South Bronx

 Traditionally, there has been a trade-off perceived between protecting the environment and economic growth. But sustainability analysts reject this trade-off and argue that economic growth requires effective environmental stewardship. According to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, “green is the new red, white and blue.”

In his article “The Power of Green,” Friedman argues that green is not about cutting back. “It’s about creating a new cornucopia of abundance … It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet.”

That’s the goal of the Green-For-All campaign, which pushed Congress to provide $125 million to train 30,000 people a year in green trades. While I have reservations about the new federal Energy Independence Act of 2007—it did manage to authorize $125 million for the creation of a Green Jobs program, a worker-training program that helps poor people qualify for jobs in energy-efficient construction or the renewable power/biofuels industry.  read more »

Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx, tells New York magazine that she doesn't much care for the man some call New York's modern-day Robert Moses, Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff:

It's interesting that you group Doctoroff and Moses together. Do you think the deputy mayor sees himself as the new Moses?
Oh, God, yeah. Completely. He thinks he's the man ... The problem with the big projects of Moses and now Doctoroff is that they don't think about what the long-term impacts are of exercising that much power on people who have none. It's the idea that people are in the way.

- Tom Acitelli

Thursday night's panel on "Lessons of Robert Moses" at the Museum of the City of New York opened with the patina that the man did, at least, get things done--and that we have figured out how to do so without breaking as many eggs as Mr. Moses did.

But this Bloombergian consensus was shattered by Majora Carter, the one African-American on the panel, the one woman, and the one representative of "the community perspective" (she is executive director of Sustainable South Bronx). Ms. Carter, when innocently asked by the architecture critic for Bloomberg L.P. for her opinion on all the grand-scale planning going on in the city now, took a deep breath, paused for effect, and began:

"This is the first day of Black History Month. I am struck by the irony of the efforts to rehabilitate the image of a man who has done such terrible things to black people...."

Ms. Carter went on for 10 minutes, detailing how the destruction of the Bronx, where she grew up, was still felt today--and was still continuing today, arguing:

"The Bloomberg administration should be commended for its commitment to environmental justice.... However, those are exceptions to the rule..."

She concluded by criticizing the Bloomberg adminstration's plan to put a jail in the South Bronx.

It must have been hard to be Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, who was sitting just four seats away.

- Matthew Schuerman

Later today Mike Bloomberg is taking Houston Mayor Bill White on what City Hall is calling a "learning tour" of some of the city's more successful housing projects in Harlem and the South Bronx.

He's the latest of the country's mayors to make the pilgrimage to New York to talk to Bloomberg.

The visit grew out of a a May 19th letter that White sent to Bloomberg, asking the New York mayor for some pointers on public-private partnerships and affordable housing.

- Jason Horowitz

It's sometimes not until new development starts threatening a blighted area, and lots of eyeballs are focused on it from the outside, that neighborhoods develop their own organizations to improve conditions. Meet the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance:

Our neighborhoods are saturated with junkyards, waste transfer stations, brownfields, and truck-dependent, polluting industries that pollute our air, water, and soil. A highway-dominated planning mentality dating back to the 1950s left the South Bronx fragmented and isolated by a network of highways designed to serve regional and national needs, regardless of the costs they imposed on the low-income communities they passed through. Today, those communities are confronting the legacy of Robert Moses, and struggling to forge a new vision, grounded in values of environmental justice and sustainable development.

The group, a consortium of several community and city-wide organizations and the Pratt Institute, seems mostly concenred for now with getting rid of the stub of Robert Moses' largely unsuccessful Sheridan Expressway to clear land for park and help clean up the Bronx River.

You'll be hearing more from these people as government and real-estate interests converge on the South Bronx in coming years.  read more »

- Tom McGeveran

Sheldon Solow's development near Robert Moses Park, the privatization of a public park planned for the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, the mounting constructions in downtown Manhattan, and the fight for public parks over market space in the South Bronx: The overtaking of public spaces by private investors and developers has become a regular routine in the city's real estate sections.

Astor Place, modestly reimagined.

