Still Plagued by Multiple Ills, South Bronx Is Slowly Rising From Ashes : Urban renewal: Along with housing, the retail sector is reviving. Of six prime city-owned retail sites, five have been awarded to developers.

When Elsa Ortiz lived in an East Harlem housing project, where crime kept her a prisoner in her 17th-floor apartment, there was one place she always thought was worse: the South Bronx.

“I used to hate it. It looked like a dump. All these empty lots around. All these burned buildings.”

But life takes unexpected turns, and Ortiz, 31, is now happily settled with her husband, her parents and her two little boys in a two-family row house in--yes--the South Bronx.

On a recent evening she proudly showed off her home.

There were three bedrooms--one with a walk-in closet!--two bathrooms, a living room, a dining room, a laundry room and a kitchen with yards of counter space. Family photos crowded the walls, plastic runners covered the pinkish carpet and a locked gate protected the car.

In the past few years, scores of developments like this one have sprung up alongside the vacant lots strewn with whiskey bottles and old tires.

The South Bronx is struggling to reinvent itself after the fires of the 1970s and the drugs of the 1980s. It is still plagued by crime, poverty and patronage-based politics, but there are signs of hope.

Along with housing, the retail sector is reviving. The city’s Economic Development Corp. put out Requests for Proposals for the development of six prime city-owned retail sites, and five have been awarded to developers.

Bernard Rosenshein, a New Rochelle-based developer who recently persuaded the Bradlee’s discount chain to open a 170,000-square-foot store in the South Bronx, is bullish on the area.

“The perception of the South Bronx being so negative is ill-wonted,” he said. “It’s a very active retail area. The streets are crowded with shoppers. And there are a lot of projects on the board.”

Not everyone agrees about how to repair the place that has served as a backdrop for politicians from President Jimmy Carter to HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros as they vowed to tackle the ills of urban America.

For instance, many activists dislike the relatively low density of developments like Thurston Plaza, the one where the Ortiz family lives. They say the one- and two-family houses are too expensive for the area and do not re-create the vibrant urban community that once existed there.

They point to the cold metal fences, the condos that turn in on a central courtyard and not out onto the street.

“I’m sure the families in there are safe but it doesn’t contribute to any kind of street life,” said Richard Kahan, the chairman of an alternative urban renewal project called Bronx Center.

Eugenie Birch, a city Planning Commission member who has passed judgment on the new Bronx developments, agreed that concerns about density and fortress-like looks have merit.

“It’s a tough call, quite frankly,” she said. “I myself have been torn. . . . You’ve got to have compensating amenities that will attract families there.”

The New York City Housing Partnership, the nonprofit housing arm of the New York City Partnership, a group of business leaders, has sponsored the development of about 2,700 housing units in the South Bronx. Another 1,000 are scheduled for construction starting this year or next.

With land donated by the city, tax abatements and public and private subsidies, Partnership homes are cheap--in some cases unbelievably cheap--by New York standards. At one new project, Melrose Court, three-bedroom condominiums are selling for $73,000 and two-bedroom units for $56,000.

Buyers of Partnership homes have an average family income $35,000 a year. But the median family income in the Bronx is $21,944. In the 16th Congressional District, which encompasses most of the borough’s southern sections, it’s $15,060.

“People know this housing is not for them,” said Harry De Rienzo, a longtime Bronx housing activist. Such developments tell those who can afford them, “ ‘We value you, and the rest of you can go to hell.’ This creates tensions.”

De Rienzo is on the steering committee of Bronx Center, which envisions a different future for the South Bronx.

Imagine an urban renewal that rebuilds without removing anyone, that provides housing “designed to meet the needs of existing residents regardless of income level” and also to attract newcomers. Imagine a plan that creates jobs and brings back the kind of neighborhood where people spend long summer nights gossiping on their stoops. And, to top it off, that induces George Steinbrenner to keep the Yankees in the Bronx.

It sounds utopian but it’s what Bronx activists, with help from Borough President Fernando Ferrer, are trying to do.

Bronx Center encompasses a 300-block chunk of the South Bronx including Yankee Stadium, the borough’s courthouses and art museum, a busy shopping center and residential areas. It also is the name for an organization and a plan for a revitalized Bronx “Downtown.”

A big component of the project, some 1,700 units of mixed-income housing called Melrose Commons, is now before the Planning Commission.

The city’s original redevelopment plan for Melrose Commons “was based on the assumption that there was almost no one left in the bombed-out area, and the ones who were left were the weakest, who hadn’t left because they couldn’t leave,” said Kahan, of Bronx Center.

“It was commonly accepted practice to relocate all of them,” he said, and the most vocal coalesced in a group that designed the plan now under review.

In 1975, De Rienzo was a social worker in a settlement house in the part of the Bronx called Fort Apache. The district went from a population of 80,600 in 1970 to 34,400 in 1980, he said.

“That’s when the fires were going,” he recalled. “When I started working there it was full of life. . . . By 1980 it looked like Dresden. It was like a war hit it.”

The pendulum has swung; by 1990 the district’s population was back up to 39,500. While De Rienzo and Nos Quedamos may have a different vision for the South Bronx from Elsa Ortiz’s, all of them want to stay there and make it work.

It was Ortiz’s husband, Jorge, who told her, “They’re building beautiful houses! You should see them!”

“I said, ‘What for? Only negative people live there. Only gangs.’ Now I don’t want to leave the Bronx.”