Organizing the South Bronx (SUNY Series on the New Inequalities)

By Jim Rooney

Book Overview

This is a story of heroic and articulate individuals who were able to defy overwhelming odds and build affordable housing in the South Bronx. It is about the process of teaching citizens in a low-income neighborhood how to participate in public life.

Very little is written about the catastrophic and precipitous collapse of the South Bronx, although its fate is universally cited as emblematic of urban hopelessness. This inquiry focuses on community organizers who are sifting through the wreckage and making progress in battling an inept municipal government and the centrifugal forces of decay. The locus is a coalition of forty minority congregations, who battled the city of New York for vacant land in order to build owner-occupied row houses. This is a study of how to educate adults in a democracy to find their voice and wield the power that is inherent in large numbers of organized citizens.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0791422097
• ISBN13: 9780791422090
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Organizing the South Bronx, by Jim Rooney

I recall reding this book about 4 years ago. My recollection is that Rooney did a good job of explaining how he came to study education in the Bronx and discovered Industrial Area Foundation organizing in the South Bronx around the issues of better public education and affordable housing in particular. I thought he did a good job of gaining valuable access to the organization, its leaders and organizers. His interviews and insights were very interesting. I must admit being of a fan of this kind of Faith-based organizing myself having seen it be effective in Chicago as it has been in Rooney's description of the Bronx. Faith-based plus other institutions can democratically improve neighborhoods and revitalize citizen democracy in all types of neighborhoods from the Bronx to Westchester County.