Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2, Winter, 1987

NEIGHBORHOOD PROBLEMS

THE SOUTH-BRONX STORY:AN EXTREME CASE OF NEIGHBORHOOD DECUNE

Nathan GiazerHansard University

Periiaps the most remarkable phenomenon to have affected NewYori< City in the iast 15 years was the destruction of vast quantitiesof good housing through abandonment and arson. This epkJemic t>ecameevkJent oniy in the iate 1960s, raged through major parts of the cityin the 1970s, and finaiiy sonnewhat abated in the mkJdie 1980s. Modestsigns of rebuiiding in the area of worst devastation have becomeevkJent in the last few years, but they are as nothing compared to thescale of the previous destruction. Mk;haei Stegman summarized thescaie of destruction in 1982:

"Based on census estimates, 321,000 dweiiing units whichwere part of the New York City's housing inventory in 1970had been iost by the time of the 1^1 Housing and Vacancysurvey. Tfiat is, these units had either been demdished,condemned, witixJrawn from the market, and boarded upand/or burned out whiie stiii under private or city owner-ship, converted to nonreskJentiai use or merged with otherapartments. Net iosses from the suppiy from April 1970through March 1981 equalled approximately 11 percent ofthe 1970 and 1981 housing inventory. Of these 321,000 units,aimost fiaif fiave been demdished, whiie another 31 percentare stiii vacant, i.e., boarded-up, partiaiiy gutted by fireand/or open to the elements. . . . Some of the demditionsmay be bulkJings which iandlords have abandoned t)ecausethey have lost aii hope of operating them proflfabiy in thefuture. Other bumed-out shells might have i een apartmentbuildings which were profifable untii they burned" (Segman,1982:176-177).

EXPLANATIONS THAT DONT WORK

The greatest impact of this destruction was on the Bronx, one ofNew York City's five boroughs. One-third of the iosses were

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concentrated in the Bronx, which had less than one-fifth of NewYork's popuiation. Losses from the housing inventory in the Bronxaccounted for more than one-fifth of its housing in 1970. (These arefigures for net iosses, and do not inciude iost units that iater retumedto the housing stock through rehabilitation.)

How abnormai was this situation? Were we seeing simpiy aprocess of adapfation to a deciining popuiation? Of a case of fiiteringout of the dd and worst housing as new housing came on the market?in part, this is indeed wfiat was happening, but if we were to explainthe situation in these terms aione we wouid be quite wrong.

New York was it is true iosing one-tenth of its popuiation in the1970s, through iargeiy white migration to the suburbs, repiaced in partby incoming biacks and Hispanics. (Biacks and Hispanics were ofcourse aiso part of the outward movement.) But New York's housefiddsshowed oniy a 2 percent drop (Stegman, 1982:2), because of a drop inaverage househdd size. Further, there was sufficient building, mostiyfederaiiy, state, and city subsidized, to actuaiiy maintain the housingstock at pretty much the numijers of the eariy 1970s (Sterniieb andListokin, 1986:383). New buHding showed a catastrophic drop after themkJ 1970s, but between 1970 and 1974, aimost 130,000 new units werestarted in the city (Sterniieb and Listokin, 1986:384). There is acertain piausibiiity, thus, in the argument that the stock was adjustingto increases at the upper end by eiiminating the worst part of it atthe iower end. One prot^em with this expianation is that the destruc-tion affected not oniy the worst part of the housing stock but greatnumbers of weii-buiit structures Inhabited by the stabie workingciass, mkldie ciass, and even upper-mkldie ciass. This was no normaiadaptation to change.

Was New York simpiy adapting to greater poverty and a ioss ofJobs? New York was aiso iosing Jobs during this period, and the entiremetropditan area was chaiienged by the growth of the South andWest. New York iost, between 1969 and 1979, an astonishing 515,000Jobs-13.5 percent of the 3,797,000 Jobs in 1969, a ioss concentrated inthe first haif of the decade (Horton and Brecher, 1981:19). That someshrinkage in the housing suppiy wouid occur was naturai.

But what made the situation exceptionai was the way in whichhousing was removed from the stock. From the point of view of thoseiiving in the buiidings that were destroyed, it was not a matter ofdeciding they preferred newer housing in different parts of the city oroutside it. They feit they were being driven from their housing, bycrime, by arson, by the flooding of buildings as vandals ripped outplumbing, by the unwiiiingness or inabiiity of iandiords to maintainbuildings, and the unwillingness or inability of the city to restrain theconditions that were destroying buildings while people lived in them.The scene was often described as reminding people of Berlin or

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Dresden after the war. But that destruction was after ail caused bywar and bombs. One saw an onsiaught on physicai structures that fiasno parallel in the history of civilized urban iife. There was abandon-ment and destructkMi in other American cities, but nothing on thescaie of New York, even accounting for its much iarger size (Saiins,1980:35). One sees nothing iike it in En^Hand's deciining mkJiand cities,even though their popuiatksns and employment opportunities have beenmore radk^iiy reduced, and much of the housing stock has beendemdished or is in bad repair. One sees nothing like it in the greatcities of the Continent, or tfie deveioping worid.

