Guess Who Saved the South Bronx? Big Government - urban renewal in New York, New York

Washington Monthly, April, 1999 by Robert Worth

Yet for all their heroism, the CDCs were too small and too poor to turn the tide in the South Bronx. The city helped keep them alive, but a financial crisis lasting through the '70s prevented it from doing more. Housing had traditionally been a federal responsibility, but the Carter administration was reluctant to pour money into such a notorious sinkhole. After Reagan was elected the federal government made a full-scale retreat, slashing the overall budget for affordable housing by two thirds. Even small efforts failed. In the wake of Jimmy Carter's celebrated visit to the rubble of Charlotte Gardens in 1977, Mayor Ed Koch tried to put up new housing on the site, but the city's Board of Estimate voted him down.

It took three things to turn the city's head back towards the Bronx. First, the financial crisis ended and the city got back into the bond market in the early '80s, freeing it to spend money. Second, by the mid-'80s homeless men and women were living in cardboard boxes on Fifth Avenue, prompting an outbreak of civic concern and putting political pressure on Koch to build more affordable housing. Still, a third element was required: political commitment. Koch could have ignored the Bronx after his re-election in 1985, but he chose to follow through on an unprecedented "Ten Year Plan" for affordable housing. The plan called for $4.1 billion in reconstruction--later upped to $5.1 billion. Although the plan was citywide, the rebuilding of the Bronx was a high priority. "The goal was to rebuild the entire South Bronx, to take every vacant building and make it into a viable housing unit," says Abe Biderman, Koch's housing commissioner during the late '80s. According to the city's department of Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD), some $1.3 billion of city funds went into the South Bronx alone.

In this respect, the Bronx also benefited from the skill and honesty of its own borough president, Fernando Ferrer, a former city planner. "In Harlem all the civic and political leaders were interested in was the contracts, and who would be given the job of rehabilitation and who would decide who would work on what," says Koch. "Ferrer never did that. All he did was to say let me give you my advice on what to do first, and we listened to him" This may sound like common sense, but it was worlds away from the practice of Stanley Simon, Ferrer's predecessor. "The first time I met Stanley," says Kathryn Wylde, the director of the New York City Housing Partnership, "he took me aside and bragged that he personally gave every builder the [permit] for their home, and that he would be telling me who the builders were for each of our projects"

Still, honesty and buckets of money were not enough. The Ten Year Plan consisted of a bewildering variety of programs, but its success can be boiled down to a few basic principles, all of which represent a real advance over the redevelopment efforts of the past.

Use what 5 there. For years, city officials had argued that the South Bronx was "beyond tinkering, rebuilding and restoring," as Robert Moses put it in 1973. Three years later Roger Starr, the city's housing administrator, suggested a goal of "planned shrinkage"--razing the worst areas, relocating the residents, and closing down subway stations, police and firehouses, hospitals and schools. The Koch administration reversed this draconian logic, recognizing that it would be foolish not to make use of the city's countless abandoned buildings. "We made a conscious decision that we could make scarce resources go farther if we did rehabilitation," says Paul Crotty, Koch's housing commissioner from '86 to '88. In part, this decision grew out of a desire to maintain whatever sense of community was left, as the CDCs had been doing for years. But it also made economic sense. The cost of a "gut rehab," in which everything but the building's outer walls is removed and replaced, turned out to be $65,000 per apartment, versus $135,000 if you built from scratch.