Claudia Smith has lived in Central Harlem for 65 years. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1930 –one of the youngest of eight children. Living in Harlem since the 1950s, she has experienced Central Harlem’s deterioration of 1960s riots, the 1980s crack epidemic, gang wars, and police brutality. She has been effected by these major occurrences in Harlem. Smith has lost family and friends during the crack epidemic, and she has watched many of her close friends migrate back to the south during Harlem’s deterioration. After being inflicted by the social problems and secluded by social problems to Harlem neighborhood, at 85, she still has to feel the infliction of social problems and now something quite differently, excluded from Harlem because of social problems. When she fled to the urban society of New York City, she was looking for opportunity that the south could not provide during that era. With no college degree, just a rudimentary education, she was only capable to get a job as a home health aide. The job provided little to nothing in pay, but she was able to afford a modest apartment with her husband. Throughout major struggles to make the minimum income needed for subsistence, now, she has to deal with the big, bad gentrification. A stirring problem for native residents who are mostly considered lower class citizens living at or below the poverty level, of whom have made it through the eye of the storm to be pirated.