Two Bronx zip codes covering a large swath of East Bronx neighborhoods have shown a spike in positivity rates for COVID-19.
According to the list, which was made public by Governor Cuomo’s office, 10462, covering Parkchester and parts of Pelham Parkway and Morris Park showed a 3% positivity rate with 7 positive tests out of 266.
Almost a quarter of yesterday's positive cases were from just 20 hotspot ZIP codes.
We are targeting these clusters immediately to prevent community spread.
If you live in one of these ZIP codes, treat this seriously.
10465 covering Throggs Neck and Country Club, had a 4% positivity rate with 5 out of 140 tests coming back positive for COVID-19.
While the numbers may not seem high, they can indicate a community spread and the State will target these areas immediately to prevent such an outbreak.
We simply cannot return to the dark days of March and April where we lost thousands of lives just here in The Bronx while being the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in not just the city but the country.
Now with indoor dining resuming and the colder weather coming pushing more activities indoor, it’s important to not let our guard down.
Even as air has grown cleaner in The Bronx, a highway through its heart belches pollution researchers say may be linked to risk of death from the coronavirus.
Elisha Bouret says she and her family have been impacted by pollution from the Cross Bronx Expressway, Sept. 18, 2020. | Hiram Alejandro Durán/THE CITY
This story is part of “MISSING THEM,” THE CITY’s ongoing collaborative project to remember every New Yorker killed by COVID-19. If you know someone who died or may have died due to the coronavirus, share their story here, leave us a voicemail at 646-494-1095 or text “remember” to 73224.
Elisha Bouret’s 3-year-old son Miguel asks for his asthma inhaler more often these days.
Over the previous few months, as fewer cars took to the roadways near the family’s west Bronx home during the city’s COVID-19 lockdown, he rarely needed the pump, she said.
And while Bouret cannot prove it, she suspects the return of constant motor vehicle emissions from local thoroughfares — including the Cross Bronx and Major Deegan Expressways — may be triggering her son’s symptoms.
“Once the pandemic started and there were less cars in the street, my son had not had an asthma attack,” Bouret, a mother of two, told THE CITY. “Ironically, now that the outside has opened again, my son has had to use his pump a little bit more.”
His symptoms have been severe enough to warrant hospitalization four times in his young life, said Bouret — he even spent his second birthday in the hospital.
Concern over her son’s health compounds an already taxing time for Bouret and her family. Like many in Morris Heights, where she lived until recently, Bouret tested positive for the virus, as did her two sons, she said. Only she and her older son, Jonathan, who is 7, showed symptoms.
Her grandmother-in-law, Joan Terrero, a mother of 10, died from the virus in early May on her 86th birthday.
Nationally, this link is most apparent in The Bronx, according to a new peer-reviewed study from researchers at SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry and ProPublica, published in the journal “Environmental Research Letters.”
Using U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data and local mortality figures, scientists found the Bronx ranked the worst for COVID-19 death rates and respiratory hazards of the more than 3,100 other counties in the country. Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens placed second, third and sixth, respectively.
Like Terrero, many Bronx residents included in THE CITY’s MISSING THEM memorial lived in neighborhoods where they were consistently exposed to a major source of air pollution: the busy expressways nearby. For about 20 years, Terrero, who raised Bouret’s husband, lived in an apartment two blocks from the Cross Bronx Expressway.
“Higher particulate matter is related — in the United States — to higher death rates from COVID-19,” said Michael Petroni, a doctoral candidate and the lead author on the SUNY ESF/ProPublica study. “Highways are a source of particulate matter, but we also know that they’re a source of all sorts of other air pollutants that affect people’s respiratory system.”
An Outsized Burden
Bronx neighborhoods like Morris Heights, which sits at the often-congested meeting point of the Cross Bronx and the Major Deegan Expressways, have shouldered an outsized burden of the city’s coronavirus-related death toll. As of late September, more than 4,000 had died from the virus in the borough, according to city health department data.
