The Bronx: Now Booming, not Burning

[Beet]

Apologies if this has been posted before (the article's a few days old):


New construction is changing the look of many Bronx neighborhoods, but some fear the effects of gentrification and the loss of green space.

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: March 19, 2006

For decades, the area known as the Hub has been the retail heart of the South Bronx, attracting throngs of people to its small family-owned stores even as the residential blocks around it were ravaged by crime and, at times, consumed by flames.

But now, those who have kept this scrappy shopping district alive are worried, and the source of their fears is not robbers or arsonists, but development. A long-vacant lot is the planned home of a major shopping center that will include national chain stores like Staples, Forman Mills and Rite-Aid. Their impending arrival has caused as much apprehension as happiness.

"We have to watch out for the mom-and-pop stores," said George Rodriguez, chairman of the local community board, who for years has sought to bring national retailers to the area. "They did not move out, they did not capitulate. They served the clients in the area."

And the Hub is just the heart of it. A few decades after it became a national symbol of urban decay, the Bronx is home to a rash of new construction projects that are changing neighborhoods that have seen little new building in half a century. Many residents are uneasy.

The anxiety extends from woodsy Riverdale, which has had a spate of new condominium construction, to the suburblike eastern Bronx, where huge homes have started popping up, and to the South Bronx, where plans for luxury condominiums and high-end stores have prompted fears of gentrification. Projects either planned or under way include thousands of units of new housing, shopping malls, an $800 million baseball stadium for the Yankees — perhaps a convention center and the borough's first major hotel.

The frantic pace has spurred opposition to small and large projects alike, resistance that only a few years ago would have been unthinkable in the borough, which includes one of the poorest Congressional districts in the country. The aversion to the boom is due to the dizzying speed of change, and has grown as New York City has become a more desirable place to live. Property values have skyrocketed, and wealthy people who in past generations might have moved to the suburbs are now staying and looking for more space. Poor people often find they cannot leave their current homes for fear that they will not find any place as affordable. And longtime businesses fear they will not be able to compete against chain stores.

Many are pleased about the rush. The Bronx borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr., notes that construction means new jobs in a borough with the highest unemployment rate in the state, 7.6 percent. Still, that is much lower than the 11.2 percent rate in January 2003.

"It's a good problem to have when the arguments that people are having are not so much 'Why is nothing happening?' but 'Why is so much happening and how can we absorb it?' " Mr. Carrión said. "It's a fair concern that people have."

Dozens of residents who are critical of specific projects say they are not generally against new construction, saying their borough has been starved too long for restaurants, brand-name shops, even banks and grocery stores.

The Bronx remains seared in many minds as a symbol of urban decay — an image crystallized when a fire near Yankee Stadium led Howard Cosell to announce during the 1977 World Series that the Bronx was burning. That same year, President Jimmy Carter toured Charlotte Street, which was so ravaged it looked as if it had been bombed.

"We all know what happened in the 70's in the Bronx," said Anthony Perez Cassino, a Riverdale resident who grew up in the borough. "It's exciting to see all the development, but there's a downside — which is that in some areas, it's happening too much, too quickly. "

Last year, 9,168 building permits were issued in the borough, almost double the 4,955 awarded in 1995. And the 901 permits allotted for construction of new buildings last year was triple the number issued in 1996. The value of residential property in the Bronx has increased 42 percent, to $2.5 billion, since 2000. Land in the borough is at such a premium that single-family homes are being razed for multistory apartment buildings, houses are being built in alleys and in one case, a three-story apartment building is being constructed around a neighbor's tree.

"We're not paying attention to the alternatives for the people who are going to be displaced," said William Bosworth, director of the Bronx Data Center at Lehman College.

In Geneva Causey's neighborhood near Yankee Stadium, residents say they learned of definitive plans for a replacement ballpark through a news conference announcing the plan in June 2005. After 38 years of living in the South Bronx, Ms. Causey believes it finally might be time to move: The proposed new Yankee Stadium would be built across the street, 90 feet from her bedroom.

Mr. Carrión and other local politicians say the project will jump-start economic development. The City Council is expected to vote on the project in April. The Yankees want to start construction by May 1.

The proposal calls for building a stadium on two large neighborhood parks adjacent to the current stadium. Residents fear that the patchwork of new parks that will replace them will not make up for the green space, and the popular gathering spots, that they will lose.

