South Bronx example essay topic

Chapter 1: The South Bronx, From the Bottom Up The tale of the South Bronx is one that many people do not understand. This is a city that made a remarkable turnaround without getting rid of or enriching their poor. It was done over the course of many years and a lot of money, but this money was not needed in one lump sum. It began with Jimmy Carter, who went to the South Bronx, hoping that he could help restore the area.

He never actually promised any money, but in later years, when the story was told, he reportedly had done so. He wanted to improve the city badly, but by the time he returned home, only a few hundred thousand dollars had arrived and he felt defeated. He was then blamed for a lot of what was going on in that area. For twenty years, the South Bronx became a politically detrimental area.

Almost no presidents stepped foot there for fear of being thought to make a promise to change things. Then in 1997, President Bill Clinton went there with cameras and everything for another look at "the urban wasteland". With the help of community organizations and some funding from New York City, the South Bronx had done a complete change. In the worst areas, shootings were down by more than 2/3, and robberies and assaults by more than 1/2. School attendance had also dramatically increased.

Property values had become so high that some residents of more affluent neighborhoods like Manhattan could barely afford to live there. The credit for this change does not go to one person or organization only. The change was set in motion on Oct. 5, 1977, and took 20 years to realize. The three elements for the change were: 1.

Community organizations willing to stay and build 2. A federal government willing to finance their efforts 3. A local government that had learned clear but bitter lessons from decades of massive, top-down "renewal" This was a shocking event to those who saw it on the day that Clinton arrived, but there are some things that he did NOT see. In the 1970's, the South Bronx had lost a great deal of its population, and they never returned. Poverty is still significantly higher than in most other parts of NY.

The South Bronx has not regained its former grandeur and will probably not do so. It has become something more lasting: it has become pleasant and livable. Because the South Bronx was such a politically detrimental area, they had very little, if any, governmental support in implementing the changes that took place. Therefore, they had to utilize all of their other resources in the attempt to change.

A community-based, nonprofit group was formed with the name of Mid-Bronx Desperadoes. Unlike the more radical People's Development, the Desperadoes showed a talent for working diplomatically with the city to raise money and finish projects. Nonprofit community organizations like the Desperadoes continued to form, build and prosper. Policing methods in the Bronx have also improved and they built alliances with community organizations and other city services that targeted low-level crimes. Was the turnaround of the South Bronx a rare occurrence, or if given time and some money, can all cities make the progress that was made there?

Chapter 2: A Vision of Urban Doom The final agonies of the American city come in four waves. The first of these is middle-class flight. For the American middle class, the lure of suburban living has been tightly bound up with a desire to be surrounded by people of comparable means. This is why there was a great move from urban areas to the suburbs. The second of the urban death throes is the evaporation of inner-city jobs and businesses. As industry becomes more and more mobile, the jobs follow the most desirable workforce.

This leaves the largely minority poor not only stranded in crumbling inner cities, but more and more isolated from the employment that might help them rebuild or move. Suburban planning also favored the automobile, and created an entirely new urban design built around parking lots, which left people without cars stranded at the commuter-rail station, with little option beyond taxis for getting to far-flung job sites. Even if city residents could find service-sector work, advancement in that sector depended more and more on skills and education that were becoming inaccessible in ossified urban school systems. In the next wave of urban decline, the blight creeps outward. Marginal communities between the slums and the suburbs gradually succumb to the creeping decay, victims of the centrifugal pull of skills and money toward the suburbs, and the slow gnaw of poor households spreading out from the core.

Pg. 41 - Illustration of the expansion of Milwaukee's ghetto 1970-1990 The last and deadliest stroke is social implosion. The unrelieved isolation of the poorest communities leads to social disintegration and deepening demands on public services (such as health, social services, public safety, and sanitation) from a city that no longer has the tax base to provide any of these services effectively. Once these four waves begin to settle in, what types of things can be done in order to stop it from progressing beyond repair? And even after the fourth wave has taken over, is there anything that can redeem the city? Chapter 3: A surprising convergence of positives Many times the success stories of urban cities are somehow thought to be beside the point, not the example.

The temptation to treat recovering neighborhoods as just an asterisk in a great urban Decline and fall is hard to resist. Academically, however, they do have a point. Things are not bright on the inner-city horizon. How do we reconcile the story of the South Bronx with the encyclopedia of urban gloom that the last chapter summarized? The South Bronx is unique in a couple of respects: It was among the worst, and the most famous of the allegedly irredeemable slums of the 1970's It was among the earliest to get the kind of attention and public imagination that a lasting recovery demands. It's distinctive for long odds and a historic head start, but otherwise it's just one story among hundreds.

Until very recently, orthodox opinion was that little could be done about crime, particularly the drug-related type in city neighborhoods. Yet, surprisingly, crime, especially violent crime, is dropping spectacularly in many cities. Components of new policing strategy o Strong community cooperation o Relentless tracking of crime patterns o Less tolerance of the so-called "quality of life" crimes that fray the social fabric There is a great belief that little things lead to big things and all results, no matter how modest can build morale and involvement from the community. Even if the city is still poor, it displays the attributes of safety and order that are indispensable to social stability and commerce. Many times, public housing had isolated the poorest of the poor in a ghetto, cut off from work and any other meaningful participation in mainstream life. Schools were also either very good or very bad.

Despite many remarkable individual schools sprinkled in cities across America, the big-city school systems as a whole were unresponsive and indifferent. From within the public schools, the charter school movement was rapidly growing. More than 1,700 charter schools are in operation. And from without, a relentless pressure was mounting from a host of privatization schemes. The very factors that seemed to form impregnable barriers to recovery are slowly but visibly beginning to crack. Even if the renaissance of the South Bronx can be repeated and expanded, it is not a complete change from how things were.

There will still be a very large gap in income between the rich and the poor. Racial segregation and isolation will continue. Does this then make the renaissance described one not worth pursuing? Which South Bronx would we rather have? The 1977 version or the 1997 version? Community development corporations, because of their tenacity, resolve, and results, have won for themselves an armada of support from philanthropy, the private sector, and government at all levels.

More than 2,500 Cds are now at work, producing a dizzying variety of re-development activity. As a result, the new life has spread from the Bronx to Harlem.