A number of elements of uniqueness may thus be listed. First,scaie. Second, the direct onsiaugfn on the physicai structures byelements of the populatk>n that lived in them. Third, the apparentinability or unwillingness of the city to restrain the destruction. Theauthorities were as if paraiyzed, and while teievision and movie crews(particulariy foreign ones, deprived of war-destroyed urban iandscapesby postwar rebuilding) reguiariy fiimed the scenes of destruction,fascinated by a sight unequaiied in the civilized (or uncivilized) worid,the city and its pditk;ai ieaders were remarkaiSly mute, it is true from1975 on they were in the throes of a financiai crisis that threatenedbankruptcy and seemed to fiave attention for nothing eise. But anaiystswere also struck dumb, though Joumaiists described what was happen-ing in fascinated horror again and again.

A further element of uniqueness we have referred to: Thehousing that was being destroyed was for the most part weii buiit,often with elegantly designed lobbies, of sdki masonry and brickconstruction, with iarge apartments with good detaiis. Tlie neighbor-hoods of destruction were weii iocated on major subway iines a haifhour from tfie heart of Manfiattan, weii supplied with parks, schods,iibraries, churches and synagogues. The neighborhoods had been buiftup at a high density, and many famiiies with chiidren wouid havepreferred lower densities. But those who fled from the swathe ofdestructbn commonly ended up in new publidy-subskJized develop-ments, for the poor or mkldie dasses, that boasted even higherdensities, though in high towers that permitted more open space onthe ground.

New York was no poorer than other iarge Northeastern and Mid-western cities, iosing Jobs at no greater a rate, nor was its popuiationchanging raciaiiy and ethnicaiiy at a more rapid rate than others inthe 1960s. One great difference however between New York and othercities is that New Yori< City is primariiy a city of renters-71 percentof the housing is rentai units. The iandiord thus becomes a keyparticipant. Was the iandiord at fauit, as tenants believed? But if so,what had happened that made it to his interest to destroy his buiiding

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or faii to resist its destruction by others or to simpiy abandon thebuiiding and waik away?

The prominence of the rentai housing sector suggests otherpossiii^e cuiprits in the New York City housing disaster. One isrediining-the refusai of banks to provkle mortgages and ioans forimprovement. Another is reduced building code enforcement. Another isrent controi and rent sfabilization. But these were not prime causes.The process of destruction wouid have made It madness to iend moneyon housing in the path of destruction, and the banks dkJ not. Wherepubiic money was avaiiat}ie for reiiabiiitation in the areas of destruc-tion-and it often was, since huge sums of money were being pouredinto New York for housing aii during this period-rehabilitated housingseemed as incapabie of resisting physicai destruction as unrehabHIfated.The ievei of code enforcement during much of this period was morestringent than ever before in New York City's history, and wascombined with court-sanctioned rent withhdding that drasticaiiypunished iandiords who dkJ not maintain their buiidings (Saiins,1980:9).

Even the reiationship between rent controi and housing destruc-tion is not easy to demonstrate. Rent controi, aii agree, ied toreduction in maintenance. But for the most part it aiso led to a stabieand fixed tenantry, resistant to moving and change, in order to gainits benefits, in the zone of destruction the probiem was not that rentcontrd ceiiings iimited what iandiords couid ask, but rather, findingany tenant who wouid pay any rent.

EXPLANATIONS THAT DO WORK

One possibie reiationship between housing destruction and rentcontroi has been suggested by Peter D. Saiins in The Ecology ofHousing Destruction. After arguing against some of the theories thatattempt to expiain the phenomenon presented above, Saiins gives anexpianation based on two key eiements in the system of sociai pdicyin New York, the weifare system, and rent contrd. The welfare grantin New York is divided into two parts, one part for food, ciothing andother needs, and another which can be used oniy for rent, and forwhich maximums are set depending on the size of the famiiy. Theweifare rent grant encourages the famiiy receiving it to use it to itsfuii vaiue, by finding apartments that rent at the maximum the grantaiiows. The system of rent contrd greatiy expands the weifare ciient'sopportunities for choice because rents do not directiy reflect themarket, but the impact of a variety of complex means of rent-setting.This gives a different and arbitrary rent for each apartment. The rentaiiowance, which in principle should confine the welfare client to theoldest, poorest, or cheapest stock, concentrated in certain areas of the

