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The Bradhurst in Harlem at 145th Street

NEW YORK

Turning Neighborhoods Around

The South Bronx Miracle

When Jimmy Carter visited the South Bronx in 1977, he called it the worst slum in America. Filled with abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots, in one four-year period during the 1970s it saw over 40,000 arson fires. A study of three streets in its Hunts Point section, published in 1969 by The New York Times, found that residents had only a one in 20 chance of dying of natural causes—most were murdered or died of drug overdoses.

In the early 1980s, though, the South Bronx Development Office and the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes CDC built Charlotte Gardens, a ranch-house development on the same street Jimmy Carter had walked despairingly in 1977. Charlotte Gardens showed it was possible to build and sell homes in the South Bronx, and when New York emerged from its decade-long fiscal crisis Mayor Ed Koch invested over $1 billion in the borough. The money went to private landlords and developers, and through Enterprise and LISC to CDCs, and after a decade resulted in 10,000 new homes.

Crime fell dramatically. Income to the city from real estate taxes doubled. Civic participation surged. The South Bronx ceased to be an icon of urban decay and became instead a functioning, livable neighborhood for working families.

A Second Renaissance in Harlem

In the 1960s and 1970s Harlem, too, was in famously bad shape, plagued by high crime, drugs, abandoned buildings, poor health care, and soaring unemployment. But since the 1980s CDCs have led an economic resurgence in Harlem, fueled by commercial and residential development.

On the residential side, Harlem CDCs have built or renovated over 2,000 homes. On West 130 th Street, for instance, Abyssinian Development Corporation worked with the NYC Landmarks Conservancy to restore 28 century-old brick row houses, triggering revitalization of many nearby properties. Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, Inc. (HCCI—an inter-faith consortium of more than 90 congregations) invested over $42 million from a variety of sources in once-blighted 148 th Street, turning it into a vibrant, mixed-income community with 290 renovated rental and co-op homes, a neighborhood park, and a new restaurant.

CDCs have been hard at work attracting commercial investment, too. Abyssinian, for example, was instrumental in bringing a huge full-service Pathmark supermarket to East Harlem in 1999. At the same time Magic Johnson’s development group was busy planning for a retail and movie-house complex just blocks away. These efforts in turn have brought an explosion of retail building and renovation along 125 th Street, Harlem’s main artery. To help bring similar growth to 145 th Street, HCCI is building another Pathmark there, in connection with the creation of 125 market rate co-op apartments. Abyssinian worked with the New York City Department of Education to build the Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning and Social Change, the first new public high school in Harlem in 50 years—and the home of an International House of Pancakes franchise that trains neighborhood residents in franchise business management.