It’s Official: The Times Declares South Bronx Is ‘Gentrifying.’ But Is it True?

Posted on BronxMatters

This time it’s not even a prediction, but a bold declaration that the south Bronx has been gentrified. Based almost entirely on anecdotal evidence, Joseph Berger of The New York Times real estate section has painted a picture of an area of the south Bronx on the Grand Concourse as a new middle class hub where white folks don’t just go for Yankee games.

While the amazing housing stock along the lower Grand Concourse — mostly built in the 1920s and 30s and chock full of art deco gems — is no secret, the area has been largely working class/working poor with a smattering of middle class black and Latino residents (think public sector workers) for the past few decades. (Tip: Read Constance Rosenblum’s Boulevard of Dreams if you are looking for a great book about the housing on the Concourse and its fascinating history. I appropriately read it while on jury duty on 161st Street a few years ago.) Berger simplifies the complicated reasons behind the decline of the area down to “white flight and urban disenchantment,” though to be fair that’s not the point of the article.

The point, rather, is that “more middle-class professionals, many of them white, are … buying co-ops with sunken living rooms and wraparound windows for under $300,000 in Art Deco buildings that straddle a boulevard designed to emulate the Champs-Élysées.” While this is likely true, the question is whether the numbers are significant enough to declare something so controversial as gentrification having already occurred.

Fortunately, the new Census data should help us sort this out. While Berger claims the numbers back him up, I find this a stretch at best. He writes, “An analysis of three ZIP codes along the southern Concourse shows that from 2000 to 2010 the non-Hispanic white population, though still small, rose by 17.5 percent: to 3,055 from 2,600.” So, 455 new white people in three zip codes over ten years is enough to declare fully completed gentrification?

My own analysis of census data I pulled from the City Planning website (much easier to access than the confusing new Census American Fact Finder site), shows that Bronx Community Boards 1 and 4 (which comprise the western part of the south Bronx in the vicinity of the lower Concourse) added a total of 16,216 people from 2000 to 2010. Much of this population growth is thanks to new affordable housing constructed on the vacant lots remaining from the earlier periods of abandonment. Broken down by race and ethnicity, the black population dropped by 664 and the white population grew by 504 — not that different than the number cited in the article. However, Mr. Berger fails to note that almost all of the growth is among the Latino population that increased by 17,516. I just don’t see how 500 new white residents in the midst of 17,500 new Latinos equals gentrification from a purely racial definition.

Income data does show a slight increase in median household income in Bronx Community Board 1, but in general incomes in the west and south Bronx have not kept up with inflation in the past decade and there are much bigger trendsgoing on, though they don’t grab the same headline attention.

Berger also assumes that this new white, middle class influx is responsible for the clear signs that lower income folks will be priced out (what folks generally assume gentrification to mean) such as: “a yoga studio, arugula and organic spinach at the local Foodtown supermarket, a weekly farmers’ market in the warmer seasons and a new deli that sells croissants and banana-chip yogurt muffins.” What Mr. Berger fails to realize is that yoga is popular across many demographics, as is the idea of eating healthy. Farmer’s markets are now in many parts of the Bronx, and many residents flock to them to use their SNAP (food stamps) allotments and Health Bucks that are a great Department of Health program to make farmers’ markets more affordable for low income residents. Also, last I checked, Fresh Direct does not deliver to any Bronx neighborhoods outside of Riverdale, despite the recent sweetheart deal to get them to move their headquarters to the south Bronx, but that’s another story.

Don’t get me wrong, the article overall is not that bad. There are some moderate and middle-income folks moving to the area, which I think almost everyone agrees is a good thing, and might be worth something of a story. The article also cites the fact that there have always been black and Latino middle class folks in the neighborhood, which isn’t news at all, but does conveniently back up the story line. What is extremely problematic, both from a racial and real estate perspective, is declaring that the arrival of white grant writers, guidance counselors and school teachers means that gentrification has already occurred.

This looks like the Real Estate section is feeling it’s time to get back to its old agenda (boosting property values and discovering the next hot neighborhood before anyone else) and the uncovering of very little corroborating evidence gave the editors just enough confidence to run the ridiculous headline. The Bronx has already suffered greatly from real estate speculation in the past few decades (see Freddie Mac in the early 1990s and Predatory Equity in the last decade) and this headline recklessly disregards this history.

Housing Research Links

I'm on NY1 segment on "Making Census Of It: Affordable Housing Spurs Bronx Population Boom"

White House Kitchen Garden vs. Federal Farm Subsidy "Garden"

Mark Bittman: Don’t End Agricultural Subsidies, Fix Them

Mark Bittman, who write for the NYTimes and has a number of amazing and comprehensive cookbooks (including two that we own: How to Cook Everything and The Food Matters Cookbook), has an opinion piece up about farm subisidies.