"This is not going to be a desirable living area," Ms. Causey said. "It's kind of like, 'Where do you go?' This is affordable housing for people in this neighborhood. You will kill the community off."

Within walking distance of Yankee Stadium is the Bronx Terminal Market, a 31-acre collection of crumbling but popular warehouse shops. As part of a $400 million redevelopment plan, the market's remaining merchants and hundreds of their employees are being evicted. The market, which dates to the 1920's, will be replaced by Gateway Center, a mall that will include national chain stores.

Majora Carter, executive director Sustainable South Bronx, a community organization, said that officials had accepted projects that were not necessarily the best for the community because of an "inferiority complex" left over from the borough's leaner years.

"I'm all for development, but there's nothing in the middle at all," Ms. Carter said. "It's either they do a large-scale development or nothing at all. There are no neighborhood-scale shops."

And then there is the planned $50 million, 170,000-square-foot commercial development in the Hub, which like the proposed new Yankee Stadium, depends on government financing. It will include a Forman Mills discount retail store, a Staples and a Rite-Aid when it opens in two years. Though the area has sought chain stores for years with little luck, residents and community leaders like Mr. Rodriguez wonder if by upgrading they might upset the area's delicate economic balance. "We've got to make sure that whatever is done is done for the benefit of everyone in the community," Mr. Rodriguez said.

The eastern Bronx has similar concerns. BJ's is trying to move into the area, and City Councilman James Vacca, who represents the district, said he fears a warehouse-style store would hurt local businesses, including several new supermarkets that have opened in the area recently.

The eastern Bronx has also had an increase in the number of huge homes being built on relatively small lots, which for years has been a problem in other areas of the city but is a relatively new phenomenon there. In response, neighborhoods like City Island and Throgs Neck have successfully lobbied for zoning laws in recent months to limit new building.

"We always saw ourselves as a touch of suburbia in the Bronx," Mr. Vacca said. "You want to retain trees and open space, and you don't want to live on top of your neighbor."

In the northern Bronx — including parts of Riverdale and Kingsbridge — zoning laws have changed as well to keep out new multistory apartment buildings and homes deemed too large for their lots.

Still, modest-size houses on streets that have not been rezoned have been bought by developers and demolished to make room for huge houses in the past year. In one case, on Tulfan Terrace in Riverdale, a 20-story condominium tower was built on the space that had housed three of the cul-de-sac's eight homes.

"We are in the midst of the most intense development push since the apartment house boom that transformed large parts of Riverdale in the 1950's," said Bradford Trebach, an associate broker and general counsel for his family's real estate firm, Trebach Realty.

Sometimes large-scale development has been greeted with praise. In Kingsbridge, a proposal to build a 207,000-square-foot shopping mall has received wide support among residents, even though some shops that the developers are in talks with, like Whole Foods, have higher prices than residents in the nearby housing projects are used to.

The new stores, which could include a chain bookstore, would force nearby retailers to adapt, said Fern Jaffe, who has owned the Paperbacks Plus bookstore for 36 years.

"We can weather the storm," Ms. Jaffe said. "Would I rather they weren't there? Of course. But development is development."

[Beet]

Historical note: For a interesting account of the fall of the Bronx and the greater urban problems of NYC in decades past, I suggest you check out The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York about the life and times of Robert Moses, suburban visionary and urban destroyer.

[dazzleman]

Historical note: For a interesting account of the fall of the Bronx and the greater urban problems of NYC in decades past, I suggest you check out The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York about the life and times of Robert Moses, suburban visionary and urban destroyer.

Beet, I read that book and it tells a very interesting story about the decline of the Bronx, and many of the areas around New York City in the 1950s and 1960s.

IMO, it puts too much blame on factors such as highways, and doesn't put enough emphasis on the rise in crime and taxes, and decline in educational facilities, that drove many people out of the neighborhoods in which they lived.

I am well acquainted from the Bronx, having gone to college there and having many friends originally from there.  Not a single one of my friends continues to live in the Bronx.

I hope that the Bronx is finally turning around.  It never made a lot of sense that a place so well located relative to Manhattan was doing so poorly for so long.

Time will tell how the whole development issue plays out there.  Time is probably on the Bronx's side, as the momentum now seems to be in favor of urban rejuvenation, rather than the inexorable decline that continued for so many decades.

