United Africa United Football Club is a soccer team made up of newly immigrated African teenagers to the Bronx. It was founded in 2010 with 22 players and has more than 150 alumni.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
One day nine years ago, Abrourazakou Bawa, a truck driver originally from Togo, was in his home borough of the Bronx when he noticed a disappointed kid walking with a soccer ball under his arm.
“Where are you going?” Bawa asked the boy.
“I couldn’t find anyone to play with,” said the young footballer, who had hoped to find a pickup game at the public park next to Yankee Stadium.
That simple incident led Bawa, then 43, to brainstorm: Why not start a soccer team for the many African kids who live around the neighborhood? It would ease their adjustment to the United States, and might keep them out of trouble.
Originally dubbed the African Diaspora Youth Sports Club, that team is now called the United Africa Football Club —a multilingual group that has won seven annual soccer tournaments organized by the Immigrant Outreach Unit of the New York City Police Department’s Community Affairs Bureau. The NYPD started the tournaments to strengthen relationships between police officers and the city’s new immigrant teenagers, aged 14 to 19 years old, and to reduce their chances of getting involved in crime and drug use.
Bawa, an independent volunteer, represents the police on game day, coaching from the sidelines in an NYPD jersey. His team is open to kids from all 54 African countries, with players hailing from Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria and more; a new addition is a teen of African descent from Honduras. On the field, English, French, Twi, Hausa and Ewe are just some of the languages spoken as players pass the ball back and forth. Bawa coaches them in English, as well as soccer.
The coach Abrourazakou Bawa surveys practice field to get ready for the next opponent, Bawa grew up boxing in his native Mali, and watched YouTube instructional videos to learn how to coach soccer.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
He wants players to accept one another for their character instead of their religion or ethnicity. The teammates give each other a hard time in person, or over a WhatsApp group chat, if one doesn’t show up for practice. If a player is caught fighting on the field or around the neighborhood, he’s not allowed to play again until his parents call Bawa to say he has apologized.
“It’s just like family,” said Yaya Issa Yaya, 18, one of the team’s two captains who moved to the United States from Accra, Ghana, in 2013. Now a senior, Yaya likes math and science, and he helps his teammates with homework. “Our coach devotes all his time and sweat in making it possible for us to play, so we ought to do our best and make him proud.”
Yaya is passionate about soccer. Since he lives next to the Crotona Park soccer field, he practices several times a week with his younger brother, even in the winter, when the lights stay on until 7:30 p.m. But he eventually wants to leave the Bronx.
“The streets are not safe,” he said. “Anyone here can get into trouble without looking for it.”
Keeping young people out of trouble was one of Bawa’s motivations for originally starting the soccer club.He lives in Claremont Village, a sprawling cluster of public-housing complexes in the South Bronx that’s home to approximately 11,000 residents. He has a lot of friends there, and once campaigned unsuccessfully to be a judicial delegate, knocking on people’s doors for votes. The most common complaint he heard from his neighbors is that the city’s housing authority doesn’t keep up with maintenance. Bawa says there’s a good sense of community.
“I never had problems,” he said. “Anybody, they see you, they say hi.”
During his decade in the Bronx, Bawa’s lived around many unsupervised young people who’ve been affected by crime. In 2009, there had been 15 murders and 303 felony assault offenses within the one square mile of the 42nd Precinct, where he and the majority of his future players lived. Some of his friends had been mugged on the way to their mosque.
Kelvin Akisi is a senior in high school and he is the comic relief for the team. He missed a few practices for the Regents Review, a program that prepares students for a college entrance exam.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
Bawa, a father of three, sees soccer as one way to keep the neighborhood’s young residents away from trouble. He pays for the team’s gear out-of-pocket, and drives them to and from events in his nine-person sport utility vehicle.
“Let them smile,” Bawa said of his players. “That’s my payment.”
The coach borrows nets from other teams for games and his players wear used jerseys, which he collects and washes. Bawa has collected donations to pay the entry fees for tournaments from nearby restaurants, residents and Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. The team plays at various Bronx fields, but don’t have permits, so if another team arrives with a permit in hand, Bawa and his players have to pack up their things.
“We don’t have much,” Bawa said. “But I don’t care…My priority is not to win. My priority is to bring those kids together.”
Bawa admits he has little knowledge of soccer. To learn more, he watches YouTube videos and takes pointers from advanced players and volunteer assistant coaches.
“I’m trying my best,” he said.
Regardless of his inexperience, his players say he’s an effective coach because he’s a good motivator and helps them focus on the field.
Despite the team’s trophies and medals on display in Bawa’s apartment, the United Africa Football Club has a problem with defense. Several times a game, Bawa’s defenders, eager to score, run forward. They forget their duty to support the goalie.
“Yo,” goalie Kelvin Akisi, 18, from Ghana, shouted at his teammates during a match versus Bowne Football Club in the summer of 2018. “They got three men up top, and I got only one defender.”
Ghanaian pop music played at full volume from a Bluetooth speaker on the sidelines. Akisi shouted orders at his distant teammates in Twi. Moments later, he dove for the ball as two unopposed strikers rushed the goal at full speed. The ball bounced out of Akisi’s gloves into his opponent’s cleats. The forward passed the ball to his teammate, who kicked it in for a goal.
“Not everyone can score,” assistant coach Jeremiah Abdul shouted in anger at his ineffective defenders. That day, the game ended in a tie. Bawa again realized the kids have a lot to learn.
“Just pass the ball,” Bawa repeats every practice. “Don’t be selfish.”
United Africa United Football Club is a soccer team made up of newly immigrated African teenagers to the Bronx. It was founded in 2010 with 22 players and has more than 150 alumni.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
One day nine years ago, Abrourazakou Bawa, a truck driver originally from Togo, was in his home borough of the Bronx when he noticed a disappointed kid walking with a soccer ball under his arm.
“Where are you going?” Bawa asked the boy.
“I couldn’t find anyone to play with,” said the young footballer, who had hoped to find a pickup game at the public park next to Yankee Stadium.
That simple incident led Bawa, then 43, to brainstorm: Why not start a soccer team for the many African kids who live around the neighborhood? It would ease their adjustment to the United States, and might keep them out of trouble.
Originally dubbed the African Diaspora Youth Sports Club, that team is now called the United Africa Football Club —a multilingual group that has won seven annual soccer tournaments organized by the Immigrant Outreach Unit of the New York City Police Department’s Community Affairs Bureau. The NYPD started the tournaments to strengthen relationships between police officers and the city’s new immigrant teenagers, aged 14 to 19 years old, and to reduce their chances of getting involved in crime and drug use.
Bawa, an independent volunteer, represents the police on game day, coaching from the sidelines in an NYPD jersey. His team is open to kids from all 54 African countries, with players hailing from Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria and more; a new addition is a teen of African descent from Honduras. On the field, English, French, Twi, Hausa and Ewe are just some of the languages spoken as players pass the ball back and forth. Bawa coaches them in English, as well as soccer.
