"Because I wrote a book about this neighborhood," answered Mr. Quinonez, who was 18 months old when he arrived from Ecuador in 1966, after an anti-Communist coup left his father, a librarian, blacklisted there.
It is the neighborhood's answer to happy hour, with alfresco dining and drinking always an option.
The neighborhood's answer was clear, Mr. Padavan said: "There is a large unmet need that could be very profitable for whoever meets it".
As I rode up and down Flatbush Avenue on the "dollar vans" that ply the neighborhood, the answer was almost always the same: the streets are safer.
When a young girl there was asked about the low-level warfare that engulfs her neighborhood, her answer's heart-sinking simplicity seemed to vouch for this approach of chronicling America as though seeing it for the first time.
At the Murphys', as at nearly every other house in the neighborhood, the answer seems to be enough for every member of the family, the maid or nanny and a guest or two to lie on different sofas and watch different televisions, all at once.
"I'm from this neighborhood," he answers.
Tom's also become a resource for teen fans on Tumblr, Just Your Friendly Neighborhood Trans Kid, answering questions about gender and sexuality.
For example, when asked how often they spend a social evening with neighbors, relatives, or friends beyond the neighborhood, the answers changed hardly at all from 1985 to 2004.
