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South Bronx

Harlem/Bx NYCHA Buildable Area

Map posted June 9, 2010

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Lower Concourse Workers

Map posted May 25, 2010

The unofficial downtown of the Bronx is home to courts, government offices, Yankee Stadium, and retail, and served by multiple transit options. The diversity of employment and transportation choices is reflected in how commuters get to work and especially in the heavy use of transit. Most commuters from other boroughs take the subway.

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Blueprint America: Road to the Future

Media posted May 26, 2009

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Inclusionary Zoning

Project posted April 29, 2009

Brad Lander at the IZ Press Conference

A Powerful Tool for the Creation of Affordable Housing

During his first term in office, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced expansive plans to rezone more than twenty New York City communities – including the Far West Side of Manhattan, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Long Island City, and parts of the South Bronx. As originally proposed, the plans were poised to generate more than 50,000 new units of housing, almost all of them for rent or sale at market rates. 

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Greening the South Bronx

Page posted April 16, 2009

Grassroots organizations in the South Bronx have made environmental justice a central part of their agenda for community revitalization. The Pratt Center has been there with them from the beginning, providing mapping, architecture and urban planning resources that have allowed neighborhood organizations to build a greener, healthier environment in neighborhoods that have carried more than their fair share of the city's polluting facilities. Sewage treatment plants, waste transfer stations, truck highways, wholesale markets, power plants, gas and oil depots—the South Bronx hosts essential infrastructure that allows the New York City region to function but that also leaves the surrounding neighborhoods with New York City's highest asthma rates and a diminished quality of life.

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Sheridan Expressway

Project posted April 16, 2009

The Pratt Center is working, as part of the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance, on a collaborative vision for demolishing the underutilized Sheridan Expressway and replacing it with affordable housing, green open space, and other amenities. New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff has called the Sheridan plan one of the best models in the nation for reclaiming America's cities.

Removing the Sheridan would allow over 1,200 units of new housing, plus 500,000 square feet of commercial, community, and light industrial space to be developed on its footprint. The plan routes truck traffic along a new overpass and reconnects local streets to the waterfront, including the new Concrete Plant Park on a former industrial site.

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Tax-exempt bonds for Yankee Stadium

Testimony last updated January 15, 2009

Statement in Opposition to Additional Proposed Tax-Exempt Bonds for Yankee Stadium
Testimony to the New York City Industrial Development Agency

Joan Byron
Pratt Center for Community Development
January 15, 2009
The Pratt Center joins Good Jobs New York, and the South Bronx-based organizations testifying here today, in opposing the issuance of $371 million in new tax-exempt bonds to cover additional construction costs for Yankee Stadium.

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Hunts Point Rezoning

Testimony last updated June 17, 2008

Testimony to the City Council Committee on Zoning and Franchises Special Hunts Point District, Bronx (C080248ZMX)

Joan Byron
Director, Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative
Pratt Center for Community Development
June 17, 2008

My name is Joan Byron; I am the Director of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative of the Pratt Center for Community and Environmental Development. The Pratt Center works for a more just, equitable, and sustainable city for all New Yorkers, by empowering communities to plan for and realize their futures. We are especially proud to have supported the work of Hunts Point and other South Bronx organizations since the early 1990s in the many battles they have fought for environmental justice; Hunts Point bears more than its share of the burdens of the infrastructure and land uses that make New York City's density and vitality possible, to the daily cost of the people who live, work, and breathe in the shadow of highways, electric power plants, sewage treatment and sludge pelletization facilities, and dozens of waste transfer stations and waste handling facilities.

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Reinventing America's Cities: The Time is Now

Media posted April 20, 2009

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