South Bronx residents flee as rents climb

Longtime residents of Grand Concourse and Highbridge in the South Bronx are skipping town amid an uptick in both rental rates and homelessness.

Average income in those neighborhoods grew by 15 percent between 2005 and 2010, a new report from the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness showed. The percentage of residents who have a bachelor’s degree also rose by 40 percent. In that span of time, rents increased by 10 percent to an average of $954 per month for all apartment sizes.

“You’d think you could afford to live in the Bronx,” Lucia Davis, a Grand Concourse resident, told Crain’s. “But the prices are going up, and a lot of people are moving out.”

Within the same period of time, the quantity of families moving into homeless shelters in those neighborhoods was up by 33 percent in 2010, compared to 2005. It was second-highest among all community-board jurisdictions in the city at 633 families, the report said.

Residents find that they cannot affordable the rent in affordable housing projects, not to mention private housing in those neighborhoods.

“After [the low rents in the Bronx], there is nowhere to go,” Ralph da Costa Nunez of the  Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness told Crain’s. [Crain’s] — Mark Maurer