Residents argue traffic, overcrowding are already bad enough
Tenants of a Longwood building complex say a new development being proposed by their landlord would lead to the destruction of the only nearby playground and green space their children have access to and would make the neighborhood’s overcrowding and traffic problems worse.
Residents of the four apartment buildings on Simpson between 163rd Street and Westchester Ave. say no one from Property Resources Corp. notified them that the project was underway. One resident found out from workers he saw drilling in the adjacent parking lot in early January.
“Instead of having a meeting or contacting the tenants, they basically do whatever they want to do. They never notified anyone,” said the 39 year old tenant, one of about a dozen who attended a rally at the proposed building site on Jan. 8 to try to stop the project. The tenants declined to provide their full names, fearing the landlord may retaliate by not providing maintenance or apartment upgrades if they complain openly.
“We weren’t treated with dignity and respect,” said another resident. “This must have been happening already for a while.”
A 31 year old tenant who identified herself as Ms. Rodriguez, said she received a letter from PRC Management during the first week in January, ordering residents to move their cars from the parking lot by Jan. 9 so that repair work could be done, but saying nothing of the new development. A second letter from the landlord was posted in the buildings’ hallways on Jan. 8, urging residents to remove their cars by Jan. 31.
“So they play it off as if they are fixing it,” Rodriguez said of the parking lot. “Maybe they are fixing it for now until they decide, but we saw them drilling. What’s the purpose of it?”
Rodriguez and other tenants say that quality of life in the area will be diminished if the new project is completed.
“That building is going to be huge,” she said. In all, the proposal calls for three new buildings, although the number of apartments has not yet been determined. “If they make it what I think it is, it’s going to be at least ten floors. Whoever is living in the back will have no sunlight at all.”
The parking lot consists of 43 parking spots, including three spaces for the handicapped. Residents pay $75 a month for a spot, compared with nearly triple that in nearby parking lots.
“This is a dead end and this is overcrowding,” said a 61 year old resident. “I have a 79 year old husband. He’s in a wheelchair. I can’t drop him off and he can’t wheel himself.”
The president of PRC, Frank Linde, said in a phone interview with The Hunts Point Express that the parking issue is temporary and his company is not ignoring tenants’ concerns.
“We’re prepared to work with them to find them temporary parking,” Linde said, adding that plans to build on the playground and parking lot are provisional and open to changes. He insisted that PRC is not trying to fool tenants and that the plan is consistent with the mayoral administration’s push to build 80,000 new units of affordable housing within the next decade.
“It would be an affordable housing development under the NYC programs under the de Blasio administration,” Linde said.
Harvey Epstein, associate director of the Urban Justice Center, a non-profit that provides free legal services to low-income tenants, said clashes between developers and tenants are becoming increasingly common in the wake of a building frenzy prompted by the mayor’s plan.
“There has to be a balance between affordable housing and having open space for residents who live in the city,” Epstein said. “Not everyone has the ability to live near Central Park.”
When Rodriguez went door-to-door to circulate a petition to demand the playground be spared, she found that few residents were aware of the pending development. When they were told, however, she says they were troubled by the news, citing excessive traffic and limited green space.
Rodriguez pointed out that there is nowhere else nearby where her three children can go outside to play.
“This is the only playground we have for our kids,” she said. “There is nothing in the proposal to replace it or anything worth quality of life.”
Community Board 2’s housing committee chair, Joyce Campbell-Culler, has lived in the development for 34 years. She said that neither the landlord nor the tenants have given the playground the kind of care it requires, adding that condoms and needles are often strewn about.
“It’s been an eyesore for years,” Campbell-Culler said. “Tenants should band together to improve conditions in the park” more frequently, in order to discourage developers looking to seize underused space to build on, she said.
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Screw parking. This is all about parking. The vast majority of residents in this area do not even drive.
This is an excellent location for dense, mass transportation oriented housing. The parking minimum requirements should be waved near rail rapid transit already.
It’s absolutely not all about parking, but that’s how the whole thing came to everyone’s attention. They pushed the people who pay for the building’s spots out and now they are forced to park on the streets in one of the areas of NY with the highest auto theft rates.
