This is part of a series about New Yorkers who have recently relocated to the Bronx. It’s called The New Bronx.

Melissa Asencio walked with her arms crossed closely against her chest, slouching as she made her way down Morris Avenue on a Monday morning. The weather was warm for a mid-September day, but the 28-year-old made no effort to look up on her way to an early class at Bronx Community College before her full-time job as a school custodian started later in the day.

It has been three months since Asencio moved to northwestern Bronx from Queens, but said she could never see herself fully opening up to the people in the new neighborhood.

Moving in with her mother in the Bronx was her best option for her financially, she said. “Even if it meant being surrounded by unfriendly neighbors and filthy-mouthed children on the block,” said Asencio.

“I remember the day I first got here, I looked around this place and the only thing I liked about moving was my spacious bedroom. But out in the streets, they made me feel so uncomfortable,” she said, adding that she felt a danger she had not felt before.

“Never have I felt so afraid to walk outside after dinner by myself,” Asencio said. “I hear police cars in the streets almost every other night, and I hear reports of violence or burglary the morning after on that same street in the morning.”

Asencio used to live in Richmond Hill, Queens, before her father’s construction business filed for bankruptcy a year ago. He rented out her attic room and asked her to move in with her mother.

Refusing to move to the Bronx right away, Asencio sought an affordable one-bedroom apartment nearby. She found it difficult to find an apartment for less than $1,100 –exactly the amount her mother pays for a three-bedroom apartment in the Bronx.

Asencio earns $500 monthly from a cleaning job with the Board of Education.  “With these wages I can barely pay my tuition at the Bronx Community College,” she said, adding that she wants to help her mother, who is also a janitor as well.

“I tried looking for other kinds of jobs everywhere – but they just weren’t hiring, and most of them required a college degree, even if I could do the same job that they were asking me to do,” Ascencio said, explaining that she chose to enroll in the community college for a wider range of options to make ends meet after graduation.

“It was the total opposite in Queens – it was peaceful, friendly, and everyone knew my name,” she said. “It was all houses and families back there. Here, it doesn’t seem like a place I don’t want to raise my kids up in.”

Asencio said another difference living in the Queens with her father and in the Bronx with her mother is the presence of a landlord.

“When I lived in the house that my dad owned, I felt comfortable, and I felt like I was home,” Asencio said.

Her new room in the Bronx, however, is almost three times the size of her attic room at her father’s place, she said.

“It’s not all bad. At least I get to move around in this bedroom,” she said, referring to her new home. “But when I save enough to move out of this neighborhood and I’m able to stand on my own two feet, I am getting the hell out of here.”