Key Ingredient in Bronx Rebirth: The Picket Fence

Before dawn 14 years ago, Edward Logue stood nervously in the bitter cold on a street corner in the South Bronx, awaiting a small caravan of trucks.

The trucks were carrying the pieces of two modular homes across the George Washington Bridge from a factory in Pennsylvania to Charlotte Street, where Logue had decided to erect a handful of suburban-style private houses, complete with white picket fences.

It was the worst possible location--a wasteland so desolate it served as a mandatory stage setting for presidents and lesser politicians bemoaning America’s urban crisis.

On Wednesday, President Clinton toured the neighborhood of Charlotte Gardens, where 89 tidy suburban-style homes now stand, symbolizing what urban strategists say is not only a rebirth of the Bronx, but of inner-city development across the country.

“Look at where the Bronx was when [President] Carter came here in despair,” Clinton said after his tour. “Look at where the Bronx was when President Reagan came here and compared it to London in the Blitz. And look at the Bronx today.”

Mitchell Sviridoff, a major player in the original project, said the president told him privately: “You had the right idea back then. It was a gamble, but a good one.”

Logue, a builder, was backed by a team of community activists, foundations and government officials. What ensued is now a template for public-private partnerships in scores of cities.

According to the Center for National Policy, a Washington study group, the latest available statistics show the number of community development corporations has grown from 200 or more in 1970 to more than 2,000.

In the South Bronx alone, more than $1 billion worth of housing has been built or renovated.

“Charlotte Street was a pioneer, a leading edge of this phenomenon,” said Maureen S. Steinbruner, the Center for National Policy’s president.

“The whole idea of home ownership in poverty areas was born on Charlotte Street,” said Anita Miller, an urban strategist who worked closely with Logue on the project. “We tore down all the stereotypes with this effort.”

“One of the most important lessons is the discovery how this is universally applicable,” said Paul Grogan, president of the Local Initiatives Support Corp., which funded the first houses with a $125,000 grant. “ . . . It means if the South Bronx has come back, what area can’t come back?”

None of that was obvious when Logue decided to build on the rubble. He had been summoned to New York first by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and had functioned as an urban czar, sprinkling New York state, Johnny Appleseed-style, with projects.

By 1983 he was director of the South Bronx Development Corp., a public-private partnership set up with city participation to rebuild the Bronx. Angered at the parade of politicians who came to Charlotte Street to pose for portraits of despair, he turned to the Local Initiatives Support Corp., a not-for-profit organization that began operating in 1980 with the backing of the Ford Foundation, businesses and banks.

LISC came up with the initial funding, but official skepticism was so great that the city originally only granted a one-year lease for the land for the first two model homes. Logue feistily went ahead and poured the foundations for 70 more homes. “Let’s see what these people do,” he said.

City officials reasoned, who in their right minds would want to move to the South Bronx?

It turned out lots of people.

The project’s sponsors received 2,500 inquiries and 507 applications from potential buyers for the first batch of homes, which sold for prices ranging from $49,975 for one model with a full basement and $44,975 for a house with 1 1/2 baths.

Just recently, one of the houses in Charlotte Gardens sold for $185,000.

To qualify for the 30-year mortgage, buyers then had to show they had a $5,000 down payment and $3,400 in closing fees. They also had to be screened by the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes Community Housing Corp., sponsors of the project.

“It says the most successful form of housing in this country is owner-occupied housing,” Logue happily proclaimed as the applications flowed in. “It says to me our government has been on the wrong track for 50 years.”

Urban experts say time has proved Logue and others who believed in the project to be right. And new lessons have been learned.

“In order to keep all these houses viable, one had to look beyond brick and mortar,” said Miller, now program director of the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program, a consortium of foundations, businesses and banks dedicated to neighborhood rebirth and improvement.

“What you had almost was a new community without doctors, parks or playgrounds, without adequate shopping, linkages to employment,” she said. “ . . . One of the biggest challenges was to rebuild the social fabric of the neighborhood.”

From the experience of Charlotte Gardens, CCRP learned that a broader approach was needed to turn neighborhoods around after housing was improved.

LISC, Charlotte Gardens’ original funder, has prospered. The organization has 40 offices across the country and will give over half a billion dollars this year in grants, low-interest loans and investments to community development corporations.

Over the last 10 years, LISC has directly invested about $150 million in Los Angeles, helping to create about 5,000 homes in such neighborhoods as South Central, West Hollywood, Venice and Little Tokyo, among others.

Today, former City Councilman Michael Woo will become LISC’s new local director, heading a $35-million redevelopment campaign next year.

In San Diego, LISC has invested more than $22 million in the last seven years, creating 1,200 new homes and apartments, said director Anne Wilson.

In addition to praising Charlotte Gardens on Wednesday, Clinton used the trip to lobby for a role for the federal government in the “urban renaissance” he said is taking place across the nation.

He announced plans to ask Congress to increase by $45 million funding for the federal community development financial bank, which makes loans to individuals to start or expand businesses in low income areas. The president also said his administration is providing $96 million for low-income housing in New York City and $50 million in low-interest small-business loans in the Bronx.

“Government has to be a partner to get it right,” Clinton said. “We can give you the tools . . . so you can have the power to change your own lives,” he told several hundred people at a Boys and Girls Club near the Charlotte Gardens site.

Some residents who listened to the president said that although the Bronx certainly has improved, much remains to be accomplished.

“For years, we’ve gotten attention when something tragic happened,” said Antonio Shy, 37, a coordinator at a day-care center who has lived in the Bronx for a decade. “Now there’s something good coming out of the Bronx.”

Fourteen years after the first houses were erected on Charlotte Street, the president’s visit provided a reunion for many veterans of the project.

Absent, however, was Logue.

“Ed is very proud of what happened on Charlotte Street,” said his wife, Margaret, from their home in Massachusetts. She said her husband was in Boston on business. “He follows it from afar, but with great interest.”

Times staff writer Vanessa Hua contributed to this story from Los Angeles.