The new constructions often promise to maintain a section of park or plaza space, but they are typically out of reach to the public at large. Or large segments of them are parceled off for development in return for private maintenance of the public part of the space. And, of course, there is a difference between wasteful and useful public space—open, sans gate, with seats and maybe food.

The New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign is now focusing on another public space that routinely requires private maintenance—the city's streets. Taken together they are by far the city's largest public space. Tuesday night was the opening gala for Livable Streets: A New Vision for New York , an multimedia exhibit on display at The Urban Center until March 29th that explores how traffic and poor planning affects the quality of urban life.  read more »

Bloomberg’s State of the City    read more »

The developer who brought Chelsea Market to Manhattan now wants to replicate it in the South Bronx.  read more »

Campaign blogs are, it's increasingly clear, generally a bad idea. Mostly because nobody reads them -- except your opponent's researchers.

As in this release from the Bloomberg campaign:

FERRER: WRONG ON HIS OWN RÉSUMÉ Ferrer personally wrote blog item telling voters that he was "educated in public schools for most of my education" - an untrue statement The quote in question is here:

"I was born in the South Bronx and educated in public schools for most of my education. If it weren't for my inspirational teachers and a strong after school program, I don't know where I'd be today."  read more »

NOTE: Here's a theory under which Freddy spent most of his education in public school: He began a Master's degree at Baruch College of CUNY in the 1970s and finished it, as the Observer reported last year, in 2003. UPDATE: The claim has been taken out of the blog item. A screen-shot of the original is here.

Crain's is reporting that the Fulton Fish Market's move to the Bronx is being delayed yet again.

The Bronx fish market, which will supposedly generate 700 jobs in the borough and $1 billion in economic activity to the South Bronx, was supposed to be up in a few weeks' time.  read more »

Janel Patterson, the flack for the city's Economic Development Corporation, said the delay is because wholesalers are taking a long time to customize their spaces in the new facility.

The Fulton Fish Market is scheduled to be redeveloped.

If, like us, the only paper you've had a look at over the weekend is the Bangor Daily News, (our favorite vacation paper!) The Real Estate is happy to oblige you here with a round-up of the weekend's real-estate coverage. The Times has already pumped up the South Bronx as the new real estate hot-spot. (Write in if you know any Times editors who live there!) This week they bring unlikely word of a housing boom in ... East New York! We learn about a couple who ignored pleas to leave the neighborhood, and instead watched their house rise in price from $62,000 in 1987 to a current appraisal of $350,000. That's significant, since the Times is fond of reporting that you can't find a decent apartment in this town for under $400,000. The City Section's Coping column (incidentally, we've always wondered: Coping? I'd rather read something called Kvetching) takes up a defense of Murray Hell, as we dubbed the neighborhood in a recent article by Lizzy Ratner (registration required!), and its beer-swilling, heel-clicking post-Ann Arbor Fraternity Row set, under the headline "Dull is Beautiful." We wonder whether the City Section doesn't have lots of reasons to endorse that sentiment.

In the Post, Braden Keil finds recent bachelor Matt Lauer and ad-guy Donny Deutsch both renting at Trump Park Avenue (several floors apart).  read more »

New York Magazine looks at how rising prices have created a most unwelcome trend: too many brokers! Also, more Matt Lauer real-estate gossip. Is there a reconciliation in the works? - Michael Calderone

Freddy's fundraiser at Coda last night was closed to the press (new regime!), but a Politicker spy tells us that the event was well-attended, and that the candidate really turned it on for the first time in a while. He promised to fight and throw punches. He also went after Mike for spending money on Astroturf instead of after-school programs.

Here's our correspondent's rendering of part of what he said:

"You all know a little bit about my story, where I came from. I grew up on Fox Street, a little ways away from here, in the South Bronx. I grew up there, played stickball on a tough street. And that's where I learned how to fight. And you make judgments very early on. And it wasn't about picking the fights you could win; it was getting in the fights that were right. Getting in the fights that meant something. And something you learned very quick: those kinds of fights you never walk away from. Those kinds of fights you always stay in because winning them means something. So if I've gotta take some punches, that's ok. I know who I'm taking those punches for....

