For decades, America watched its cities empty out. Some became eerily reminiscent of wartime ruins, with street after street of vacant, bombed-out apartment buildings, terrifying testimony to a rampant, incurable urban cancer. The ultimate, world-famous example of American urban abandonment was Charlotte Street in New York City's South Bronx. The chaos -- of dysfunctional inner-city poverty-fragile families, drugs, gangs and horrific crime -- spun out of control in the 1970s. For a decade, the arson fires burned, decimating 20 square miles of Bronx neighborhoods.
Most Americans believe that these infamous urban disaster zones, their spectacular collapse so vividly documented (it made for great, heart-wrenching TV), remain moribund wastelands, shunned by every sensible citizen.
What a delightful and astonishing surprise to discover that almost the entire South Bronx has been rebuilt and that tens of thousands of hard-working New Yorkers have chosen to buy new townhouses (built on those much-photographed rubble-strewn lots) and raise their families there! And what encouraging news from the urban front to learn that the monumental and amazing redevelopment seen in the South Bronx has been quietly under way elsewhere on a smaller scale. It turns out that despite decades of doom and gloom, we now know how to revive cities.
In Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio's Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival (Westview Press, 285 pages, $16), the authors hail the unheralded rebounding of the American inner city that has proved many an expert wrong.
They do not speak of miracles, but of big improvement, cautioning: "Even the fastest-recovering inner cities are still hardscrabble places occupied largely by poor families and struggling businesses. The point is not that poverty has been abolished, or will be, nor is it that cities can or should return to the full glory of their wealthier pasts. The point is that they are becoming places where people want to live, shop, run businesses and go to school."
They quote one Chicago community organizer as saying of his reviving neighborhood: "It's not pretty. It's still not clean. We've got problems. But economically, it works, and people like it here."
Twenty-two years of Republicanism (sometimes quite right-wing) at the national level have relentlessly pushed the mantra that government is bad. But these reviving cities show not only that government properly applied can do great good, but also that government is crucial to revival.
In this story, the role of government has been both indirect -- helping generate huge amounts of new capital through changed laws -- and direct, by dramatically bringing down violent crime. Savvy longtime grass-roots groups have recast themselves as nonprofit community development corporations (CDCs) that work closely with local government. They serve as the bedrock of neighborhood revival, rehabbing thousands of apartment houses and building new homes, luring in new businesses, setting up child-care centers, charter schools and other needed services.
Alexander von Hoffman describes how several of these CDCs operate -- their trials, tribulations and triumphs -- in Fuel Lines for the Urban Revival Engine: Neighborhoods, Community Development Corporations, and Financial Intermediaries (Fannie Mae Foundation, 98 pages). He explains the critical role of several large national nonprofits like the Ford Foundation-backed Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and James Rouse's Enterprise Foundation.
These two groups work with almost 3,000 CDCs nationwide, helping them make financial deals and providing technical advice of all kinds. LISC, Enterprise and a few others, says Hoffman, "monitor CDCs and their projects, giving philanthropies, corporations, and banks confidence to invest." Most of these CDCs are able to obtain the all-critical capital thanks to government intervention and regulation. How?
Two major federal laws dramatically changed the rules of the capital and credit game in places like the South Bronx. The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to stop redlining, causing their bank investments in poor neighborhoods to soar from $3 billion in 1977 to $43 billion in 1997. The 1986 Low Income Housing Tax Credit offered tax write-offs to corporations and individuals who invest in creating housing for the poor.
A Chicago-based clearinghouse, the National Equity Fund, makes it easy for corporations to buy $1 million blocks of tax shelter. A total of $3 billion in these tax credits has flowed into new inner-city projects. So, at long last, serious and desperately needed big money is reviving communities. The results are becoming highly visible.
Home ownership is now a recognized anchor in rebuilding stable neighborhoods. But when Chase Manhattan banker David Rockefeller first proposed making New Yorkers homeowners by buildings thousands of new houses on the city's open wastelands and vacant lots, most viewed this as evidence of the "onset of terminal lunacy."
Charles J. Orlebeke, in his history of the New York Housing Partnership, New Life at Ground Zero: New York, Home Ownership, and the Future of American Cities (Rockefeller Institute Press; 300 pages, $18.95), describes other bankers' "first incredulous reaction ... to Rockefeller's idea: 'You want to build what? You want to build where?" The prevailing wisdom was that anyone with the money to buy a house would promptly flee to the suburbs. But time and experience revealed that there are always more urban buyers than (subsidized) new townhouses available in these once-shunned neighborhoods.
In the last two years, I have visited the South Bronx many times after an absence of 14 years. (I had moved to Baltimore about the time I finished a book on its rise, fall and incipient resurrection.) Gone were the grim, dark ruins and empty looming hulks of my memory. The Bronx had roared back to life.
Above all, I noticed the townhouses, filling block after block with new life and pride. The size and scope of the renaissance was truly difficult to absorb. Just as the South Bronx was once the poster child for urban disaster, so today it is the poster child for revival.
Why? Not only did South Bronx CDCs have access to the usual funds, but Mayor Edward J. Koch also committed $1 billion in city housing monies to completely rebuild its infamous ravaged neighborhoods. Now, mile after mile is transformed with renovated apartment houses and thousands of new two- and three-family rowhouses, new colorful playgrounds, community gardens, new Police Athletic League centers and public schools.
We're not talking gentrification, just regular gritty urban streets, a story I tell in my book's revised edition, South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City (Fordham University Press, 480 pages, $25). Government in recent years has not only unleashed new capital, it has also taken on crime, one of the great destroyers of cities.
In New York City, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani inaugurated in 1993 a smarter, more strategic style of policing, dramatically reducing the city's terrible crime rate, made even worse by the horrors of crack. Giuliani's proactive policing inspired a nationwide revolution in attitudes toward reducing crimes big and small, a subject intelligently considered in Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman's The Crime Drop in America (Cambridge University Press, 330, $21).
Peace and order have largely been restored in places like Charlotte Street, though more northerly neighborhoods still struggle with a bad drug scene. While smarter policing was a major factor in the plummeting New York crime, it was not the only explanation.
One local Bronx community activist sighed and said, "A lot of the criminals died from crack, people died of AIDS, some were murdered and a lot of them went to prison." Between 1985 and 2000, about 5,000 Bronxites (in a population of 1 million) died of drug overdoses, 12,460 died of AIDS (generally contracted from drug use) and 5,286 were murdered. Ten thousand Bronxites are incarcerated, just in state prisons.
So reclaiming American cities from decades of despair and chaos has not been and will not be easy. But we now have a real template for how it's done. With it, many American cities are slowly returning from the dead.
Jill Jonnes is an American historian and author. Her Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World will be published next year by Random House. An updated edition of her book South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City is coming out this fall.