Census-tract-level highway air pollution data shows elevated air quality hazards concentrated around Morris Heights.
When THE CITY tracked down the home addresses of the nearly 1,800 people in the MISSING THEM database, using voter-registration data and other public records, it revealed clusters of deaths among people who lived near the Cross Bronx.
Two of the four Bronx ZIP codes where city health records show COVID-19 cases topped 2,000 and 25% or more residents tested positive well into July contain a stretch of the Cross Bronx Expressway.
One was Morris Heights, ZIP 10453; the other, Soundview’s 10472.
Morris Heights residents said the virus devastated the community.
“We lost quite a number of folks,” said Dr. Bola Omotosho, a doctor at Montefiore Medical Center who is also chair of Bronx Community Board 5. “There were many people that were sick in my district.”
He said he was one of them.
Like their neighbors elsewhere in the borough, Morris Heights residents experience chronic health conditions, like asthma and diabetes, that can exacerbate COVID-19 disease at levels far higher than much of the city and the country.
Many area residents were already struggling financially, even before pandemic-related job losses. The Bronx now has an unemployment rate in excess of 21%, the latest state Department of Labor statistics show.
And 58% of households living in Bronx Community District 5 spend more than 35% of their incomes on rent, the second-highest of any of the city’s 59 districts.
‘We All Know Someone with Asthma’
For decades, community members and environmental groups have complained about noise and traffic-related pollution from the Cross Bronx. The highway had been unpopular since infamous New York “master builder” Robert Moses proposed steamrolling swaths of neighborhoods to build the Cross Bronx in the 1940s.
Some five decades after its completion, some nearby residents say it is hard to imagine the noisy highway not being part of the neighborhood.
“It’s sad to say, but it becomes so much a part of your lived experience that you don’t pay it any mind,” said Dior St. Hilaire, who lives near the expressway in Tremont and runs GreenFeen, which trains community members on sustainable living and composting. “We all know someone with asthma, so that says a lot about the air quality.”
“It’s not until you leave that city that you realize that your air is sh—ty,” she added.
Ben Fractenberg/THE CITYTrucks barrel down the Cross Bronx Expressway near Jerome Avenue, Sept. 15, 2020.
Levels of lung-aggravating PM 2.5 have fallen in The Bronx and citywide in the last decade, the health department’s Community Air Survey has found. But higher levels of PM 2.5 persist in places with high traffic emissions — including along the Cross Bronx.
“If you’re living next to a highway, you are exposed to higher levels of air pollution,” said Markus Hilpert, associate professor in the environmental health sciences department at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and one of the authors of a recent study on truck traffic and pollution in the South Bronx.
He also noted that living near a highway is usually, though not always, associated with lower economic status.
“Where the housing is cheapest is often where the exposures are greatest,” said Diana Hernández, an associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Mailman who studies the impact poverty and place have on health.
“Lower-income people can’t necessarily escape multiple forms of disadvantage,” added Hernández, one of the co-authors of the traffic study.
Residents of these communities often contend with other polluting infrastructure, said Tok Oyewole, an organizer at the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance.
This can include “clustering of waste transfer stations, peaker power plants, food distribution and associated heavy-duty truck traffic from industry, on top of proximity to highways,” she said.
Decades of Opposition
Though the expressway was first proposed by the Regional Plan Association in 1929, it would not be started until the late 1940s, under Moses, then head of the City Planning Commission.
The Moses plan required builders to demolish parts of Tremont, displacing thousands. A coalition of residents — led mostly by local housewives and increasing numbers of Black and Puerto Rican families then moving to the area — fought the plan for years.
The group even proposed an alternate route through Crotona Park that they believed would avoid mass displacement, historians say — to no avail.
“There was the mayor’s New York City and then there was Robert Moses’,” Lloyd Ultan, Bronx borough historian, told THE CITY.
