An explosion on October 1, 2025 sheared off the corner of a Mitchel Houses high-rise apartment building.
The cause of the explosion at Mitchel Houses in the South Bronx harkens back to the arson-for-profit schemes of the 1970s that caused mass destruction of Black and Latine communities. Decades later, the method of destruction has changed from matches to government bureaucracy, but the target has not.
“NYCHA always gets away with bullshit” - Resident of Mitchel Houses @jjjerrellon.
For residents of public housing, unaddressed maintenance requests are part of a decades-long routine of malicious negligence. The persistent leak, broken elevator, or mold growing on the wall are conditions consistently reported into a bureaucratic void where they are logged, ignored, and allowed to fester. At Mitchel Houses in the South Bronx, that routine hazard included the smell of gas.
When residents reported on September 30, 2025, their calls were dismissed. On October 1, 2025, this particular negligence turned into a catastrophe. An explosion tore from the boiler room, up through the building’s chimney, and sheared off a corner of the structure.
In the aftermath, residents were forced to leave without their belongings, such as clothing and essential medications. Others, including children, suffered from untreated wounds and were forced to take refuge in a crowded shelter. Many of the affected residents have expressed their pain and trauma from the experience, and state that they have yet to receive guidance or timelines for repairs or renovations. Three weeks after the explosion, many residents have only recently been allowed to move back into their homes. However, the building is still without gas and, therefore, heat for the foreseeable future. The fear of future tragedy has gripped the residents of the affected building and those nearby.
Their continued suffering weeks after the collapse is a direct indictment of a system that fails to protect them before disaster strikes and leaves them to bear the consequences. This was not just a simple accident. It was the latest battle in a protracted war which, as the Black Alliance for Peace articulates, is “the strategic invasion, destabilization, and potentially elimination of a people, their land, and their agency.” This front of the war is waged through manufactured decay against Black, Brown, and working-class people.
Mitchel, like other housing developments, was a fortress left to degrade and crumble. New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments in the Bronx were built with dense cement walls and fire-isolating compartments designed to withstand fire and explosion. Their decay is not the work of their ungovernable Black and working-class residents, as is the claim. A deliberate policy of strategic disinvestment is what caused the walls of Mitchel Houses to fall. They were failed by a state apparatus that views their inhabitants as disposable.
This deadly negligence follows a seasonal pattern. Starting in the fall and continuing through the winter, complaints about a lack of heat and hot water increase across the Bronx at the highest rates in New York City. Without adequate heating, residents are forced to rely on dangerous tactics like stoves/ovens and space heaters to survive. This reliance on alternative heating sources, combined with the dangerous conditions caused by structural disrepair, creates a tinderbox every cold season. The cyclical crisis is a direct result of landlords being permitted to ignore maintenance on heating systems. It is no coincidence that the Mitchel explosion occurred days after the start of fall.
In 2022, a massive fire destroyed the Twin Parks apartment in the Bronx. It was nothing less than a massacre enabled by policy. The blaze killed 17 people, predominantly from Gambia and other West African nations. The tragedy was blamed on a malfunctioning space heater, but it is better explained as a series of systemic failures. The faulty self-closing door that violated city code failed to contain the smoke, turning a single-unit fire into a building-wide death trap. This event was the very predictable outcome of a system where landlords are free to neglect life-saving infrastructure in Black/African communities with impunity. The fire devastated a vibrant, tight-knit community, demonstrating how calculated neglect functions as a tool of displacement and social destruction.
This pattern proves that the attack is not limited to the decay of NYCHA fortresses. The explosion at Mitchel Houses is part of the same overarching assault on the very right of people to exist and thrive in the Bronx. This front in the war is the entire borough, and its targets are Black/African and Brown working-class people.
These events are a direct descendant of the “Bronx Fires” era of the 1960s and 70s. A devised media spectacle painted a picture of a borough consumed by internal chaos. The narrative was one of Black and Latine savagery with stories of riots, gang violence, and people destroying their own homes. This narrative was a lie. The truth lies with a different kind of arson. Landlords seeking insurance payouts for devalued property paid gangs to light the matches. City planners, enacting the racist logic of figures like Robert Moses and the “benign neglect” advocated by Daniel Moynihan, turned off the water and closed fire stations. Redlining and rezoning, designed to corral Black and Latine people, created the tinderbox that went up in flames. The fires were a leading indicator, Moynihan said, of “social pathologies.” But he had it backward. The fires themselves were the pathology—a symptom of the white supremacist, capitalist sickness.