"I'm from Fox Street, I'm glad to take those punches because I know who I'm taking them for. And I want to remind you, I just don't only take punches, I give a couple too. I'll throw a couple to the people who stand back and can't figure out a way to expend some political will and say, 'look, we've gotta come up with a way to find billions of dollars to educate our kids right here in this city.' If they're too cowardly to find a way, let them stand aside, because somebody's willing to lead....  read more »

"We're going to have an open and honest debate about what will each of us put on the table to make this city, the greatest city on Earth, a city that works better for every New Yorker. Now I believe that's a fight worth getting into, that's a fight worth taking punches for, and that's a fight worth administering a few punches about. To me, that's even more than a fight. To me, that's a cause...."

"I see the faces who are all depending on us to fight the fight that they may not be able to get in the ring for. But I damn well can and I will this November."

The folks over at the Center for an Urban Future aren't going to like this, but Joel Kotkin has a new article arguing fairly persuasively that the future is actually suburban. Planners, architects, and environmentalists, he says, should get used to it.

Kotkin offers some data to back up the claim that "the notions of suburban decline or a big-time downtown revival are delusional.

"All the growth predicted recently for the 30 top U.S. downtowns through 2010 turns out to be less than half the suburban growth of greater Seattle during the 1990s," he writes. "Many cities that are seen as harbingers of a dense urban future—San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis—have actually lost population since the millennium, following some gains in the 1990s. "

Kotkin doesn't mention New York, and his piece is another mark of how anomalous the city we're living in now really is, floating on a flood of immigration and a real estate boom that's touching the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy.  read more »

(Jarringly, the Economist just ratified the Brooklyn boom with a piece calling the borough "Manhattan's Left Bank." Here come the limeys!)

We reported yesterday on social service organizations in East Harlem and the Bronx that were promised grants last year by Republican State Senator Olga Mendez. She lost her reelection, and the State Senate took the grants away. State Senator Jose M. Serrano's office has given us a list of the organizations that got, as one of their leaders said, "screwed."

They include everyone from the Harlem Drummers, Steppers and Flag Team, which lost a $10,000 grant, to El Museo Del Barrio, which lost $30,000.

Also on the list is Presbyterian Senior Services, which had been awarded $15,000, according to an October letter from Mrs. Mendez. The grant would have gone toward everything from a copy machine to field trips to the theater and the park for members of the cash-strapped Highbridge Senior Center in the South Bronx, the group's executive director, David Taylor, told us.

"I am pleased to inform you that I have been able to secure" the grant, Mrs. Mendez wrote. "I am delighted to have been able to support your organization."

But on December 17, a little over a month after Mendez lost her election, the organization received another letter, this one from the state's Office for the Aging. It acknowledged the grant was included in the state budget.

"[H]owever, we were notified that this grant has been put on hold by the legislative finance committee and is not available for use by your organization," wrote James Foy, the agency's assistant director.

Pretty blunt, no?

"She loses and they take it away," said Taylor. "So what am I supposed to conclude? They're buying our vote."  read more »

We're just a little blog, and our Albany bureau is a bit understaffed. But Taylor would love to talk about it more. And shouldn't somebody be asking Joe Bruno about this?

We hope the Times's chronicler of tasty local political brawls will soon make his way up to the South Bronx soon, where a truly Bronx-tastic City Council special election is underway.

"Some things never change. Like good, old-fashioned Bronx County politics," a correspondent emails. "Some things do change. Like names."

Here's the deal: the race features two guys named Serrano, neither of them related to Congressman Jose E. Serrano or to his son, Jose M. Serrano, who is vacating the Council's 17th district for a State Senate seat.

We also have Maria del Carmen Arroyo -- daughter of Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo -- whose name, until recently, was Maria Aguirre.  read more »

The Serranos and other power players -- including Local 1199 SEIU-- were backing George Torres (one of two guys named Torres) -- until he got tossed off the ballot.

We love this race! The vote is February 15.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx , by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.  read more »