Ultimately, Tremont residents lost their bid, when officials “overrode vociferous and sustained efforts” from community members and approved the proposal to build the middle of three sections of the expressway as originally planned — right through the heart of The Bronx, The New York Times reported in December 1954.
“Their chief argument has been that they would be unable to obtain new homes and that the city would not assist them in getting replacement houses equal to the old ones,” the report said.
And while there were attempts to relocate families, Ultan said, some estimate 5,000 residents were displaced during the nearly 15 years it took to complete the Cross Bronx. Many did not return, and countless others left, their lives disrupted by relentless noise, dust and fumes, journalist Robert Caro noted in “The Power Broker,” his book about Moses.
“One can sit next to the expressway for five days, observing it, and notice that by the fifth day the nausea and headache and dizziness one felt at first are gone,” Caro wrote in the 1974 book. “But no one knows what the inhalation of carbon monoxide — and assorted hydrocarbons emitted by automobile motors — in diluted form produces, for no study has been done on the effect of prolonged exposure to such gases.”
Today, far more is known about exposure to emissions, and researchers are beginning to link exposure to pollutants to increased death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Whenever anything comes up about COVID, I want to do the interviews.’
For families near the Cross Bronx, these preliminary findings validate what they have suspected for years: that the highway is contributing to poor health outcomes in the community.
“I think it impacted us the most because of the air quality,” Bouret said of the coronavirus. “We were more susceptible to it.”
Her grandmother-in-law’s death has heightened Bouret’s commitment to understanding the impact of the environment on health, she said.
“Whenever anything comes up about COVID, I want to do the interviews, I want to speak out, I want to provide as much information as I can,” Bouret said. “’Cause I know she would want me to.”
Caroline Leddy is a J-Corps fellow from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Caitlin Antonios is a reporting fellow for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at Columbia Journalism School. Funding for CJI is provided by the school’s Investigative Reporting Resource.
THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.
Eleven years ago, I decided to start a blog because I was tired of the constant negative portrayal of The Bronx in the mainstream media.
Each time I’d Google The Bronx, images of a burnt out borough that no longer existed—that hadn’t existed for decades—would be the first thing to come up.
On the Grand Concourse
Even the news about our beloved borough and home was consistently negative. The major media outlets just focused on the crime and ignored all the beauty and people that flourish here despite the odds being stacked against us and having been written off by our government and the rest of the world.
I saw this as an opportunity to highlight the beauty and document the rapid changes happening right before our eyes.
Van Cortlandt Lake
Little did I know then that what started out as a hobby would grow into what we are today: The Bronx’s largest and most successful independent Bronx-based blog and news site.
Within a month of launching 11 years ago we were on the front page of the Mott Haven Herald and by year’s end we were in the New York Times and The New Yorker.
A favorite Bronx pastime.
Fast forward to today and we have been quoted in the mainstream media well over 500 times with dozens of quotes and even a feature in The New York Times.
We have also been quoted in The New York Daily News, the New York Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, appeared several times on BronxTalk, and dozens of times on NY1, Pix11 News, CNN, News 12 The Bronx, and also in several published books.
The diversity of The Bronx.
And perhaps one of the most humbling moments was when we were notified by Colombia University Libraries that our website is considered to be of important significance and would be archived in perpetuity.
From our inception first as Welcome2Melrose and then Welcome2TheBronx, we have been not only reporting the news but we have helped reshape the narrative of our beloved Bronx.
Many of our original stories have been picked up by the local and national media helping put a spotlight on people and issues amplifying their voices.
It all seems a bit crazy to me that what started out as a hobby would turn out to be my life’s passion and work.
Orchard Beach, the Riviera of The Bronx
I have met so many wonderful people along the way on this journey and so many of you have inspired me to keep on pushing even when I feel like I just wanna give up on the darkest of days.
Everywhere I go in our borough, I’m inspired by the selflessness of our people always ready to help whether we’re facing a global crisis like the current coronavirus pandemic or quieter times: There are always Bronxites doing the work in our communities that needs to get done and many without pay.