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city, thus did not have this effect in the 1970s: the rent aiiowancepermitted the weifare ciient to range far afieid. Surprisingly themedian of rents for public assistance clients, according to Saiins, wasoniy $25 iess than tiiat for nonpubiic assistance tenants in 1978($165.56 to $191.16).

in the areas of the city that are most desirable, the rent grantdoes not give welfare dients much entree, since few people ieavethese desirable apartments, and they are transferred on the isasis ofacquaintanceship or bribes, which excludes the welfare tenants. But inother parts of the city the mari<et had indeed weakened in the eariy1970s, and the iarxliord was wiiiing to accept a tenantry for whichrent was apparentiy guaranteed by the weifare department. These arenot desiraisle tenants, owing to their sociai problems, high proportionsof children, and to tiie propensity to rent delinquency. Weifare clientsoften withhold rent checks and use them for other purposes since thepenaities are slight.

It would appear that it wouid be a desperate iandiord indeed whowouid take in welfere clients, if this is the case, but of course thereare differences even among welfare clients. Saiines' argument then isthat, after initiaiiy fitting buildings in soft areas with weifare ciients,the landlord gets into troui3ie. He sells if he can. And If he can't, heeither has to waik away from a buiiding that is no longer economic,or begins to "miik* the buHding-get from it what he can, stoppingmaintenance, or the provision of heat and hot water, even seiiing offparts of it himself. There are some landlords who specialize in this.

The explanation is compiex: it involves the interaction of thesystem of separate rent grants for welfare ciients, a system thatImposes no great costs for weifare dient deiinquency in rent ortreatment of property (the welfare system must find them new apart-ments if they are evicted), related to a market in which soft areasappear and in which many apartments are affordabie by welfaredients. Whether Saiins' explanation, based on the interpiay betweenthe welfare rent grant and rent-control, actuaiiy works, would be hardto say, but it matches the uniqueness of housing destruction in NewYork City with a unique sociai poiicy pattern.

Three other elements I iseiieve must be added to explain theprocess. First is the raciai aspect. The great majority of the welfaredients is biack or Puerto Rican. White tenants fear that when t)lacksand Puerto Ricans move in, the area deciines. There is enoughevidence that this has happened to produce a kind of desperation inthe working and iower-middie dass white citizens of New York. Foran exampie of this desperation in practice, consider Jonathan Rieder'sstudy of Canarsie, describing a neighborhood which in the mid-1970sfought with violence against the busing in of biack chiidren forpurposes of desegregation. To the resident of Canarsie, any sign of a

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islack presence evoked the devastated neighborhoods they had fled. Itis not necessary to go into an anaiysis of whether this is a case ofpure and simpie racism or of a rational assessment of the impact ofpoor black and Puerto Rican residents.

Second, all during this period, while New York's population wasdropping, softness was deveioping in the housing market, vacancieswere increasing, and the iseginnings of abandonment were evident. NewYork was buiiding heavily subsklized low-income and middie-incomehousing. The figures are phenomenal: in the course of the 1960s,176,000 such units were built, as against 172,000 private units. Between1971 and 1974 (the New York City housing market cdiapsed in 1975,when only 4,000 units were built), another 56,000 publicly assistedunits came onto the market (Sternlieb and Listokin, 1985:384,388). Thelower part of the Bronx was dominated by the enormous red-bricktowers of housing projects. Interspersed among them the well-buiithousing of the 1920s was burning and being abandoned, Unsubsldized,they could not compete with the low-rent projects,

A final factor has been seriously underestimated in this processof massive abandonment and physicai destruction: this is the rde ofcrime, A heightened degree of physical danger to tenants and toshopkeepers, and of assault on existing properties for purposes ofsalvage and resale, made any more normal process of adaptation of thehousing stock to locational shifts, different tastes, increasing poverty,lmpossit>le. These "more normal" adaptations would have consisted of athinning out of density, leaving a good number of vacant apartments-as occurred, for example, when the Lower East Side emptied out inthe 1930s and 1940s (Gret)ler); the elimination of some buildings forsuch public uses as widened streets and new parks (as also occurredon the Lower East Side); the eventual demdition of buildings as theyshifted Into pubiic ownership when landowners saw no prospect foreconomic reuse.

