Ha, if you think things are bad now, you should have seen how it was back in NYC '70-71 with Vietnam Vets strung out in every city park. Needle Park they called them and they were all over the city. The little triangle in Times Square, Bryant Park, Gramercy Park, Tompkins Square, Washington Square. There were Smack addicts laying in the handball courts of my future junior high school when I was 8 years old.
Neighborhoods like Soundview, Hunts Point, Mott Haven have been blighted, like Brownsville and E. New York for generations regardless of ethnicity. The population density and the development of the Cross Bronx Expressway contributed to the rise of these breeding grounds for crime.