Bronx Was Worse Off Than Detroit, and Turned Around Its Decline

[From article]
The South Bronx has become much safer—to an extent barely imaginable a generation ago. In 2013, the 41st precinct suffered just two murders, compared with more than 100 each year during its Fort Apache days.
[. . .]
In 1985, under Mayor Ed Koch, New York launched a major housing initiative that would spend $5 billion on renovations and new construction, with the South Bronx being a prime location for the investment.
[. . .]
The area’s 40.2 percent poverty rate is only slightly better than Detroit’s 41.5 percent. And 60 percent of households with related children are headed by single mothers, a figure that hasn’t budged in 30 years. Sixty percent of South Bronx residents are on Medicaid. Though the teen pregnancy rate has declined, drug addiction remains entrenched.
[. . .]
Detroit may not have hit rock bottom yet
[. . .]
The most important lesson that Detroit can derive from the South Bronx’s experience is that things can get better. Many despaired over the South Bronx’s future during the 1970s out of conviction that New York City was ungovernable. How could a city incapable of preventing 14-year-olds from defacing subway cars be expected to revive a neighborhood resembling post-World War II Berlin? But the skeptics were wrong, as more effective government—as opposed to simply less or more—proved central to New York’s epic crime decline and many other municipal improvements.

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon0930se.html

Stephen Eide

Lessons from a Catastrophe

The South Bronx came back—can Detroit?

30 September 2014