The (South) Bronx is up: a neighborhood revives

During a 1977 World Series game at Yankees Stadium, television commentator Howard Cosell directed the cameras away from the Yankees and Dodgers on the diamond toward a burning building a few blocks from home plate. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Cosell announced to the nation, “the Bronx is burning.”

It wasn’t much of an overstatement.

Much of the borough’s lower regions–that collection of neighborhoods roughly below the Cross Bronx Expressway known as the South Bronx – had been in disrepair and decline for decades.

By the late 1970s, landlords craving insurance money–and other arsonists– regularly torched South Bronx buildings, sparking fires that sometimes consumed entire blocks, scarring the region with emptiness and inviting comparisons to bombed-pocked German and Japanese cities at the end of World War II.

Barely a generation later, gentrification is replacing conflagration in the South Bronx. While it’s far from becoming the next East Village or Williamsburg–crime remains high and air quality low, for instance – the population of the once-emptying region is growing, and the real estate scene is evolving as more people discover a cheaper alternative to Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods.

Randy Lee has watched the South Bronx real estate market since the 1960s. Lee, CEO of Leewood Real Estate Group, said middle- to high income homes are going up in the South Bronx, although only 10 years ago developers stuck mostly to building low-income housing. That fresh housing, Lee said, is being snatched up by people who would’ve left the South Bronx after a raise at work or starting a family, as well as by people who are returning to an area once synonymous with urban blight.

“What I see is that, where developments were a dime a dozen even five years ago,” Lee said, “the competition today from as far down to the 140s is hot.”

The South Bronx’s population increased 11.8 percent in the 1990s, according to the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems at New York University, which spearheaded a policy study of the region in 2004. That’s a greater population increase for the decade than the borough, the entire city and the state. With an approximate population of 523,000 as of 2000, the South Bronx is home to 40 percent of the borough’s population. The demographics there are shifting, with the percentage of African-Americans in the South Bronx dropping in the last several years and the Latino population increasing by double-digit percentages.

Artists and musicians are now part of the mix as they head north across the Harlem River in search of cheaper real estate. These reformed Manhattanites have rejiggered their new neighborhoods so much that the local media now speak of the South Bronx as a potential “next East Village.” That lower Manhattan neighborhood was once synonymous with drugs, crime and squatting, and is now the site of $2,000-a-month studios and $500,000 walk-up one-bedroom apartments.

Could the South Bronx ever commonly command such prices? Short answer: No. Long answer: Yes, but it’d take a while.

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A brownstone dating from the late 1880s recently went on the market in Mott Haven for $470,000, a much lower price than a similar property would command anywhere in Manhattan. Many detached, framed houses sit snugly among the South Bronx’s public housing buildings and still-vacant lots, and, generally go for well under $1 million. Rentals mirror prices available in much of Queens, Brooklyn or Staten Island. A two-bedroom for under $2,000 a month is not uncommon in the South Bronx. Rezoning by the Bloomberg administration will soon make considerable amounts of industrial space available for commercial and residential use.

Lower rents are a draw for artists moving into the region, said Barry Kostrinsky, a co-founder of the Haven, an art space on 141st Street in Mott Haven. He has worked in the South Bronx since the early 1980s and lived there in the 1960s. Part of the region’s allure for artists in addition to being cheap is its accessibility to galleries in lower Manhattan, Kostrinsky said.

“The express subway stop on 138th means it takes 20 minutes to get to 14th Street, to the galleries there,” he said. “I’ve gone to 86th Street in 10 minutes.”

Also, because of its bad reputation for so many years, time forgot some areas of the South Bronx, Kostrinksy said. Development ebbed to a trickle, and industrial areas converted into art spaces now serve as islands of quiet in which artists can produce.

“So, the South Bronx,” Kostrinsky said, “it was terrible, right? That’s what people said. But it started to clean up 20 years ago.”

Still, crime rates remain higher in the South Bronx than in much of the rest of New York despite a more than 70-percent drop in major crimes over the past 12 years, according to the New York Police Department. The area’s crime-ridden reputation, established decades ago, lingers.

Crime, asthma, unemployment — not exactly strong selling points to lure new buyers and renters. Couple these with the resistance of some current residents who reject a gentrified South Bronx as another homogenous, expensive enclave, and real estate brokers have a clear challenge touting the region to outsiders, even with lower prices than much of the city. ”

It would be trite to say it’s an up-and-coming place,” Lee said, “but I think it’s certainly a comeback place.”

Perhaps if (or when) the Yankees host another World Series in the South Bronx, a successor to the late Howard Cosell will gaze over the borough’s southern environs and declare, “The Bronx is gentrifying.”


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