In response to recent derogatory portrayals of the borough by “American Idol” and Glenn Beck, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. went on the offensive last month, highlighting the positives and success stories of the Bronx during his second state of borough speech.
While continuing to press his mantra of borough residents and workers coming together to form “One Bronx,” or “Un Solo Bronx,” Diaz spent a great deal of his nearly 90-minute speech at DeWitt Clinton High School hyping his accomplishments and all of the great things the borough has to offer.
“It is time to let the world know once again that the Bronx is a place of success,” Diaz said.
Toward the beginning of the speech, Diaz unveiled a new hip hop video, produced by Derek Woods for Bronxnet and featuring musicians Opera Steve, Silkedeezy and Steve Kane, that extolled the virtues of the borough through rap lyrics and snippets of interviews with famous Bronxites, including author Mary Higgins Clark and seminal Bronx rapper Grandmaster Mele Mel.
Aside from highlighting Bronx success stories, Diaz spent much of his speech talking about the state of the borough’s economy and what his office was doing to improve it. Despite investment and other efforts, by his office and others, to bring in new developments and cultivate “green jobs,” Diaz acknowledged that the Bronx still has the highest poverty rate of any urban county in the United States.
To combat that poverty rate, Diaz said he supported a new City Council bill that would require developers to guarantee living wages ($10 an hour, plus benefits, or $11.50 an hour without) if they receive significant city subsidies. The “Fair Wages for New Yorkers” legislation currently has 29 supporters in the City Council, but needs five more to overturn a sure veto by Mayor Bloomberg, who says the bill will discourage city development.
“Not only is this the right thing to to lift our people out of poverty,” Diaz said, “it is sound economic policy.”
The living wage bill was born out of the 2009 fight over the development of the Kingsbridge Armory. The Council killed a Bloomberg-backed plan to turn the Armory into a shopping mall when an agreement couldn’t be worked out over wage guarantees.
Last year, Diaz created a task force full of big names to figure out a new plan for the Armory. And last week, he revealed a few of the groups — the YMCA, two production studios and New York Arena Management, a sports arena developer — that the task force has spoken to about using the monstrous and vacant 575,000 square-foot building.
Diaz said he would make recommendations on possible uses of the Armory in April and called on Bloomberg to release another RFP for the long-vacant Armory.
Like borough presidents in the past, Diaz vowed to bolster the Bronx’s tourism industry by bringing a world-class hotel to the area near Yankee Stadium. He talked about transforming one of the struggling parking garages into deluxe accommodations for visitors.
Diaz touched on other issues — improving schools, getting guns off the street, standing up against hate crimes, saving Bronx trees — and made several pop culture references (Snooki, from “Jersey Shore,” made an appearance on the video screen backdrop) during his speech, which ended where it started.
“We will not listen to those who say that poverty is an inevitable part of life in the Bronx,” he said. “We will show them that those chains can be broken.”
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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.
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It is good to read the Bronx borough president’s words. I just don’t see any of that he is talking about. The Bronx is overrun with programs, like drug programs and prisoner re-entry programs and poverty programs.
The huge spike in the Bronx population is largely due to the proliferation of these programs. Also, the bulk of the jobs in the Bronx are supported by the public sector, city and state contracts, that serve these under-served populations. Just like bureaucracies, the people who run and work in these programs have little incentive to realize actual human gains, as such progress of their constituents threatens their income. The workers are mostly about one-half paycheck from poverty themselves.
So, until the Bronx borough president really supports actual human capacity and economic development in the Bronx, we are left with rhetoric and more rhetoric and no gains.
A few years ago, a publication called The Living Pulpit published an article with a title like, Show Me Your Money and I”ll Show You Your Priorities. As I follow the money in the Bronx, I do not see any going to economic development and capacity building in the neighborhoods, but more for the “players” of the game.
Mr. Diaz, the Bronx deserves better.