Groups like Loving The Bronx led by the Queen of The Bronx herself, Nilka Martell, are out there cleaning up our beautiful Bronx and inspiring others to do the same.
Folks like Marjorie Velazquez who has helped get food to thousands of families during the pandemic that otherwise would have gone hungry.
Organizations like The Bronx River Alliance that keep a watchful eye on the city’s only freshwater river while also providing access and education to our kids on this important natural resource.
Places like the Bronx Documentary Center, an important center of photography and documentary journalism not just locally but within the global community that is also teaching our kids to become the next generation of story tellers from within our community.
Giants like the late Dr Richard Izquierdo, founder of Urban Health Plan which 40 years later provides tens of thousands of Bronxites with the quality health care that they deserve and are entitled to.
Through this journey, I have become a better version of myself which has only been made possible through the interaction with these organizations and individuals.
Ferragosto in Little Italy
Welcome2TheBronx’s success wouldn’t be possible without our readers and followers across social media their support.
You all are my motivation to keep this site running. Thank you for believing in me and believing in our work.
What’s The Bronx without our Bodega Cats?
Each corner of The Bronx has a story to tell and it is my wish and hope to be able to do just that.
If you didn’t live in NYC or were here, you will never comprehend 8:46AM on 9/11.
You won’t understand what it feels like to spontaneously just cry your soul out when you remember.
You may have watched it on TV and read about it, saw the horrific images but if you didn’t live here or were in New York City when it happened, you cannot comprehend the trauma we experienced living in New York City.
This isn’t to diminish your suffering. This is simply a perspective; MY perspective on it during the past 19 years.
From hundreds of conversations (maybe thousands by now) with folks who weren’t near the areas or even region, I’ve been able to make this observation.
You just don’t really get it or comprehend the severity and magnitude of what we suffered that day.
We New Yorkers know with just a look and generally don’t need to put it into words.
Chances are you also don’t suffer from some sort of mental illness as a result whether it’s anxiety, depression, PTSD or any combination thereof.
I miss how we were so united afterwards. Sadly it only lasted for a brief moment.
PS we’re still dying. Over 2,000 have died since 9/11 as a result of 9/11 related illnesses and over 10,000 first responders have been diagnosed with cancer.
Never ever forget but if you didn’t live in New York City, you will never understand.
The Bronx Has been an unfortunate dumping ground for the city’s troubles for decades.
Whether industries that heavily rely on intensive truck traffic which spews deadly pollution into our communities to medical waste incinerators the city has allowed to operate in the most vulnerable communities of The Bronx, we have been a veritable dumping ground for everything the rest of the city doesn’t want.
Sadly, this includes human lives by way of homeless shelters and supportive facilities for people suffering from addiction.
The latter recently became an issue for residents of Manhattan’s “liberal” and “progressive” Upper West Side when the city transferred hundreds of people living in shelters to hotels in the area due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The “liberal” Upper West Side
Homeless shelters had become a coronavirus hot-spot due to it being impossible to social distance in such facilities.
The solution was to transfer them to underutilized hotels so that they could isolate in their rooms rather then living on top of each other.
Sadly, a number of these individuals are also battling numerous issues such as addiction and mental health problems and soon Upper West Side residents began seeing the problems we in The Bronx have endured with zero help for decades.
From public urination to overdosing inside a Duane Reade, what these residents have been sheltered from was now in their face.
So what does this liberal neighborhood do? They united, created a non-profit, hired a lawyer ans threatened to sue the city for “destroying” their neighborhood.
And what does the city do? They announce that the residents will be sent back to their shelters amid a pandemic where they will no longer be able to socially distance themselves from one another.
Meanwhile just a few miles north in the South Bronx, we’ve been battling these issues for years as the area around The Hub at 3rd Avenue and 149th Street is over saturated with supportive facilities and shelters and yet the city doesn’t do a thing.
Our children have to walk over used syringes just like when we had to walk over crack vials littering the streets.