The coach Abrourazakou Bawa surveys practice field to get ready for the next opponent, Bawa grew up boxing in his native Mali, and watched YouTube instructional videos to learn how to coach soccer.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
He wants players to accept one another for their character instead of their religion or ethnicity. The teammates give each other a hard time in person, or over a WhatsApp group chat, if one doesn’t show up for practice. If a player is caught fighting on the field or around the neighborhood, he’s not allowed to play again until his parents call Bawa to say he has apologized.
“It’s just like family,” said Yaya Issa Yaya, 18, one of the team’s two captains who moved to the United States from Accra, Ghana, in 2013. Now a senior, Yaya likes math and science, and he helps his teammates with homework. “Our coach devotes all his time and sweat in making it possible for us to play, so we ought to do our best and make him proud.”
Yaya is passionate about soccer. Since he lives next to the Crotona Park soccer field, he practices several times a week with his younger brother, even in the winter, when the lights stay on until 7:30 p.m. But he eventually wants to leave the Bronx.
“The streets are not safe,” he said. “Anyone here can get into trouble without looking for it.”
Keeping young people out of trouble was one of Bawa’s motivations for originally starting the soccer club.He lives in Claremont Village, a sprawling cluster of public-housing complexes in the South Bronx that’s home to approximately 11,000 residents. He has a lot of friends there, and once campaigned unsuccessfully to be a judicial delegate, knocking on people’s doors for votes. The most common complaint he heard from his neighbors is that the city’s housing authority doesn’t keep up with maintenance. Bawa says there’s a good sense of community.
“I never had problems,” he said. “Anybody, they see you, they say hi.”
During his decade in the Bronx, Bawa’s lived around many unsupervised young people who’ve been affected by crime. In 2009, there had been 15 murders and 303 felony assault offenses within the one square mile of the 42nd Precinct, where he and the majority of his future players lived. Some of his friends had been mugged on the way to their mosque.
Kelvin Akisi is a senior in high school and he is the comic relief for the team. He missed a few practices for the Regents Review, a program that prepares students for a college entrance exam.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
Bawa, a father of three, sees soccer as one way to keep the neighborhood’s young residents away from trouble. He pays for the team’s gear out-of-pocket, and drives them to and from events in his nine-person sport utility vehicle.
“Let them smile,” Bawa said of his players. “That’s my payment.”
The coach borrows nets from other teams for games and his players wear used jerseys, which he collects and washes. Bawa has collected donations to pay the entry fees for tournaments from nearby restaurants, residents and Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. The team plays at various Bronx fields, but don’t have permits, so if another team arrives with a permit in hand, Bawa and his players have to pack up their things.
“We don’t have much,” Bawa said. “But I don’t care…My priority is not to win. My priority is to bring those kids together.”
Bawa admits he has little knowledge of soccer. To learn more, he watches YouTube videos and takes pointers from advanced players and volunteer assistant coaches.
“I’m trying my best,” he said.
Regardless of his inexperience, his players say he’s an effective coach because he’s a good motivator and helps them focus on the field.
Despite the team’s trophies and medals on display in Bawa’s apartment, the United Africa Football Club has a problem with defense. Several times a game, Bawa’s defenders, eager to score, run forward. They forget their duty to support the goalie.
“Yo,” goalie Kelvin Akisi, 18, from Ghana, shouted at his teammates during a match versus Bowne Football Club in the summer of 2018. “They got three men up top, and I got only one defender.”
Ghanaian pop music played at full volume from a Bluetooth speaker on the sidelines. Akisi shouted orders at his distant teammates in Twi. Moments later, he dove for the ball as two unopposed strikers rushed the goal at full speed. The ball bounced out of Akisi’s gloves into his opponent’s cleats. The forward passed the ball to his teammate, who kicked it in for a goal.
“Not everyone can score,” assistant coach Jeremiah Abdul shouted in anger at his ineffective defenders. That day, the game ended in a tie. Bawa again realized the kids have a lot to learn.
“Just pass the ball,” Bawa repeats every practice. “Don’t be selfish.”
United Africa United Football Club is a soccer team made up of newly immigrated African teenagers to the Bronx. It was founded in 2010 with 22 players and has more than 150 alumni.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
One day nine years ago, Abrourazakou Bawa, a truck driver originally from Togo, was in his home borough of the Bronx when he noticed a disappointed kid walking with a soccer ball under his arm.
“Where are you going?” Bawa asked the boy.
“I couldn’t find anyone to play with,” said the young footballer, who had hoped to find a pickup game at the public park next to Yankee Stadium.
That simple incident led Bawa, then 43, to brainstorm: Why not start a soccer team for the many African kids who live around the neighborhood? It would ease their adjustment to the United States, and might keep them out of trouble.
Originally dubbed the African Diaspora Youth Sports Club, that team is now called the United Africa Football Club —a multilingual group that has won seven annual soccer tournaments organized by the Immigrant Outreach Unit of the New York City Police Department’s Community Affairs Bureau. The NYPD started the tournaments to strengthen relationships between police officers and the city’s new immigrant teenagers, aged 14 to 19 years old, and to reduce their chances of getting involved in crime and drug use.
Bawa, an independent volunteer, represents the police on game day, coaching from the sidelines in an NYPD jersey. His team is open to kids from all 54 African countries, with players hailing from Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria and more; a new addition is a teen of African descent from Honduras. On the field, English, French, Twi, Hausa and Ewe are just some of the languages spoken as players pass the ball back and forth. Bawa coaches them in English, as well as soccer.
The coach Abrourazakou Bawa surveys practice field to get ready for the next opponent, Bawa grew up boxing in his native Mali, and watched YouTube instructional videos to learn how to coach soccer.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
He wants players to accept one another for their character instead of their religion or ethnicity. The teammates give each other a hard time in person, or over a WhatsApp group chat, if one doesn’t show up for practice. If a player is caught fighting on the field or around the neighborhood, he’s not allowed to play again until his parents call Bawa to say he has apologized.
“It’s just like family,” said Yaya Issa Yaya, 18, one of the team’s two captains who moved to the United States from Accra, Ghana, in 2013. Now a senior, Yaya likes math and science, and he helps his teammates with homework. “Our coach devotes all his time and sweat in making it possible for us to play, so we ought to do our best and make him proud.”
Yaya is passionate about soccer. Since he lives next to the Crotona Park soccer field, he practices several times a week with his younger brother, even in the winter, when the lights stay on until 7:30 p.m. But he eventually wants to leave the Bronx.
“The streets are not safe,” he said. “Anyone here can get into trouble without looking for it.”
