Playing With Fire

As an affordable-housing developer, I found Daniel Immerwahr’s article about the wave of arson that ravaged the Bronx in the nineteen-seventies fascinating (Books, August 25th). In 1983, a report estimated that, since 1970, New York City had lost approximately three hundred and ten thousand apartments to abandonment or demolition—many were burned. Immerwahr alludes to several of the systemic issues behind the destruction, but they warrant greater attention.

First, jobs that residents of the South Bronx held left the city. In 1950, New York had a million manufacturing jobs. Over the next three decades, these moved to New Jersey, to Pennsylvania, and, eventually, to cheaper labor markets in the South. Between 1969 and 1977, the city lost six hundred thousand jobs. Meanwhile, the disparity between rents and the cost of operating buildings grew. From 1964 to 1968, as inflation more than doubled, the rise in operating expenses for apartment buildings outpaced the increase allowed under rent control by a factor of three.

By 1970, much of the housing stock was fifty years old and in need of substantial capital investments: new roofs, elevators, plumbing, and electrical wiring. Many small landlords simply couldn’t afford these improvements. They did not abandon their buildings because they lost value—they abandoned them because they were losing money. Some of these landlords had put their life savings into their buildings.

The same dynamics are reëmerging here today. A.I.-related job losses are coming, with the more than five hundred thousand positions in the financial-services sector among the most vulnerable. New York’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act is re-creating the conditions under which landlords’ expenses outpace their rental income. Mortgage defaults are rising. If there is to be rent control, it has to serve those who really need it, and either match the true cost of operating buildings or be paired with low-cost mortgages, real-estate-tax abatements, and rental subsidies to compensate for rising expenses.

As our affordable- and workforce-housing stock continues to age, landlords once again do not have the funds to make necessary capital improvements. The seventies were a terrible time for tenants and landlords in New York City. Let’s use the lessons from those years to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Jonathan F. P. Rose
New York City

In the early seventies, I was a teen-ager living in the Bronx. My family lived on Park Avenue, between 179th and 180th Street, on the top floor of one of those “brick and concrete” walkups that Immerwahr mentions. My brothers and I would lean out one of the windows to watch other apartments burn. I marvel at our lack of empathy and at the fact that I wasn’t particularly afraid that our building would be set ablaze.

As I recall, the conventional wisdom at the time was that landlords were paying people to burn their buildings, not that the fires were statements or acts of rebellion on the part of our neighbors. I internalized a distrust of landlords. When ours would visit, which he did rarely, I followed the example of my parents and neighbors and said nothing to him. Our building did eventually burn, but by then my family had joined the white flight and relocated a mile north, to 196th Street. If we hadn’t moved, my parents’ collection of hundreds of New Yorker magazines would have been reduced to ash; surely, we wouldn’t have grabbed them as we scrambled down the fire escape.

Maureen Camp Nichols
Charlottesville, Va.

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