Also, for an area where most of the residents don’t even drive, there’s never any parking. Pretty odd how that works, huh?
In any case, this will increase congestion, give local kids less places to play and will also have an impact on the increase in crime. Idle kids with no where to go turn to trouble in these areas.
So there’s a huge trickle down effect happening here that definitely is not just parking.
Of course they pushed them out. The land values are too high for parking.
And yes, most residents do not drive. I would be surprised if even 25% of units in the adjacent residential complex have an automobile registered.
Doubt crime will be an issue. As density has increased, crime per capita has declined in the Bronx.
25 percent is a lot, my friend.
25 percent of the actual amount of how many people live there is a lot of people. Literally every parking spot on the street is full. All local parking lots are filled to capacity. On Southern boulevard, people double park constantly because there’s nowhere to go.
But again, parking isn’t the issue here, it’s quality of life for residents. You want to pack them in like tuna because it’s good business for someone else, damn the poor.
Intervale is quite a walk for some of these older folks to bring their grandkids and even then, there aren’t any playgrounds there,only fields which are occupied by ball teams this time of year.
Also the more people, the more crime. Especially in poor communities, what bogus source are you getting your statistics from? This is the Bronx, a quick flip through any local paper will show you that crime isn’t going away any time soon and packing more poor folks in will only make things worse. Don’t believe me? See: Compton Los Angeles between 1975-1995 as their density increased. See Detroit, see New Orleans, Washington DC, St Petersburg Florida.
Come on, man.
You’re throwing a lot of industry terms around, so methinks you’re with the company or definitely not from the community which explains the bias. Sure, making money is great, but when you make money at the expense of others, you’re a horrible person.
25% of households is not 25% of people. There are many multifamily households in this area, and with one vehicle only one trip can be prioritized at a time. That means that most children, including of teen and pre-teeen age, walk or take mass transit to school. There are many multigenerational families in Longwood/Hunts Point (children, mother, grandmother) as well. Roommates, also common, do not often share a vehicle. Real automotive access is probably less than 10% of the population of the community as a whole.
The streets in the area are full because of several reasons:
-Free parking. People who don’t need autos may have one and park it for days without use. There is no disincentive to ownership. These people would better benefit from a car share service when they need it. We could use Car2Go in the Bronx and Uber, Lyft, green cabs/livery, bikes, a walkable neighborhood, and mass transportation make not having a car pretty easy for most.
-Low cost building parking like this one. This encourages people to own when most should be instead walking or taking transit or cabs when needed. Most driving trips in this community are less than 5 miles, a substantial percentage are less than 3.
-Low meters and lack of metered parking. Shoppers on Southern Blvd have incentive to drive because of close free parking and low meters. Residential parking permits would go a long way to keep them off side streets and high meters would increase turnover. Make it hard to drive and people will increasingly arrive by mass transit.
Crime is down. Substantially. When this neighborhood was full of abandoned buildings and lots, crime was substantially higher and population density lower. Stop reading local rags like the NY Post and Daily News. Those are tabloids and sensationalize crime. Look at the city crime statistics if you want the facts.
And more cars = more congestion and associated problems. When you reduce incentives for owning a car, you reduce the number of cars.
I’m still wondering why you’re so fixated on the parking spaces when the issue is much bigger than that. It’s literally the least of the problems here.
Also 25 percent of households is still pretty high considering that at least 2-4 people on average live in each apartment.
Multiply the number of apartments times 2-4 people across each apartment, across each building in the area, forget about it, that’s a lot of people no matter how you cut it.
Even if only one person lived in each apartment in the immediate Longwood/Hunts Point area, you’re talking thousands.
On top of that, the need for a car varies. Do city folk need cars as much as suburban folks? Of course not, but it opens up more doors for us. We can shop outside of the confines of our congested and expensive neighborhoods. We can travel wherever. The possibilities are endless.
By your logic, people who live here should remain here or go as far as transportation allows and don’t need cars That’s a pretty awful way to look at things.
Are they not allowed to have luxuries?
In any case, let’s pretend no one drives for a second and move along because again, this is not really the issue.