Keeping young people out of trouble was one of Bawa’s motivations for originally starting the soccer club.He lives in Claremont Village, a sprawling cluster of public-housing complexes in the South Bronx that’s home to approximately 11,000 residents. He has a lot of friends there, and once campaigned unsuccessfully to be a judicial delegate, knocking on people’s doors for votes. The most common complaint he heard from his neighbors is that the city’s housing authority doesn’t keep up with maintenance. Bawa says there’s a good sense of community.
“I never had problems,” he said. “Anybody, they see you, they say hi.”
During his decade in the Bronx, Bawa’s lived around many unsupervised young people who’ve been affected by crime. In 2009, there had been 15 murders and 303 felony assault offenses within the one square mile of the 42nd Precinct, where he and the majority of his future players lived. Some of his friends had been mugged on the way to their mosque.
Kelvin Akisi is a senior in high school and he is the comic relief for the team. He missed a few practices for the Regents Review, a program that prepares students for a college entrance exam.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
Bawa, a father of three, sees soccer as one way to keep the neighborhood’s young residents away from trouble. He pays for the team’s gear out-of-pocket, and drives them to and from events in his nine-person sport utility vehicle.
“Let them smile,” Bawa said of his players. “That’s my payment.”
The coach borrows nets from other teams for games and his players wear used jerseys, which he collects and washes. Bawa has collected donations to pay the entry fees for tournaments from nearby restaurants, residents and Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. The team plays at various Bronx fields, but don’t have permits, so if another team arrives with a permit in hand, Bawa and his players have to pack up their things.
“We don’t have much,” Bawa said. “But I don’t care…My priority is not to win. My priority is to bring those kids together.”
Bawa admits he has little knowledge of soccer. To learn more, he watches YouTube videos and takes pointers from advanced players and volunteer assistant coaches.
“I’m trying my best,” he said.
Regardless of his inexperience, his players say he’s an effective coach because he’s a good motivator and helps them focus on the field.
Despite the team’s trophies and medals on display in Bawa’s apartment, the United Africa Football Club has a problem with defense. Several times a game, Bawa’s defenders, eager to score, run forward. They forget their duty to support the goalie.
“Yo,” goalie Kelvin Akisi, 18, from Ghana, shouted at his teammates during a match versus Bowne Football Club in the summer of 2018. “They got three men up top, and I got only one defender.”
Ghanaian pop music played at full volume from a Bluetooth speaker on the sidelines. Akisi shouted orders at his distant teammates in Twi. Moments later, he dove for the ball as two unopposed strikers rushed the goal at full speed. The ball bounced out of Akisi’s gloves into his opponent’s cleats. The forward passed the ball to his teammate, who kicked it in for a goal.
“Not everyone can score,” assistant coach Jeremiah Abdul shouted in anger at his ineffective defenders. That day, the game ended in a tie. Bawa again realized the kids have a lot to learn.
“Just pass the ball,” Bawa repeats every practice. “Don’t be selfish.”
United Africa United Football Club is a soccer team made up of newly immigrated African teenagers to the Bronx. It was founded in 2010 with 22 players and has more than 150 alumni.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
One day nine years ago, Abrourazakou Bawa, a truck driver originally from Togo, was in his home borough of the Bronx when he noticed a disappointed kid walking with a soccer ball under his arm.
“Where are you going?” Bawa asked the boy.
“I couldn’t find anyone to play with,” said the young footballer, who had hoped to find a pickup game at the public park next to Yankee Stadium.
That simple incident led Bawa, then 43, to brainstorm: Why not start a soccer team for the many African kids who live around the neighborhood? It would ease their adjustment to the United States, and might keep them out of trouble.
Originally dubbed the African Diaspora Youth Sports Club, that team is now called the United Africa Football Club —a multilingual group that has won seven annual soccer tournaments organized by the Immigrant Outreach Unit of the New York City Police Department’s Community Affairs Bureau. The NYPD started the tournaments to strengthen relationships between police officers and the city’s new immigrant teenagers, aged 14 to 19 years old, and to reduce their chances of getting involved in crime and drug use.
Bawa, an independent volunteer, represents the police on game day, coaching from the sidelines in an NYPD jersey. His team is open to kids from all 54 African countries, with players hailing from Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria and more; a new addition is a teen of African descent from Honduras. On the field, English, French, Twi, Hausa and Ewe are just some of the languages spoken as players pass the ball back and forth. Bawa coaches them in English, as well as soccer.
The coach Abrourazakou Bawa surveys practice field to get ready for the next opponent, Bawa grew up boxing in his native Mali, and watched YouTube instructional videos to learn how to coach soccer.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
He wants players to accept one another for their character instead of their religion or ethnicity. The teammates give each other a hard time in person, or over a WhatsApp group chat, if one doesn’t show up for practice. If a player is caught fighting on the field or around the neighborhood, he’s not allowed to play again until his parents call Bawa to say he has apologized.
“It’s just like family,” said Yaya Issa Yaya, 18, one of the team’s two captains who moved to the United States from Accra, Ghana, in 2013. Now a senior, Yaya likes math and science, and he helps his teammates with homework. “Our coach devotes all his time and sweat in making it possible for us to play, so we ought to do our best and make him proud.”
Yaya is passionate about soccer. Since he lives next to the Crotona Park soccer field, he practices several times a week with his younger brother, even in the winter, when the lights stay on until 7:30 p.m. But he eventually wants to leave the Bronx.
“The streets are not safe,” he said. “Anyone here can get into trouble without looking for it.”
Keeping young people out of trouble was one of Bawa’s motivations for originally starting the soccer club.He lives in Claremont Village, a sprawling cluster of public-housing complexes in the South Bronx that’s home to approximately 11,000 residents. He has a lot of friends there, and once campaigned unsuccessfully to be a judicial delegate, knocking on people’s doors for votes. The most common complaint he heard from his neighbors is that the city’s housing authority doesn’t keep up with maintenance. Bawa says there’s a good sense of community.
“I never had problems,” he said. “Anybody, they see you, they say hi.”
During his decade in the Bronx, Bawa’s lived around many unsupervised young people who’ve been affected by crime. In 2009, there had been 15 murders and 303 felony assault offenses within the one square mile of the 42nd Precinct, where he and the majority of his future players lived. Some of his friends had been mugged on the way to their mosque.
Kelvin Akisi is a senior in high school and he is the comic relief for the team. He missed a few practices for the Regents Review, a program that prepares students for a college entrance exam.
Trevon Blondet/Bronx Documentary Center
Bawa, a father of three, sees soccer as one way to keep the neighborhood’s young residents away from trouble. He pays for the team’s gear out-of-pocket, and drives them to and from events in his nine-person sport utility vehicle.
“Let them smile,” Bawa said of his players. “That’s my payment.”
