Ive only every seen the South Bronx twice, once when I made a wrong turn trying to get onto the RFK bridge, and once from an academic perspective at the Queens Museum Panorama. Driving through the area, especially at night, made me feel extremely unsafe, despite living in East Flatbush for a year prior. I think what differentiates the Bronx from other areas in NY is how compact it is. Wallace brings up overcrowding in houses in the Bronx. And I dont think I need to reiterate that this, paired with injection drug use, among other things, makes the area extremely prone to HIV.

So, are parts of New York “to far gone?” is there a way ha we can restore, not just the Bronx, but the bad areas of New York? and how? it’s easy to say urban renewal, but we all know that that would simply displace to many people to deal with, on top of the cost.

The spread of drug abuse, and indices of public health including homicide and infant mortality suggest a disruption of personal domestic and community networks accompanied the migration of ghetto communities. While HIV may be mainly regarded as a public health issue, it must be regarded in a larger social context as well. HIV/AIDS not only deteriorates health but contributes to urban decay, catalyzing a collapse of the urban ecosystem. Ostracizing and stigmatizing such individuals leads to social disunity naturally caused by ignorance and apathy of individuals and government.

Could this ignorance be analogous to a “societal HIV infection” in that in that it disrupts the societal structure and causes its slow, dwindling emaciation, which is virtually incurable?

As many others already mentioned, the first thing that came to my mind when I realized this article was about the South Bronx was the trip to the Queens Museum as well. I remember during the trip how Professor Braine kept saying Bronx, particularly South Bronx, is perhaps the only are where we’d see completely black on the map. After reading this article, it is not so difficult to understand why.

The article starts of by mentioning the reduction of the fire service. This might seem irrelevant, however, it acts as the initiator of a chain reaction which ultimately lead to the spread of HIV/AIDS in South Bronx and much of Bronx in general. When fire services were reduced, people tended to come together in a community, as they felt the sense of security they had lost when the fire services were gone, could be replaced by people simply being next to each other. However, Wallace makes it explicitly clear that while there are various mediums by which HIV/AIDS could be transmitted, drug abuse was the vector in South Bronx. The problem would not have been potent were it not for the “planned shrinkage” program of the city and the redlining by the Fire Department. These two events caused “the geography of drug abuse from being tightly and centrally distributed in the traditional poverty communities of the South-Central Bronx into a split and bifurcated pattern covering a much larger area…” (Wallace 17). The expansion of drug use also led to the expansion of drug abuse, which in turn exponentially increased the rate of HIV/AIDS. My question, however, is why did the government not try to tackle the drug abuse problem? This was clearly the reason for the staggeringly high rates of HIV/AIDS in the South Bronx, so why was this problem not addressed?

This reading reminded me of what we talked about on our trip to Queens Museum and how the South Bronx was consistently affected throughout the years whether it was about poverty or HIV/AIDS. It was one of the few areas that was concentrated with people affected by both. I like how Wallace uses a lot of graphs to show how the South Bronx is being affected. He makes an interesting correlation by starting off about the lack of fire services in the South Bronx. Who knew that this would eventually lead to increase poverty and people with HIV/AIDS in the area. It’s sad to see that the government wasn’t able to help South Bronx. Even if the government did start to build more fire services in the area, it simply wasn’t enough to counteract the downward slope the South Bronx was headed towards. Even today the South Bronx is still a community know to have a high poverty rate and a greater density of people with HIV/AIDS. Wallace makes a good connection as to how the South Bronx needs more help and that it left alone it’s only a downward slope for the community. He talks about how there are some apartment buildings that have a lot of tenants who have HIV/AIDS and how people find the building “undesirable” and then eventually the landlord abandons the building which then becomes a perfect place for fire setting. My question is how can we rebuild the South Bronx? Sadly society is shallow to an extent and it’s unfortunate that people would be turned off by people who have a disease that isn’t even air born. How do we prevent these buildings from closing down and how do we detach the stigma associated with the neighborhood?

It was necessary to keep the spread of HIV and AIDS in check in the south Bronx and other areas because the rapid spread of these diseases effected the population on a larger scale. Drug use and other promiscuous behaviors spread the disease and this soon effected more “developed” parts of the nation. Looking at the Bronx, these mechanisms to spread HIV/AIDS effected South-Central Bronx and Northwest to East Bronx.  And this, along with other factors, gave New York City the title of the HIV capital of America.

It was interesting to see how housing related to people who were infected to HIV. I have never thought of it in that light. The sicker people were, the less able they were to work and pay the rent. There was also a chance that a particular housing area could have multiple people infected and that would drive away healthy tenants. There was an urban crisis that often composed of either homelessness, drug use, violence, deterioration of public health, or poverty (2).

My question has to do with something mentioned later on in the article. Why is it that when a larger population of people are infected the number of people with symptoms are proportional to the number of people without symptoms.

Like Albert, I was surprised by how there could be a domino effect that would lead from neglecting municipal fire services to drugs and urban decay.  This paper was definitely a challenging read because of all of the math and statistics involved in explaining the correlation between these seemingly independent variables.  How can neglecting municipal fire services cause people to contract HIV/AIDS?  I never would have guessed that there would be a connection.  Nevertheless, I am both intrigued and dismayed by the fact that this series of cause and effect could have been stopped, but it was not.  Instead, it was a “planned shrinkage.”  I want to know how the government was allowed to let all this happen.

While reading Wallace’s article I was both shocked and amazed by the statistics he presented and how he correlated them. However, what I found most interesting was not actually in the article, but rather the words on the first page under the author’s name:

Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Epidemiology of Mental Disorders Research Department, New York State Psychiatric Institute

Am I the only one who thinks it odd that AIDS is being studied by someone in a department on the epidemiology of mental disorders?(If there is a sensible and factual answer to this question please provide it because I am not asking this question rhetorically.)

While reading the article, the most prevalent thought I had was that this cycle is a vicious one. The fact that it can be stopped but isn’t, simply for politics is one that disgusts me. I myself hate politics because morals always seem to take a back seat to policy.

But one thing lingered within me. My question is what are the other interrelated concepts that haven’t been looked into? Where do they play into the scheme of living, and how do they impact, speed up or slow down this vicious cycle?

The reading by Wallace presented the spread of AIDS in a very different angle when compared to the more traditional approach of discussing AIDS. The author discussed the direct correlation between the wide spread drug abuse and the concentration of AIDS specifically in the South Bronx. This in turns fuels the rates of urban decay and forced displacement in people which in turn accelerates the further spread of AIDS.

A key point that the article makes is that the destruction of neighborhood social networks and such programs, serve to bolster the percentage of AIDS among people.  The destruction of many neighborhoods served as an impetus for the wide spread of AIDS. Certain areas were deemed blighted. Many components that make up a neighborhood were slowly taken away from the neighborhoods chosen for “planned shrinkage.” This in turn resulted in the wide spread of AIDS. The disease moved in a diffuse pattern and spread rapidly.

There are proposed solutions to the restoration of the affected communities such as the re-development of municipal service, and community organizing. This can only serve as a preventative measure for any future unrealistic outbreaks of AIDS. What about the people who were already infected by the disease as a result of “planned shrinkage”? How does it feel to know that your life endangered because of a political drive?

David Zilberman