Agricultural subsidies have helped bring us high-fructose corn syrup, factory farming, fast food, a two-soda-a-day habit and its accompanying obesity, the near-demise of family farms, monoculture and a host of other ills.

Yet — like so many government programs — what subsidies need is not the ax, but reform that moves them forward. Imagine support designed to encourage a resurgence of small- and medium-size farms producing not corn syrup and animal-feed but food we can touch, see, buy and eat — like apples and carrots — while diminishing handouts to agribusiness and its political cronies.

Maybe he's been teaming up with Michael Pollan or something, but he's getting more political here and I like it. Even though I think my family members who farm feed crops out in Kansas are recipients of these subsidies, wouldn't it be great to instead subsidize farmers for growing fruits and vegetables? Think about the reduced health care costs if we made healthy food cheaper and meat and HFCS more expensive!

The farm bill, up for renewal in 2012, includes an agricultural subsidy portion worth up to $30 billion, $5 billion of which is what you might call handouts, direct payments to farmers.

The subsidy-suckers don’t grow the fresh fruits and vegetables that should be dominating our diet. Indeed, if all Americans decided to actually eat the five servings a day of fruits and vegetables that are recommended, they would discover that American agriculture isn’t set up to meet that need. They grow what they’re paid to grow: corn, soy, wheat, cotton and rice.

The first two of these are the pillars for the typical American diet — featuring an unnaturally large consumption of meat, never-before-seen junk food and a bizarre avoidance of plants — as well as the fortunes of Pepsi, Dunkin’ Donuts, KFC and the others that have relied on cheap corn and soy to build their empires of unhealthful food. Over the years, prices of fresh produce have risen, while those of meat, poultry, sweets, fats and oils, and especially soda, have fallen. (Tom Philpott, writing in the environment and food Web site Grist and citing a Tufts University study, reckons that between 1997 and 2005 subsidies saved chicken, pork, beef and HFCS producers roughly $26.5 billion. In the short term, that saved consumers money too — prices for these foods are unjustifiably low — but at what cost to the environment, our food choices and our health?)

Well, we'll see what happens. I don't think it helps that Iowa is the first state up in the presidential race, but you never know. Maybe we can get some collective common sense and overcome the corporate lobbyists of agro-business who benefit from our handouts to them -- talk about welfare queens!

Here are his recommendations:

• Provide necessary incentives to attract the 100,000 new farmers Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack claims we need.

• Save more farmland from development.

• Provide support for farmers who grow currently unsubsidized fruits, vegetables and beans, while providing incentives for monoculture commodity farmers to convert some of their operations to these more desirable foods.

Charting Growing Income and Wealth Disparities

Wisonsin, Unions, and the Return of Solidarity

Here is a blog post from Mark Naison, the Fordham University Professor who was my Urban Studies Director.

The success of the Wisconsin movement to protect collective bargaining rights of government workers, and of similar movements around the country, depends on the revival of a concept that has been out of favor in the United States for many years- the concept of “Solidarity”. Republican lawmakers like Scott Walker were clearly expecting that this concept was dormant when they decided to attack bargaining rights of public employees. They were gambling that workers in the private sector who had lower wages, less generous benefits, and less job security than government workers would want to see them cut down to size in a Recession. They were expecting that envy, rather than Solidarity, would govern the attitudes of people hit hard by the Recession. Their experience, and their ideology, suggested that working class Americans would be more interested in lowering their own tax rates then protecting the bargaining rights of their unionized brothers and sisters.

But the response of to the Wisconsin bill, and to similar bills in Ohio and Indiana, seems to have caught Republican lawmakers by surprise. Firefighters and police officers, both exempt from the elimination of bargaining rights the Walker Bill, both turned out in force to support the protests as the Wisconsin Capital. So did high schools students, who came to support their teachers, and University students, who feared the Governors next step would be steep tuition rises and the elimination of bargaining rights for graduate students. When you couple this local response with the support of organized labor nationally, the result was the largest labor protest in a state in recent American history, with 70,000 people turning out the first weekend of the demonstration.

And when you look at the growing size of protests at the Ohio State capital, where private sectors unions have joined public sector unions in denouncing a similar bill to the Wisconsin one, you have to ask “What is going on? Why are labor unions, which have been on the defensive for the last thirty years, able to mount this kind of movement? Why is Solidarity, out of favor for many years, suddenly back in fashion?”