The coach borrows nets from other teams for games and his players wear used jerseys, which he collects and washes. Bawa has collected donations to pay the entry fees for tournaments from nearby restaurants, residents and Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. The team plays at various Bronx fields, but don’t have permits, so if another team arrives with a permit in hand, Bawa and his players have to pack up their things.
“We don’t have much,” Bawa said. “But I don’t care…My priority is not to win. My priority is to bring those kids together.”
Bawa admits he has little knowledge of soccer. To learn more, he watches YouTube videos and takes pointers from advanced players and volunteer assistant coaches.
“I’m trying my best,” he said.
Regardless of his inexperience, his players say he’s an effective coach because he’s a good motivator and helps them focus on the field.
Despite the team’s trophies and medals on display in Bawa’s apartment, the United Africa Football Club has a problem with defense. Several times a game, Bawa’s defenders, eager to score, run forward. They forget their duty to support the goalie.
“Yo,” goalie Kelvin Akisi, 18, from Ghana, shouted at his teammates during a match versus Bowne Football Club in the summer of 2018. “They got three men up top, and I got only one defender.”
Ghanaian pop music played at full volume from a Bluetooth speaker on the sidelines. Akisi shouted orders at his distant teammates in Twi. Moments later, he dove for the ball as two unopposed strikers rushed the goal at full speed. The ball bounced out of Akisi’s gloves into his opponent’s cleats. The forward passed the ball to his teammate, who kicked it in for a goal.
“Not everyone can score,” assistant coach Jeremiah Abdul shouted in anger at his ineffective defenders. That day, the game ended in a tie. Bawa again realized the kids have a lot to learn.
“Just pass the ball,” Bawa repeats every practice. “Don’t be selfish.”
The old saying, often mangled, is that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But what of the rest of us? What are those who know history, and remember it, supposed to do with that knowledge?
Vivian Vázquez Irizarry remembers the history of the South Bronx, where she was born and grew up. She remembers the strong and supportive communities that existed before the bad years, and she remembers the fires. She has studied the backstory that fueled those flames—redlining, White fight, the consultant-driven withdrawal of urban fire protection. Perhaps most important, she remembers what happened after the blazes: the rebuilding of the borough’s human fiber and physical shape thanks largely to working-class people who gathered together and fought for their place in the city. “We were the ones who saved the Bronx when no one else cared,” is how she sums up the story.
Along with Gretchen Hildebran and producers Julia Steele Allen, and Neyda Martinez, Vázquez Irizarry last year produced the film “Decade of Fire,” which revealed that history.
The Bronx had a uniquely dramatic experience, but similar narratives traced their arcs in many cities around the county in the 60s and 70s. And now, in many of those places, a different challenge presents itself: disinvestment and abandonment have been replaced by aggressive development and the threat of displacement. It’s the urban side of the larger national housing crisis, which is erupting into view everywhere from New Hampshire homeless shelters to Colorado manufactured-home parks, and has attracted the attention of most Democratic presidential candidates.
If the presidency shifts parties major housing-policy changes could come in 2021. But chances are, low-income communities are still going to have to fight for their interests and their places.
In a new short film called “Defending Your Block: How to Stay, Fight and Build,” Vázquez Irizarry and her team extract lessons from the experiences of community advocates in the Bronx, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles to inform those efforts at survival.
“Today we’re still fighting a housing crisis in the Bronx and across the country,” Vázquez Irizarry says in the film. “Every neighborhood is different but what we have in common is our determination to stay, fight and build.”
The film, being released Thursday exclusively on City Limits, focuses first on Hetty Fox, a legendary champion for Lyman Place in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx who began working in 1970 to save it from eradication by the flight of capital and the invasion of violence.
William Geist captured some of her spirit in a 1984 New York Timesprofile: “She said she spent a good deal of time on her second-story porch watching over the block. She walked the street at 2 A.M. to show a presence. She was mugged by a purse- snatcher who slugged her twice in the face but could not wrestle her purse away. She went home, put on her sneakers and went out after him.”
Fox, who died last year and to whom the film is dedicated, called this work “block defense.” She explained it simply in the movie: “You take responsibility for any misbehavior on your block.”
“I used to sleep with my boots on,” she said. “I had to be ready to jump up and run, jump up and fight, jump up and do whatever had to be done on a moment’s notice.”
It was about building as much as it was about fighting. Fox took over an abandoned building and made it into a community center. She built relationships by saying hello to people, approaching strangers, organizing block parties.
To Vázquez Irizarry, Fox’s success at protecting Lyman Place identifies four critical elements for looking to defend their place on the third planet from the sun: Vigilance. Engage with neighbors. Lead with a shared vision. Occupy space.
The same elements are in the story told by Ronell Guy, who helped organize tenants in a Pittsburgh housing development who were facing eviction in the late 1990s. After learning she’d be evicted with only 30 days notice from a Section 8 home, Guy rallied her neighbors–“We called the press. We did everything we could to draw attention.”–and, with the help of Legal Aid, got the eviction overturned.
But Guy understood that the victory was temporary. “We decided that we are never going to go through this again. We decided we’re going to take the property,” from the landlord who had tried to force her and her neighbors out. After learning that the city was about to forgive a huge note to the property owner, Guy and her allies convinced the city to instead move the properties toward tenant control.
Guy, whose organization became the Northside Coalition for Fair Housing, advises counterparts in other cities that “whenever sales occur, that’s your opportunity” to change the destiny of the properties that make up neighborhoods. But she also notes the importance of building the kind of community support that gives organizations the standing to get governments to listen to them. In Northside’s case, that involved a toolkit that would have been familiar to any old-time ward heeler, like diaper giveaways and cooking people dinner.
That sort of moment-to-moment, apartment-by-apartment approach to making change is the kind of thing history books will never capture. Like any successful grassroots movement, neighborhood organizing involves occasional instances of high drama surrounded by weeks and months of plodding work.
It’s that kind of effort viewers see in the story of the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC), an organization founded in the Boyle Heights neighborhood in 1995 to stop a scheme to redevelop the area around a planned transit hub in a manner that would have displaced the area’s people and culture. ELACC organizer Carla de Paz stressed the importance—and the labor intensity—of tracking lot by lot what parcels were changing hands, and which development plans were being hatched, so that ELACC could fight for its vision of developing the land itself.
Finally, “It was really hard for Metro to push back on us,” de Paz said, referring to the transit agency leading the development. “They saw the power that had been built.” Since 1998, ELACC has developed 731 units affordable housing.
The film notes Fox’s passing as well as the deaths of Jerome Avenue-area advocate Carmen Vega-Rivera and pioneering South Bronx activist Al Quinones, all in 2019. Vega-Rivera was a key figure in the resistance to the rezoning—an effort that failed. Not all community led efforts result in wins. And no win is ever permanent. But one lesson the film delivers, without saying so, is that the battle to save neighborhoods can actually create communities.
