to move out of New York City. As breweries in Bushwick closed, the neighborhood's economic base eroded. Discussions of urban renewal took place in the 1960s, but never materialized, resulting in the demolition of many residential buildings with the intent of replacing these structures with public housing, but nothing new was built in its place as these proposals were scrapped. Another contribution to the change in the socioeconomic profile of the neighborhood was the John Lindsay administration's policy of raising available rent for welfare recipients. Since these tenants could now bring higher rents than tenants would on the open market, landlords began filling vacant units with such tenants. By the mid-1970s, half of Bushwick's residents were on public assistance. According to The New York Times, Bushwick was "a neatly maintained community of wood houses" by the mid-1960s. Within five years, it had become "what often approached a no man's land of abandoned buildings, empty lots, drugs and arson." On the night of July 13, 1977, a major blackout cut power to nearly all of New York City, and arson, looting, and vandalism occurred in low-income neighborhoods across the city. Bushwick suffered some of the most devastating damage and losses. While store owners along Knickerbocker and Graham avenues were able to defend their stores, the Broadway shopping district was heavily looted and burned. Twenty-seven stores along Broadway were burned, and looters and some residents saw the blackout as an opportunity to get what they otherwise could not afford. Newspapers around the country published UPI and the Associated Press's photos of Bushwick residents with stolen items and a police officer beating a suspected looter, and Bushwick became known for riots and looting. Fires spread to many residential buildings as well. After the riots were over and the fires were put out, residents saw unsafe dwellings and empty lots among surviving buildings, leading one author to describe the scene as "some streets that looked like Brooklyn Heights, and others that looked like Dresden in 1945": The business vacancy rate on Broadway reached 43% in the wake of the riots. The 1977 blackout and resulting riots left Bushwick without a commercial retail hub. Middle-class residents who could afford to leave did so, in some cases abandoning their homes. New immigrants continued to move to the area, many from Hispanic America, but renovation and new construction was outpaced by the demolition of unsafe buildings, forcing