Crosstown Heights

A dense residential high-rise neighborhood above Crosstown, where public housing towers form a skyline of their own and the elevators are rarely all working.

Crosstown Heights is a sky-high version of Crosstown's density — a cluster of 1960s-era public housing towers stacked twenty and thirty stories up, housing a tightly-packed community of families, elders, recent immigrants, and long-time residents whose histories in these buildings go back generations. The elevators break more than they run, the hallway lighting is usually some combination of flickering and broken, and yet the towers function — they're full of cooking smells, crying babies, visiting relatives, corner prayer groups, card games in the lobby, and kids running the hallways. The courtyard between the buildings contains what everyone agrees is one of the best basketball courts in the state, a cracked-concrete patch where some of Vice City's professional players learned their handle. The neighborhood has its problems — drug corners, turf issues, the occasional catastrophic building fire — and its fierce defenders who will tell you, correctly, that it's also one of the realest communities in Leonida.