My Love Letter to the Bronx: What Happened to Us?
I have spent my entire life in the Bronx.
I was born here. Raised here. My roots are right here on 194th Street and Decatur Avenue. The Bronx isn’t just where I live, it’s part of who I am. It shaped me, challenged me, and taught me what community looks like. That’s why it’s so hard to watch the place I love struggle in ways that feel both familiar and entirely new.
Lately, I’ve found myself asking a question that I can’t seem to answer.
What came first….the chicken or the egg?
Does the condition of our borough reflect the people who live here? Or does it reflect years of leadership that has failed to protect, invest in, and inspire our communities? Or, if we’re being honest, is it a combination of both?
Before we can answer that question, we also have to be honest about our history.
The Bronx didn’t arrive here overnight.
Long before today’s conversations about public safety, sanitation, or quality of life, our borough experienced decades of disinvestment. The 1970s became synonymous with “The Bronx is Burning,” but that wasn’t simply a story about buildings on fire. It was the visible result of policies that allowed entire neighborhoods to be abandoned, families to be displaced, public services to deteriorate, and hope to slowly disappear. Entire generations grew up feeling like the Bronx had been written off.
When a community is neglected long enough, that neglect doesn’t just damage buildings, it begins to shape expectations. People stop believing they deserve better. They stop expecting clean streets, thriving parks, or responsive leadership because they’ve spent decades being shown otherwise.
Maybe that’s the hardest part of all. Physical neighborhoods can be rebuilt far more easily than a community’s belief in itself.
When I was a child, seeing crack vials and discarded needles on the sidewalk wasn’t unusual. As the years went by, it felt like we were making progress. The streets became cleaner. There was hope that we were turning a corner.
Today, it feels like we’re slipping backward.
Needles and drug paraphernalia are becoming common sights again. A few years back, a truck regularly parked near Poe Park to distribute clean drug-use supplies. I understood the public health argument behind it, but I couldn’t help wondering: Was this the best we could offer? Were we treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease? Where was the equal investment in recovery, prevention, mental health, housing, and hope?
Then there’s the dumping.
Somewhere along the way, parts of my neighborhood became a place where people feel comfortable dropping off mattresses, broken furniture, air conditioners, and whatever else they no longer want. They don’t live here, but they leave their trash here, because I guess to the naked eye, we already live there in squalor so if we don’t give a fuck why should they?🤷🏾♀️
And then there’s the dog shit.
I know it seems small compared to everything else, but it’s not. It says something about how we value the spaces we all share. Every day people walk past sidewalks and tree beds covered in dog shit, and somewhere along the way we accepted that as normal. I can’t accept that. I refuse to believe that’s the standard our community should settle for.
Our tree beds tell another story.
The overwhelming majority are neglected, filled with litter, weeds, and dog shit instead of flowers, greenery, or signs of neighborhood pride. Organizations like Bronx Is Blooming, Big Reuse, GreenUp, and others are doing incredible work across the borough, but too often neighborhoods like mine seem to be left out of those conversations. Why?
These aren’t rhetorical questions.
They’re questions I genuinely wrestle with because I love this borough enough to ask them.
Is this a leadership problem? Is it a community problem? Have residents become so accustomed to dysfunction that we’ve become desensitized and just stopped expecting better? Or have people stopped believing leadership will ever deliver it?
Maybe it’s all of those things, because they can absolutely all be true at once
What I do know is this: I don’t write these words from a place of criticism. I write them from a place of love.
Because when you love something, you don’t ignore its flaws, you confront them.
I have seen what happens when neighbors organize. I’ve watched blocks transform because ordinary people refused to wait for someone else to fix them. I’ve seen children reclaim streets through Open Streets. I’ve watched tree beds come back to life. I’ve seen strangers become neighbors simply because someone decided to care first.
That’s the Bronx I know.
That’s the Bronx I believe in.
This isn’t a love letter because I think the Bronx is perfect.
It’s a love letter because I believe we’re worth fighting for.
Maybe the better question isn’t whether leadership failed us or whether we’ve failed ourselves.
Maybe the question is: What are each of us willing to do to make sure the next generation inherits a Bronx that’s better than the one we have today?
Because I still believe paradise isn’t something you find.
Sometimes, it’s something you build.