They have to see dozens of people strung out getting their fix with syringes sticking out of their arms but the city turns a blind eye to our own quality of life because we, as a community, do not have money and aren’t white like residents in the Upper West Side.
Every neighborhood needs to do their part with the homeless crisis as well as the addiction crisis we’re facing.
We’re not saying that we don’t want them here for they are human lives that are suffering. We are simply stating that we shouldn’t have to bear the burden for the city.
We need to invest more money in helping our most vulnerable with compassion and the care that they need so we won’t have this problem in the first place.
And to the residents of a so called liberal neighborhood, you should be embarrassed of yourselves for lacking compassion and empathy.
The money you threw at lawyers and to get “rid” of the problem should have been spent to at least lobby our elected officials to come up with solutions to the crisis.
MELROSE—Discount retailer 5 Below, which sells products for, you guessed it, under $ bucks, is opening its first South Bronx store.
The giant retailer will join Burlington and Marshall’s at the old Alexander Department store building on Third Avenue in The Hub, The Bronx’s oldest shopping district and work is already underway at the ground-floor location.
5 Below currently has over 900 stores across the country and despite the challenges of operating retail spaces under the COVID-19 pandemic, the company is continuing its nationwide expansion albeit at a scaled back pace.
Although an opening date has yet to be announced, the new store isn’t on its website’s list for 2020, perhaps it will open at some point next year.
5 Below did not confirm its arrival at The Hub but workers on site confirmed that indeed it was the discount retailer who leased the space.
While small businesses and even major retailers are going bankrupt or shutting their doors for ever as a result of the economic fallout of the pandemic, it will be interesting to see how such stores like 5 Below manage to survive.
Yesterday the activist community was met with the bombshell news that a local activist and professor of African American studies who claimed to be an afrolatina Puerto Rican woman from The Bronx was in fact a white, Jewish woman.
Jess La Bombera was not in fact from The Bronx but Jessica A. Krug from Kansas City.
Krug revealed her years of deception in a blog post yesterday on Medium where she wrote:
“For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies.
To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.
I have not only claimed these identities as my own when I had absolutely no right to do so — when doing so is the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures — but I have formed intimate relationships with loving, compassionate people who have trusted and cared for me when I have deserved neither trust nor caring.
People have fought together with me and have fought for me, and my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial — but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.“
The bombshell immediately made headlines across not just the country but made it to the international news cycle in this connected world we live in.
For most of the day I was occupied with work and had forgotten to read the story until a friend messaged me with the link and her picture popped up.
My face clearly showed my lack of enthusiasm around her.
I froze. I realized that I think I may have met her at some point and when my friend told me she was a salsa teacher I immediately remembered from where.
Last year I attended the annual Puerto Rican festival in East Harlem with some friends and a close friend of mine introduced us.
She was dancing salsa with a Puerto Rican flag hanging from her shorts and, well, seemed like one of us.
Krug never identified herself as an Afro Boricua to me but she did say she was Puerto Rican from The Bronx living in East Harlem.
I never questioned her accent for it sounded pretty authentic to me (maybe it was the two nutcrackers I had in me but I digress) but there was something indeed off about her and I was turned off by the energy she projected so I tried to limit my interactions with her.
Krug talked to me about being a salsa dance teacher and after watching her dance I thought she was pulling my leg because she wasn’t really that good of a salsa dancer to be an instructor but I digress yet again.
To me, she was Puerto Rican and didn’t seem otherwise. Even if she said her last name was Krug I wouldn’t have thought twice about it given the history of colonization in Puerto Rico.
A few months later we ran into each other again at another festival but I quickly parted ways as I didn’t want to be around that off energy she gave.
Fast forward to the present day and my gut instinct about her was right although I would never have imagined it was something so violent as claiming a heritage that isn’t yours especially in academia.
As a white woman, her theft of an Afro Latina identity is violence. That’s not up for discussion.
