Michael Powell’s article in the New York Times discusses the rebirth of the South Bronx and he attributes its restoration to the government. He seems to make the point that the restoration is incredibly successful and an outstanding indication of the success of the government dictating housing projects, yet I find his statements too subjective.

I found it interesting that Powell would tour the South Bronx in the 70s with his friends for fun. Powell’s description of the old South Bronx and the stories I have heard paint it as a dangerous area, yet Powell says “We could not have been safer; [the drug dealers] assumed we were white boys in search of a fix” (Powell). It seems that the area would be dangerous regardless and it is surprising that Powell considered himself to be safe. Were there not robberies or other crimes happening there as well which could have affected them?

I was also not aware that the South Bronx has greatly improved in crime and I recall hearing news of shootings in the South Bronx. According to New York City’s Police Department, there have only been 12 murders and 1,621 total crimes (including murder, rape, burglary, assault, etc.) committed in the calendar year 2012 in one of the precincts in the South Bronx, precinct 40.* In comparison, there were 72 murders and 7,232 crimes reported in 1990. This is only based upon one of the police precincts in the South Bronx. While crime rate seems to have gone down significantly in the past several years, crime is still an issue there.

Powell claims that the improvement of the South Bronx is due to the efforts of Mayor Koch and Mayor Bloomberg, who “poured more than $8 billion into building and preserved 165,000 apartments” (Powell). The low and moderate income housing in the South Bronx definitely fared a lot better than housing failures such as Pruitt-Igoe but this may be due to a multitude of factors, such as how the housing was constructed. Private developers built much of the housing with government subsidies and “dozens of savvy nonprofit groups” (Powell). Since developers were given incentives to build, perhaps it was enough to sustain the bellow market rent that tenants would provide to the building owners.

I think it would be interesting to see how well the area develops in the future, given some time. Since the housing is subsidized and rent is below market value, there aren’t any incentives for building owners to keep the apartments in repair and up to date. Perhaps given time the housing will deteriorate. Also it may be that a mix of middle and low income housing provides adequate revenues and the neighborhood might eventually change to attract more people, increasing rent prices. I just don’t find Powell’s main message that one public housing and neighborhood restoration process that was relatively successful is a concrete indication that the government is an efficient system to provide housing.

* http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cs040pct.pdf