To understand this, it helps to look back at American History. For the last one hundred years, Solidarity has been more notable in its absence than its presence in the American working class. For the first thirty years of the 20th Century, corporations were able to keep the largest and most fast growing industries in the country- steel, automobile, electronics, ground transportation- almost entirely union free by playing off workers against one another by race, religion, and national origin and convincing the majority of the white protestant population in the nation that organized labor was a foreign implant.

However, all that changed during the Great Depression. When banks failed and the economy imploded, leaving nearly a third of the labor force unemployed by 1933, and another third working part time, working class Americans, seeing that that hardship hit people of all racial and religious backgrounds, and in every region of the country, began to listen to labor organizers, and representatives of radical parties, who argued that individual effort could no longer assure prosperity and that workers could only improve their lives by organizing together. These organizers made the argument that ALL workers would benefit when employed workers were able to form strong unions and they urged unemployed people to support unionization drives in major industries, rather than be recruited by employers to be strike breakers and anti-union vigilantes.

In the two most successful strikes of the Depression Era, the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, which led to the unionization of a sizable share of overland truck traffic, and the Flint Sit down strikes of `1936-37 which led to the unionization of General Motors and US Steel, both of which involved pitched battles between strikers, police and Citizens Committees organized by employers, the unemployed either remained neutral or took the side of the strikers. As a result, employers not only were unable to recruit strikebreakers, they were unable, even with the police on their side, to control the streets surrounding the plants and warehouses that were on strike assuring that the protests went on for weeks, and months, until the employers finally agreed to union recognition. There were other conditions that led to the success of these strikes, such as the refusal of the Minnesota and Michigan governors to us the National Guard to remove workers from factories and warehouses, but the support of the unemployed who had nothing to gain, in the short run, from the success of these movements, was absolutely critical. Somehow, a critical mass of the unemployed, along with workers outside the affected industries, had come to believe in all workers would benefit when some workers achieved union recognition. They had become caught up in “union fever” the idea that only by organizing unions could workers attain dignity and respect as well as a decent standard of living and they fought side by side in the streets with striking workers until these communal battles were won.

Were they justified in this belief, or had they just succumbed to the UnAmerican propaganda of Communists and Socialists? Fast forward to the 1950’s. Thirty five percent of the American labor force is unionized, including most of those working in steel, auto, electronics and transportation. The people who built these unions not only had the highest standard of living in the world, they lived in one of the most equal advanced nations on the planet, where the top one percent of the population controlled 9 percent of national income, as opposed to 23 percent today. In New York City, where unions were particularly powerful, you had an amazing network of public universities, which charged no tuition, public hospitals, schools with free after school centers and great music and sports programs, and museums and zoos which charged no admission. The evidence is incontrovertible- the rise of organized labor, from the mid 1930’s to the mid 1950’s, coincided with a significant improvement in the standard of living of all American workers, whether or not they were in unions.

Most Americans do not know this. Except among people in union education departments and those who teach labor history in universities, the role of labor unions in spreading the benefits of prosperity in the years following the Depression is neither known, nor acknowledged. However, the current economic crisis, with its eerie parallels to the Great Depression, is making many working class Americans wonder whether their dreams of individual prosperity and security are still possible in a society where the housing market, banking system, and now local governments are in such trouble. Some may be blaming their plight on the “fat contracts” and “bloated pensions” of government workers, but others are wondering what the role of the banks and large corporations have been in putting them in such a predicament, and how they can fight back

It is in this context that the Wisconsin protests put forward a message that, to everyone’s surprise, touches a chord. Maybe working Americans have had enough of blaming unions and government for what has happened to them. Maybe they are starting to think that the calls for “sacrifice” that politicians of both parties are making should be directed toward the very wealthy, who are the only people who have not been hurt during the crisis. And maybe they are starting to hear a message that says that working Americans had better overcome their differences and start to fight for their rights or their hopes for a life of comfort and security will be gone forever.

Solidarity, here in America, in 2011? Look around you, in a million years, would you have expected there to be 70,000 people massed outside the Wisconsin State Capitol demanding protection of collective bargaining rights for government workers?. Why, the very thought is as improbable as Black students sitting in at lunch counters in 35 cities throughout the South.

History can move in mysterious ways.

And Solidarity may be making a comeback.

Studio 360 on the Autobiography of Malcolm X

The WNYC/PRI show devotes an entire hour to the journey of Malcom, the writing of the book with Alex Halley, and how it has influenced a cross section of individuals. I read this book for the first time in high school, around the time the Spike Lee movie came out. I read it again in college in an amazing class on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Hearing this segment makes me want to pick it up and read it again!

Listen to past shows in the American Icons series here.

Meet New York's Worst Buildings

NBC News covered UNHP's Building Indicator Project Database on May 20, 2010.

Crain's on UNHP's Building Indicator Project