The article “Government Can’t Help? Tell That to the South Bronx” by Michael Powell talks about how the government saved the South Bronx. The South Bronx reached a low point in the 1970’s, with significant poverty, gangs, drugs, fires, and more. However, that changed with the governments help, and the Bronx, along with many neighborhoods of Queens, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, is one of the greatest public rebuilding achievements since World War II.
Something that caught my eye was that former Mayor Ed Koch began the resurrection, and is continued today with great vigor by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In the end, the Bloomberg administration will have invested more than $8 billion into building and preserving 165,000 apartments. This is something I hadn’t heard about before. Most of the things most people hear about are the negatives, and I also believed that the Bloomberg administration wasn’t really doing anything, or not enough to combat the housing crisis, so it is good to know that the government is actually doing something about it, but there is more to it than just building and preserving apartments, so I wonder if the problem could really ever truly be fixed by the government. Part of the problem is not having enough housing, but I think a larger problem is people not being able to afford housing, which there are many factors causing that.
Something related that I also found interesting was that the South Bronx could be seen as an example that the government can work on a large scale and accomplish remarkable tasks. This is something that many people think the government can’t do, and I think a lot of people don’t have faith in the government to accomplish much. Of course people tend to focus on the negatives, but it would be nice to read more and hear more about all the good things the government has done so people can trust policymakers more and not just think they are in it for themselves or won’t really do much in office.
From the title of the article, I expected it to be much different than it was. I thought that it would be about the poor conditions of the South Bronx and how they need government help to get by and improve conditions because when I think of the South Bronx, I think of a poor, dangerous area, filled with drugs and violence that is falling apart. I think this is how most people in New York who don’t really know about the South Bronx view the area. I never knew about the urban renewal in the 1980s or about the buildings mentioned in the article, which sound like they’ve really helped to improve the neighborhood.
Upon further research however, I found that many of the residents live below the poverty line, and drug and gang activity among other things are still common there. The last sentence of the article is “ The era of government may be in danger. But it saved the South Bronx.” I guess there are different ways to interpret this, but although the area is better than it was in the past, it doesn’t seem like the government actually “saved” the South Bronx. It seems like there is still much more the government can do to for the South Bronx and its residents.
