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[HiPointDem]

83. the economy of ghettos; the economy of places from which capital has disinvested.

those who have the means leave; those who are left behind survive as best they can.

ghettoization is the process through which this situation develops.


On December 3, 1967, Regina and Charles Schneibel were trapped by fire in their Lower East Side apartment....In the blaze, Charles, Regina, and their two oldest children suffered severe burns. Their three youngest children died of smoke inhalation. Incredibly, the death of the three children didn’t even merit its own headline, because it wasn’t the biggest fire tragedy to report. They shared a story with five children in Brooklyn who had died in a similar fire earlier the same day. A month earlier, a mother, her two children, and her niece and nephew were all killed in a fire.

All thirteen victims died in an era of New York’s history when more than 300 people, mostly poor Black and Latino New Yorkers, were killed every year by fire. The fires were one of New York’s worst disasters, and the toll was devastating. By the time the fires were out, thousands of New Yorkers had been killed between 1965 and 1983. One South Bronx neighborhood that held 836 buildings in 1970 had nine left in 1980. Other tracts lost more. Tens of thousands of people lost their homes. City officials had advocated abandoning whole neighborhoods and then closed fire stations in the very Black and Latino neighborhoods that were burning out of control. The deaths were the direct result of those policies. It was the closest New York City came to genocide in the twentieth century.

For the current generation of writers making sense of contemporary New York — from William Sites’ Remaking New York to Miriam Greenberg’s Branding New York — the city’s crises, fiscal collapse, and shock therapy of the 1970s are the Big Bang from which today’s neoliberal New York erupted.[1] Joe Flood contributes to the study of this vital period a rich description of the era and explains how a handful of officials with the power to stop the fires watched while New York burned. The fires are not an unknown part of New York’s history.[2] But there has been no broad history of the fires until now. In presenting the protracted trauma, The Fires makes the story of the burning of the South Bronx so engaging that we are a little less likely to ever forget. It is a much needed book. But the reckoning of the fires is not done.

O’Hagan used the RAND corporation’s computer analysis to justify closing fire departments in the Bronx even while whole neighborhoods burned, thus earning the appreciation of financially strapped mayors John Lindsay and Abe Beame. Flood tells of the rise of RAND from a group of World War II slide rule warriors to an influential, politically savvy, and high-priced consulting organization. No one else has made the story of rational management and early computer modeling read like an engrossing Greek tragedy.

Along the way, Flood weaves together many threads of this story. He explains how redlining by banks and the federal government’s Home Ownership Loan Corporation explicitly denied non-white neighborhoods the loans that building owners needed to maintain their property, leading to the deterioration that was a precursor to the fires. He just as deftly dismisses some of the popular assumptions about the chaos of the era when he demonstrates that the notorious killing of Kitty Genovese did not, in fact, reflect a callous city that ignored a murder victim’s cries, but a typical case of residents who did call for help.

The most common cause of the conflagrations was more dismaying for how mundane it was: a much larger constellation of powerful people allowed perfectly normal fires to burn out of control and displace tens of thousands of families.

http://newpol.org/content/fires-next-time