Percent loss of housing units in (A) New York City and (B) the Bronx between 1970 and 1980. The geographic units are the designated health areas that encompass 10 census tracts; at the time of designation in the 1960s, they were socioeconomically homogeneous, with average populations of 20,000. The areas that lost > 20% of housing units are all in zones with high levels of poverty: South Bronx, Harlem, the Lower East Side, and the poverty belt of Brooklyn from Bedford-Stuyvesant through Brownsville/East New York. 

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... an economic recession occurs, the dense fabric of weak and strong ties facilitates, for example, the sharing of resources to tide over affected families and individuals. Stack (1974) and Susser (1982) each performed anthropological studies of how neighborhoods function to keep poor women and their families housed, fed, and clothed. These studies illustrated Grannovettor’s (1973) concept. Although poor families and individuals depend more heavily for survival on strong and weak ties, all families and individuals need them at some time or other. Masten and Obradovic (2007) described resilience in the context of human development, namely the sequelae of impacts on children and their life courses. They placed these sequelae in the context of family and of neighborhood institutions such as the school and the community social structure in a cross-scale analysis. Urban areas are as dependent on the healthy functioning of neighborhoods as on municipal services and private enterprise for the delivery of necessities. Well-functioning communities provide services, just as well-functioning ecosystems provide services. Without social control, for example, even the highest level of policing would not be able to keep violent crime rates low. Even very high levels of public health activity would be unable to keep diseases in check without the support of the social fabric of neighborhoods in favor of preventive behaviors. Most pertinently, in this era of disaster and terrorism scholarship, social networks are mobilized in disasters to pick up the pieces and save families and the community (Solomon 1986). However, in the 1970s and 1980s, social control and support ebbed steeply in inner-city neighborhoods. Tuberculosis, violence, sexually transmitted diseases, and drug abuse were four of many conditions that soared in incidence and prevalence, peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Wallace and Wallace 1998). Social control and support depend on the social stability of neighborhoods, which in turn depends on municipal services and certain private services that ensure the physical stability of housing. The neighborhood forms a critical level of organization between the individual or family level and the municipality and metropolitan region. Masten and Obradovic (2007) described the linkage between the individual and family to the larger social environment of neighborhood entities such as the school and the neighborhood social network and how that linkage influences individual resilience and family function. Although literature from the Reform Era explored the role of housing in the socioeconomic function of neighborhoods (e.g., Griscom 1844), modern appreciation for this role arrived with so-called urban renewal. Schwartz (1993) conducted a detailed analysis of the outfall of urban renewal in New York City, and Fullilove (2004) examined the impact of urban renewal on all of the traditional African-American neighborhoods in the United States, with a detailed examination of Roanoke, Virginia, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The dislocations imposed by urban renewal broke social networks and the ties between social networks. Schwartz described the loss of social control and support and the resulting rise of drug abuse, alcoholism, promiscuity, and poverty, which led many groups, including major religions, to oppose urban renewal and make it politically unacceptable. Even the public health community, which had looked on slums as “hives of sickness” from the get- go (Rosner 1995), began to question whether the social cost of forced dislocation attendant on the demolition of slums and building of high-rise public housing outweighed the benefits (Hinkle and Loring 1977). Such luminaries as Lorin Hinkle and Leonard Duhl (the founder of the Healthy Cities movement), who worked in the Centers for Disease Control during the Carter Administration, could not find health or mental health benefits from the new public housing, but did find benefits from other elements of the Model Cities Program, which engaged and empowered neighborhood groups (Duhl 1990). Thus, municipal services and real estate practices that preserve housing are critical for the socioeconomic resilience of neighborhoods. We have studied the cascade of impacts resulting from the closing of fire companies in the poor neighborhoods of New York City in the 1970s. Fire in New York, and probably in other densely populated cities, can become a contagious process in the absence of adequate fire control services and in the presence of dense stands of overcrowded, undermaintained dwellings (Wallace 1978). Indeed, the fire epidemic of the 1970s in New York and in many other older cities such as