logo for print

 


The Manhattan Bridge

New York

Community Development Shows How It’s Done

Throughout most of America’s history, New York has been its preeminent city: the largest and wealthiest, home to publishers, artists, financiers, and entertainers. It has also been the country’s primary immigrant gateway, welcoming millions from around the world. Yet with the end of the shipbuilding boom of World War II, the end of the construction boom of the 1950s, and the loss of jobs in the apparel industry jobs to the South and overseas, New York suffered an erosion of population and opportunity, sliding into economic stagnation. By 1975, it was bankrupt.

In response residents and community organizers began to band together, forming what are today some of the nation's largest and most sophisticated CDCs. Over the next three decades, they and their intermediary partners used close to $9 billion in public and private investment to create more than 50,000 new homes and more than one million square feet of commercial and industrial space. Block after block of abandoned and burnt-out apartment houses were rebuilt; single family homes rose on thousands of acres of derelict land. The City in particular offered remarkable regulatory and financial support, first by changing its tax-foreclosure procedures to get abandoned property into CDC hands more quickly, then by putting more than $5 billion into home construction or renovation—at its peak a greater yearly housing investment than the next 50 largest U.S. cities combined.

The results have been remarkable. Today some of the most depressed areas in the city—including huge districts like Harlem and the South Bronx—are once again livable, vital neighborhoods. In the 1990s New York reversed decades of population loss, growing by almost 10 percent, actually faster than its suburbs.