How many grants and opportunities did she steal by passing as such? How many other REAL Afro Latinas missed out on a crucial opportunity to advance their careers because of this vulture appropriating a culture that is not hers?
We already know that oftentimes Afrolatinos are overlooked in favor of whiter or lighter presenting Latinos in every aspect of society so this isn’t a stretch but a fact that theft of opportunities did occur.
This incident also opens up another discussion which is as to what exactly does a Puerto Rican look like.
I’ve seen a lot of ignorant comments across social media stating, “Oh she’s definitely not Puerto Rican, look at her!” but the fact of the matter is that we are not a monolithic people where we all share the same traits.
In Puerto Rican culture we’re taught that we’re a mixture of and descendants of three races: White, African, and the Taino indignenous people who inhabited Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.
But that is one of the biggest myths because we’re not all this pure mixture of the three.
A Puerto Rican can as easily be White appearing as they can be Black, or Taino presenting or a mixture of all.
We’re not what Hollywood and the media portrays us to be but immensely more diverse than what you may think.
There’s so much to unpack and discuss here.
People trusted Krug and let her into their spaces and lives, spaces that are sacred and like a mythical vampire she drained the life from these relationships she built upon a foundation of deception only to better herself and her own livelihood.
At least George Washington University is now investigating the fraud that is Jessica Krug but the damage is done and although she’ll forever be a pariah, she’ll likely continue to make a living perhaps with a book deal like all the frauds before her.
MELROSE—A law firm on 161st was vandalized yesterday with a swastika and the words “white power”.
But several local residents were not having it and got together and painted over it and drew a flower over the racist garbage.
Before
“We didn’t want that in our community,” said a local resident who wishes to remain anonymous and took part in the cleaning up of the offending graffiti outside the law firm of Getz and Braverman at 172 E 161st Street.
After
“Members of the community who have lived here near the 161st area for decades were appalled that a person or persons showed complete disregard of what this community is inherently about. ” the three individuals who cleaned up the racist graffiti added.
The individual claimed they were gonna write flower power instead but decided to just paint over it and leave the flower.
As of now, we have yet to hear back from the law firm regarding this incident.
This act of cowardice will not be tolerated in The Bronx. It is a appalling that in a community that is overwhelming Latino and Black that they would write something like this.
Amazon appears to be betting big on The Bronx as the company has reportedly leased a third warehouse in the borough and the second one this year.
New York Business Journal reports that it was also the top lease transaction for industrial space during the second quarter of the year.
Located at 1500 Basset Avenue in Morris Park, the 366,000 square foot property sits on 17 acres and up until last year was owned by Model’s Sporting Goods which sold the property for $115 million to current owner Realterm Logistics.
Amazon has been aggressively leasing warehouses not just in The Bronx but across the region over the past few years as they continue to expand their last mile footprint in the area in order to provide even faster deliveries.
Earlier this year, the companyleased the former ABC Carpet 200,000 square foot warehouse at 1055 Bronx River Avenue now owned by Prologis and last year Amazon signed a lease for The 117,000 warehouse in Hunts Pointat 1300 Viele Avenue.
The latest least brings the total Amazon footprint in our borough at over half a million square feet.
When we last reported on these leases, many residents were worried about increased traffic and pollution in their respective areas and we can only expect traffic to get worse in Morris Park as a result of Amazon’s presence.
Do you live in Morris Park? Tell us what you think.
New data reveals that Bronx residents have the highest rate of positive test for coronavirus antibodies in New York City.
The Bronx had a positive rate of 33% almost a full 5 percentage points above the next borough which is Queens at 28.2% and 6 points above the city average of 27%.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise given that The Bronx was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year when it all began in New York City.
Via NYC Department of Health
The borough also lead New York City in a another grim statistic with the highest rates of death due to COVID-19 which appeared link to the fact that residents suffer from multiple comorbidities that put you at greater risk for serious complications like heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and compromised immune systems.
