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NEW YORK

The South Bronx Miracle

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

But positive change became noticeable in the late 1980s. The City’s South Bronx Development Office and the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes community development corporation (CDC) built Charlotte Gardens, a ranch-house development on the street that 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 an agreement among the City, the Enterprise Foundation and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), to CDCs. The result in a decade was 10,000 new homes.

Crime fell dramatically. City income from real estate taxes doubled, a sign that a true real estate market had been reestablished. Civic participation surged. The South Bronx ceased to be an icon of urban decay and became instead a functioning, livable neighborhood for working families. In fact, some neighborhoods once plagued by abandoned buildings are now facing housing shortages.

One of the ingredients of the South Bronx success was a unique effort among New York philanthropies that built on the success of the City and CDCs to go beyond “just” housing development into a more comprehensive community development strategy. Led by the Surdna Foundation, the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program (CCRP) worked with a handful of CDCs to support child care, education, job readiness, and other programs in areas of the South Bronx where the Desperadoes and other groups had been developing housing. CCRP has since been copied in Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities across the country.

Mid-Bronx Desperadoes (now MBD Housing Corp., Inc.) is one of several CDCs in the South Bronx receiving Living Cities funds through LISC and Enterprise. Their shared success in the South Bronx has inspired community development supporters across New York City—and across the country.