“I knew that success was to keep the houses here, and keep the people here and interested in staying here,” Fox told the filmmakers. “I knew I had to create something that fascinated people: Look inside, internally, and see what we can do together.”
The old saying, often mangled, is that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But what of the rest of us? What are those who know history, and remember it, supposed to do with that knowledge?
Vivian Vázquez Irizarry remembers the history of the South Bronx, where she was born and grew up. She remembers the strong and supportive communities that existed before the bad years, and she remembers the fires. She has studied the backstory that fueled those flames—redlining, White fight, the consultant-driven withdrawal of urban fire protection. Perhaps most important, she remembers what happened after the blazes: the rebuilding of the borough’s human fiber and physical shape thanks largely to working-class people who gathered together and fought for their place in the city. “We were the ones who saved the Bronx when no one else cared,” is how she sums up the story.
Along with Gretchen Hildebran and producers Julia Steele Allen, and Neyda Martinez, Vázquez Irizarry last year produced the film “Decade of Fire,” which revealed that history.
The Bronx had a uniquely dramatic experience, but similar narratives traced their arcs in many cities around the county in the 60s and 70s. And now, in many of those places, a different challenge presents itself: disinvestment and abandonment have been replaced by aggressive development and the threat of displacement. It’s the urban side of the larger national housing crisis, which is erupting into view everywhere from New Hampshire homeless shelters to Colorado manufactured-home parks, and has attracted the attention of most Democratic presidential candidates.
If the presidency shifts parties major housing-policy changes could come in 2021. But chances are, low-income communities are still going to have to fight for their interests and their places.
In a new short film called “Defending Your Block: How to Stay, Fight and Build,” Vázquez Irizarry and her team extract lessons from the experiences of community advocates in the Bronx, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles to inform those efforts at survival.
“Today we’re still fighting a housing crisis in the Bronx and across the country,” Vázquez Irizarry says in the film. “Every neighborhood is different but what we have in common is our determination to stay, fight and build.”
The film, being released Thursday exclusively on City Limits, focuses first on Hetty Fox, a legendary champion for Lyman Place in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx who began working in 1970 to save it from eradication by the flight of capital and the invasion of violence.
William Geist captured some of her spirit in a 1984 New York Timesprofile: “She said she spent a good deal of time on her second-story porch watching over the block. She walked the street at 2 A.M. to show a presence. She was mugged by a purse- snatcher who slugged her twice in the face but could not wrestle her purse away. She went home, put on her sneakers and went out after him.”
Fox, who died last year and to whom the film is dedicated, called this work “block defense.” She explained it simply in the movie: “You take responsibility for any misbehavior on your block.”
“I used to sleep with my boots on,” she said. “I had to be ready to jump up and run, jump up and fight, jump up and do whatever had to be done on a moment’s notice.”
It was about building as much as it was about fighting. Fox took over an abandoned building and made it into a community center. She built relationships by saying hello to people, approaching strangers, organizing block parties.
To Vázquez Irizarry, Fox’s success at protecting Lyman Place identifies four critical elements for looking to defend their place on the third planet from the sun: Vigilance. Engage with neighbors. Lead with a shared vision. Occupy space.
The same elements are in the story told by Ronell Guy, who helped organize tenants in a Pittsburgh housing development who were facing eviction in the late 1990s. After learning she’d be evicted with only 30 days notice from a Section 8 home, Guy rallied her neighbors–“We called the press. We did everything we could to draw attention.”–and, with the help of Legal Aid, got the eviction overturned.
But Guy understood that the victory was temporary. “We decided that we are never going to go through this again. We decided we’re going to take the property,” from the landlord who had tried to force her and her neighbors out. After learning that the city was about to forgive a huge note to the property owner, Guy and her allies convinced the city to instead move the properties toward tenant control.
Guy, whose organization became the Northside Coalition for Fair Housing, advises counterparts in other cities that “whenever sales occur, that’s your opportunity” to change the destiny of the properties that make up neighborhoods. But she also notes the importance of building the kind of community support that gives organizations the standing to get governments to listen to them. In Northside’s case, that involved a toolkit that would have been familiar to any old-time ward heeler, like diaper giveaways and cooking people dinner.
That sort of moment-to-moment, apartment-by-apartment approach to making change is the kind of thing history books will never capture. Like any successful grassroots movement, neighborhood organizing involves occasional instances of high drama surrounded by weeks and months of plodding work.
It’s that kind of effort viewers see in the story of the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC), an organization founded in the Boyle Heights neighborhood in 1995 to stop a scheme to redevelop the area around a planned transit hub in a manner that would have displaced the area’s people and culture. ELACC organizer Carla de Paz stressed the importance—and the labor intensity—of tracking lot by lot what parcels were changing hands, and which development plans were being hatched, so that ELACC could fight for its vision of developing the land itself.
Finally, “It was really hard for Metro to push back on us,” de Paz said, referring to the transit agency leading the development. “They saw the power that had been built.” Since 1998, ELACC has developed 731 units affordable housing.
The film notes Fox’s passing as well as the deaths of Jerome Avenue-area advocate Carmen Vega-Rivera and pioneering South Bronx activist Al Quinones, all in 2019. Vega-Rivera was a key figure in the resistance to the rezoning—an effort that failed. Not all community led efforts result in wins. And no win is ever permanent. But one lesson the film delivers, without saying so, is that the battle to save neighborhoods can actually create communities.
“I knew that success was to keep the houses here, and keep the people here and interested in staying here,” Fox told the filmmakers. “I knew I had to create something that fascinated people: Look inside, internally, and see what we can do together.”
The area around 425 Westchester Avenue, site of a soon-to-be charter school and office building in the South Bronx. Developer AB Capstone funded the project primarily through opportunity zone capital from Starwood Opportunity Zone Fund.
In November 2018, Marlene Cintron, the Bronx’s head of economic development, stood up in front of a crowd of mostly developers and lawyers, as they sipped pitorro at the Port Morris Distillery. She was there to champion a federal tax break that promised to revitalize the borough.
“We have always been the most ignored,” Cintron said to her audience. “These opportunity zones are here for you to take advantage of them.”
This time last year, anticipation for the Trump tax policy was high in the Bronx, one of the poorest districts in the nation. The tax incentive, introduced in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, allows investors who fund business ventures or develop real estate in a designated low-income census tract called an opportunity zone to defer capital gains taxes on profits earned elsewhere and, in some cases, completely eliminate them on the new investment.
The Bronx has 74 of these zones. And brokers predicted that the kind of investments the tax incentive could attract would create an entirely new borough. But a year later, Cintron has all but soured on the program.
“It didn’t happen,” she says now.