The history of the Bronx fires era of fire goes back to the 1930s, when redlining became the primary mode of managing neighborhoods to bolster segregation in New York City. From approximately 1917 through the 1970s, an increasing number of Black and Puerto Rican people migrated to the city from the colonized island of Puerto Rico or from the South via the Great Migration. This is especially true for the Bronx. Uptown became a hub where racial and ethnic groups lived together, sharing rich cultures. The strategic decay of these neighborhoods began in the borough, as with other areas like Harlem, with disinvestment, policy changes, and the exodus of white residents who veiled their racism with language such as “better education” and “better housing”. White flight and the corralling of Black and Puerto Rican people into inhumane conditions laid the groundwork for the ever-intensifying siege on the borough and city at large.
The last several decades have not seen a change in this process. The controversial takeover of public housing by private entities like C+C Management, and the “renovations” in Mott Haven and Edenwald Houses destroy more than they improve. This is the tried and true neoliberal method: manufacture a crisis through disinvestment and policy, then present private capital as the only solution. It is an ongoing process designed to displace and dispossess.
The data provide undeniable evidence of a structural assault on certain neighborhoods in New York City. Areas with high Area Deprivation Index (ADI) scores—a metric that accounts for income, education, employment, and housing quality—map perfectly onto high fire incidence and severity. The Bronx is not only the poorest borough in the city, but also constitutes the largest non-white population. Where Black people are concentrated, the risk of fire escalates.
As gentrification targets the South Bronx, a media offensive lays the groundwork for the next wave of displacement. Negligent coverage of the fires and a surge of reports on “violent crime” can be seen in Northern Bronx neighborhoods like Wakefield, which lies right at the border of the wealthy suburban Westchester County. This media blitz functions as propaganda, manufacturing consent for decreased resources, intensified policing, and the cleansing of Black and Brown people from the area.
The fires and degradation of public housing are not signs of internal collapse but a tool of external control. Our movements have always understood this and have waged counter-offensives to increase the consciousness of residents in these communities and move them to action. The Black Panther Party newspaper boldly proclaimed that substandard housing was a function of capitalist and racist exploitation. The Party connected dilapidated homes to police violence and imperialist war, organizing tenants to demand repairs and assert their humanity.
This tradition of on-the-ground investigation can also be seen in the newsletter from a white revolutionary community organization, based in NYC. The White Lightning newsletter, which was circulated during the 1970s, unapologetically named the true arsonists. It directly connected the infernos consuming the Bronx to the calculated greed of landlords in neighborhoods like Fordham, exposing how they torched their own properties for insurance windfalls.
These publications did not merely report the news, but framed it as an ongoing counterinsurgency against the poor, and they organized accordingly. They revealed the true face of the crisis, dismantled the racist myth of Black self-destruction, and placed this information directly into the hands of Black, Brown, and working-class people in the city.
This tradition continues in the organizing work of groups like Dare to Struggle, which, among other areas of work, investigates these assaults on our right to live and organizes tenants in NYCHA housing. Like organizations of the past, they publish literature and identify the conditions as a war against poor and working-class people, targeting those responsible with sharpness and clarity.
The explosion at Mitchel Houses was a preventable disaster. The smell of gas was a warning from a history we are forced to repeat. However, it is also a moment to learn from. In this stage of the imperialist war against Black/African people globally and here in the domestic colony, we must confront the forces of capitalism and imperialism and fight for peace, self-determination, and sovereignty.
True peace will not be found in the quiet after the rubble settles, but in the achievement of a world liberated from the systems that make such collapses inevitable. This struggle requires us to reclaim the radical tradition of those who came before us and move from analyzing the crisis to confronting it with organized, unyielding power.
Imani Nile is the assistant to BAR's Executive Editor, a proud member of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) NYC/NJ, and the BAP Communications Team Lead. She works in movement communications and media.
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