The Bronx is also home tomore essential workers than most of the city who had to keep working during the worst of the first wave of this pandemic thus risking being exposed more than the majority of Manhattan residents below 96th street who had jobs where they could work remotely.
As with The Bronx, the other areas in New York City which show the highest rates of antibodies are neighborhoods that are predominantly of color which is in line with how this pandemic has played out across racial lines with Black and people of color having greater risk of not only contracting the virus but at twice the rate of mortality than white counterparts.
While the science of coronavirus antibodies is still being researched, new data suggests that they may provide protection against reinfection for a longer period than previously thought.
This doesn’t mean that we’re out of the clear. A second wave will more than likely come and that still leaves 67% of the population in The Bronx and 73% across NYC without the possible protection of antibodies.
We must continue with best safe practices for the foreseeable future until this scourge is but a painful memory.
Earlier this summer we wrote about the launch of luxury rental units at The Arches along the South Bronx’s Harlem River Waterfront in Port Morris where two bedroom units are listed as high as $3,758 in the over 450 unit development spread across two 25-story towers.
This development is the first luxury development of its scale in the South Bronx and now, through the city’s affordable housing program, 129 of those units are available for individuals making the required income.
A unit at The Arches
And this is where we know this development is not for local residents in the area.
This is also where the entire affordable housing program loses its credibility and is simply a scam for developers to call something affordable and get tax credits and the likes to construct their market-rate luxury apartments in the country’s poorest congressional district.
At minimum, a prospective tenant must make $73,715 to qualify for a studio unit renting at $2,150. This is almost 3x the median income of $25,729 in Community Board 1 where the development is located.
The building has a slew of high end amenities like yoga and dance studios, doorman, children’s room, media room and much more but on Housing Connect’s website there’s a disclaimer that not all amenities may be available to all residents, setting the stage for a tale of two cities within a development for “lower” income residents.
While there are many affordable housing developments that are truly affordable for those in need, with an income requirement of 130% of the Area Median Income, this is not one of them.
This is a perfect example of the loopholes that exist to enrich developers at the expense of taxpayers who foot such developments whether through direct financial assistance to developers or by way of tax credits.
The Arches
It should be further noted that this development isn’t subject to Mandatory Inclusionary Housing requirements and these units will not be permanently affordable.
We need to close these loopholes that allow such trojan horse developments into vulnerable communities like the South Bronx. it’s truly disgraceful that this is being touted as “affordable” when it is anything but.
Anyway, if you want to apply or learn more, you can do so here just remember to do it by October 14, 2020.
Despite many New York City boroughs and zip codes experiencing a drop in median sales price, the top four most expensive in The Bronx all showed an increase year over year for the first half of 2020 and it seemed the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t impacted Bronx real estate at least for now.
Pretty much as expected, 10471 which covers most of Riverdale, including Fieldston, was the most expensive zip code in the borough with a median sales price of just shy of $1 million at $999,000 and placing 39th of the top 100 zip codes in New York City up 16 places from last yea
With the rapid gentrification with thousands of luxury residential units under construction, and close proximity to Manhattan it’s only a matter of time that this zip code reaches the top spot in The Bronx.
Meanwhile, up in the Northeast Bronx is 10475 which covers all of Co-op City and a few parts of Eastchester and Edenwald at third place in The Bronx. Median sales price during the first half the year here hit $735,000 propelling it by 65 places to number 88 on this list—the biggest jump on the list.
Finally, coming in at fourth place in The Bronx on the top 100 most expensive zip codes list is 10461 covering Morris Park, Indian Village, Pelham Parkway South, Westchester Square, Pelham Bay, and Schuylerville with a median sales price of $690,000. This places the zip code at 99th place, up 24 places from last year.
Property values in 10461 may continue to rise after the Morris Park Metro North Station is completed and same with 10475 which will be getting one in Co-op City too.
According to Amast who ran the study, only residential properties like condos, co-ops, single, and two family home sales that closed between January 2020 and June 2020 were considered for this report.
You can check out the entire list and report here.
Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