The fervor around opportunity zones in the Bronx has shrunk from a clap to a whisper. In 2018, several high profile developers, including Brookfield Properties, Somerset Partners and Starwood Capital, set out to raise millions in their own respective Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds to invest in the Bronx. But if they invested that money in 2019, they did it quietly.
The end of last year marked a major deadline for the program. Those who invested funds into a project by 2019, wouldn’t be taxed at all for their capital gains on that investment if they waited until 2029 to sell. But the New Year came and went, and there are only two known development projects fully or partially funded by opportunity zone capital in the Bronx.
Enthusiasm around the federal program has fizzled, perhaps because of a lingering stigma against the Bronx, a shortage of available property, or treasury guidelines that are vague and uncertain.
“It’s not something a lot of people talk about,” Cintron said. “It’s not a sexy subject for anybody because it’s not necessarily working.”
The Bronx’s development isn’t slowing down, as investment continues to grow, but Cintron and several brokers all said the same thing: the investment hasn’t been accelerated by opportunity zones. The Bronx’s biggest projects were set in motion long before the federal program started.
A slow year
In 2018, Ariel Property Advisors’ Year-End Sales Report in the Bronx touted the benefits of the federal program, crediting the OZ tax policy for a huge increase (114 percent) in private and institutional investors. But in Ariel Property’s mid-year report for 2019, opportunity zones weren’t mentioned at all, even though investment in residential and commercial real estate continued to rise.
“We were surprised, even as brokers,” said Jason Gold, an Ariel Property broker. “There are more development sites being traded in the Bronx in the past two years than anytime before, but it’s not as much as we expected.”
It’s hard to actually attribute an uptick in investment to OZ capital. Because the federal policy has no reporting requirements, it’s difficult to track exactly where opportunity fund capital is going.
This is a problem with the policy that’s not limited to the Bronx, according to Scott O’Sullivan, a partner at accounting and advisory firm Margolin, Winer & Evens (MWE). At the beginning of 2020, MWE conducted a poll of real estate professionals who attended a panel discussion the firm held on Jan.15 in Manhattan. Over 75 percent of attendees said they had not yet invested in a Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund, although 39 percent said they plan to invest in the next six months.
There’s a lot of uncertainty around OZs, O’Sullivan says, particularly for a smaller investor. There’s a lack of transparency in how many qualified opportunity zone funds are out there and which ones are smartest to invest.
“It’s not like shopping for a car, where there are dealerships all along the street ready to tell you what to buy,” O’Sullivan says. “For the big players, the RXR Realty’s of the world, they have the in-house attorneys and the in-house tax people, but for the mom and pops, there’s still a lot of uncertainty to how Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds work.”
The tax policy is best suited for large investors with millions in capital gains, which there’s no shortage of as the stock market reaches all-time-highs. But as the New York Times pointed out, this means investment in opportunity zones is going to be aimed at projects that will reap the greatest returns, largely high-rise, market rate apartments.
Opportunity Zones across the nation have raised more than $6.7 billion since the program started, according to most recent Novogradac Opportunity Funds listing. But there has been some hesitation in investing that money, O’Sullivan says, because there’s no certainty that the program will still exist in 2029, when investors have to pay taxes on the money they’ve invested, or that the capital gains taxes in New York and on a federal level won’t have risen substantially. This is a particularly slow investment period, as investors are waiting to see what happens in the 2020 presidential election, O’Sullivan says.
There’s still positive buzz around the program though. At the start of February, the New York Post ran a story singing a similar tune to what was written a year before. “New York City may be on the cusp of a new multibillion-dollar investment boom.” The Post interviewed an investor out of Arizona who said he planned to allocate $250 million of new investments in areas including New York. RXR Realty also launched an opportunity zone fund aiming to raise $500 million to funnel into redevelopment of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and a project in New Rochelle.
In the Bronx, Brookfield Properties’ four-acre, $950-million development project that broke ground in December did use some investment from Brookfield’s opportunity fund, according to spokesman Andrew Brent.
“With the help of the Opportunity Zone program, Brookfield is cleaning acres of contaminated waterfront in Mott Haven and transforming land that has sat idle for decades into much needed housing,” Brent said.
But the massive waterfront project was set in motion nearly three years ago, before the land was designated an opportunity zone.
Most of the development that has already happened under OZ capital likely would have happened anyway in the Bronx, and Cintron said it was designed that way.
Nearly all of the Bronx qualifies to be an opportunity zone, as it’s one of the poorest counties in the nation.
“All they had to do was throw a couple of darts at a map and they would have been good,” Cintron said of the Empire State Development Corporation.
Instead, the Bronx EDC and the and the state ESD worked together in deciding where an opportunity zone would be the most valuable in the borough, Cintron said. Cintron said that the EDC looked at where projects were already starting and designated those areas as opportunity zones, so folks already investing in the borough could tap into opportunity fund capital.
The state’s ESD says it weighed input from Regional Economic Development Councils and local elected officials when deciding where to designate opportunity zones, but wouldn’t comment specifically on what Cintron said.
The Benedetto family, titans in New York City’s recycling industry, were able to lease their 250,000-square-foot tract of land in Port Morris to the highest bidder this year because the land’s position in an opportunity zone made the sale more attractive. But the family always had an intention to lease their property, according to their broker Randy Modell. He said the timing of the sale had nothing to do with opportunity zones.
“It was just a happy coincidence,” Modell said.
The most forthright example of Opportunity Zone investment in the Bronx in 2019 was Starwood Capital Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund’s investment in office space for a number of businesses in the South Bronx, as well as a charter school. While the money was useful for all parties, Ron Solarz, the broker who helped developer AB Capstone secure the equity from Starwood, said the project was already in motion before opportunity zones existed.
“The opportunity zone has nothing to do with what a developer decides to build.” Solarz said. “It was just the cherry on top. He wouldn’t have changed his plan at all.”
Gold also agrees that the existence of the opportunity zone policy doesn’t change much about whether the Bronx sees investment.
“People aren’t buying property in the Bronx because it’s in an opportunity zone,” Gold says. “The opportunity zone just adds to the story a little bit.”
No land
To be sure, the policy is new. And despite a passed deadline, there are still nine more years for investment to take hold. Gold said 2019 saw fewer development projects because of the new rent laws out of Albany, and trade war turmoil, but he expects to see many more developers take advantage of opportunity zone capital in 2020.
Developers might have nowhere to build, though. While the Bronx is known for having more available space than other boroughs, Cintron says, on top of many property owners being reluctant to sell, most of the available land in desirable neighborhoods like Hunts Point, Mott Haven or Port Morris is owned by the city.
About 1.4 square miles of city owned land in the Bronx is vacant. But Cintron says it’s been hard to negotiate with city officials to sell.
“There might be open space left, but it’s not for sale,” Cintron said. “In Hunts Point, the city of New York owns quite a bit of lots, but they want them for the garbage trucks, they want it for their stuff.”