The open question is -- if the Bronx, and places like it, become more affluent and have more attractive development, where will many of the people currently living there go?

In reality, there is plenty of developable land in the Bronx, because so many of the buildings there were underutilized and in many cases abandoned.

But in all honesty, I continue to consider the Bronx, including the so-called 'good' sections, to be highly unattractive as a place to live, for many reasons, and I suspect many people will continue to perceive that to be the case.

[Michael Z]

A similar thing is happening to previously rough neighbourhoods in London. Take the Docklands, where I live - as early as 10 years ago it was a wasteland of empty warehouses and rough council estates. Now, after some considerable development (most noteably Canary Wharf), it's a booming & trendy area inhabited by young professionals from all over the world.

However, there is also a downside to this, in that some people who previously lived in those areas are now being pushed into the suburbs, which as a consequence are seeing a steady rise in what's called petty crime. One good example of this is Ilford, which used to be very affluent and middle class and is now definitely not the sort of area you'd want to be in after sundown (I used to live there a few years ago).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think I may have gone on off a few tangents here... anyways...

A similar thing is happening to previously rough neighbourhoods in London. Take the Docklands, where I live - as early as 10 years ago it was a wasteland of empty warehouses and rough council estates. Now, after some considerable development (most noteably Canary Wharf), it's a booming & trendy area inhabited by young professionals from all over the world.

Ten years ago? Well that would depend where in the Docklands; developments in most of Rotherhithe did come relatively late though and a lot of stuff since then has been handled by the various boroughs councils.
The LDDC did most of it's work in the late '80's and the early '90's, before being killed off in 1998.
In general the Docklands are a good example of regeneration and so on should not be done (you've addressed some of that below, but I'll add a few other things now) the worst aspect was the autocratic (verging on dictatorial) powers of the LDDC (the abuse of complusory purchase orders (that's eminent domain for any Americans reading this) to clear out the locals in some parts of Millwall and Limehouse was just disgraceful and is partially to blame for all the racial (and other) tension the area has had ever since (including the election of a certain Mr. Galloway)... the openly racist LibDem administration on Tower Hamlets LBC also has a lot to answer for) as well as the blatent social engineering (the LDDC was "supposed" to build mainly properties that would be affordable to the locals. Hah. Hah. Hah). I think worse than that was that they didn't really do what they said they would do; the old dockers communities are still in a bad way in some areas (the Isle of Dogs especially) and didn't exactly get much help from the LDDC, who seemed to be more interested in building a load of yuppy flats along the banks of the Thames rather than regenerating the Docklands. I made some very detailed maps to do with this... I'll see if I can find them...
Some of the alternative plans for regenerating the Docklands would have worked a lot better than what actually happend; not enough emphasis was placed on the poor sods that lived in the area, and far too much on property. The history of the area, and the area is very important from a historical point of view (especially the Dockers strike in the late 19th century), was also forgotten.
In general the newer developments were (and are) a lot better and more mixed than the older ones (and they don't look like lego either).

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Yes, a lot were. Which is ironic (if sad) as it goes contrary to the stated purpose of the LDDC.

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Yes, Ilford has changed a lot over the past two decades... it's now quite a bit less middle class than the London average (something unthinkable until, well, a lot of displaced people from the East End and the Docklands moved out there) and has changed a hell of a lot politically as well. Once upon a time it was marginal with a lean towards the Tories...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

*bumps interesting thread*

[Michael Z]

You know Al, you never told me why you're so familiar with the Rotherhithe/Salter Road area. Let's hear it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You know Al, you never told me why you're so familiar with the Rotherhithe/Salter Road area. Let's hear it.

Aha...

...well... let's just say that it's the only part of London where I've spent more than one night in and can remember doing so... and let's just leave it at that...

[afleitch]

You know Al, you never told me why you're so familiar with the Rotherhithe/Salter Road area. Let's hear it.

Al is an ominpresent being

[Michael Z]

You know Al, you never told me why you're so familiar with the Rotherhithe/Salter Road area. Let's hear it.

Aha...

...well... let's just say that it's the only part of London where I've spent more than one night in and can remember doing so... and let's just leave it at that...

Ahaha. Say no more.

Al is an ominpresent being

That would explain why he knows so much about, well, everything.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

This isn't really news, those fires were in the '70s.