In the South Bronx, Blight Returns to a Rehabilitated Block

The four-story wreck that is 920 Kelly Street is a South Bronx time machine for Harry De Rienzo. Its broken windows, garbage-choked halls, mold-mottled rooms and smoky stench remind him of what much of the area looked like nearly 35 years ago, when he first arrived to work at a settlement house.  Back then, 920 was among a handful of tidy buildings maintained by a landlord who was struggling against the arson and abandonment encroaching all around. His pluck inspired Mr. De Rienzo to organize the block and its beleaguered residents into the Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, which renovated three crumbling buildings on the street and started Mr. De Rienzo on a career providing housing for poor and working people.

Half a lifetime later, Mr. De Rienzo is back on the block. But this time he is trying to save 920 and four neighboring buildings, which have fallen into such disrepair that they are considered among the city’s worst, with more than 2,000 housing code violations among them.

If Kelly Street was once an outpost of hope, Mr. De Rienzo and others worry that it may now be a harbinger of trouble for the South Bronx and beyond. In the feverish real estate speculation of the past decade, buildings like these were passed back and forth among landlords and banks. But since the bubble burst, the properties have fallen into financial limbo; many owners cannot keep up on mortgage payments, much less repairs.

“This is a real big problem,” said Mr. De Rienzo, 57, a plain-spoken, streetwise New Yorker who is now chief executive of Banana Kelly. “They thought they could always cash out their equity and flip the property. But when the recession hit, that kind of predatory investing stopped — and the tenants got stuck.”

Back in 1976, the fires that would incinerate so much of the South Bronx had begun to nip around the edges of Kelly Street when Mr. De Rienzo, fresh out of Manhattan College, started working at the settlement house, Casita Maria, running a basketball program.

Cooling down after games, he chatted with residents about the neighborhood, where a near-bankrupt city was taking over scores of tax-delinquent and abandoned buildings, but doing little to make them livable.

He befriended Leon Potts, whose father, Frank, a hard-working jack-of-all-trades, owned several buildings on Kelly, living with his family in one of them.

“Potts was totally at variance with everything that was going on in the South Bronx at the time,” Mr. De Rienzo said. “Here was a landlord who was staying put. He used to wake up at 5 in the morning to go to work on the trucks in Hunts Point. Then he’d come back and work on his buildings. He’d be so tired, sometimes I saw him sitting on the stoop, too tired to walk up three steps to his apartment.”

It was wrenching for Mr. De Rienzo to watch adjoining buildings go vacant, but he saw them as an opportunity.

“The city had written off the area,” he said. “Landlords had run away. So all we could do was sweat equity and do it for ourselves, since nobody else was going to do it.”

By the end of the 1970s, the three buildings that prompted the formation of Banana Kelly had been renovated and were being run by tenants. The organization expanded into social services and education. Mr. De Rienzo went to law school, and then to work for a foundation that supported community-based housing groups. And Mr. Potts, long the mainstay of his block, sold his buildings and moved away.

Today, to tour the blocks around Kelly Street is to see a world transformed. On Longwood Avenue, neat brick town houses line the wide street. Modest apartments have risen from empty lots. Even Little Korea, a stretch of Fox Street notorious for its murders, looks suburban with its boxy white homes.

Banana Kelly, the group that helped with the rebirth, did not fare so well. Mr. De Rienzo and others watched with alarm throughout the 1990s as the group sought international attention for its ideas on urban development while neglecting the housing that had been its original mission. In 2002 the state attorney general, spurred by complaints of mismanagement, forced out the group’s leadership.

As part of the deal, Mr. De Rienzo was coaxed into returning temporarily to get the group back on solid financial ground. He wound up staying on.

This year, conditions in the old Potts properties became so bad that two advocacy groups, Mothers on the Move and the Urban Justice Center, began speaking with tenants and city officials. In recent years, the city had placed four of the five buildings in a program that made emergency repairs and then billed the landlord.