Cintron’s space challenge tracks with the Bronx’s economic growth in 2019. The borough’s investment sales market increased 22 percent in the first half of 2019, but the volume of property sold decreased by 25 percent, according to Ariel Property Advisors’ 2019 Mid-Year Sales Report. But Gold says this has more to do with the cost of steel and other building materials going up because of international trade wars.
He says he still sees a lot of untapped resources in the Bronx. The problem, instead, is that long term investment in the borough is a bit of a gamble.
Shaking off the Bronx’s reputation
For many, the benefits of investing in the Bronx are still unknown, particularly investing opportunity zone capital. For an investor to benefit as much as they can from the tax policy, a project must have at least a nine-year longevity, and it must be able to turn a significant profit by 2029. In Brooklyn or Manhattan, a developer largely knows what kind of return they’ll get on their investment. In the Bronx, the waters are murky.
“I think it’s a big bet, because the Bronx still isn’t proven,” Gold said. “Businesses are thriving and more businesses are coming to the area, but can you still achieve the numbers you need to survive?”
As for opportunity zones bringing the essentials to low-income neighborhoods like Mott Haven, which proponents of the policy have promised, Cintron says she doesn’t see it. Developers want to look for the biggest projects, with the biggest long term gains.
“I don’t see it as a grocery store kind of policy. I’m quite frankly surprised someone was able to use it for a school,” Cintron says. “It was supposed to predominantly be about commercial development. It was a gift to the President’s Wall Street friends, one that we were willing to entertain as long as the community benefited.”
For residents of the South Bronx, barriers to development are welcomed. Cintron said that Brookfield deciding to develop in the neighborhood “was huge,” but community members like Welcome2TheBronx Editor-in-Chief Ed Conde don’t see it that way.
“There’s absolutely nothing positive about Brookfield,” Conde said. “Putting luxury housing in an area still puts pressure on the existing housing stock. It’s displacing people.”
Conde says he is starting to see a slow-down of building in the area, which might mean the neighborhood isn’t destined to be the next Williamsburg or Long Island City. But he still views gentrification of the South Bronx as inevitable, and opportunity zones will only continue to attract the wrong kind of development. Even the kind of development that the best side of the policy offers, Conde finds demeaning.
“Is that what we’re worth? A supermarket or menial retail jobs? Why do we have to wait for a developer to come in to get a school?” Conde says.
In the end, the policy hasn’t yielded what it promised for the borough. But if investors aren’t drawn to the borough, even with the tax incentives, Cintron says good riddance.
“We’re okay with them not coming if it’s not going to benefit our community,” she says.
The area around 425 Westchester Avenue, site of a soon-to-be charter school and office building in the South Bronx. Developer AB Capstone funded the project primarily through opportunity zone capital from Starwood Opportunity Zone Fund.
In November 2018, Marlene Cintron, the Bronx’s head of economic development, stood up in front of a crowd of mostly developers and lawyers, as they sipped pitorro at the Port Morris Distillery. She was there to champion a federal tax break that promised to revitalize the borough.
“We have always been the most ignored,” Cintron said to her audience. “These opportunity zones are here for you to take advantage of them.”
This time last year, anticipation for the Trump tax policy was high in the Bronx, one of the poorest districts in the nation. The tax incentive, introduced in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, allows investors who fund business ventures or develop real estate in a designated low-income census tract called an opportunity zone to defer capital gains taxes on profits earned elsewhere and, in some cases, completely eliminate them on the new investment.
The Bronx has 74 of these zones. And brokers predicted that the kind of investments the tax incentive could attract would create an entirely new borough. But a year later, Cintron has all but soured on the program.
“It didn’t happen,” she says now.
The fervor around opportunity zones in the Bronx has shrunk from a clap to a whisper. In 2018, several high profile developers, including Brookfield Properties, Somerset Partners and Starwood Capital, set out to raise millions in their own respective Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds to invest in the Bronx. But if they invested that money in 2019, they did it quietly.
The end of last year marked a major deadline for the program. Those who invested funds into a project by 2019, wouldn’t be taxed at all for their capital gains on that investment if they waited until 2029 to sell. But the New Year came and went, and there are only two known development projects fully or partially funded by opportunity zone capital in the Bronx.
Enthusiasm around the federal program has fizzled, perhaps because of a lingering stigma against the Bronx, a shortage of available property, or treasury guidelines that are vague and uncertain.
“It’s not something a lot of people talk about,” Cintron said. “It’s not a sexy subject for anybody because it’s not necessarily working.”
The Bronx’s development isn’t slowing down, as investment continues to grow, but Cintron and several brokers all said the same thing: the investment hasn’t been accelerated by opportunity zones. The Bronx’s biggest projects were set in motion long before the federal program started.
A slow year
In 2018, Ariel Property Advisors’ Year-End Sales Report in the Bronx touted the benefits of the federal program, crediting the OZ tax policy for a huge increase (114 percent) in private and institutional investors. But in Ariel Property’s mid-year report for 2019, opportunity zones weren’t mentioned at all, even though investment in residential and commercial real estate continued to rise.
“We were surprised, even as brokers,” said Jason Gold, an Ariel Property broker. “There are more development sites being traded in the Bronx in the past two years than anytime before, but it’s not as much as we expected.”
It’s hard to actually attribute an uptick in investment to OZ capital. Because the federal policy has no reporting requirements, it’s difficult to track exactly where opportunity fund capital is going.
This is a problem with the policy that’s not limited to the Bronx, according to Scott O’Sullivan, a partner at accounting and advisory firm Margolin, Winer & Evens (MWE). At the beginning of 2020, MWE conducted a poll of real estate professionals who attended a panel discussion the firm held on Jan.15 in Manhattan. Over 75 percent of attendees said they had not yet invested in a Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund, although 39 percent said they plan to invest in the next six months.
There’s a lot of uncertainty around OZs, O’Sullivan says, particularly for a smaller investor. There’s a lack of transparency in how many qualified opportunity zone funds are out there and which ones are smartest to invest.
“It’s not like shopping for a car, where there are dealerships all along the street ready to tell you what to buy,” O’Sullivan says. “For the big players, the RXR Realty’s of the world, they have the in-house attorneys and the in-house tax people, but for the mom and pops, there’s still a lot of uncertainty to how Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds work.”
The tax policy is best suited for large investors with millions in capital gains, which there’s no shortage of as the stock market reaches all-time-highs. But as the New York Times pointed out, this means investment in opportunity zones is going to be aimed at projects that will reap the greatest returns, largely high-rise, market rate apartments.
Opportunity Zones across the nation have raised more than $6.7 billion since the program started, according to most recent Novogradac Opportunity Funds listing. But there has been some hesitation in investing that money, O’Sullivan says, because there’s no certainty that the program will still exist in 2029, when investors have to pay taxes on the money they’ve invested, or that the capital gains taxes in New York and on a federal level won’t have risen substantially. This is a particularly slow investment period, as investors are waiting to see what happens in the 2020 presidential election, O’Sullivan says.
