Transferred

One City block passed between City agencies: a hospital, a tow pound, a jail, and a lot marked for housing.

The study area

Mott Haven is at the southern end of the Bronx, across the Harlem River from Manhattan. The City’s own neighborhood geography combines it with Port Morris; its community district, Bronx 1, adds Melrose. The Major Deegan Expressway runs along its western edge, and the Bruckner Expressway along its southern and eastern sides.1

The study area is Mott Haven between East 138th and East 149th Streets, from the Grand Concourse to the Bruckner: about 1,600 tax lots around the jail site. Its edges are streets, not neighborhood lines, so it takes in blocks the City’s own geography counts as Melrose. It is where the City’s management of time can be read parcel by parcel.

Here the conditions this project follows meet, often on the same blocks: the expansion of carceral infrastructure, with a jail under construction in a district that already holds a police precinct, a juvenile detention center and shelters; property speculation, and developers rezoning lots for new housing; and the displacement of residents through vacate orders, shelter closures and rents set against incomes far above the neighborhood’s. Each runs on its own clock: a jail with a completion date, after-hours permits issued fourteen days at a time or less, vacate orders that set no date for return. The people who live here live with all of them at once.

Some of what this project follows lies beyond the study area, in the rest of Community District 1. Where a figure covers the whole district, it says so.

Every figure below is a count of parcels or of records, not of people. The record counts land. Where a household appears in it, it appears because a lot did.

One block, four uses

One block carries most of what this page is about.

It held the old Lincoln Hospital. A Sanborn fire insurance plate, drawn around 1908, places the hospital complex on this block. It is a private atlas, made for underwriters, and it is the earliest record this project cites that puts the hospital here.2

It became a police tow pound. The disposition ran through the City’s land use review procedure in 1981–82, as a single application.3

It is now two lots. The instrument that divided it is not among the records this project holds; DURATION sets out what is known. One lot is a jail under construction. The other has not been built on.4

Four uses, and only two of the transitions have a City document behind them. The hospital is placed by a fire insurance map drawn by a private company for underwriters. The tow pound is placed by a City land use action with a number. The only date this project holds for the hospital’s departure, 1976, comes secondhand, from a land use filing made in 2019. What closed it is in no record this project holds, and that absence is examined in THE GAP rather than filled in here.5

Housing designated on the jail site, 2019

The second lot carries Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, Options 1 and 3, adopted on 17 October 2019 by the Department of Correction’s own text amendment.6

MIH requires a share of any new housing on a lot to be permanently affordable. Here it was adopted through the jail’s own approvals, on the lot beside the jail.

Housing built through these programs is let by lottery, through the City’s Housing Connect system. Applicants apply building by building. Each application is given a random number, and the building works down the list in that order. Eligibility depends on household size and income, set as a percentage of the Area Median Income (AMI), a regional figure far above incomes in Mott Haven.7

AMI is the benchmark the City uses to set what income-restricted housing rents for. It is derived from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s income limits for the New York region and adjusted for household size. In 2026, 100 percent of AMI for a family of three is $152,700. HUD’s own median family income for the region is $104,300. In ZIP code 10454, which covers Mott Haven and Port Morris, the median household income is $24,086.8

“I know AMI is tremendously flawed. We all do. But we have to deal with it right now. And so you can see that AMI is 23% for the neighborhood. They like to use family of three — so that means a family of three in this neighborhood is making around 34,000, 35,000.”

“When they had their quote-unquote affordable housing lottery, the minimum income for somebody to qualify for that affordable housing lottery is $86,500. That’s crazy...People in this neighborhood are not making that.”

Planned shrinkage, 1976

In 1976 the head of the City’s own housing agency, Roger Starr, publicly proposed what he called “planned shrinkage”: withdrawing City services from the neighborhoods losing the most people. It was denounced at a public hearing before the Board of Estimate, and the City Planning Commission dissociated itself from it.9 Inside City government, withdrawing services from a neighborhood could be proposed openly, as a plan.

The plan was disowned. Between 1970 and 1980 the population of Community District 1 fell from 138,557 to 78,441, by more than two-fifths; the Bronx as a whole lost 302,729 people, a fifth of the borough.10

Two deeds, 8 August 1978

On 8 August 1978, a district’s worth of land changed hands on two deeds.

