To a lot of readers, I may seem an odd one to be writing about the state of America's urban areas. It's no surprise to anyone who has been reading my work for more than about the last six minutes that I prefer rural life. I had a mostly rural youth, and while I lived and worked in urban areas for many years, now I'm back where I belong, in a house out in the woods. Oh, we have our issues out here in the boonies as well; every place does. But all in all, most of us stick together, look out for one another, and get by pretty well.
So why am I concerned about America's cities? Because, throughout America's history, the cities have been vital parts of the American culture, the American way of life, and of American prosperity. For many years, America's great cities were the world's great cities: San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, just to name a few. But these cities are now falling apart; under decades of Democrat rule, they have fallen far and fast, to the point where they may be beyond the point of no return.
Case in point: The neighborhood in New York City they call the "Broadway of the Bronx."
A seedy South Bronx neighborhood dubbed the “Broadway of the Bronx” remains a grimy, trash-strewn nightmare, crawling with garbage, strung-out junkies and used syringes — more than a year after The Post blew the whistle on the unsightly “Hub.”
“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it,” neighborhood resident Margarita Rivera, a 70-year-old retired teacher, said Wednesday.
“This is called the Roberto Clemente Plaza. It’s in his honor. He must be turning over in his grave,” she said of the baseball great.
“It’s disgusting. It’s horrible, horrible. I try not to walk by here anymore. I don’t even come here to shop anymore. I avoid this area.”
The reputation of the South Bronx has never been what you'd call stellar. But recent years have not been kind to this urban neighborhood; watch:
So why is this happening? The area's Congressman, Ritchie Torres (D-NY), has some thoughts.The Post, which exposed the unkempt neighborhood in a report last year, revisited the area after a troubling report on the commercial hub was released Wednesday by US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx).
“The City of New York has fundamentally failed to deliver a durable solution to a crisis that continues to spiral out of control,” he said. “The city’s response has amounted to little more than a game of whack-a-mole — briefly suppressing illicit activity, only for the drug market to re-emerge with greater intensity.”
That's all fine, flowery talk, but it's short on solutions. What we might note - and Congressman Torres won't - is that this is a fundamental failure of government, but in the neighborhood, borough, city, and state levels, that government is uniformly Democrat.
What isn't happening is someone taking responsibility for getting the junkies off the streets and into a rehab program. This has to happen; it's a large part of the decline in this area, and while I'm as staunch a proponent of liberty and individual choice as you're liable to find on this side of a Heinlein novel, this is different. Not only is this a matter of public safety, it's also a matter of basic health and sanitation:
A 50-year-old local store maintenance worker identifying himself only as Mamadou said he has to keep a close eye on the neighborhood junkies, who have a tendency to relieve themselves in and around his store.
“They pee and they poop over there,” he said. “They’re around my store, the exit area. Every day I have to clean around there. If they don’t see anybody they poop on the escalator.
The left, and make no mistake about it, it is the left that governs here, loves to go on about how compassionate they are. But if we are to gauge our response to this mess on compassion alone, which course is more compassionate: Leaving the junkies on the street to eventually overdose and die, and in the meantime to cause havoc on the streets? Or to place them in some rehab program, involuntarily if need be, to get them cleaned up, dried out, and in treatment if necessary?
The area's New York State assemblyman, one Amanda Septimo, is in utter denial.
But State Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo, who also represents The Hub, said it’s “a zoning matter.”
“That is the heart of the issue,” she said. “You can’t police your way out of this problem.”
What utter fertilizer. This is fundamentally a policing problem. There is law-breaking going on every day, in plain sight, and the city does nothing. There is no "zoning" solution here.
It's become very apparent that the city's and the state's current leadership is incapable of any meaningful action here. The question is this: Are the voters still capable of any such action?
See Also: Will America Last Beyond 250 Years? I Think It Will.
Are Our Cities Now Past the Point of No Return?
There is one primary purpose of government, one role that they are morally, legally, and constitutionally mandated to carry out: Protecting the liberty and property of the citizens. In the South Bronx, as in so many other urban areas, every level of government has failed. It's time for new leadership; it's time that the voters in these cities looked beyond the Santa Claus promises of the left and took a good, hard look at alternatives.
Until and if that happens, our cities will continue to decline.