There’s still positive buzz around the program though. At the start of February, the New York Post ran a story singing a similar tune to what was written a year before. “New York City may be on the cusp of a new multibillion-dollar investment boom.” The Post interviewed an investor out of Arizona who said he planned to allocate $250 million of new investments in areas including New York. RXR Realty also launched an opportunity zone fund aiming to raise $500 million to funnel into redevelopment of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and a project in New Rochelle.
In the Bronx, Brookfield Properties’ four-acre, $950-million development project that broke ground in December did use some investment from Brookfield’s opportunity fund, according to spokesman Andrew Brent.
“With the help of the Opportunity Zone program, Brookfield is cleaning acres of contaminated waterfront in Mott Haven and transforming land that has sat idle for decades into much needed housing,” Brent said.
But the massive waterfront project was set in motion nearly three years ago, before the land was designated an opportunity zone.
Most of the development that has already happened under OZ capital likely would have happened anyway in the Bronx, and Cintron said it was designed that way.
Nearly all of the Bronx qualifies to be an opportunity zone, as it’s one of the poorest counties in the nation.
“All they had to do was throw a couple of darts at a map and they would have been good,” Cintron said of the Empire State Development Corporation.
Instead, the Bronx EDC and the and the state ESD worked together in deciding where an opportunity zone would be the most valuable in the borough, Cintron said. Cintron said that the EDC looked at where projects were already starting and designated those areas as opportunity zones, so folks already investing in the borough could tap into opportunity fund capital.
The state’s ESD says it weighed input from Regional Economic Development Councils and local elected officials when deciding where to designate opportunity zones, but wouldn’t comment specifically on what Cintron said.
The Benedetto family, titans in New York City’s recycling industry, were able to lease their 250,000-square-foot tract of land in Port Morris to the highest bidder this year because the land’s position in an opportunity zone made the sale more attractive. But the family always had an intention to lease their property, according to their broker Randy Modell. He said the timing of the sale had nothing to do with opportunity zones.
“It was just a happy coincidence,” Modell said.
The most forthright example of Opportunity Zone investment in the Bronx in 2019 was Starwood Capital Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund’s investment in office space for a number of businesses in the South Bronx, as well as a charter school. While the money was useful for all parties, Ron Solarz, the broker who helped developer AB Capstone secure the equity from Starwood, said the project was already in motion before opportunity zones existed.
“The opportunity zone has nothing to do with what a developer decides to build.” Solarz said. “It was just the cherry on top. He wouldn’t have changed his plan at all.”
Gold also agrees that the existence of the opportunity zone policy doesn’t change much about whether the Bronx sees investment.
“People aren’t buying property in the Bronx because it’s in an opportunity zone,” Gold says. “The opportunity zone just adds to the story a little bit.”
No land
To be sure, the policy is new. And despite a passed deadline, there are still nine more years for investment to take hold. Gold said 2019 saw fewer development projects because of the new rent laws out of Albany, and trade war turmoil, but he expects to see many more developers take advantage of opportunity zone capital in 2020.
Developers might have nowhere to build, though. While the Bronx is known for having more available space than other boroughs, Cintron says, on top of many property owners being reluctant to sell, most of the available land in desirable neighborhoods like Hunts Point, Mott Haven or Port Morris is owned by the city.
About 1.4 square miles of city owned land in the Bronx is vacant. But Cintron says it’s been hard to negotiate with city officials to sell.
“There might be open space left, but it’s not for sale,” Cintron said. “In Hunts Point, the city of New York owns quite a bit of lots, but they want them for the garbage trucks, they want it for their stuff.”
Cintron’s space challenge tracks with the Bronx’s economic growth in 2019. The borough’s investment sales market increased 22 percent in the first half of 2019, but the volume of property sold decreased by 25 percent, according to Ariel Property Advisors’ 2019 Mid-Year Sales Report. But Gold says this has more to do with the cost of steel and other building materials going up because of international trade wars.
He says he still sees a lot of untapped resources in the Bronx. The problem, instead, is that long term investment in the borough is a bit of a gamble.
Shaking off the Bronx’s reputation
For many, the benefits of investing in the Bronx are still unknown, particularly investing opportunity zone capital. For an investor to benefit as much as they can from the tax policy, a project must have at least a nine-year longevity, and it must be able to turn a significant profit by 2029. In Brooklyn or Manhattan, a developer largely knows what kind of return they’ll get on their investment. In the Bronx, the waters are murky.
“I think it’s a big bet, because the Bronx still isn’t proven,” Gold said. “Businesses are thriving and more businesses are coming to the area, but can you still achieve the numbers you need to survive?”
As for opportunity zones bringing the essentials to low-income neighborhoods like Mott Haven, which proponents of the policy have promised, Cintron says she doesn’t see it. Developers want to look for the biggest projects, with the biggest long term gains.
“I don’t see it as a grocery store kind of policy. I’m quite frankly surprised someone was able to use it for a school,” Cintron says. “It was supposed to predominantly be about commercial development. It was a gift to the President’s Wall Street friends, one that we were willing to entertain as long as the community benefited.”
For residents of the South Bronx, barriers to development are welcomed. Cintron said that Brookfield deciding to develop in the neighborhood “was huge,” but community members like Welcome2TheBronx Editor-in-Chief Ed Conde don’t see it that way.
“There’s absolutely nothing positive about Brookfield,” Conde said. “Putting luxury housing in an area still puts pressure on the existing housing stock. It’s displacing people.”
Conde says he is starting to see a slow-down of building in the area, which might mean the neighborhood isn’t destined to be the next Williamsburg or Long Island City. But he still views gentrification of the South Bronx as inevitable, and opportunity zones will only continue to attract the wrong kind of development. Even the kind of development that the best side of the policy offers, Conde finds demeaning.
“Is that what we’re worth? A supermarket or menial retail jobs? Why do we have to wait for a developer to come in to get a school?” Conde says.
In the end, the policy hasn’t yielded what it promised for the borough. But if investors aren’t drawn to the borough, even with the tax incentives, Cintron says good riddance.
“We’re okay with them not coming if it’s not going to benefit our community,” she says.
United Africa United Football Club is a soccer team made up of newly immigrated African teenagers to the Bronx. It was founded in 2010 with 22 players and has more than 150 alumni.
The coach Abrourazakou Bawa surveys practice field to get ready for the next opponent, Bawa grew up boxing in his native Mali, and watched YouTube instructional videos to learn how to coach soccer. 
Kelvin Akisi is a senior in high school and he is the comic relief for the team. He missed a few practices for the Regents Review, a program that prepares students for a college entrance exam.