The larger deed moved 3,747 lots on 1,110 blocks across the Bronx. Inside the blocks this project’s land-records search covers, the two deeds together moved 1,447 lots on 298 blocks.11

A deed is a record of one transaction between two parties. Two of them, covering that much ground, is a transaction between two parties that happens to move a district.

Visits, 1977–2026

Presidents, mayors and candidates have been photographed in the South Bronx, against its ruins and its rebuilding. Jimmy Carter stood on Charlotte Street, in Crotona Park East, in October 1977; Ted Kennedy stood on the same spot in March 1980, and Ronald Reagan, then a candidate for president, in August 1980. By 1980, Peter L’Official writes, Charlotte Street had become “the bleakest whistle-stop on every national politician’s tour of urban America.”12 Charlotte Street lies outside Community District 1. The later visits photographed here are closer to this ground: Bill de Blasio in 2015, Eric Adams in 2025, and Zohran Mamdani in 2026.

The city has not exactly been like, here, let’s talk to the community.

Eighteen parcels held by law-enforcement and social-services agencies

City property records list eighteen parcels in this community district under a law-enforcement or social-services agency code: ten held by the Police Department, three by the Department of Homeless Services, two by the Human Resources Administration, two by the Department of Correction, and one shared by the Administration for Children’s Services and the Police Department. Among them are the jail site, a juvenile detention center, a police precinct, shelters and benefits offices. Seventeen are City-owned; one, 305 Rider Avenue, is leased to the Human Resources Administration. Seven are used for parking or storage, and one is an air-rights lot held by the Police Department that has no lot shape to draw.13

Each parcel is on the list because of the agency that holds it. Together they show how much land in one district is held by agencies that police, detain, shelter or administer benefits; the City’s own property records make that measurable.

In May 2026 Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced in Mott Haven that the Bronx would be divided into two patrol boroughs, the first division of the borough in the police department’s history, bringing, in his words, “nearly 200 additional officers to the borough”. The new Bronx South command is headquartered, the Police Commissioner said at the same announcement, “right here in the old 40th Precinct” — the renovated building on one of the eighteen parcels counted above, and the building the organizer quoted below had hoped would become something else.14

“The Bronx South operation and command center is that old historic 40th precinct building. One thing I’ll say about the old 40th precinct building is that it’s public property — it’s funded by our taxpayer dollars. We were looking at it as an opportunity to be some kind of community center run by community members, bringing more resources and opportunities to the neighborhood.”

The HEArts Center

The Mott Haven–Port Morris Community Land Stewards and local organizations hold a building at 349 East 140th Street, the former Lincoln Hospital Recovery Center, a City health facility, and intend to reopen it as the HEArts Center.15

It stands 3,915 feet (0.74 miles) from 745 East 141st Street and 4,176 feet (0.79 miles) from 320 Concord Avenue, measured parcel centroid to parcel centroid. The range is two destination lots, not two methods.16

The comparison this project draws is one of duration. A community-led project on a City-owned building and a City-led project on a City-owned lot, about three-quarters of a mile apart, moving at different speeds through the same apparatus.

The City’s own property file still lists that building as an operating ambulatory health clinic, held by Health + Hospitals.17

The project can date the financing that will reopen the building, in documents dated 30 July 2026 and recorded on 12 August, more precisely than any City record dates its closing.18

“Our stance as a community land trust organization is that public land should be for public good. And there’s so much public land in this neighborhood that has not been used for public good. Much of the waterfront in our neighborhood — we always advocate and educate everybody about this — is public land. It’s mostly state owned, but through backdoor deals it has been leased and then subleased to private companies.”

What the records show

At this scale the instruments that appear are the ones that move whole blocks at once. A disposition through land use review. Two deeds in one day. A text amendment. A lot split. None of them is about a household, and every one of them changes what can be built where people live.

Two of them did their work and stopped. The tow pound is gone; the deeds are nearly fifty years old. Two are still operating: the MIH designation on the jail block and the zoning on the corridor.

The block that carries four uses has a dated City document for two of its transitions and none for the hospital’s closing. That is what the record holds, and its shape is the finding.

One street inside this area has thirty-five lots. That street is ZONED.

See THE GAP.