This is decidedly not what happened. One of the first analysts ofthe abandonment problem, Frank Kristof, pointed out that the problembegan with only one or a few vacancies in a building: with the rise ofdrug-induced crime, these apartments would be stripped of any salableparts, and in New York's multiple dwelling structures this meant thata 10 percent vacancy rate-In other circumstances, normal andhealthy-was an invitation to physical destruction. This generally drug-driven crime invdved attack on the physical property, was combinedwith burglary and the robbing of tenants and shopkeepers, and asituation in which the causes that might have led to moves away(changing tastes, greater affluence, inability to pay the rent, etc)were magnified by a fear that overrode everything else. This was nonormal adaptation to the factors studied by urban economists.

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Under these circumstances, expioitative iandiords joined in thestripping of their buildings, aiong with, or before, the drug addU:tsand other vandais couid get to them. Or they burned their buiidings toget the insurance. The main point to understand is that the physicalassault that reduced the buildings of the South Bronx to hulks andrubble cannot be explained by the factors urban economists andgeographers normaiiy make use of. Crime was the key element whichchanged what woukJ have t)een a thinning out of popuiation into apiague of destruction, in which 40,000 units a year were abarxloned.Active assauit was necessary to destroy the housing stock of theSouth Bronx, and produce that eerie scene of heaps of rubiile and afew stiii-standing waiis in which presidentiai aspirants Jimmy Carterand Ronaid Reagan were teievised in 1976 arxJ 1980.

It is the journaiistic accounts of what happened that i find mostconvincing on the role of crime, for example a detaiied account byJonnes on the basis of interviews with peopie who iived in theCharlotte Street area, wfiich isecame famous on the basis of the visitsby presidentiai candidates after it was entireiy leveled (Jonnes, 1986).

SETTING UMITS TO DESTRUCTION

One possible source of explanations is to be found when we tryto expiain why the destruction moderated, as it did in the early 1980s.One reason-one finds it in Jonnes-is that the wave of destructioncame up against effective iocal organization which forced iandiords tomaintain houses, the city to maintain services, and which throughcitizen effort fought drugs arxJ crime. This was in the North Bronx, anarea of Catholic itaiian and Irish neighixtrhoods. One reason foreffective organization undoubtediy is to be found in the roie of theCathdic church. The Ciiurch is organized in parishes, and does notsurrerxJer them easiiy. The parishioners were a iess mobiie popuiationthan the Jews of the mid-Bronx. Jews have aiways been readier thanothers to move on, and to give up their synagogues and institutions tonewcomers, whiie they rebuiid further out (Glazer and Moynihan,1963).

Another factor in moderating the destruction was the deveiop-ment of serious housing shortages, particuiariy as the buiiding ofpubliciy subskjized housing aimost ended after the mkJ-i970s. it was noionger the case that the ioss of housing meant movement into equai orbetter housing. By the mid-1980s, it meant indeed a situation where nohousing for the poor at aii was avaiiabie, and weifare famiiies in thethousands were i3eing put up in hoteis and emergency sheiters. This isone expianation for a reduction in the wiiiingness of tenants totoierate housing destruction, whether from iandiords, or vandaisvariously motivated by drugs, money, or excitement.

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Yet another factor may be a teaming curve by the city Itself andthe institutions that ignored or tderated housing destruction in the1970s, The insurance companies must have become more careful, andwith reduced possibilities of a return from insurance, arson deciined,PossiUy, fdiowing such grim analysts as Edward Banfield (1970) andRoger Starr (1985), the destructive eiement was also self-destructive,arKJ its numbers had been reduced by the mid-1980s.

Despite these hypotheses, one cannot be confident tfiat weunderstand why it happened and why it abated. This is a subject thatstill demands research and understanding.

REFERENCES

Banfield, Edward, 1970, The Unheavenly City (Boston: Little, Brown),

Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P, Moynihan, 1963, Beyond the Melting Pot(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press),

Grebler, Leo, 1952, Housing Market Behavior in a Declining Area (NewYork: Cdumbia University Press),

Horton, Raymond D,, and Charles Brecher, 1980, Setting MunicipalPriorities, 1981 (Montclair, NJ: Allenheld, Osmun),

Jonnes, Jill, 1986, We're Still Here: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection ofthe South Bronx (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press),

Rieder, Jonathan, 1985, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of BrooklynAgainst Liberalism (Cambrk:lge, MA: Harvard University Press),

Salins, Peter D, 1980, The Ecology of Housing Destruction: EconomicEffects of Public Intervention in the Housing Market (New York:New York University Press),

Starr, Roger, 1985, The Rise and Fall of New York City (New York:Basic Books),

Stegman, Michael A, 1982, The Dynamics of Rental Housing in NewYork City (Piscatawny, NJ: Center for Urban Pdicy Research,Rutgers University),

Sternlieb, George, and David Listokin, 1985, "Housing," In Raymond D,Horton and Charles Brecher, Setting Municipal Priorities, 1986(New York: New York University Press).