Now we can focus on the companies creating new buildings and adding more people to this already overcrowded area which will impact everything.
Education getting the worst of it.
I believe four buildings are being constructed if I’m not mistaken. Could be more/less, I don’t know, but the local schools are WAY beyond capacity. I’m talking 40+ kids per classroom on a good day. Those buildings will bring in at least 250 families assuming they’re the same size as the existing buildings.
Where will all those kids go to school? They’ll just be jammed into the already jam packed school district.
Teachers struggle with a class of 20. 40+ kids, it’s insanely difficulty to teach classes as it is, more kids will make it impossible.
There’s a huge trickle-down effect happening already and it’ll just be worse for the area.
More people = less resources, strained education, overcrowding.
Less greenspace/parks, etc = hundreds, maybe thousands of kids with nothing to do locally. Bored kids will undoubtedly cause problems.
And that’s not even in bad areas. A bored kid in the suburbs will do dumb things too.
A weak education is probably the biggest issue we’re talking about here because the less educated a person is, the more likely they are to NOT succeed in life and in turn , they won’t contribute to society.
This is a fact. That’s why poor areas have high crime despite you not believing this.
This isn’t just reported in those rags the NY Post or the Daily News, it’s also reported on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Yahoo, Google, etc. I mean, search that info on any search engine and the first ten results will show you how bad it is.
You say more people = less crime, if that’s true, take a walk through any local projects/ housing developments and tell me how safe you feel.
Uneducated people can’t land a good job because they lack the skills and academic ability to do so. So what’s left? Grunt work like McDonalds or some local stores, barely scraping by, getting public assistance.
More than likely, this struggling life can lead to a life of crime. That’s it for most.
I get what you’re saying, but you’re looking at it from an outside point of view.
Of course seeing poor people complain about other poor people getting homes sounds ridiculous, but put yourself in the shoes of these folks, it’s a bad situation.
The available resources are slim pickings as it is, it’ll only be worse.
What if this were your neighborhood, your kids being affected?
You’d be out there protesting and fighting too because you know that in the end, this is going to affect your very own family. Your children.
Sure, everyone needs a place to live and we should all be so fortunate but if all you’re doing is packing already unfortunate people into a bad area and not educating them, not allowing them to thrive, not letting them have the opportunities that everyone else has, then you’re just creating more problems for the world. Trust me.
Simply put, this is the gist here:
More people in school equals less education.
Less education equals more poverty.
More poverty equals more crime.
The key to almost every problem we face today is education and taking that away, or making it very difficult for people to get solves nothing in the end.
That’s why these people are fighting for their quality of life.
There’s about 3 people per household in 10459. That means about 8% of residents own or lease an automobile if 25% of households have one registered. There are situations where the vehicle is shared, but most of the time it is used by one person traveling to a single location. Even families can usually only utilize one vehicle for one purpose at a time. If someone in that household drives to work for example, than no one else can use that car until the work day is over. This a poor form of mobility, especially in the city.
As for transportation and access. No one is saying that no one should have a car, but most people should not have a car because it then negatively affects the quality of life in the neighborhood. If everyone in Longwood and Hunts Point had a car, than half of the neighborhood would be a parking lot. Air pollution would be much worse. Traffic would not move. Crashes would be more common place. All assuming the same existing density. Use transit, walk, bike, use cabs, etc. You can reach Midtown from Hunts Point Ave station or Simpson St by subway during the day faster than by car. Plenty of amenities available for non-drivers.
As for schools, if overcrowded schools are a concern, than build more schools. Transit is packed, then establish BRT routes and improve train service via signal upgrades.
Again, crime is down. Last year there were 3 homicides within the 41st precinct. Compare that to even 2001 when there were 12, or 1990 when there were 44. In fact, during the late 1970s, this neighborhood used to average over 100 homicides per year. Crime is down so much in the South Bronx in general, and NYC as a whole.
