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→Notable natives: Removed Kay Flock from this section because he was not raised in South Bronx. It's well documented and said by Kay Flock himself that he grew up in 187th Street of the Belmont section of the Bronx aka Sevside. The Belmont neighborhood is not considered part of South Bronx. Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit |
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The South Bronx was populated largely by working-class families. Its image as a poverty-ridden area developed in the latter part of the 20th century. There were several factors contributing to the decay of the South Bronx: [[white flight]], [[landlord]] abandonment, economic changes, [[Crime in New York City|crime]], demographics and also the construction of the [[Cross Bronx Expressway]].<ref name='Caro'/>
The [[Cross Bronx Expressway]], completed in 1963, was a part of [[Robert Moses]]'s urban renewal project (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_renewal#United_States) for New York City, funded by the [[Housing Act of 1949]]. The expressway is now known to have been a significant factor in the extreme urban decay seen by the borough in the 1970s and 1980s. Cutting through the heart of the South Bronx, the highway displaced thousands of
The already poor and working-class neighborhoods were further disadvantaged by the decreasing property value, in combination with increasing vacancy rates. While some ares of the South Bronx were racially integrated as early as the 1930's, later larger scale influxes of African Americans immigrants from the American South, combined with the racially-charged tension of the Civil Rights Movement, the rage following the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the dramatic rise in crime rates, further contributed to white middle-class flight and the decline of many South Bronx neighborhoods. Following the implementation of desegregation busing policies, white parents who worried about their children attending the racially integrated schools began to relocate to the suburbs, which remained predominately white due to cost as well as legal barriers created by restrictive housing covenants, and selective lending. In turn, areas of the Bronx that became predominately African American or Hispanic were considered bad risks by lenders ("redlining"),contributing to the decline in real estate values and lack of investment in the existing housing stock. Rent Control, which limited the rental income potential of properties, also contributed to the disinvestment seen in the area.
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