to hit Howard in the shower.

"In his family, there was no financial stability, no structure, no predictability," said Warren, Schultz spokesman. "Other families in Bayview may have had more money or better jobs, but the Schultz family was poor, period."

Bill Block, one of Schultz's best friends in his childhood, lived on the same floor as Schultz and claimed that the family did not look worse off than the others in Bayview.

"As a kid, Howard was really good at hiding the family's problems," said Block, a clinical psychologist based in Germany. "The Schultzes seemed pretty normal to everyone. But much later, Howard told me about his mother's anxiety and depression and her father's difficulties. His personal situation was worse than that of other people in Bayview. But Howard did not show it – there was so much shame there. "

A "melting pot" that was not

In the new autobiography, Schultz calls Bayview "an urban melting pot. . . . There was a lot of diversity around us. Schultz says that "about a third" of Bayview residents "were African-Americans and a lower percentage of Puerto Rico". Bayview, he said, "reflects the composition of Brooklyn residents in social housing. "

He does not have it.

At the time, blacks made up a much larger proportion – 38% – of New York City's low-income neighborhoods. Projects in Brooklyn alone had a similar racial mix, Bloom said.

Henry Bolus, who is African-American and has lived in Bayview for 43 years, including most of the time where Schultz was on-site, said "we could look from near and far and maybe meet a another black person. "

By the time Schultz moved to Michigan to go to university in 1971, Bayview was 81% white and 17% black.

"It was a wholly white and Jewish neighborhood, with some Italians," Blank said. "Even the rabbi and the owner of the toy store have lived in the development."

Warren, spokesman for Schultz, said "Howard's neighborhood was diverse – Jewish children, Italian children, Irish children, Puerto Rican children and black children. Like many social housing projects in America, Bayview has become poorer and more dangerous than it was in the mid-1950s. "

Sheryl Boyce, president of the Bayview Houses Community Association, has been living in the Brooklyn real estate project since it opened in the 1950s. (Timothy Fadek for the Washington Post)

In the 1970s, Canarsie was the scene of conflicts over school transportation. The neighborhood's white parents organized a school boycott to protest the city's decision to bring dozens of black children from Brownsville's Brooklyn section to Canarsie College. According to census records, the neighborhood around Bayview was still 90% white in 1980, long after Schultz left.

Sheryl Boyce has lived in Bayview since opening and runs her Resident Association, as her mother did before her. Boyce, who is black, said the population of the complex was anything but diverse.

"There may have been two black families in each building," she said. "Everyone had an average income – you had to fill out an annual income form to prove it. Everyone is of course. My family had only one incident, when children wrote on the door of our apartment: "This house stinks because n —– lives here." But that's all. I even went to the synagogue with the Jewish children. We had two kosher groceries that everyone bought, whether you're Jewish or not.

Bayview residents of Schultz's day described an atmosphere that allowed them to break free from the cramped and insecure neighborhoods they had fled.

Although the Bayview physical plant has deteriorated and a poorer population has moved in the last three decades, in the 1950s and 1960s, "the atmosphere was utopian: they had fields, children were playing. outside, playgrounds ". Bloom said. "Schultz has benefited from high quality social housing for middle class families, better than what could be found in the private sector."

Bolus said, "We called it" the fortress "because we had a sense of unity. It was the jewel of the habitat.

The non-purse

Schultz said for many years that his escape from Bayview had taken the form of a scholarship for football. But he has never received a football scholarship.

Block, Schultz's childhood friend, said that "as far as I know, his purse pulled him out of Bayview."

Schultz's escape from Brooklyn to Northern Michigan University was thanks to a "football purse," Charlie Rose said in an interview in 2007.

"That's right," Schultz replied.

Already in 2001, Schultz told New York Post columnist Vic Ziegel that his scholarship in football was the key to opening the door to the university: "Financially, that would have been impossible without the sport."

In his 2012 book, Schultz stated that, when he had received a call from a recruiter from the NMU football team, "I yelled and I heard yelled. . . . Northern Michigan basically offered me a football purse, the only offer I had. Without that, I do not know how I could have realized my mother's dream of going to college. "

Former Starbucks general manager Howard Schultz, who is considering an independent race at the White House, speaks Wednesday in Miami. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

But in his new autobiography, Schultz provides a different story: there was no study, but a misunderstanding on his part.

"I convinced myself that it was the case, I had a football scholarship," he wrote. "What I really had was making one."

In this version, Schultz was informed that while he was training the team, he would get some financial help.

But the first days of training clearly showed that "I was not good enough to be a quarter of northern Michigan," he wrote.

So he took jobs, student loans, and even sold his blood to pay the annual cost of US $ 1,410 from northern Michigan, Schultz said.

In a statement, Warren, spokesman for Schultz, said: "He left in northern Michigan, persuaded that he was going to play football with a scholarship, but he did not go to school. soon realized that it was not good enough for a scholarship to materialize ".

University spokesman Derek Hall said scholarship offers and recruited athlete visits "are not archives that the university keeps".

After past invitations, Schultz visits

Although many people do not agree with Schultz's description of Bayview, current residents say they are proud of the billionaire they saw emerge from their community and sought his help in making this connection.

In 2012, Boyce, president of the Residents' Association, wrote to Schultz asking him if he could provide Starbucks gift cards worth $ 5 to tenants attending the annual celebration. Mother's Day and Father's Day.

A Starbucks executive rejected the request, saying in a letter to Boyce that the national attention earned by the company "forced us to limit our commitments" and advising the group to "discuss your request with a local store manager ".

There are no Starbucks in Canarsie or the surrounding areas.

"All we have is Dunkin 'Donuts," said Boyce. "I called Starbucks after this letter and I had an unpleasant conversation. They did not move.

Two years later, the group tries again, asking only permission to add Schultz's name and a message to "our youth" to a list of personalities who lived in Bayview.

This request was also refused. Starbucks' response stated that the company "does not seek national or local sponsorship opportunities" and does not accept "in-kind" requests.

"We just wanted to include his name to show that just growing up in a housing administration does not mean you can not succeed," Boyce said. "They said no. I do not know why he hates this place. I have lived here 63 years and I love it. "

A spokesman for Schultz did not answer questions about the handling of Boyce's claims.

Last year, while Schultz was preparing for a possible election campaign, he visited Bayview, went to his former elementary school, asked the school principal what she needed and promised to pay to renovate the gym and other facilities.

School guard Al Watson said Schultz "never did anything for school before, but this time he came to the teachers' room, the doors, the gym – also do a good job. "