St. Louis, Missouri; Washington, D.C.; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, interacted with an epidemic of landlord abandonment of buildings to result in massive housing destruction (Wallace 1989). We illustrate the percentage of New York City housing that was destroyed between 1970 and 1980 (Fig. 1), the time trend of fire damage across New York City (Fig. 2), and the massive migrations made within New York City between 1970 and 1980 from neighborhoods with a high density of destroyed housing units to other neighborhoods (Fig. 3). Because of the changes in patterns of housing overcrowding and the social and physical disruption from mass migrations, the middle class left the city en masse between 1970 and 1980; 1.3 million white people left New York City in that decade (United States Census Bureau 1984). Middle-class African- Americans also left; the congregation of the famous Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem plummeted from over 20,000 in 1972 to approximately 6000 in 1984 (Reverend Carl Butz personal communication ). New York City actually experienced an increase in racial segregation between 1970 and 1980 (Massey and Denton 1993). In ecological parlance, the diversity of individual neighborhoods generally declined. For example, the Italian presence in East Harlem almost disappeared, and East Harlem truly became Spanish Harlem. Central Harlem had health areas (aggregations of approximately 10 census tracts) that had approximately 98% African- American population by 1980. This level of segregation means that there are very few opportunities for weak ties between social networks of differing characteristics, a steep loss of resources for resilience. The effects of segregation were exacerbated by the instability of the population. The decades of building social, economic, and political structure were ruined in approximately half a decade (Wallace 1991 a ). Not only were the opportunities for weak ties severely cut, but even the networks of strong ties unraveled into small fragments (Wallace 1991 b ). Sampson et al. (1997) found that community efficacy requires residential stability. A geographical place where residents come and go cannot develop community efficacy. A neighborhood with a high prevalence of small, tight, isolated social networks is brittle. Not only are the resources within each little group thin in the event of need, but the isolation renders each group prone to behaviors that are not welcome in the larger society. We compared the resilience structure of the South Bronx with that of Upper Manhattan. In the South Bronx, paradoxically, the housing destruction was so intense and geographically widespread that it selected for large social networks and mixed African-American and Latino populations. This mixing resulted in increased integration. In contrast, in Upper Manhattan, the housing destruction left small, tight social networks and greatly increased segregation (Wallace and Wallace 2000). Using the rate of low-weight births and the incidence of homicide as outcomes, we adapted the Ives measure of ecosystem resilience (Ives 1995) and found that the amplification factor, an indication of how greatly an impact would be amplified along tight ties, was approximately five times greater in Upper Manhattan than in the South Bronx. The rather high resilience of the South Bronx is both a blessing and a curse. Although impacts may roll off it like water off a duck, bringing beneficial changes may also prove difficult. Any change may prove hard to initiate. This resilience may confer the ability to absorb both good and bad impacts with little or no change. The mere presence of contagious phenomena implies the resilient behavior of a system. Epidemic contagion occurs after a threshold is reached. For example, in infectious disease epidemiology, an epidemic threshold is defined by the density of infected and infectious individuals and susceptible individuals (Bailey 1975). In the parlance of ecosystem resilience, the system will absorb impacts until it reaches a threshold and crosses into the domain of epidemic contagion. We have studied building-fire epidemics (Wallace and Wallace 1998), but Dear (1976) and Odland and Balzer (1979) studied building-abandonment epidemics in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Indianapolis, Indiana, respectively. During the 1970s, many large cities in the United States suffered from massive losses of housing, especially low-income housing, because of these epidemics. Approximately 15 yr after the end of the fire epidemic in New York City, the cascade of effects began to reverse. Violent crime, tuberculosis, and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) began to decline, even before the availability of highly active antiretrovirus therapy for AIDS and directly observed therapy for tuberculosis. We conclude that 15 yr was needed to allow the regrowth of social networks and ties between social networks. The poor neighborhoods determined the municipal processes both during the deterioration of the late 1970s to early 1990s and during the post-1993 rehabilitation because of the cross-scale phenomenon of contagion. Thus, two scales depended on the public and private policies, the implementation of which destroyed a large proportion of the housing of the poor: ...