Thirty stories high in the heart of Manhattan’s Financial District, I had a bird’s eye view of New York City from downtown to the East River and Brooklyn. As a leasing agent, I had access to this panoramic view on a regular basis. It was my job to shepherd potential renters through the building and admire the cityscape from the roof deck. One day, a prospective tenant asked what the tall buildings were that obstructed our view of the East River. When I responded that those buildings were affordable housing, he responded, “What a waste of real estate.” I knew he didn’t mean to offend me, but I took his comment to heart. Did the poor not deserve this view? Did he think that just because I was wearing business attire that I shared his scorn? On that day, I felt a strange combination of quiet anger combined with invisibility.

It was then that I remembered the fleeting moment when my father and I drove past his childhood home and he pointed out the windows of the small apartment in the Eastchester Gardens Housing Development of the Bronx. Although I did not grow up in the projects, our family lived in a rent-stabilized apartment in a neighborhood full of the same tower blocks that stood by the East River. From the time that I was a teenager, I worked alongside New York City’s wealthiest, first as a hostess doing coat check for upscale venues, and then leasing luxury apartments in downtown Manhattan. Yet I knew that I was not one of them. As a college student, I commuted between Hunter College on the Upper East Side and my small family apartment in Queens. It struck me that the essence of New York’s diversity lay in this range between the rich and poor. Early on, I became an observer who lives somewhere between the two starkly different realities: the New York of the polished and well-educated who are bred with a sense of enhas-tooltip tooltip-contentment, and the working-class New York of my childhood.

The bridge between these two worlds seemed to be education, considered by many to be “the great equalizer” of class difference. Although I felt fortunate for my education, I became preoccupied in college with how opportunity is distributed unequally. The way that socioeconomic status impacts an individual’s opportunities began to unfold during the fall semester of my sophomore year. A course I was taking called Anthropology of Race culminated in a lengthy research paper in which I compared the learning environments of an elementary school in the South Bronx and another in Port Washington, a historically affluent neighborhood on the North Shore of Long Island. I interviewed a teacher who had taught at both schools and found that the school in the Bronx received significantly less funding than the one in Port Washington. As a result, the students in the Bronx - many of whom had difficult situations at home - had the odds stacked against them. Lack of funding compounded by domestic problems meant that Bronx students did not perform as well. More subtle patterns reinforced the cycle. Qualified teachers left to take jobs elsewhere, where the schools had more resources or were located in better neighborhoods, resulting in younger and less-qualified teachers being hired in these already lower performing schools. It is a problem that sustains a location-based distribution of opportunities in New York and widens the education gap even further.

Though socioeconomic class divisions are powerful predictors, it is possible – given luck and talent, to overcome them. At some level, I know I am an example of that transcendence. When I join my brother and sister as First Generation College graduates this May, I will have transcended a barrier of my socioeconomic class, much as my father did, when he left the "Projects” behind. Although on some level I have had to experience a harder life, it is precisely these experiences that have made me reflect more deeply on the role of education and housing laws in our society. Were it not for rent-stabilization, our family would have been evicted a long time ago in the course of our financial struggles. Seeing how certain laws have directly impacted my family’s well-being informs my understanding of how they function within the larger society. I am interested in how the law sets into motion the policies that protect or undermine socio-economic diversity. Growing up in the densely populated city of New York has forced me to confront and care about class and racial inequalities. I hope that law school will equip me with the ability to combat some of these entrenched patterns of unequal opportunity, and to assume the role of an actor rather than an observer.