2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

Once again, we read a depressing and disturbing article. There’s almost a sick humor in that, efforts to make minority and poor populations move out of concentrated areas only made things way worse for the overall areas. Basically, AIDS spread and housing overcrowding made safety even less possible to maintain. However, when I detach from the situation and look at it without thinking of it in terms of real people in places so close to us, I actually find the way things work quite fascinating. Simply put, once something bad happens, it only leads to more bad things to follow. For example, people living in a building suffer from AIDS and this can lead landlords to abandon the buildings in poor neighborhoods. Or, people flee from a place, but then it leads to overcrowding in another place…

What actually interests me most is the fact that so many complicated mathematical formulas are used in this article. This might be because I like math. I always think of topics such as this one as being totally about opinions, facts and simple statistics and correlations, trying to solve one of the many problems in the world. I haven’t even tried to understand the formulas in the article, especially those starting on page 22, but I kind of like how these human trends can be understood with straight formulas, rather than just a bunch of people brainstorming different ideas.

While trying to get past the plethora of statistics presented in this paper I managed to get the point: the planned shrinkage and essential redlining in poor, overcrowded neighborhoods actually led to the expansion of HIV and AIDS within the community and borough. There were numerous public health risks involved as I went through the paper. The first issue was the original concept of overcrowding in these low income neighborhoods. This was similar to the immigrant culture of the 1920s, particularly in the neighborhood now known as Chinatown. Families and distant relatives would huddle into small apartments while working meager wages to be able to pay rent. Overcrowding could cause hygiene concerns, fire hazards, and loss of other amenities as landlords became disillusioned with upkeep. The fire hazard concern was only amplified as corporate investment took hold and fire services were limited. This in turn alleviated the overcrowding issue through the worst possible means for almost every party as mental health took a turn by losing community bonds but managed to move lower income people to better buildings while also causing homelessness. THE FINAL EFFECT! The spread of HIV and AIDs as intravenous drug users had sexual intercourse to spread the disease.
The article made points on how the city would be affected by this in the long term but the article was published a while ago and it would be interesting to see the development of these neighborhoods after redlining took hold and to see if the predictions made actually occurred. I also remember speaking of East New York being redlined by fire and the community is still greatly impacted. As mentioned, like three times before, we talked about this in our Seminar class last term.

I think it is pretty amazing to see how things all tie together, how corporate decisions ripple down into ways they probably never worried about, especially since AIDS was heavily stigmatized at the time as a gay disease that heterosexuals could not get. To be able to conceive a spread of disease on this scale was not an issue for them and in certain ways overcrowding posed a greater disease threat through the sheer concentration of people in close proximity with each other. A cholera outbreak would not necessarily be an issue but meningitis and other diseases derived from close contact with bacteria in saliva or fecal deposits could pose a threat.

My father grew up in the South Bronx. He carries that with him everywhere he goes, and in everything he does. I’ve seen his childhood home and wondered, a child myself, why it was so dirty and why it smelled the way it did and why there were so many flystrips speckled with dead flies to the point of obscurity. I wouldn’t learn until years later what the actual reasons for these conditions were. It was ironic to read about policies that called for a pullback in fire services because the aforementioned childhood home of my father did actually catch fire some years back.

My father moved to Queens when he was very young. Queens, of all places (like, who goes to Queens willingly?) He didn’t have many friends growing up (or so he tells me), but he always had two friends, Ryan and David. Today, only Ryan is alive. They lost David to AIDS some decades ago. My father’s never told me this himself; I learned it through my mother.

It’s saddening to read about how city policy hindered progress in regards to controlling the spread of HIV and AIDS. Unfortunately, the inner city is like a petri dish wherein one can grow a culture of a germ unhindered. The overcrowdedness, the relative isolation, and the low quality of life don’t only enable the spread of HIV/AIDS, they encourage it. It’s important to note that there is a direct correlation betweent the number of AIDS deaths and the number of injection drug overdose deaths; drug habituation and AIDS are understandably linked. This is why systems such as needle exchanges are so important. I’m glad I got a chance to learn about those when we visited the Harm Reduction Committee.

It was interesting to read about how “planned shrinkage” redistributed people in such a way that injection drug users were sent to different places in the Bronx as well. Surely that would result in harmful spread. I suppose the question from here on in is, how do we combat urban decay such that we stimy the spread of HIV/AIDS?