The buildings are coming and there is nothing the community can do to stop it. It’s smarter to improve existing infrastructure to handle the coming population, than complain about inevitable construction. There’s still a lot of underutilized land in the area, and mass transportation access is excellent. Only a matter of time before the community sparks more interested from people of higher incomes for residence and business. This area was once much more dense, prior to the abandonment and resulting urban decay of the mid-20th century. Every street was once lined with rows of 5-6 story apartment buildings. Today, much of that is gone, replaced with 1-story garbage commercial, parking lots, and vacant lots though it’s changing.
And for the record i’m a local. I’m just educated in planning and urban development. Fighting for parking is not going to improve the area, and in all honesty that is the biggest gripe for those that are complaining. The underutilized park is an afterthought, and there is a wonderful park located down the block on Intervale Ave. The locals should demand that the new buildings provide a mutual low-key greenspace for everyone instead of pure reactionary opposition.
“As for schools, if overcrowded schools are a concern, than build more schools. Transit is packed, then establish BRT routes and improve train service via signal upgrades.”
That’s all I want, man. That’s all I want.
Finally we agree on something!
But they won’t do any of that and you know that, so,we get the problems.
There’s no money in it in their eyes. No money means no point in doing it.
No one wants to move here because it’s a crap hole because of that.
I have never in my life heard anyone say they want to move to the South Bronx unless they were from an even worse area or conditions like slums in PR or DR.
The only time I’ve ever heard any folks with a decent wage saying they’d move to the Bronx period, they meant Riverdale.
The Bronx is the last borough to gentrify because it’s one of the only boroughs where everything is years behind the times compared to the others and it’s ridiculously difficult to integrate outsiders while reassuring their safety. You don’t really see any white folks in 10459 unless they’re cops, shop owners or teachers rushing through to the trains.
While it may be safer compared to the horrible earlier years, it’s by no means safe in the general sense of the word.
Someone was raped while going to check the mail in a building on Fox street the other day while another guy got stabbed right out front a few days later.
Gets worse especially in the summer as well you should know when everyone’s out and about.
10459 has years to go before it catches up to neighborhoods in the northern/western Bronx. Hell, it has years to go before it catches up to Fordham.
Look at all the awful, rip-off shops still up and running on Southern Boulevard if that’s any indication.
Sure Fordham has them, but Fordham also has way more big name stores, the biggest one around 10459 is probably Gamestop, maybe Aaron’s (which is a notorious financial trap for the poor).
But in the end, yes, the buildings will be built, the people will get over it and more than likely, there will be no greenspace built since the residents have zero say so as to what gets done around here. No one even knew that these buildings were being built until they closed down the parking lot. Imagine trying to get them to build a playground or park. That would be something.
So yeah, big business wins, the poor will expect the worst but hope for the best and I’ll be really surprised to see the crime stats being lower in the next five years while the overall ratings and grades in schools goes up in 10459.
I just want to be wrong and I wish more people would lend their voices to issues like this so that we can always compromise. The best end result is when everyone wins.
The Bronx has been gentrifying for a long time. The urban decay of the mid-20th century left behind a severely impoverished population. Those that could leave left. Starting in the late 1980s, people with income to buy property began moving into pockets like Charlotte Street. By the 1990s, these pockets were going up all over and today there’s quite a bit of income diversity. More recently, those of substantially higher incomes are moving in. The newer buildings going up across the greater South Bronx now are pretty nice (e.g. Via Verde).
I’m personally interested in buying a condo here (we need condos). I don’t find the area dangerous. Things happen, normally between people involved in activity which often leads to violence, but overall the neighborhood is pretty decent. What we need is more retail diversity, but that’s going to take more affluent residents. And we need to redevelop underutilized property like parking and vacant lots, and renovate buildings in poor condition.
For pedestrian space, let’s convert the dead end streets on Simpson to pedestrian plazas throughout.
This is not about parking this is about taking away green space that people who don’t live here want to take away. This is about adding to an already overpopulated area where residents need space to enjoy and not have to travel by train or bus just to enjoy grass and play spaces for their children. It’s about quality of life issues that so many other get to enjoy in their posh neighborhoods but are being ripped away from the ones that live here.
It’s all about the money for them. Money talks and we have no voice.
There’s a great park down the street on Intervale.